Though it’s still early 2026, the turbulence of the last few weeks is overshadowing its novelty. We are finding refuge in books, both to make sense of the bad news vortex and to welcome escape. It’s a big year for books. Gov. Gavin Newsom has a memoir out next month, many millennials are foaming at the mouth anticipating the release of Lena Dunham’s new memoir, and there are also big drops from Michael Connelly, Michael Pollan and hit sci-fi novelist Mike Chen. (What a year to be a Michael). Our list of 20 books calls out reads you might have missed among these powerhouse titles, including highly anticipated works from Tayari Jones, Emily Nemens, Álvaro Enrigue, Claudia Rankine, T.C. Boyle and others.
We asked a prolific author, local professors, book critics, literary folks about town and a self-described “sailor punk rat” to make their picks personal. After all, is there anything more personal than absorbing a book for days at a time while the laundry stays undone and dishes pile high in the sink? Our list features neo-noir, studies on female friendship and works that speak to our current moment confronting race and border tension, along with a few narratives that weave in hope. Something we could all use more of.
— Sophia Kercher
If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.
Tangerinn
By Emanuela Anechoum
Europa Editions
(Out now)
This is a debut novel, translated from the Italian. It is a novel about a woman in her early 30s trying to figure herself out as she returns home to the Calabrian coast and tries to help her sister run their father’s bar. This sounds like both a fantasy and a serious meditation on belonging to me, and I’m ready to go. Now. For many reasons, for too many reasons, all I want to think about for as long as possible in the new year is something like this novel: belonging while running away, a gathering place for all the runaways and outcasts, and a nice bar on the coast.
— Michelle Chihara
Salvation
By C. William Langsfeld
Counterpoint Press
(Feb. 3)
We don’t usually think of pastors as wobbly in their own faith, but doubt stalks them just as much as it does any ordinary human being. This debut novel gives an important role to the Rev. Morris Green, a devout Lutheran who has begun to question the meaning of the universe and the validity of his own spiritual authority. A harsh kind of answer seems to come in the form of a young visitor to his door who has killed his own best friend and is on the run from the law. That it’s set on the Western Slope of the Colorado Rockies makes it even more appealing. There are echoes here of Thornton Wilder’s “The Eighth Day” about a flight away from a homicide that shakes up a small mining town and also of John Updike’s “In the Beauty of the Lilies,” in which religious questions keep echoing through generations. I like thrillers that work a little theology into the plot: the mysteries of a crime — not just whodunit, but a whydunit — can throw a little light on the mysteries of creation and existence.
— Tom Zoellner
Clutch
By Emily Nemens
Tin House
(Feb. 3)
I’ve only recently stumbled upon Emily Nemens, which surprises me. The writer has a storied career as a literary genius and editor. Her debut novel, “The Cactus League,” received praise by NPR, the New York Times and is a favorite among my smartest friends.
Speaking of friends, her new novel follows five college friends converging in Palm Springs after leading vastly different lives across the country. The women have each endured private struggles and have come together to “reconcile professional ambition with personal tumult.” The novel has been described as beautiful, moving and absorbing — perhaps “White Lotus” with more sincerity and heart. I’m so hypnotized by stories of female friendship, especially the way they complicate and evolve over time. I’m thrilled to dive in.
— Maddie Connors
Warning Signs
By Tracy Sierra
Viking/Pamela Dorman Books
(Feb. 10)
“Nighwatching,” Tracy Sierra’s acclaimed 2024 debut, features a young mother who must overcome withering self-doubt and grief to save herself and her children from a sadistic, murderous intruder. In “Warning Signs,” Sierra has set up an even more suspenseful tale centered on fathers, sons and the toxic masculinity that surrounds them. After learning the risks and dangers of the Colorado Rockies’ backcountry from a loving but complicated mother, Zach Fisher, a sensitive 12-year-old, joins Bram, his hypercritical father, on a father/son ski trip. First, an animal’s carcass is found, eviscerated in a way no predator could. Then, after the various men, all potential investors in Bram’s business venture, and their sons assemble, Ginny, Bram’s assistant, goes missing. As an avalanche and dead bodies ratchet up the suspense, Zach must lean on his mother’s wisdom to fight for his life while deciphering a confusing undercurrent of danger, violence and betrayal among the survivors. “Warning Signs” promises to be even more of a nail-biter than Sierra’s debut, a deepening of her examination of families in extremis, which should earn it a top spot in readers’ TBR list.
— Paula L. Woods
I Am the Ghost Here
By Kim Samek
Dial Press
(Feb. 24)
The debut by Pushcart-winning short story writer Kim Samek blends subversive humor with the absurd in a memorable collection of stories written during the COVID-19 pandemic. These weird tales, some of which are set in L.A. where Samek has worked as an Emmy-nominated TV writer and producer, reflect that strange and unsettling time: A man reveals to his family that’s he’s being controlled by a puppeteer, a new mother turns into an egg, and a grieving widow joins a reality show for wives who’ve lost their husbands in tragic accidents. Recommended for fans of Ben Loory and Aimee Bender, whom Samek will be in conversation with at Vroman’s in Pasadena on March 17.
— Jim Ruland
Kin
By Tayari Jones
Knopf:
(Feb. 24)
Tayari Jones excels at writing novels that, regardless of how big the social issues surrounding them may be, are firmly centered on human relationships. After the international success of “An American Marriage,” which focuses on a nuanced, triangulated relationship that arises out of a Black man’s wrongful conviction for raping a white woman, Jones turns her attention to two motherless young women from Honeysuckle, La., whose paths and fortunes diverge when Vernice attends Atlanta’s Spelman College, where she finds sisterhood and a different kind of inequality, while Annie searches for the mother who abandoned her, sending her on a path of adventure but also grave danger. Although their paths seem to be widely divergent, Vernice and Annie’s common desire for love, connection and purpose resonates deeply, which promises to make “Kin” a balm for readers’ fractured spirits in these divided times.
— P.L.W.
Now I Surrender
By Álvaro Enrigue
Riverhead Books
(March 3)
Translated into English, Álvaro Enrigue’s novel reimagines the American West through historical fiction. Enrigue has a long career of writing brilliant and gripping literary accounts of Mexico’s history with a daring flair. His work is a moving and complex love letter to Mexico, mesmerizing anyone who has ever been awestruck by the country. His novel “You Dreamed of Empires” was described by NPR as a “counterfactual history of Hernan Cortés’ arrival at Moctezuma’s court. It’s also a drug novel. Moctezuma is high on mushrooms for the whole book.”
His next translated book, “Now I Surrender,” is equally ambitious, telling the story of a woman fleeing an Apache raid on the Mexican-American border. The historical fiction imagines the Mexican and American armies fighting for control of the West — part myth, fact and fiction spanning the past and present. It’s a slice of bloody American history with a timely edge.
— M. Connors
The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on the End of the World
By Rebecca Solnit
Haymarket Books
(March 3)
After Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential win, Rebecca Solnit’s slim volume “Hope in the Dark” nearly became a sacred text to those reeling from the election results. The long, lyrical essay, originally written during the Bush years at the height of the second Iraq war, directly challenges the idea that “nothing ever changes.” In it, Solnit examines history to show how small, often forgotten actions led to massive cultural and political shifts. What I like about Solnit’s work is that she never promises to be the final authority and instead invites dialogue. (It’s worth mentioning that she helped popularize the term “mansplaining,” after all). Her new work, “The Beginning Comes After the End” is what Solnit calls the sequel to “Hope in the Dark.” In it she leans into how interconnected humanity is and, again, offers what she calls her “freakish hope” for readers. Last year on the podcast “How to Survive the End of the World,” she announced: “We’re not hopeless, we’re not losers, and we’re not living in a static world which nothing can change.” This new volume expands on that sentiment, serving as another urgent manifesto for our tumultuous time.
— S.K.
Day Care
By Nora Lange
Two Dollar Radio
(April 7)
Nora Lange’s follow-up to her Los Angeles Times bestselling novel “Us Fools” is a collection of short fiction that confronts family dynamics while cozying up to the surreal. These short, dense stories are clotted with information — personal quirks, relationship histories, family lore — and simmer with sexual tension that is often joyously perverse. Lange rarely sticks with one timeline or point of view and the result is a unique and unpredictable collection that elevates the fatigue of simply trying to exist at the quarter pole of the 21st century to an art form.
— J.R.
American Spirits
By Anna Dorn
Simon & Schuster
(April 14)
If you’ve been to a literary event in the last few years in Northeast Los Angeles, you’ve likely seen Anna Dorn coolly reading poetry off her iPhone about a woman’s freakish inner life — creepy, lonely, a throbbing desire to die. (I mean this as a compliment.) Dorn’s writing feels unique in its portrayal of Los Angeles in all its sleazy, cigarette-stained, voice-fried glory. This spring, Dorn returns with “American Spirits,” described as a novel following a pop star and her fan-turned-assistant in isolation together during the pandemic. The work is a meditation on fandom, fame and pop music. I imagine the book as a Lynch film with a score by Lana Del Rey — disturbing, weird and poignant. Plus, I’ll read anything about a crazy woman — let alone two.
— M. Connors
The Complete Works of Ricardo Reis
By Fernando Pessoa
New Directions
(April 21)
Is Fernando Pessoa the most fascinating writer ever? Best known for “The Book of Disquiet,” a fragmented masterpiece of urban ennui, the bulk of Pessoa’s literary output wasn’t discovered until after his death in 1935 at age 47. He left behind a massive steamer trunk full of manuscripts, many of which were attributed to artists not named Fernando Pessoa.
These works were penned by Pessoa’s heteronyms, a term he came up with to describe the scores of distinct authorial entities he invented. More than a pseudonym, these poets and writers had different backgrounds and influences. Some even held controversial views that Pessoa himself didn’t share.
