10 New Releases for 2026 That Intrigue Me

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Going into 2026, I’m not going to try to answer every weekly prompt – I don’t have time for that with everything else I want to get done this year – so I’m just going to cherry-pick the ones I feel like doing!

This week’s prompt is for new releases for the first half of 2026 that I most anticipate. I don’t naturally pay any attention to new releases and rarely anything hot off the press, so there isn’t much that I anticipate… but I do enjoy this prompt for encouraging me to check the lists and see what is going to be coming.

This time, I decided to focus on literary fiction, and honestly, these were all gathered from scrolling through Lit Hub’s mega list until I’d got 10! This did result in a pleasing list of different enough book covers… though I can definitely see publishers have a favoured couple of fonts for this genre!

I won’t read any of these until I get hold of a cheap copy on an eBook deal, or from the library, but they’re all going onto my Watch List to keep an eye on reviews once they are out into the wild.

1. Discipline by Larissa Pham

Christine is on tour for her novel, a revenge fantasy based on a real-life relationship gone bad with an older professor ten years prior. Now on the road, Christine is seeking answers—about how to live a good life and what it means to make art—through intimate conversations with strangers, past lovers and friends.

But when the antagonist of her novel—her old painting professor—reaches out in a series of sly communiques after years of silence to tell her he’s read her book, Christine must reckon with what it means to lose the reins of a narrative she wrote precisely to maintain control. When her professor invites her to join him at his cabin, deep in the woods of Maine, what she encounters threatens to change the very foundations of her life as she’s imagined it.

A delicately explosive high-wire act about the fictions we construct for ourselves just to survive, Discipline is a terse triumph about art-making and rigor, intimacy and attention, punishment and release.

Release: 20 Jan 2026

This sounds like it’ll hit themes of loneliness, narrative and identity that interest me.

2. One Aladdin Two Lamps by Jeanette Winterson

A woman is filibustering for her life. Every night she tells a story. Every morning she lives one more day. One Aladdin Two Lamps cracks open the legendary story of Shahrazad in One Thousand and One Nights to explore new and ancient questions: Whom should we trust? Is love the most important thing? Does honesty matter? What makes us happy?

Posing as Aladdin—the orphan who changes his world—Jeanette Winterson asks us to re-examine what we think we know, to look again at how fiction works in our lives, giving us the courage to change our own narratives and alter endings. As a young working-class woman with no obvious future beyond factory work or marriage, Winterson realizes through the power of books that she can read herself as fiction as well as a fact: “I can change the story because I am the story.”

Release: 20 Jan 2026

I would really like to get back into reading Winterson. I enjoyed her while I was at university, but haven’t read her since.

3. Superfan by Jenny Tinghui Zhang

Freshman Minnie is adrift at college in Austin, Texas, when she discovers a boy band called HOURglass and the online forums that worship them. She especially loves Halo, whose sharp edges feel somehow familiar. After a brief romance goes painfully awry, Minnie pours everything into her new fandom, clinging to each livestream and bonding with other fans online. But when a scandal threatens to expose Halo to harm, Minnie decides that she is the only one who can save him.

Except Halo’s secret is darker than anything the tabloids could imagine. Before he was a superstar heartthrob, he was a high school dropout haunted by a tragic accident. When he is recruited for HOURglass, it feels like a chance to become someone else. And when he is onstage in front of his fans, he can almost forget the horrors of his past—until one of those very fans threatens to destroy everything.

Dazzling, entrancing, and deeply heartfelt, Superfan is about fandom in all its magic and its terror, and the extreme lengths to which we go to rid ourselves of loneliness.

Release: 3 Feb 2026

This sounds a little weird and crazy, and again, loneliness in books always interests me. I’ll keep an eye on readers’ thoughts once this is out. There are hints in that blurb that the story could be predictable.

4. The End of Romance by Lily Meyer

Sylvie Broder was taught early to embrace joy. The granddaughter of Holocaust survivors who’d developed a system of thought that focused on enjoying the life they’d snatched back from Hitler, Sylvie grew up believing in the tenacious pursuit of pleasure. So, when she finds herself trapped in a suffocating, emotionally abusive marriage, no one is more unmoored than Sylvie herself. With enormous fortitude, Sylvie frees herself and turns to graduate school, determined to prove her new Straight women will find true liberation and happiness only once romance is eradicated.

