Books to look out for in 2026 – fiction

 

Books to look out for in 2026 – fiction

This article is more than 4 months old

Maggie O’Farrell, Yann Martel and Julian Barnes are among the authors publishing new novels this year

Justin Jordan

Saturday 27 December 2025

The beginning of the books calendar is usually dominated by debuts, but January 2026 sees releases from some of the year’s biggest authors. Known for his surreally bittersweet short stories, George Saunders has written only one novel so far – but that one won the Booker prize. The follow-up to 2017’s Lincoln in the Bardo, Vigil (Bloomsbury) focuses on an unquiet spirit called Jill who helps others pass over from life to whatever comes next. She is called to the deathbed of an oil tycoon who is rapidly running out of time to face up to his ecological crimes, in a rallying cry for human connection and environmental action. Ali Smith’s Glyph (Hamish Hamilton) is a companion to 2024’s Gliff, and promises to tell a story initially hidden in that previous novel. Expect fables, siblings, phantoms and horses in a typically playful shout of resistance against war, genocide and the increasingly hostile social discourse. And in Departure(s) (Jonathan Cape), Julian Barnes announces his own – this blend of memoir and fiction, exploring memory, illness, mortality and love across the decades, will be his last book. “Your presence has delighted me,” he assures the reader. “Indeed, I would be nothing without you.”

Julian Barnes

Interview

‘I didn’t think it was possible to be a novelist’: Julian Barnes on literature, loss – and his late friend Martin Amis

This article is more than 2 years old

The Booker winning author talks about how his most recent work was inspired by Hilary Mantel, and the way the books world has changed since his debut was published more than 40 years ago

Lisa Allardice

Saturday  16 September 2023

Too many people have been dying lately,” Julian Barnes reflects over the phone from his home in north London. He has muted the Test match, he tells me, so he won’t be tempted to shout at the screen. This is a follow-up conversation to a meeting earlier this year to discuss his latest novel, Elizabeth Finch, in which, although unnamed in the book, Hilary Mantel, who died aged 70 last September, played a key part. Barnes’s great friend Carmen Callil, founder of Virago Press, died a month later. “I did adore her,” he says now. And, since we last spoke, Martin Amis has also died, in May.

 

Review

Changing My Mind by Julian Barnes review – a manifesto for open-mindedness

This article is more than 10 months old

The author’s suite of essays, originally conceived for broadcast, don’t always translate well for the page

Pratinav Anil

Thu 20 Mar 2025 

Julian Barnes’s latest book comprises five micro-essays, originally commissioned for a radio series a decade ago and repackaged here. The publisher spies an opportunity, perhaps, for something like a manifesto on open-mindedness, with Barnes’s musings the vehicle. Not unreasonable: as the author of 14 novels, winner of the Booker, he knows a thing or two about the power of language: “I believe deeply in words, in their ability to represent thought, define truth, and create beauty. I’m equally aware that words are constantly used for the opposite purposes: to obfuscate truth, misrepresent thought, lie, slander, and provoke hatred.”

 

Julián Barned
London, 2025
Photo by
Sebastian Nevols

Book of the day

Review

Departure(s) by Julian Barnes review – this final novel is a slippery affair

Memoir merges with fiction as the author reflects on failed love, ageing and the end of life in this last instalment to his writing career

Alex Clark
Monday 19 January 2026

Julián Barnes tells us that this is his final book, so that’s one departure accounted for – the last instalment of a writing career spanning 45 years, encompassing novels and short stories, memoirs and essays, biography, travel writing, translation and even a little pseudonymous detective fiction. Many of these works turn up here, whether obliquely or overtly, referred to through subject matter, style, tone or connotation; in the contemporary cultural argot, which Barnes is fond of examining, these writerly winks might be known as Easter eggs.

 

Julian Barnes

Book of the day

Review

Departure(s) by Julian Barnes review – this final novel is a slippery affair

Memoir merges with fiction as the author reflects on failed love, ageing and the end of life in this last instalment to his writing career

Alex Clark
Monday 19 January 2026

Julian Barnes tells us that this is his final book, so that’s one departure accounted for – the last instalment of a writing career spanning 45 years, encompassing novels and short stories, memoirs and essays, biography, travel writing, translation and even a little pseudonymous detective fiction. Many of these works turn up here, whether obliquely or overtly, referred to through subject matter, style, tone or connotation; in the contemporary cultural argot, which Barnes is fond of examining, these writerly winks might be known as Easter eggs.

Julian Barnes Looks at Art

 

Julian Barnes, pictured here in 1995, has published “Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art,” a collection of writings that previously appeared in a variety of publications over the last few decades.Photograph by Ulf Andersen / Getty

Julian Barnes Looks at Art

By Cody Delistraty

October 14, 2015

Julian Barnes says that, while he “has taught himself a fair amount about painting over fifty years,” he “only really has one shot in his locker about each painter.” He told me this on a recent afternoon, at his home in London. We were talking about his new book, “Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art,” a selection of articles that previously appeared in a variety of publications over the last few decades. “When I get asked to, say, review a biography of Braque or go and see a show of Manet, I think, I’ve only got one go at this, because I don’t have more than that amount of thoughts about the person,” he said.

Sex, death and parrots: Julian Barnes’s best fiction – ranked!

 

Julian Barnes by David Levine

Sex, death and parrots: Julian Barnes’s best fiction – ranked!