Pessoa created 75 of these personas (my favorite name of the bunch is Alexander Search), but three of them — Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos, and Ricardo Reis — wrote volumes of poems, enough for several books. Since 2020 New Directions has been putting out bilingual editions of these poems, with “The Complete Works of Ricardo Reis” being the latest. This all sounds very experimental as befitting the James Joyce of Portugal, but does it amount to more than a literary leg-pull? Pessoa possesses a genius for keeping the reader close and when I read Reis’ poems, I feel like the authors are peering over my shoulder and reflecting on the horrors of this distracted age: “Master, how serene / Are all the hours / We waste / If, as we waste them, / We place them in a vase / Like flowers.”
— J.R.
No Way Home
By T.C. Boyle
Liveright Publishing
(April 21)
Beloved both by book clubs and spirited Reddit threads, the prolific T.C. Boyle is called a literary “American master” for a reason. With the release of his 20th novel, Boyle invites readers into a tequila-soaked love triangle with scenes that volley from high-stakes L.A. hospital drama to desert rats slamming beers in a Nevada small town. The main character grapples with the untimely death of his mother as he navigates a new, possibly treacherous, relationship. A complicated love story told by one of Southern California’s literary giants? Count me in. I grew up in a mixed reading household. My mom swallowed self-help books and the occasional memoir as my dad tucked into the latest Michael Connelly. Meanwhile, my sister collected cookbooks and fantasy tomes as I finished the final chapters of yet another Jane Austen classic. But we all found ourselves pulled toward one of Boyle’s books at some point. I’m glad he keeps gracing my bookshelf.
— S.K.
A Violent Masterpiece
By Jordan Harper
Mulholland Books
(April 28)
“Everybody Knows” was Harper’s 2023 incendiary take on Hollywood fixers. Now comes a second neo-noir that has us primed for an epic excavation beneath the foundations on which the industry stands. Among the players in Harper’s ninth circle of Hollywood Hell: a well-connected pedophile who mysteriously “commits suicide” just before naming his accomplices; a young woman whose disappearance, then very existence, is erased despite its possible connection to a serial killer; and the L.A. Ripper himself, who hides clues in graphic crime scenes. Three Hollywood insiders — the pedophile’s scrappy attorney, an underground concierge serving the uber wealthy’s every dark whim and a bottom-feeding live streamer who sees L.A. as a Frankenstein’s monster of felonies sewn together into a city — race to uncover the conspiracy that links the crimes, no matter the risks. This walk on Hollywood’s very dark side highlights one of Harper’s great gifts making readers care about even the most compromised among us. Do the allusions and shout-outs to current events and personalities seem a little too close for comfort? I certainly hope so!
— P.L.W.
John of John
By Douglas Stuart
Grove Press
(May 5)
On the Scottish island of Harris, the setting for this novel, expensive tweeds are a costly commodity. John-Calum Macleod, or “Cal,” has returned to the cramped, emotionally suffocating family home he left behind, now shared with his father and maternal grandmother. Like the protagonists in Stuart’s previous novels, Shuggie Bain and Mungo Hamilton, Cal is gay. Though he found freedom in Glasgow’s queer community, he couldn’t make a living there. His father, a fire-and-brimstone-spouting church elder, ordered him back, demanding he care for his grandmother, Ella, with the stark insistence: “She’s not my responsibility. It’s not fair of you to put the burden on me.” Cal’s mother, Grace, is estranged from the family, having left her terrifyingly pious and physically abusive husband, as well as her own mother, who appears complicit in her son-in-law’s behavior. Cal slowly begins to reconnect with old friends while actively defying his father’s dictates. When John commands Cal to cut his long hair, Cal rebels by dyeing it platinum and trimming it into a chin-length bob. This unshakable belief in his own self-sovereignty offers a welcome contrast to the islanders’ inherent fear of change. Stuart, demonstrating an almost anthropological understanding of his homeland, reveals how the Hebridean culture has been maintained for centuries and continues to thrive today. This preservation is ensured through strict weavers’ guild regulations, a vigilant (both positive and negative) neighborliness, and careful resource management. However, John and Cal’s relationship involves more than just weaving and loom maintenance. As Cal tells his former best friend, Isla, her Fair Isle sweater boasts 29 different shades. This detail highlights the complexity of color, mirroring how tweeds that appear predominantly green or brown are, in fact, woven from a rich spectrum of threads, including yellow and fuchsia — all the colors of the rainbow.
— Bethanne Patrick
Backtalker: An American Memoir
By Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw
Simon & Schuster
(May 5)
Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw has been rightly known until now for her immense scholarly work, establishing terms like “intersectionality” and “critical race theory” that now have grown into entire fields of study. Regardless of pushback, these vital ideas have moved beyond academia; the general public now understands that feminism cannot be described uniformly for all groups, and that racism is a social construct, not an accident. With “Backtalker,” Crenshaw turns personal. Her stories are well-told, relevant and often searing, detailing an elementary-school teacher’s slight, a hometown swimming-pool reckoning and chauvinism from an Ivy League club. She clearly had exceptional, publicly supportive parents (witness her mother’s activism at that swimming pool) and possesses a maverick’s temperament. “Being a backtalker is like being lactose intolerant,” she writes in “A Note From Kim.” “There are things that I cannot digest. To accept anything close to second-class status as the price of belonging sickens me.” The book’s three sections — “Raising a Backtalker,” “Becoming a Backtalker” and “Being a Backtalker” — reinforce the author’s belief that questioning the system to change it requires education, experience and community. The epilogue is particularly powerful, opening with Crenshaw visiting Selma, Ala., in 2025 for the 60th anniversary of Bloody Sunday. Seeing its bridge painted with the words “Selma: A Nice Place to Live,” she ponders: “I wondered whether those bold letters presided over the scene on that fateful day in 1965 when police officers, under the direction of Alabama’s segregationist governor, brutally beat scores of African Americans, injuring some for life.” The fight is far from over. We are fortunate to have warriors like Crenshaw who refuse to accept second-class status.
— B.P.
On Witness and Respair: Essays
By Jesmyn Ward
Scribner
(May 19)
Jesmyn Ward’s work has always gutted me. Her 2011 novel “Salvage the Bones,” set in Mississippi during Hurricane Katrina, immerses the reader in a world full of suffering but telegraphs something profound about human dignity and care. There is nothing romanticized about the pain her characters experience. And yet, the communities and ecosystems that come alive in Ward’s work make you want to be with her people and creatures. Images from that novel come to me unbidden when I’m alone making ramen, leaning into a cold wind or calming down my hypervigilant Doberman mutt.
Ward’s partner died suddenly in 2020, and she has said in interviews that she almost stopped writing. Lucky for us, she did not. “Let Us Descend” is a majestic novel set among enslaved people in Louisiana (2023). This upcoming book is a collection of essays, speeches and creative nonfiction. “On Witness and Respair” defines that last word as: “Respair (noun, obsolete), fresh hope after despair.” Her sentences carry real wisdom, and wisdom seems in short supply. If she can find a path to collective resilience in these dark times, I’d better suit up and buckle down.
— M. Chihara
Land
By Maggie O’Farrell
Knopf
(June 2)
Deep within this important new novel from O’Farrell, the widely praised author of “Hamnet” (to which, full disclosure, I gave a rave review in 2020), a brief love affair between two New World emigres recalls John Donne’s famous line describing his lover as “O My America, my new-found land.” It’s a reminder that although Land begins and ends with “the dog-shaped island” of Ireland — its story begins even further in the past (before that of the Neolithic girl Brith who walks the same territory) and ends far into the future. We meet Tomás and his son Liam in the late 19th century as they work for “the redcoats” to make a detailed map of their area, which shelters a copse and a deep, warm spring that seems to turn Tomás into a lunatic. That Tomás, who has already survived the Great Hunger as well as a cruel workhouse, isn’t already a lunatic is perhaps less fantastical than the plot itself at times. Throughout the book, elements from a talking fish to a possibly reincarnated dog exist alongside the bleak reality of a country so downtrodden and occupied that even its cartography isn’t in its own language. Somehow, without reducing anyone to pure stereotype (except, perhaps, for the greedy local Anglo-Irish viscount, who deserves it), O’Farrell weaves in mythology, traditional music, humble foodways and several Irish wolfhounds to demonstrate that the land belongs to no one, at least no human, and will endure despite all that humans take from it.
— B.P.
Crash Into Me
By Robinne Lee
St. Martin’s Press
(July 7)
When I’m making good decisions this spring I’m going to read a book from Verso called “The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy: Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the West,” by a scholar named A.J.A. Woods, but when I’m off the clock, I want to crawl inside a sexy novel about people I don’t know and contemplate my bad decisions. I sometimes need to be judgy and compassionate at the same time. So I’m looking out for a new book by Robinne Lee that promises to be not only sexy but “sizzling,” even, and also smart and a little bit mean. My Los Angeles is populated by working people just trying to muddle through, but I like to visit the Other Los Angeles, the one with enough ease and access that it seems both safer and nastier. I like that Lee threw some elbows to insist that her last novel, about an older woman’s affair with the lead singer of a boy band, was not generically a “romance,” thankyouverymuch. I’m interested in the way Lee takes people who might be actively blowing up their lives quite seriously. No one is above making serious mistakes for something hot but impermanent.
— M. Chihara
Triage
By Claudia Rankine
Graywolf Press
(Aug. 4)
Claudia Rankine is fearless. Her astounding bestseller, “Citizen: An American Lyric,” blended poetry, art and cultural criticism and brought her brilliant mind to the masses. In her last book, “Just Us,” she traveled around the nation asking white men in airports, dinner parties and theaters, among other shared spaces, what they thought about privilege. There’s a reason she was granted a MacArthur Fellowship — a.k.a. the “genius grant” — several years back. 2026 is already rife with racial tension; we need her. I’m eager to read what she has to say in her new book, “Triage,” which some consider to be one of her most personal works. In it, she dabbles in fiction, examines hardships in Gaza and continues to bend literary genres. “No matter our posture,” she writes “we are all among the rubble.”
— S.K.