Sylvie uses her new-found freedom to enjoy men, but never to commit to one, priding herself in separating sex from tenderness. She doesn’t sleep over, certainly doesn’t cuddle, and never hooks up with a man more than once. Then she meets Robbie and Abie…and finds her philosophy sorely tested. A warm and gentle man, Robbie treats Sylvie with patience and enormous kindness, offering her the soft place to land she hasn’t had since childhood. Abie, on the other hand, is passionate and dynamic, a man who challenges Sylvie, and with whom she finds herself constantly disarmed. With both men, she feels a deep desire that looks, worryingly, a lot like love.

Cleverly constructed, delightfully funny, and beautifully written, The End of Romance is an anti-romance romance novel that charts its fallible heroine’s tumultuous journey to love and happiness with erudition and deep feeling—a story for anyone who, despite their very best efforts, has fallen in love, and wondered why.

Release: 3 Feb 2026

I like a bit of anti-romance, especially as someone who didn’t find love until my thirties and had all but written it off.

5. She Made Herself a Monster by Anna Kovatcheva

A heady, dark-hued Gothic gem of a debut in nineteenth-century Bulgaria, a self-proclaimed vampire slayer—actually, a traveling con artist—joins forces with a teenage girl to create a monster deadly enough to vanquish their own demons. 

We make monsters in order to destroy them. For thousands of years, we’ve named witches and burned them, suspected demons and exorcised them. When crops die and children fall ill, who better to blame than a monster?

In nineteenth-century Bulgaria, Yana rides from one desolate town to the next, staging grisly displays while the villagers animal corpses in the public square, eggs filled with blood in the chicken coop. She tells the stricken villagers stories of vampires that stalk the night. Then Yana eliminates the threat, and leaves seeds of hope in her wake.

The village of Koprivici, however, is plagued by exceptional illness and misfortune, its children rarely surviving infancy. There, Yana meets a headstrong orphan who the villagers blame for their curse. As Anka approaches womanhood, the village Captain is grooming her for marriage against her will. Anka is powerless against him—that is, until Yana arrives. Together, the orphan and the vampire slayer hatch a to conjure a monster so vile, it might provide cover for Anka to escape. But their plan quickly takes on a horrifying life of its own…

Inspired by Slavic folklore, She Made Herself a Monster concocts a clever mix of witchery, ghost stories, heresy, and deception to spin a feminist fable about agency and the power of collective action. It is a haunting and astoundingly cathartic tale of two women who will stop at nothing to take control of their fate.

Release: 10 Feb 2026

This sounds wild! I was on board with con-artist vampire hunter. This sounds in a similar vein to The Snow Song by Sally Gardner, which I really loved.

6. Evil Genius by Claire Oshetsky

An exuberant novel about a young woman’s quest to carve her own path—even if she needs to step over a few dead bodies along the way

It’s 1974 and San Francisco is full of mystery and menace. Nineteen-year-old Celia Dent keeps telling herself how lucky she is to be married to Drew, a man who says he loves her. But Celia’s contentment with her little life is shattered when a woman she knows is murdered in a love tryst gone awry. What would that be like, Celia wonders, to die—or kill—for love? What would it be like to live each moment passionately and with full knowledge that each breath is bringing her closer to her final breath?

Before Celia knows it her musings about love-and-death happenings are bleeding into daily life. She’s practicing her marksmanship at a local gun range. She’s searching for a love tryst of her very own. She’s thinking about how good it would feel to bury something sharp inside her domineering husband’s ear. It’s all pretend, though, until the night comes when Celia finally goes too far, and she and Drew are set on a deadly collision course.

Exhilarating, surreal, and bitingly clever, Evil Genius is a comic noir about obsession and desire—and what happens when a sweetly seditious young woman dares to imagine a better life for herself.

Release: 17 Feb 2026

This sounds right up my street. I love a woman on the brink of violence, especially with a bit of obsession in there.

7. The Witch of Prague by J.M. Sidorova

In Cold War Czechoslovakia, dyslexic teenager Alica escapes her troubled home by answering a newspaper ad. Instructed in typing, deportment, and political intrigue by a forbidding older woman with a long history of manipulating powerful men, she becomes a secretary in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where she’s surrounded by surveillance, corruption, and rancid abuses.