As the Booker prize-winning author prepares to publish his final novel at 80, we assess his finest work

John Self

Monday 19 January 2026

10 Duffy (1980)

Duffy is the first in a series of crime novels about a bisexual private eye that Barnes published under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh. It came out the same year as Barnes’s debut novel proper, Metroland, but where that took seven years to write, this took 10 days. Not that it shows: this “refreshingly nasty” (as Barnes’s friend Martin Amis put it) crime caper is beguilingly well written, with passages that display all of Barnes’s perception and wit. The plot of reverse blackmail and the shocking climax only add to the fun.
Sample line “Two in the morning is when sounds travel for ever, when a sticky window makes a soft squeak and three Panda cars hear it from miles away.”

The 10 best short story collections

Elizabeth Day chooses the sharpest and smartest of small but perfectly formed works of fiction

Top 10 contemporary short stories

Elizabeth Day
Fri 17 Oct 2014 12.00 BST 

Photograph: Neil Bennett

This Isn’t the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You 

Jon McGregor (2012)

The best short stories should haunt you for days and weeks. The stories in McGregor’s collection have stayed with me for months on end. They are linked by a unity of place – the fenlands of Norfolk and Cambridge – and by precise, elegant prose that elevates everyday occurrences into small, perfectly rendered pieces of art. As Maggie O’Farrell put it in her Guardian review: “The stories wrap themselves around the wholly disconcerting premise that catastrophes can rear up in anyone’s life without warning.”

Photograph: Sophie Bassouls/Sygma/Corbis

Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?

Raymond Carver (1976)

Possibly the most economical short story writer in this list, Carver, with his precise, punchy prose, conveys in a few words what many novelists take several pages to elucidate. In stories such as “Fat” and “Are You a Doctor?” he writes with flat understatement about suburban disenchantment in mid-century America. The collection – shortlisted for the National Book prize – was written during what Carver called his “first life”, when he almost died of alcoholism. His “second life” started in 1977, when he gave up drinking with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Photograph: Tim Knox

Tenth of December

George Saunders (2013)

Winner of last year’s inaugural Folio prize for fiction, Saunders is, according to Entertainment Weekly, “the master of joy bombs: little explosions of grin-stimulating genius that he buries throughout his deeply thoughtful, endlessly entertaining flights of imagination”. Stories such as “Victory Lap” demonstrate his deftness of touch in mixing humour and humanity, as well as showcasing his technical brilliance, incorporating several different points of view in a contained space. And “Sticks”, little over a page in length, is one of the most moving stories I’ve ever read

The Thing Around Your Neck

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2009)

Adichie had written two novels set in her native Nigeria before this collection. It shifts her gaze to the US in 12 stories that explore the experiences of husbands and wives, parents and children, immigrants and permanent residents. The title story delves into the loneliness suffered by a Nigerian girl who moves to an America far removed from her imaginings. A wise and emotive writer, in this collection Adichie touches on her familiar themes of exile, cultural miscommunications and the human desire to reconcile internal and external worlds.

Photograph: Canadian Press/Rex

Runaway

Alice Munro (2004)

The Canadian writer won the Nobel prize for literature in 2013 for her extraordinary work as “master of the contemporary short story”. She also won the 2009 Man Booker International prize for her lifetime body of work and has been called a modern-day Chekhov. Runaway is among her best collections and displays all of Munro’s mastery: the effortless shifts in time, sometimes across decades; the ability to convey an entire life in a few pages; the exploration of complex truths in uncomplicated language.

Photograph: Topical Press Agency/Getty Images

The Garden Party and Other Stories

Katherine Mansfield (1922)

This collection was first published in 1922, a year before Mansfield’s death at the age of 34 from tuberculosis. A pioneering modernist writer, Mansfield was born and brought up in colonial New Zealand before moving to Britain, where she became friends with DH Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. The title story, one of her best-known works, is written in the modernist style, with the deceptively simple setting of a family preparing for a garden party. Against this backdrop Mansfield brilliantly interweaves meditations on class, life and death, illusion and reality.

Photograph: Richard Saker/Rex Features

Pulse

Julian Barnes (2011)

Barnes is best known as a novelist and won the Man Booker prize in 2011 for The Sense of an Ending. As a result, his short stories are rather overlooked and shouldn’t be. Pulse is Barnes’s 17th book and is a masterclass in the shorter form. He is brilliant at evoking social nuance and has an unfailing eye for the tiniest detail that will shine light on the whole. Two particularly wonderful examples from this collection are “Complicity”, about the delicate beginnings of a love affair, and “East Wind”, about a relationship between an estate agent and a foreign waitress.

Photograph: Linda Nylind for the Observer

The Collected Stories

Lorrie Moore (2008)

This deliciously fat collection gives the reader the chance to dip in and out of one of the best observers of human behaviour. Moore is notable for her arch tone and her sharp humour. But what makes her special is the way she can shift so smoothly to gut-wrenching poignancy. She writes about terminal illness, family dynamics and infidelity with equal fluency. A particular favourite from this volume is “How to Be an Other Woman” from her first published collection, Self-Help (1985), which was composed almost entirely of stories from her master’s thesis.

Interpreter of Maladies

Jhumpa Lahiri (1999)

This debut collection of nine stories won the Pulitzer prize shortly after it was published in 1999 and was named the New Yorker’s debut of the year. The stories, written with what Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times described as “uncommon elegance and poise”, deal with the diversity of Indian-American immigrant experience and the curious alchemy of love and relationships. My particular favourite in this collection is “A Temporary Matter”, a beautiful mediation on grief, love and loss as a couple try to come to terms with the stillbirth of their child.

That Glimpse of Truth

David Miller (ed) (out 23 October 2014)

Some of the best short stories contain unexpected moments of felicity on which the plot pivots. And so it was that, just as I was compiling this list, I received a giant package containing this doorstep of a book. It might be the most comprehensive collection of short stories… ever, featuring an all-star cast including Angela Carter, Charles Dickens, Roald Dahl and more, selected by David Miller, a literary agent and author.

THE GUARDIAN