Girlhood, Translated
By Suzanne Garfinkle-Crowell
Penguin
(Sept. 8)
Social media has been particularly unkind to teenage girls, putting rocket fuel onto the ordinary adolescent stressors of physical awkwardness, the sadness of comparison and the fireworks of inter-friendship conflicts. Medical professionals can sometimes do more harm than good by putting bleak-sounding labels on the distress — depression, anxiety, OCD, ADHD — and making it all seem chronic. This book takes aim at what the author calls the “therapy-speak” that means well but creates an unhelpful shorthand for the more complicated problems crying out for a better means of expression. The inner life of a teenage girl was an uncrackable mystery to me when I was a teenage boy. Now that I’m a parent of a young daughter, I hope to understand better what I failed to grasp back then.
— T.Z.
Though it’s still early 2026, the turbulence of the last few weeks is overshadowing its novelty. We are finding refuge in books, both to make sense of the bad news vortex and to welcome escape. It’s a big year for books. Gov. Gavin Newsom has a memoir out next month, many millennials are foaming at the mouth anticipating the release of Lena Dunham’s new memoir, and there are also big drops from Michael Connelly, Michael Pollan and hit sci-fi novelist Mike Chen. (What a year to be a Michael). Our list of 20 books calls out reads you might have missed among these powerhouse titles, including highly anticipated works from Tayari Jones, Emily Nemens, Álvaro Enrigue, Claudia Rankine, T.C. Boyle and others.
We asked a prolific author, local professors, book critics, literary folks about town and a self-described “sailor punk rat” to make their picks personal. After all, is there anything more personal than absorbing a book for days at a time while the laundry stays undone and dishes pile high in the sink? Our list features neo-noir, studies on female friendship and works that speak to our current moment confronting race and border tension, along with a few narratives that weave in hope. Something we could all use more of.
— Sophia Kercher
If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.
Tangerinn
By Emanuela Anechoum
Europa Editions
(Out now)
This is a debut novel, translated from the Italian. It is a novel about a woman in her early 30s trying to figure herself out as she returns home to the Calabrian coast and tries to help her sister run their father’s bar. This sounds like both a fantasy and a serious meditation on belonging to me, and I’m ready to go. Now. For many reasons, for too many reasons, all I want to think about for as long as possible in the new year is something like this novel: belonging while running away, a gathering place for all the runaways and outcasts, and a nice bar on the coast.
— Michelle Chihara
Salvation
By C. William Langsfeld
Counterpoint Press
(Feb. 3)
We don’t usually think of pastors as wobbly in their own faith, but doubt stalks them just as much as it does any ordinary human being. This debut novel gives an important role to the Rev. Morris Green, a devout Lutheran who has begun to question the meaning of the universe and the validity of his own spiritual authority. A harsh kind of answer seems to come in the form of a young visitor to his door who has killed his own best friend and is on the run from the law. That it’s set on the Western Slope of the Colorado Rockies makes it even more appealing. There are echoes here of Thornton Wilder’s “The Eighth Day” about a flight away from a homicide that shakes up a small mining town and also of John Updike’s “In the Beauty of the Lilies,” in which religious questions keep echoing through generations. I like thrillers that work a little theology into the plot: the mysteries of a crime — not just whodunit, but a whydunit — can throw a little light on the mysteries of creation and existence.
— Tom Zoellner
Clutch
By Emily Nemens
Tin House
(Feb. 3)
I’ve only recently stumbled upon Emily Nemens, which surprises me. The writer has a storied career as a literary genius and editor. Her debut novel, “The Cactus League,” received praise by NPR, the New York Times and is a favorite among my smartest friends.
Speaking of friends, her new novel follows five college friends converging in Palm Springs after leading vastly different lives across the country. The women have each endured private struggles and have come together to “reconcile professional ambition with personal tumult.” The novel has been described as beautiful, moving and absorbing — perhaps “White Lotus” with more sincerity and heart. I’m so hypnotized by stories of female friendship, especially the way they complicate and evolve over time. I’m thrilled to dive in.
— Maddie Connors
Warning Signs
By Tracy Sierra
Viking/Pamela Dorman Books
(Feb. 10)
“Nighwatching,” Tracy Sierra’s acclaimed 2024 debut, features a young mother who must overcome withering self-doubt and grief to save herself and her children from a sadistic, murderous intruder. In “Warning Signs,” Sierra has set up an even more suspenseful tale centered on fathers, sons and the toxic masculinity that surrounds them. After learning the risks and dangers of the Colorado Rockies’ backcountry from a loving but complicated mother, Zach Fisher, a sensitive 12-year-old, joins Bram, his hypercritical father, on a father/son ski trip. First, an animal’s carcass is found, eviscerated in a way no predator could. Then, after the various men, all potential investors in Bram’s business venture, and their sons assemble, Ginny, Bram’s assistant, goes missing. As an avalanche and dead bodies ratchet up the suspense, Zach must lean on his mother’s wisdom to fight for his life while deciphering a confusing undercurrent of danger, violence and betrayal among the survivors. “Warning Signs” promises to be even more of a nail-biter than Sierra’s debut, a deepening of her examination of families in extremis, which should earn it a top spot in readers’ TBR list.
— Paula L. Woods
I Am the Ghost Here
By Kim Samek
Dial Press
(Feb. 24)
The debut by Pushcart-winning short story writer Kim Samek blends subversive humor with the absurd in a memorable collection of stories written during the COVID-19 pandemic. These weird tales, some of which are set in L.A. where Samek has worked as an Emmy-nominated TV writer and producer, reflect that strange and unsettling time: A man reveals to his family that’s he’s being controlled by a puppeteer, a new mother turns into an egg, and a grieving widow joins a reality show for wives who’ve lost their husbands in tragic accidents. Recommended for fans of Ben Loory and Aimee Bender, whom Samek will be in conversation with at Vroman’s in Pasadena on March 17.
— Jim Ruland
Kin
By Tayari Jones
Knopf:
(Feb. 24)
Tayari Jones excels at writing novels that, regardless of how big the social issues surrounding them may be, are firmly centered on human relationships. After the international success of “An American Marriage,” which focuses on a nuanced, triangulated relationship that arises out of a Black man’s wrongful conviction for raping a white woman, Jones turns her attention to two motherless young women from Honeysuckle, La., whose paths and fortunes diverge when Vernice attends Atlanta’s Spelman College, where she finds sisterhood and a different kind of inequality, while Annie searches for the mother who abandoned her, sending her on a path of adventure but also grave danger. Although their paths seem to be widely divergent, Vernice and Annie’s common desire for love, connection and purpose resonates deeply, which promises to make “Kin” a balm for readers’ fractured spirits in these divided times.
— P.L.W.
Now I Surrender
By Álvaro Enrigue
Riverhead Books
(March 3)
Translated into English, Álvaro Enrigue’s novel reimagines the American West through historical fiction. Enrigue has a long career of writing brilliant and gripping literary accounts of Mexico’s history with a daring flair. His work is a moving and complex love letter to Mexico, mesmerizing anyone who has ever been awestruck by the country. His novel “You Dreamed of Empires” was described by NPR as a “counterfactual history of Hernan Cortés’ arrival at Moctezuma’s court. It’s also a drug novel. Moctezuma is high on mushrooms for the whole book.”
His next translated book, “Now I Surrender,” is equally ambitious, telling the story of a woman fleeing an Apache raid on the Mexican-American border. The historical fiction imagines the Mexican and American armies fighting for control of the West — part myth, fact and fiction spanning the past and present. It’s a slice of bloody American history with a timely edge.
— M. Connors
The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on the End of the World
By Rebecca Solnit
Haymarket Books
(March 3)
After Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential win, Rebecca Solnit’s slim volume “Hope in the Dark” nearly became a sacred text to those reeling from the election results. The long, lyrical essay, originally written during the Bush years at the height of the second Iraq war, directly challenges the idea that “nothing ever changes.” In it, Solnit examines history to show how small, often forgotten actions led to massive cultural and political shifts. What I like about Solnit’s work is that she never promises to be the final authority and instead invites dialogue. (It’s worth mentioning that she helped popularize the term “mansplaining,” after all). Her new work, “The Beginning Comes After the End” is what Solnit calls the sequel to “Hope in the Dark.” In it she leans into how interconnected humanity is and, again, offers what she calls her “freakish hope” for readers. Last year on the podcast “How to Survive the End of the World,” she announced: “We’re not hopeless, we’re not losers, and we’re not living in a static world which nothing can change.” This new volume expands on that sentiment, serving as another urgent manifesto for our tumultuous time.
— S.K.
Day Care
By Nora Lange
Two Dollar Radio
(April 7)
Nora Lange’s follow-up to her Los Angeles Times bestselling novel “Us Fools” is a collection of short fiction that confronts family dynamics while cozying up to the surreal. These short, dense stories are clotted with information — personal quirks, relationship histories, family lore — and simmer with sexual tension that is often joyously perverse. Lange rarely sticks with one timeline or point of view and the result is a unique and unpredictable collection that elevates the fatigue of simply trying to exist at the quarter pole of the 21st century to an art form.
— J.R.
American Spirits
By Anna Dorn
Simon & Schuster
(April 14)
If you’ve been to a literary event in the last few years in Northeast Los Angeles, you’ve likely seen Anna Dorn coolly reading poetry off her iPhone about a woman’s freakish inner life — creepy, lonely, a throbbing desire to die. (I mean this as a compliment.) Dorn’s writing feels unique in its portrayal of Los Angeles in all its sleazy, cigarette-stained, voice-fried glory. This spring, Dorn returns with “American Spirits,” described as a novel following a pop star and her fan-turned-assistant in isolation together during the pandemic. The work is a meditation on fandom, fame and pop music. I imagine the book as a Lynch film with a score by Lana Del Rey — disturbing, weird and poignant. Plus, I’ll read anything about a crazy woman — let alone two.