When her mentor gifts her an ancient tapestry with mysterious properties, Alica finds herself haunted by dreams of a violent hunt and a mutilated forest. By day, her powers of manipulation are only growing—and around her, the currents of resistance are beginning to electrify the country. As her city teeters on the brink, Alica must uncover the power that only she can wield.

A work of magical realism set during the 1968 Prague Spring, The Witch of Prague is a book about bodily autonomy and the fight against authoritarian regimes everywhere.

Release: 17 Mar 2026

Everything about this really intrigues me – witchy, magical realism with a historical setting I’m not familiar with,

8. American Fantasy by Emma Straub

When the American Fantasy cruise ship sets sail for a four-day themed voyage, aboard are all five members of a famous 1990s boyband, and three thousand screaming women who have worshipped them for thirty years.

Newly divorced and with an empty nest, Annie is on board as a lark to appease her sister. Once a diehard fan of the band as a teen, her tastes have matured, and she feels out of place amid the sea of bedazzled, air-brushed t-shirts bearing the singers’ faces. Yet when the lights come up and the idols of her youth begin to sing before her, something is unlocked. “Maybe that was nostalgia after all, the music a direct vein to her childhood, the least complicated part of her life. A short cut to happiness.” Between the slushy alcoholic drinks, the music of her youth, and the thousands of middle-aged women acting like lovesick teenagers, Annie finally reconnects to a long-submerged part of herself. By the time she befriends one of the band members — not just a celebrity but someone also in need of a friend — she feels like anything is possible. But a lot can go wrong on a ship ruled by hormones and hope, frustration and fantasy.

Release: 7 Apr 2026

I’ll admit this mostly intrigues me because I just went to an album signing for a boy band I loved in the 2000s, and it was a surreal experience to be across a table from them, and just think of them as people. Real, exhausted men now in their forties.

9. Kill Dick by Luke Goebel

At nineteen, Susie Vogelman should be she’s an NYU dropout with no responsibilities, endless prescription pills, and a Brentwood estate to waste away in. But Los Angeles has other plans. A string of brutal murders targeting addicts spreads through the city, and Susie’s ivory tower begins to crumble. The headlines point too close to her father’s ties to an opioid empire, a sinister secret society, and her own complicity in the systems holding it all together.

Then there’s Peter Holiday, a disgraced professor running a rehab scam so audacious it’s almost admirable. When their lives collide, Susie and Peter are dragged into a web of privilege, corruption, and violence, where every escape leads deeper into the rot.

Dark, satirical, and razor-sharp, Kill Dick is a modern literary thriller that unflinchingly dissects wealth, exploitation, and the perilous line between survival and self-destruction.

Release 14 Apr 2026

Apparently, Luke Goebel is Ottessa Moshfegh’s husband, and she blurbs quotes for the book – “If this book were any better, I’d cut my own head off.” From what I’ve read of her in interviews, I don’t think she’d be married to a bad writer, so I am intrigued.

10. Canon by Paige Lewis

Yara can’t comprehend why God has chosen them to slay Dominic, the ruthless leader of the army of Bad Guys. Cast out by their family and reeling from a destructive relationship, Yara has never felt weaker—but with nothing left to lose, they strike a deal. Abandoning their solitary days of embroidery and obsessive cleaning, Yara reluctantly embarks on a perilous odyssey designed to prepare them for the daunting mission ahead.

Meanwhile, Adrena, a disillusioned prophet with a terrifying secret power, is determined to become the hero of this story. Desperately seeking the glory of God’s approval and the promise of heaven, where she hopes to reunite with her beloved mother, Adrena must first persuade Harpo, the leader of the Good Guys, that her plan is God’s will.

As their journeys unfold in a series of unforgettable adventures, Yara and Adrena are propelled toward each other and transformative revelations about life, death, and destiny in this intensely captivating, irreverent epic from a singularly brilliant new voice in fiction.

Release: 19 May 2026

This could be really fun if well executed, or it could be cringe, or it could just fall flat… But I am very intrigued by the premise. The author is a poet, and I have not generally enjoyed “experimental” novels written by poets, so I’ll be reading lots of reviews when this does come out to gage it’s vibe.