— M. Connors
The Complete Works of Ricardo Reis
By Fernando Pessoa
New Directions
(April 21)
Is Fernando Pessoa the most fascinating writer ever? Best known for “The Book of Disquiet,” a fragmented masterpiece of urban ennui, the bulk of Pessoa’s literary output wasn’t discovered until after his death in 1935 at age 47. He left behind a massive steamer trunk full of manuscripts, many of which were attributed to artists not named Fernando Pessoa.
These works were penned by Pessoa’s heteronyms, a term he came up with to describe the scores of distinct authorial entities he invented. More than a pseudonym, these poets and writers had different backgrounds and influences. Some even held controversial views that Pessoa himself didn’t share.
Pessoa created 75 of these personas (my favorite name of the bunch is Alexander Search), but three of them — Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos, and Ricardo Reis — wrote volumes of poems, enough for several books. Since 2020 New Directions has been putting out bilingual editions of these poems, with “The Complete Works of Ricardo Reis” being the latest. This all sounds very experimental as befitting the James Joyce of Portugal, but does it amount to more than a literary leg-pull? Pessoa possesses a genius for keeping the reader close and when I read Reis’ poems, I feel like the authors are peering over my shoulder and reflecting on the horrors of this distracted age: “Master, how serene / Are all the hours / We waste / If, as we waste them, / We place them in a vase / Like flowers.”
— J.R.
No Way Home
By T.C. Boyle
Liveright Publishing
(April 21)
Beloved both by book clubs and spirited Reddit threads, the prolific T.C. Boyle is called a literary “American master” for a reason. With the release of his 20th novel, Boyle invites readers into a tequila-soaked love triangle with scenes that volley from high-stakes L.A. hospital drama to desert rats slamming beers in a Nevada small town. The main character grapples with the untimely death of his mother as he navigates a new, possibly treacherous, relationship. A complicated love story told by one of Southern California’s literary giants? Count me in. I grew up in a mixed reading household. My mom swallowed self-help books and the occasional memoir as my dad tucked into the latest Michael Connelly. Meanwhile, my sister collected cookbooks and fantasy tomes as I finished the final chapters of yet another Jane Austen classic. But we all found ourselves pulled toward one of Boyle’s books at some point. I’m glad he keeps gracing my bookshelf.
— S.K.
A Violent Masterpiece
By Jordan Harper
Mulholland Books
(April 28)
“Everybody Knows” was Harper’s 2023 incendiary take on Hollywood fixers. Now comes a second neo-noir that has us primed for an epic excavation beneath the foundations on which the industry stands. Among the players in Harper’s ninth circle of Hollywood Hell: a well-connected pedophile who mysteriously “commits suicide” just before naming his accomplices; a young woman whose disappearance, then very existence, is erased despite its possible connection to a serial killer; and the L.A. Ripper himself, who hides clues in graphic crime scenes. Three Hollywood insiders — the pedophile’s scrappy attorney, an underground concierge serving the uber wealthy’s every dark whim and a bottom-feeding live streamer who sees L.A. as a Frankenstein’s monster of felonies sewn together into a city — race to uncover the conspiracy that links the crimes, no matter the risks. This walk on Hollywood’s very dark side highlights one of Harper’s great gifts making readers care about even the most compromised among us. Do the allusions and shout-outs to current events and personalities seem a little too close for comfort? I certainly hope so!
— P.L.W.
John of John
By Douglas Stuart
Grove Press
(May 5)
On the Scottish island of Harris, the setting for this novel, expensive tweeds are a costly commodity. John-Calum Macleod, or “Cal,” has returned to the cramped, emotionally suffocating family home he left behind, now shared with his father and maternal grandmother. Like the protagonists in Stuart’s previous novels, Shuggie Bain and Mungo Hamilton, Cal is gay. Though he found freedom in Glasgow’s queer community, he couldn’t make a living there. His father, a fire-and-brimstone-spouting church elder, ordered him back, demanding he care for his grandmother, Ella, with the stark insistence: “She’s not my responsibility. It’s not fair of you to put the burden on me.” Cal’s mother, Grace, is estranged from the family, having left her terrifyingly pious and physically abusive husband, as well as her own mother, who appears complicit in her son-in-law’s behavior. Cal slowly begins to reconnect with old friends while actively defying his father’s dictates. When John commands Cal to cut his long hair, Cal rebels by dyeing it platinum and trimming it into a chin-length bob. This unshakable belief in his own self-sovereignty offers a welcome contrast to the islanders’ inherent fear of change. Stuart, demonstrating an almost anthropological understanding of his homeland, reveals how the Hebridean culture has been maintained for centuries and continues to thrive today. This preservation is ensured through strict weavers’ guild regulations, a vigilant (both positive and negative) neighborliness, and careful resource management. However, John and Cal’s relationship involves more than just weaving and loom maintenance. As Cal tells his former best friend, Isla, her Fair Isle sweater boasts 29 different shades. This detail highlights the complexity of color, mirroring how tweeds that appear predominantly green or brown are, in fact, woven from a rich spectrum of threads, including yellow and fuchsia — all the colors of the rainbow.
— Bethanne Patrick
Backtalker: An American Memoir
By Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw
Simon & Schuster
(May 5)
Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw has been rightly known until now for her immense scholarly work, establishing terms like “intersectionality” and “critical race theory” that now have grown into entire fields of study. Regardless of pushback, these vital ideas have moved beyond academia; the general public now understands that feminism cannot be described uniformly for all groups, and that racism is a social construct, not an accident. With “Backtalker,” Crenshaw turns personal. Her stories are well-told, relevant and often searing, detailing an elementary-school teacher’s slight, a hometown swimming-pool reckoning and chauvinism from an Ivy League club. She clearly had exceptional, publicly supportive parents (witness her mother’s activism at that swimming pool) and possesses a maverick’s temperament. “Being a backtalker is like being lactose intolerant,” she writes in “A Note From Kim.” “There are things that I cannot digest. To accept anything close to second-class status as the price of belonging sickens me.” The book’s three sections — “Raising a Backtalker,” “Becoming a Backtalker” and “Being a Backtalker” — reinforce the author’s belief that questioning the system to change it requires education, experience and community. The epilogue is particularly powerful, opening with Crenshaw visiting Selma, Ala., in 2025 for the 60th anniversary of Bloody Sunday. Seeing its bridge painted with the words “Selma: A Nice Place to Live,” she ponders: “I wondered whether those bold letters presided over the scene on that fateful day in 1965 when police officers, under the direction of Alabama’s segregationist governor, brutally beat scores of African Americans, injuring some for life.” The fight is far from over. We are fortunate to have warriors like Crenshaw who refuse to accept second-class status.
— B.P.
On Witness and Respair: Essays
By Jesmyn Ward
Scribner
(May 19)
Jesmyn Ward’s work has always gutted me. Her 2011 novel “Salvage the Bones,” set in Mississippi during Hurricane Katrina, immerses the reader in a world full of suffering but telegraphs something profound about human dignity and care. There is nothing romanticized about the pain her characters experience. And yet, the communities and ecosystems that come alive in Ward’s work make you want to be with her people and creatures. Images from that novel come to me unbidden when I’m alone making ramen, leaning into a cold wind or calming down my hypervigilant Doberman mutt.
Ward’s partner died suddenly in 2020, and she has said in interviews that she almost stopped writing. Lucky for us, she did not. “Let Us Descend” is a majestic novel set among enslaved people in Louisiana (2023). This upcoming book is a collection of essays, speeches and creative nonfiction. “On Witness and Respair” defines that last word as: “Respair (noun, obsolete), fresh hope after despair.” Her sentences carry real wisdom, and wisdom seems in short supply. If she can find a path to collective resilience in these dark times, I’d better suit up and buckle down.
— M. Chihara
Land
By Maggie O’Farrell
Knopf
(June 2)
Deep within this important new novel from O’Farrell, the widely praised author of “Hamnet” (to which, full disclosure, I gave a rave review in 2020), a brief love affair between two New World emigres recalls John Donne’s famous line describing his lover as “O My America, my new-found land.” It’s a reminder that although Land begins and ends with “the dog-shaped island” of Ireland — its story begins even further in the past (before that of the Neolithic girl Brith who walks the same territory) and ends far into the future. We meet Tomás and his son Liam in the late 19th century as they work for “the redcoats” to make a detailed map of their area, which shelters a copse and a deep, warm spring that seems to turn Tomás into a lunatic. That Tomás, who has already survived the Great Hunger as well as a cruel workhouse, isn’t already a lunatic is perhaps less fantastical than the plot itself at times. Throughout the book, elements from a talking fish to a possibly reincarnated dog exist alongside the bleak reality of a country so downtrodden and occupied that even its cartography isn’t in its own language. Somehow, without reducing anyone to pure stereotype (except, perhaps, for the greedy local Anglo-Irish viscount, who deserves it), O’Farrell weaves in mythology, traditional music, humble foodways and several Irish wolfhounds to demonstrate that the land belongs to no one, at least no human, and will endure despite all that humans take from it.
— B.P.
Crash Into Me
By Robinne Lee
St. Martin’s Press
(July 7)
When I’m making good decisions this spring I’m going to read a book from Verso called “The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy: Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the West,” by a scholar named A.J.A. Woods, but when I’m off the clock, I want to crawl inside a sexy novel about people I don’t know and contemplate my bad decisions. I sometimes need to be judgy and compassionate at the same time. So I’m looking out for a new book by Robinne Lee that promises to be not only sexy but “sizzling,” even, and also smart and a little bit mean. My Los Angeles is populated by working people just trying to muddle through, but I like to visit the Other Los Angeles, the one with enough ease and access that it seems both safer and nastier. I like that Lee threw some elbows to insist that her last novel, about an older woman’s affair with the lead singer of a boy band, was not generically a “romance,” thankyouverymuch. I’m interested in the way Lee takes people who might be actively blowing up their lives quite seriously. No one is above making serious mistakes for something hot but impermanent.
— M. Chihara
Triage
By Claudia Rankine
Graywolf Press
(Aug. 4)
Claudia Rankine is fearless. Her astounding bestseller, “Citizen: An American Lyric,” blended poetry, art and cultural criticism and brought her brilliant mind to the masses. In her last book, “Just Us,” she traveled around the nation asking white men in airports, dinner parties and theaters, among other shared spaces, what they thought about privilege. There’s a reason she was granted a MacArthur Fellowship — a.k.a. the “genius grant” — several years back. 2026 is already rife with racial tension; we need her. I’m eager to read what she has to say in her new book, “Triage,” which some consider to be one of her most personal works. In it, she dabbles in fiction, examines hardships in Gaza and continues to bend literary genres. “No matter our posture,” she writes “we are all among the rubble.”
— S.K.
Girlhood, Translated
By Suzanne Garfinkle-Crowell
Penguin
(Sept. 8)
Social media has been particularly unkind to teenage girls, putting rocket fuel onto the ordinary adolescent stressors of physical awkwardness, the sadness of comparison and the fireworks of inter-friendship conflicts. Medical professionals can sometimes do more harm than good by putting bleak-sounding labels on the distress — depression, anxiety, OCD, ADHD — and making it all seem chronic. This book takes aim at what the author calls the “therapy-speak” that means well but creates an unhelpful shorthand for the more complicated problems crying out for a better means of expression. The inner life of a teenage girl was an uncrackable mystery to me when I was a teenage boy. Now that I’m a parent of a young daughter, I hope to understand better what I failed to grasp back then.
— T.Z.
Though it’s still early 2026, the turbulence of the last few weeks is overshadowing its novelty. We are finding refuge in books, both to make sense of the bad news vortex and to welcome escape. It’s a big year for books. Gov. Gavin Newsom has a memoir out next month, many millennials are foaming at the mouth anticipating the release of Lena Dunham’s new memoir, and there are also big drops from Michael Connelly, Michael Pollan and hit sci-fi novelist Mike Chen. (What a year to be a Michael). Our list of 20 books calls out reads you might have missed among these powerhouse titles, including highly anticipated works from Tayari Jones, Emily Nemens, Álvaro Enrigue, Claudia Rankine, T.C. Boyle and others.
We asked a prolific author, local professors, book critics, literary folks about town and a self-described “sailor punk rat” to make their picks personal. After all, is there anything more personal than absorbing a book for days at a time while the laundry stays undone and dishes pile high in the sink? Our list features neo-noir, studies on female friendship and works that speak to our current moment confronting race and border tension, along with a few narratives that weave in hope. Something we could all use more of.
— Sophia Kercher
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Tangerinn
By Emanuela Anechoum
Europa Editions
(Out now)
This is a debut novel, translated from the Italian. It is a novel about a woman in her early 30s trying to figure herself out as she returns home to the Calabrian coast and tries to help her sister run their father’s bar. This sounds like both a fantasy and a serious meditation on belonging to me, and I’m ready to go. Now. For many reasons, for too many reasons, all I want to think about for as long as possible in the new year is something like this novel: belonging while running away, a gathering place for all the runaways and outcasts, and a nice bar on the coast.
— Michelle Chihara
Salvation
By C. William Langsfeld
Counterpoint Press
(Feb. 3)
We don’t usually think of pastors as wobbly in their own faith, but doubt stalks them just as much as it does any ordinary human being. This debut novel gives an important role to the Rev. Morris Green, a devout Lutheran who has begun to question the meaning of the universe and the validity of his own spiritual authority. A harsh kind of answer seems to come in the form of a young visitor to his door who has killed his own best friend and is on the run from the law. That it’s set on the Western Slope of the Colorado Rockies makes it even more appealing. There are echoes here of Thornton Wilder’s “The Eighth Day” about a flight away from a homicide that shakes up a small mining town and also of John Updike’s “In the Beauty of the Lilies,” in which religious questions keep echoing through generations. I like thrillers that work a little theology into the plot: the mysteries of a crime — not just whodunit, but a whydunit — can throw a little light on the mysteries of creation and existence.
— Tom Zoellner
Clutch
By Emily Nemens
Tin House
(Feb. 3)
I’ve only recently stumbled upon Emily Nemens, which surprises me. The writer has a storied career as a literary genius and editor. Her debut novel, “The Cactus League,” received praise by NPR, the New York Times and is a favorite among my smartest friends.
Speaking of friends, her new novel follows five college friends converging in Palm Springs after leading vastly different lives across the country. The women have each endured private struggles and have come together to “reconcile professional ambition with personal tumult.” The novel has been described as beautiful, moving and absorbing — perhaps “White Lotus” with more sincerity and heart. I’m so hypnotized by stories of female friendship, especially the way they complicate and evolve over time. I’m thrilled to dive in.
— Maddie Connors
Warning Signs
By Tracy Sierra
Viking/Pamela Dorman Books
(Feb. 10)
“Nighwatching,” Tracy Sierra’s acclaimed 2024 debut, features a young mother who must overcome withering self-doubt and grief to save herself and her children from a sadistic, murderous intruder. In “Warning Signs,” Sierra has set up an even more suspenseful tale centered on fathers, sons and the toxic masculinity that surrounds them. After learning the risks and dangers of the Colorado Rockies’ backcountry from a loving but complicated mother, Zach Fisher, a sensitive 12-year-old, joins Bram, his hypercritical father, on a father/son ski trip. First, an animal’s carcass is found, eviscerated in a way no predator could. Then, after the various men, all potential investors in Bram’s business venture, and their sons assemble, Ginny, Bram’s assistant, goes missing. As an avalanche and dead bodies ratchet up the suspense, Zach must lean on his mother’s wisdom to fight for his life while deciphering a confusing undercurrent of danger, violence and betrayal among the survivors. “Warning Signs” promises to be even more of a nail-biter than Sierra’s debut, a deepening of her examination of families in extremis, which should earn it a top spot in readers’ TBR list.
— Paula L. Woods
I Am the Ghost Here
By Kim Samek
Dial Press
(Feb. 24)
The debut by Pushcart-winning short story writer Kim Samek blends subversive humor with the absurd in a memorable collection of stories written during the COVID-19 pandemic. These weird tales, some of which are set in L.A. where Samek has worked as an Emmy-nominated TV writer and producer, reflect that strange and unsettling time: A man reveals to his family that’s he’s being controlled by a puppeteer, a new mother turns into an egg, and a grieving widow joins a reality show for wives who’ve lost their husbands in tragic accidents. Recommended for fans of Ben Loory and Aimee Bender, whom Samek will be in conversation with at Vroman’s in Pasadena on March 17.
— Jim Ruland
Kin
By Tayari Jones
Knopf:
(Feb. 24)
Tayari Jones excels at writing novels that, regardless of how big the social issues surrounding them may be, are firmly centered on human relationships. After the international success of “An American Marriage,” which focuses on a nuanced, triangulated relationship that arises out of a Black man’s wrongful conviction for raping a white woman, Jones turns her attention to two motherless young women from Honeysuckle, La., whose paths and fortunes diverge when Vernice attends Atlanta’s Spelman College, where she finds sisterhood and a different kind of inequality, while Annie searches for the mother who abandoned her, sending her on a path of adventure but also grave danger. Although their paths seem to be widely divergent, Vernice and Annie’s common desire for love, connection and purpose resonates deeply, which promises to make “Kin” a balm for readers’ fractured spirits in these divided times.
— P.L.W.
Now I Surrender
By Álvaro Enrigue
Riverhead Books
(March 3)
Translated into English, Álvaro Enrigue’s novel reimagines the American West through historical fiction. Enrigue has a long career of writing brilliant and gripping literary accounts of Mexico’s history with a daring flair. His work is a moving and complex love letter to Mexico, mesmerizing anyone who has ever been awestruck by the country. His novel “You Dreamed of Empires” was described by NPR as a “counterfactual history of Hernan Cortés’ arrival at Moctezuma’s court. It’s also a drug novel. Moctezuma is high on mushrooms for the whole book.”
His next translated book, “Now I Surrender,” is equally ambitious, telling the story of a woman fleeing an Apache raid on the Mexican-American border. The historical fiction imagines the Mexican and American armies fighting for control of the West — part myth, fact and fiction spanning the past and present. It’s a slice of bloody American history with a timely edge.
— M. Connors
The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on the End of the World
By Rebecca Solnit
Haymarket Books
(March 3)
After Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential win, Rebecca Solnit’s slim volume “Hope in the Dark” nearly became a sacred text to those reeling from the election results. The long, lyrical essay, originally written during the Bush years at the height of the second Iraq war, directly challenges the idea that “nothing ever changes.” In it, Solnit examines history to show how small, often forgotten actions led to massive cultural and political shifts. What I like about Solnit’s work is that she never promises to be the final authority and instead invites dialogue. (It’s worth mentioning that she helped popularize the term “mansplaining,” after all). Her new work, “The Beginning Comes After the End” is what Solnit calls the sequel to “Hope in the Dark.” In it she leans into how interconnected humanity is and, again, offers what she calls her “freakish hope” for readers. Last year on the podcast “How to Survive the End of the World,” she announced: “We’re not hopeless, we’re not losers, and we’re not living in a static world which nothing can change.” This new volume expands on that sentiment, serving as another urgent manifesto for our tumultuous time.
— S.K.
Day Care
By Nora Lange
Two Dollar Radio
(April 7)
Nora Lange’s follow-up to her Los Angeles Times bestselling novel “Us Fools” is a collection of short fiction that confronts family dynamics while cozying up to the surreal. These short, dense stories are clotted with information — personal quirks, relationship histories, family lore — and simmer with sexual tension that is often joyously perverse. Lange rarely sticks with one timeline or point of view and the result is a unique and unpredictable collection that elevates the fatigue of simply trying to exist at the quarter pole of the 21st century to an art form.
— J.R.
American Spirits
By Anna Dorn
Simon & Schuster
(April 14)
If you’ve been to a literary event in the last few years in Northeast Los Angeles, you’ve likely seen Anna Dorn coolly reading poetry off her iPhone about a woman’s freakish inner life — creepy, lonely, a throbbing desire to die. (I mean this as a compliment.) Dorn’s writing feels unique in its portrayal of Los Angeles in all its sleazy, cigarette-stained, voice-fried glory. This spring, Dorn returns with “American Spirits,” described as a novel following a pop star and her fan-turned-assistant in isolation together during the pandemic. The work is a meditation on fandom, fame and pop music. I imagine the book as a Lynch film with a score by Lana Del Rey — disturbing, weird and poignant. Plus, I’ll read anything about a crazy woman — let alone two.
— M. Connors
The Complete Works of Ricardo Reis
By Fernando Pessoa
New Directions
(April 21)
Is Fernando Pessoa the most fascinating writer ever? Best known for “The Book of Disquiet,” a fragmented masterpiece of urban ennui, the bulk of Pessoa’s literary output wasn’t discovered until after his death in 1935 at age 47. He left behind a massive steamer trunk full of manuscripts, many of which were attributed to artists not named Fernando Pessoa.
These works were penned by Pessoa’s heteronyms, a term he came up with to describe the scores of distinct authorial entities he invented. More than a pseudonym, these poets and writers had different backgrounds and influences. Some even held controversial views that Pessoa himself didn’t share.
Pessoa created 75 of these personas (my favorite name of the bunch is Alexander Search), but three of them — Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos, and Ricardo Reis — wrote volumes of poems, enough for several books. Since 2020 New Directions has been putting out bilingual editions of these poems, with “The Complete Works of Ricardo Reis” being the latest. This all sounds very experimental as befitting the James Joyce of Portugal, but does it amount to more than a literary leg-pull? Pessoa possesses a genius for keeping the reader close and when I read Reis’ poems, I feel like the authors are peering over my shoulder and reflecting on the horrors of this distracted age: “Master, how serene / Are all the hours / We waste / If, as we waste them, / We place them in a vase / Like flowers.”
— J.R.
No Way Home
By T.C. Boyle
Liveright Publishing
(April 21)
Beloved both by book clubs and spirited Reddit threads, the prolific T.C. Boyle is called a literary “American master” for a reason. With the release of his 20th novel, Boyle invites readers into a tequila-soaked love triangle with scenes that volley from high-stakes L.A. hospital drama to desert rats slamming beers in a Nevada small town. The main character grapples with the untimely death of his mother as he navigates a new, possibly treacherous, relationship. A complicated love story told by one of Southern California’s literary giants? Count me in. I grew up in a mixed reading household. My mom swallowed self-help books and the occasional memoir as my dad tucked into the latest Michael Connelly. Meanwhile, my sister collected cookbooks and fantasy tomes as I finished the final chapters of yet another Jane Austen classic. But we all found ourselves pulled toward one of Boyle’s books at some point. I’m glad he keeps gracing my bookshelf.
— S.K.
A Violent Masterpiece
By Jordan Harper
Mulholland Books
(April 28)
“Everybody Knows” was Harper’s 2023 incendiary take on Hollywood fixers. Now comes a second neo-noir that has us primed for an epic excavation beneath the foundations on which the industry stands. Among the players in Harper’s ninth circle of Hollywood Hell: a well-connected pedophile who mysteriously “commits suicide” just before naming his accomplices; a young woman whose disappearance, then very existence, is erased despite its possible connection to a serial killer; and the L.A. Ripper himself, who hides clues in graphic crime scenes. Three Hollywood insiders — the pedophile’s scrappy attorney, an underground concierge serving the uber wealthy’s every dark whim and a bottom-feeding live streamer who sees L.A. as a Frankenstein’s monster of felonies sewn together into a city — race to uncover the conspiracy that links the crimes, no matter the risks. This walk on Hollywood’s very dark side highlights one of Harper’s great gifts making readers care about even the most compromised among us. Do the allusions and shout-outs to current events and personalities seem a little too close for comfort? I certainly hope so!
— P.L.W.
John of John
By Douglas Stuart
Grove Press
(May 5)
On the Scottish island of Harris, the setting for this novel, expensive tweeds are a costly commodity. John-Calum Macleod, or “Cal,” has returned to the cramped, emotionally suffocating family home he left behind, now shared with his father and maternal grandmother. Like the protagonists in Stuart’s previous novels, Shuggie Bain and Mungo Hamilton, Cal is gay. Though he found freedom in Glasgow’s queer community, he couldn’t make a living there. His father, a fire-and-brimstone-spouting church elder, ordered him back, demanding he care for his grandmother, Ella, with the stark insistence: “She’s not my responsibility. It’s not fair of you to put the burden on me.” Cal’s mother, Grace, is estranged from the family, having left her terrifyingly pious and physically abusive husband, as well as her own mother, who appears complicit in her son-in-law’s behavior. Cal slowly begins to reconnect with old friends while actively defying his father’s dictates. When John commands Cal to cut his long hair, Cal rebels by dyeing it platinum and trimming it into a chin-length bob. This unshakable belief in his own self-sovereignty offers a welcome contrast to the islanders’ inherent fear of change. Stuart, demonstrating an almost anthropological understanding of his homeland, reveals how the Hebridean culture has been maintained for centuries and continues to thrive today. This preservation is ensured through strict weavers’ guild regulations, a vigilant (both positive and negative) neighborliness, and careful resource management. However, John and Cal’s relationship involves more than just weaving and loom maintenance. As Cal tells his former best friend, Isla, her Fair Isle sweater boasts 29 different shades. This detail highlights the complexity of color, mirroring how tweeds that appear predominantly green or brown are, in fact, woven from a rich spectrum of threads, including yellow and fuchsia — all the colors of the rainbow.
— Bethanne Patrick
Backtalker: An American Memoir
By Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw
Simon & Schuster
(May 5)
Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw has been rightly known until now for her immense scholarly work, establishing terms like “intersectionality” and “critical race theory” that now have grown into entire fields of study. Regardless of pushback, these vital ideas have moved beyond academia; the general public now understands that feminism cannot be described uniformly for all groups, and that racism is a social construct, not an accident. With “Backtalker,” Crenshaw turns personal. Her stories are well-told, relevant and often searing, detailing an elementary-school teacher’s slight, a hometown swimming-pool reckoning and chauvinism from an Ivy League club. She clearly had exceptional, publicly supportive parents (witness her mother’s activism at that swimming pool) and possesses a maverick’s temperament. “Being a backtalker is like being lactose intolerant,” she writes in “A Note From Kim.” “There are things that I cannot digest. To accept anything close to second-class status as the price of belonging sickens me.” The book’s three sections — “Raising a Backtalker,” “Becoming a Backtalker” and “Being a Backtalker” — reinforce the author’s belief that questioning the system to change it requires education, experience and community. The epilogue is particularly powerful, opening with Crenshaw visiting Selma, Ala., in 2025 for the 60th anniversary of Bloody Sunday. Seeing its bridge painted with the words “Selma: A Nice Place to Live,” she ponders: “I wondered whether those bold letters presided over the scene on that fateful day in 1965 when police officers, under the direction of Alabama’s segregationist governor, brutally beat scores of African Americans, injuring some for life.” The fight is far from over. We are fortunate to have warriors like Crenshaw who refuse to accept second-class status.
— B.P.
On Witness and Respair: Essays
By Jesmyn Ward
Scribner
(May 19)
Jesmyn Ward’s work has always gutted me. Her 2011 novel “Salvage the Bones,” set in Mississippi during Hurricane Katrina, immerses the reader in a world full of suffering but telegraphs something profound about human dignity and care. There is nothing romanticized about the pain her characters experience. And yet, the communities and ecosystems that come alive in Ward’s work make you want to be with her people and creatures. Images from that novel come to me unbidden when I’m alone making ramen, leaning into a cold wind or calming down my hypervigilant Doberman mutt.
Ward’s partner died suddenly in 2020, and she has said in interviews that she almost stopped writing. Lucky for us, she did not. “Let Us Descend” is a majestic novel set among enslaved people in Louisiana (2023). This upcoming book is a collection of essays, speeches and creative nonfiction. “On Witness and Respair” defines that last word as: “Respair (noun, obsolete), fresh hope after despair.” Her sentences carry real wisdom, and wisdom seems in short supply. If she can find a path to collective resilience in these dark times, I’d better suit up and buckle down.
— M. Chihara
Land
By Maggie O’Farrell
Knopf
(June 2)
Deep within this important new novel from O’Farrell, the widely praised author of “Hamnet” (to which, full disclosure, I gave a rave review in 2020), a brief love affair between two New World emigres recalls John Donne’s famous line describing his lover as “O My America, my new-found land.” It’s a reminder that although Land begins and ends with “the dog-shaped island” of Ireland — its story begins even further in the past (before that of the Neolithic girl Brith who walks the same territory) and ends far into the future. We meet Tomás and his son Liam in the late 19th century as they work for “the redcoats” to make a detailed map of their area, which shelters a copse and a deep, warm spring that seems to turn Tomás into a lunatic. That Tomás, who has already survived the Great Hunger as well as a cruel workhouse, isn’t already a lunatic is perhaps less fantastical than the plot itself at times. Throughout the book, elements from a talking fish to a possibly reincarnated dog exist alongside the bleak reality of a country so downtrodden and occupied that even its cartography isn’t in its own language. Somehow, without reducing anyone to pure stereotype (except, perhaps, for the greedy local Anglo-Irish viscount, who deserves it), O’Farrell weaves in mythology, traditional music, humble foodways and several Irish wolfhounds to demonstrate that the land belongs to no one, at least no human, and will endure despite all that humans take from it.
— B.P.
Crash Into Me
By Robinne Lee
St. Martin’s Press
(July 7)
When I’m making good decisions this spring I’m going to read a book from Verso called “The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy: Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the West,” by a scholar named A.J.A. Woods, but when I’m off the clock, I want to crawl inside a sexy novel about people I don’t know and contemplate my bad decisions. I sometimes need to be judgy and compassionate at the same time. So I’m looking out for a new book by Robinne Lee that promises to be not only sexy but “sizzling,” even, and also smart and a little bit mean. My Los Angeles is populated by working people just trying to muddle through, but I like to visit the Other Los Angeles, the one with enough ease and access that it seems both safer and nastier. I like that Lee threw some elbows to insist that her last novel, about an older woman’s affair with the lead singer of a boy band, was not generically a “romance,” thankyouverymuch. I’m interested in the way Lee takes people who might be actively blowing up their lives quite seriously. No one is above making serious mistakes for something hot but impermanent.
— M. Chihara
Triage
By Claudia Rankine
Graywolf Press
(Aug. 4)
Claudia Rankine is fearless. Her astounding bestseller, “Citizen: An American Lyric,” blended poetry, art and cultural criticism and brought her brilliant mind to the masses. In her last book, “Just Us,” she traveled around the nation asking white men in airports, dinner parties and theaters, among other shared spaces, what they thought about privilege. There’s a reason she was granted a MacArthur Fellowship — a.k.a. the “genius grant” — several years back. 2026 is already rife with racial tension; we need her. I’m eager to read what she has to say in her new book, “Triage,” which some consider to be one of her most personal works. In it, she dabbles in fiction, examines hardships in Gaza and continues to bend literary genres. “No matter our posture,” she writes “we are all among the rubble.”
— S.K.
Girlhood, Translated
By Suzanne Garfinkle-Crowell
Penguin
(Sept. 8)
Social media has been particularly unkind to teenage girls, putting rocket fuel onto the ordinary adolescent stressors of physical awkwardness, the sadness of comparison and the fireworks of inter-friendship conflicts. Medical professionals can sometimes do more harm than good by putting bleak-sounding labels on the distress — depression, anxiety, OCD, ADHD — and making it all seem chronic. This book takes aim at what the author calls the “therapy-speak” that means well but creates an unhelpful shorthand for the more complicated problems crying out for a better means of expression. The inner life of a teenage girl was an uncrackable mystery to me when I was a teenage boy. Now that I’m a parent of a young daughter, I hope to understand better what I failed to grasp back then.
— T.Z.
Though it’s still early 2026, the turbulence of the last few weeks is overshadowing its novelty. We are finding refuge in books, both to make sense of the bad news vortex and to welcome escape. It’s a big year for books. Gov. Gavin Newsom has a memoir out next month, many millennials are foaming at the mouth anticipating the release of Lena Dunham’s new memoir, and there are also big drops from Michael Connelly, Michael Pollan and hit sci-fi novelist Mike Chen. (What a year to be a Michael). Our list of 20 books calls out reads you might have missed among these powerhouse titles, including highly anticipated works from Tayari Jones, Emily Nemens, Álvaro Enrigue, Claudia Rankine, T.C. Boyle and others.
We asked a prolific author, local professors, book critics, literary folks about town and a self-described “sailor punk rat” to make their picks personal. After all, is there anything more personal than absorbing a book for days at a time while the laundry stays undone and dishes pile high in the sink? Our list features neo-noir, studies on female friendship and works that speak to our current moment confronting race and border tension, along with a few narratives that weave in hope. Something we could all use more of.
— Sophia Kercher
If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.
Tangerinn
By Emanuela Anechoum
Europa Editions
(Out now)
This is a debut novel, translated from the Italian. It is a novel about a woman in her early 30s trying to figure herself out as she returns home to the Calabrian coast and tries to help her sister run their father’s bar. This sounds like both a fantasy and a serious meditation on belonging to me, and I’m ready to go. Now. For many reasons, for too many reasons, all I want to think about for as long as possible in the new year is something like this novel: belonging while running away, a gathering place for all the runaways and outcasts, and a nice bar on the coast.
— Michelle Chihara
Salvation
By C. William Langsfeld
Counterpoint Press
(Feb. 3)
We don’t usually think of pastors as wobbly in their own faith, but doubt stalks them just as much as it does any ordinary human being. This debut novel gives an important role to the Rev. Morris Green, a devout Lutheran who has begun to question the meaning of the universe and the validity of his own spiritual authority. A harsh kind of answer seems to come in the form of a young visitor to his door who has killed his own best friend and is on the run from the law. That it’s set on the Western Slope of the Colorado Rockies makes it even more appealing. There are echoes here of Thornton Wilder’s “The Eighth Day” about a flight away from a homicide that shakes up a small mining town and also of John Updike’s “In the Beauty of the Lilies,” in which religious questions keep echoing through generations. I like thrillers that work a little theology into the plot: the mysteries of a crime — not just whodunit, but a whydunit — can throw a little light on the mysteries of creation and existence.
— Tom Zoellner
Clutch
By Emily Nemens
Tin House
(Feb. 3)
I’ve only recently stumbled upon Emily Nemens, which surprises me. The writer has a storied career as a literary genius and editor. Her debut novel, “The Cactus League,” received praise by NPR, the New York Times and is a favorite among my smartest friends.
Speaking of friends, her new novel follows five college friends converging in Palm Springs after leading vastly different lives across the country. The women have each endured private struggles and have come together to “reconcile professional ambition with personal tumult.” The novel has been described as beautiful, moving and absorbing — perhaps “White Lotus” with more sincerity and heart. I’m so hypnotized by stories of female friendship, especially the way they complicate and evolve over time. I’m thrilled to dive in.
— Maddie Connors
Warning Signs
By Tracy Sierra
Viking/Pamela Dorman Books
(Feb. 10)
“Nighwatching,” Tracy Sierra’s acclaimed 2024 debut, features a young mother who must overcome withering self-doubt and grief to save herself and her children from a sadistic, murderous intruder. In “Warning Signs,” Sierra has set up an even more suspenseful tale centered on fathers, sons and the toxic masculinity that surrounds them. After learning the risks and dangers of the Colorado Rockies’ backcountry from a loving but complicated mother, Zach Fisher, a sensitive 12-year-old, joins Bram, his hypercritical father, on a father/son ski trip. First, an animal’s carcass is found, eviscerated in a way no predator could. Then, after the various men, all potential investors in Bram’s business venture, and their sons assemble, Ginny, Bram’s assistant, goes missing. As an avalanche and dead bodies ratchet up the suspense, Zach must lean on his mother’s wisdom to fight for his life while deciphering a confusing undercurrent of danger, violence and betrayal among the survivors. “Warning Signs” promises to be even more of a nail-biter than Sierra’s debut, a deepening of her examination of families in extremis, which should earn it a top spot in readers’ TBR list.
— Paula L. Woods
I Am the Ghost Here
By Kim Samek
Dial Press
(Feb. 24)
The debut by Pushcart-winning short story writer Kim Samek blends subversive humor with the absurd in a memorable collection of stories written during the COVID-19 pandemic. These weird tales, some of which are set in L.A. where Samek has worked as an Emmy-nominated TV writer and producer, reflect that strange and unsettling time: A man reveals to his family that’s he’s being controlled by a puppeteer, a new mother turns into an egg, and a grieving widow joins a reality show for wives who’ve lost their husbands in tragic accidents. Recommended for fans of Ben Loory and Aimee Bender, whom Samek will be in conversation with at Vroman’s in Pasadena on March 17.
— Jim Ruland
Kin
By Tayari Jones
Knopf:
(Feb. 24)
Tayari Jones excels at writing novels that, regardless of how big the social issues surrounding them may be, are firmly centered on human relationships. After the international success of “An American Marriage,” which focuses on a nuanced, triangulated relationship that arises out of a Black man’s wrongful conviction for raping a white woman, Jones turns her attention to two motherless young women from Honeysuckle, La., whose paths and fortunes diverge when Vernice attends Atlanta’s Spelman College, where she finds sisterhood and a different kind of inequality, while Annie searches for the mother who abandoned her, sending her on a path of adventure but also grave danger. Although their paths seem to be widely divergent, Vernice and Annie’s common desire for love, connection and purpose resonates deeply, which promises to make “Kin” a balm for readers’ fractured spirits in these divided times.
— P.L.W.
Now I Surrender
By Álvaro Enrigue
Riverhead Books
(March 3)
Translated into English, Álvaro Enrigue’s novel reimagines the American West through historical fiction. Enrigue has a long career of writing brilliant and gripping literary accounts of Mexico’s history with a daring flair. His work is a moving and complex love letter to Mexico, mesmerizing anyone who has ever been awestruck by the country. His novel “You Dreamed of Empires” was described by NPR as a “counterfactual history of Hernan Cortés’ arrival at Moctezuma’s court. It’s also a drug novel. Moctezuma is high on mushrooms for the whole book.”
His next translated book, “Now I Surrender,” is equally ambitious, telling the story of a woman fleeing an Apache raid on the Mexican-American border. The historical fiction imagines the Mexican and American armies fighting for control of the West — part myth, fact and fiction spanning the past and present. It’s a slice of bloody American history with a timely edge.
— M. Connors
The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on the End of the World
By Rebecca Solnit
Haymarket Books
(March 3)
After Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential win, Rebecca Solnit’s slim volume “Hope in the Dark” nearly became a sacred text to those reeling from the election results. The long, lyrical essay, originally written during the Bush years at the height of the second Iraq war, directly challenges the idea that “nothing ever changes.” In it, Solnit examines history to show how small, often forgotten actions led to massive cultural and political shifts. What I like about Solnit’s work is that she never promises to be the final authority and instead invites dialogue. (It’s worth mentioning that she helped popularize the term “mansplaining,” after all). Her new work, “The Beginning Comes After the End” is what Solnit calls the sequel to “Hope in the Dark.” In it she leans into how interconnected humanity is and, again, offers what she calls her “freakish hope” for readers. Last year on the podcast “How to Survive the End of the World,” she announced: “We’re not hopeless, we’re not losers, and we’re not living in a static world which nothing can change.” This new volume expands on that sentiment, serving as another urgent manifesto for our tumultuous time.
— S.K.
Day Care
By Nora Lange
Two Dollar Radio
(April 7)
Nora Lange’s follow-up to her Los Angeles Times bestselling novel “Us Fools” is a collection of short fiction that confronts family dynamics while cozying up to the surreal. These short, dense stories are clotted with information — personal quirks, relationship histories, family lore — and simmer with sexual tension that is often joyously perverse. Lange rarely sticks with one timeline or point of view and the result is a unique and unpredictable collection that elevates the fatigue of simply trying to exist at the quarter pole of the 21st century to an art form.
— J.R.
American Spirits
By Anna Dorn
Simon & Schuster
(April 14)
If you’ve been to a literary event in the last few years in Northeast Los Angeles, you’ve likely seen Anna Dorn coolly reading poetry off her iPhone about a woman’s freakish inner life — creepy, lonely, a throbbing desire to die. (I mean this as a compliment.) Dorn’s writing feels unique in its portrayal of Los Angeles in all its sleazy, cigarette-stained, voice-fried glory. This spring, Dorn returns with “American Spirits,” described as a novel following a pop star and her fan-turned-assistant in isolation together during the pandemic. The work is a meditation on fandom, fame and pop music. I imagine the book as a Lynch film with a score by Lana Del Rey — disturbing, weird and poignant. Plus, I’ll read anything about a crazy woman — let alone two.
— M. Connors
The Complete Works of Ricardo Reis
By Fernando Pessoa
New Directions
(April 21)
Is Fernando Pessoa the most fascinating writer ever? Best known for “The Book of Disquiet,” a fragmented masterpiece of urban ennui, the bulk of Pessoa’s literary output wasn’t discovered until after his death in 1935 at age 47. He left behind a massive steamer trunk full of manuscripts, many of which were attributed to artists not named Fernando Pessoa.
These works were penned by Pessoa’s heteronyms, a term he came up with to describe the scores of distinct authorial entities he invented. More than a pseudonym, these poets and writers had different backgrounds and influences. Some even held controversial views that Pessoa himself didn’t share.
Pessoa created 75 of these personas (my favorite name of the bunch is Alexander Search), but three of them — Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos, and Ricardo Reis — wrote volumes of poems, enough for several books. Since 2020 New Directions has been putting out bilingual editions of these poems, with “The Complete Works of Ricardo Reis” being the latest. This all sounds very experimental as befitting the James Joyce of Portugal, but does it amount to more than a literary leg-pull? Pessoa possesses a genius for keeping the reader close and when I read Reis’ poems, I feel like the authors are peering over my shoulder and reflecting on the horrors of this distracted age: “Master, how serene / Are all the hours / We waste / If, as we waste them, / We place them in a vase / Like flowers.”
— J.R.
No Way Home
By T.C. Boyle
Liveright Publishing
(April 21)
Beloved both by book clubs and spirited Reddit threads, the prolific T.C. Boyle is called a literary “American master” for a reason. With the release of his 20th novel, Boyle invites readers into a tequila-soaked love triangle with scenes that volley from high-stakes L.A. hospital drama to desert rats slamming beers in a Nevada small town. The main character grapples with the untimely death of his mother as he navigates a new, possibly treacherous, relationship. A complicated love story told by one of Southern California’s literary giants? Count me in. I grew up in a mixed reading household. My mom swallowed self-help books and the occasional memoir as my dad tucked into the latest Michael Connelly. Meanwhile, my sister collected cookbooks and fantasy tomes as I finished the final chapters of yet another Jane Austen classic. But we all found ourselves pulled toward one of Boyle’s books at some point. I’m glad he keeps gracing my bookshelf.
— S.K.
A Violent Masterpiece
By Jordan Harper
Mulholland Books
(April 28)
“Everybody Knows” was Harper’s 2023 incendiary take on Hollywood fixers. Now comes a second neo-noir that has us primed for an epic excavation beneath the foundations on which the industry stands. Among the players in Harper’s ninth circle of Hollywood Hell: a well-connected pedophile who mysteriously “commits suicide” just before naming his accomplices; a young woman whose disappearance, then very existence, is erased despite its possible connection to a serial killer; and the L.A. Ripper himself, who hides clues in graphic crime scenes. Three Hollywood insiders — the pedophile’s scrappy attorney, an underground concierge serving the uber wealthy’s every dark whim and a bottom-feeding live streamer who sees L.A. as a Frankenstein’s monster of felonies sewn together into a city — race to uncover the conspiracy that links the crimes, no matter the risks. This walk on Hollywood’s very dark side highlights one of Harper’s great gifts making readers care about even the most compromised among us. Do the allusions and shout-outs to current events and personalities seem a little too close for comfort? I certainly hope so!
— P.L.W.
John of John
By Douglas Stuart
Grove Press
(May 5)
On the Scottish island of Harris, the setting for this novel, expensive tweeds are a costly commodity. John-Calum Macleod, or “Cal,” has returned to the cramped, emotionally suffocating family home he left behind, now shared with his father and maternal grandmother. Like the protagonists in Stuart’s previous novels, Shuggie Bain and Mungo Hamilton, Cal is gay. Though he found freedom in Glasgow’s queer community, he couldn’t make a living there. His father, a fire-and-brimstone-spouting church elder, ordered him back, demanding he care for his grandmother, Ella, with the stark insistence: “She’s not my responsibility. It’s not fair of you to put the burden on me.” Cal’s mother, Grace, is estranged from the family, having left her terrifyingly pious and physically abusive husband, as well as her own mother, who appears complicit in her son-in-law’s behavior. Cal slowly begins to reconnect with old friends while actively defying his father’s dictates. When John commands Cal to cut his long hair, Cal rebels by dyeing it platinum and trimming it into a chin-length bob. This unshakable belief in his own self-sovereignty offers a welcome contrast to the islanders’ inherent fear of change. Stuart, demonstrating an almost anthropological understanding of his homeland, reveals how the Hebridean culture has been maintained for centuries and continues to thrive today. This preservation is ensured through strict weavers’ guild regulations, a vigilant (both positive and negative) neighborliness, and careful resource management. However, John and Cal’s relationship involves more than just weaving and loom maintenance. As Cal tells his former best friend, Isla, her Fair Isle sweater boasts 29 different shades. This detail highlights the complexity of color, mirroring how tweeds that appear predominantly green or brown are, in fact, woven from a rich spectrum of threads, including yellow and fuchsia — all the colors of the rainbow.
— Bethanne Patrick
Backtalker: An American Memoir
By Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw
Simon & Schuster
(May 5)
Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw has been rightly known until now for her immense scholarly work, establishing terms like “intersectionality” and “critical race theory” that now have grown into entire fields of study. Regardless of pushback, these vital ideas have moved beyond academia; the general public now understands that feminism cannot be described uniformly for all groups, and that racism is a social construct, not an accident. With “Backtalker,” Crenshaw turns personal. Her stories are well-told, relevant and often searing, detailing an elementary-school teacher’s slight, a hometown swimming-pool reckoning and chauvinism from an Ivy League club. She clearly had exceptional, publicly supportive parents (witness her mother’s activism at that swimming pool) and possesses a maverick’s temperament. “Being a backtalker is like being lactose intolerant,” she writes in “A Note From Kim.” “There are things that I cannot digest. To accept anything close to second-class status as the price of belonging sickens me.” The book’s three sections — “Raising a Backtalker,” “Becoming a Backtalker” and “Being a Backtalker” — reinforce the author’s belief that questioning the system to change it requires education, experience and community. The epilogue is particularly powerful, opening with Crenshaw visiting Selma, Ala., in 2025 for the 60th anniversary of Bloody Sunday. Seeing its bridge painted with the words “Selma: A Nice Place to Live,” she ponders: “I wondered whether those bold letters presided over the scene on that fateful day in 1965 when police officers, under the direction of Alabama’s segregationist governor, brutally beat scores of African Americans, injuring some for life.” The fight is far from over. We are fortunate to have warriors like Crenshaw who refuse to accept second-class status.
— B.P.
On Witness and Respair: Essays
By Jesmyn Ward
Scribner
(May 19)
Jesmyn Ward’s work has always gutted me. Her 2011 novel “Salvage the Bones,” set in Mississippi during Hurricane Katrina, immerses the reader in a world full of suffering but telegraphs something profound about human dignity and care. There is nothing romanticized about the pain her characters experience. And yet, the communities and ecosystems that come alive in Ward’s work make you want to be with her people and creatures. Images from that novel come to me unbidden when I’m alone making ramen, leaning into a cold wind or calming down my hypervigilant Doberman mutt.
Ward’s partner died suddenly in 2020, and she has said in interviews that she almost stopped writing. Lucky for us, she did not. “Let Us Descend” is a majestic novel set among enslaved people in Louisiana (2023). This upcoming book is a collection of essays, speeches and creative nonfiction. “On Witness and Respair” defines that last word as: “Respair (noun, obsolete), fresh hope after despair.” Her sentences carry real wisdom, and wisdom seems in short supply. If she can find a path to collective resilience in these dark times, I’d better suit up and buckle down.
— M. Chihara
Land
By Maggie O’Farrell
Knopf
(June 2)
Deep within this important new novel from O’Farrell, the widely praised author of “Hamnet” (to which, full disclosure, I gave a rave review in 2020), a brief love affair between two New World emigres recalls John Donne’s famous line describing his lover as “O My America, my new-found land.” It’s a reminder that although Land begins and ends with “the dog-shaped island” of Ireland — its story begins even further in the past (before that of the Neolithic girl Brith who walks the same territory) and ends far into the future. We meet Tomás and his son Liam in the late 19th century as they work for “the redcoats” to make a detailed map of their area, which shelters a copse and a deep, warm spring that seems to turn Tomás into a lunatic. That Tomás, who has already survived the Great Hunger as well as a cruel workhouse, isn’t already a lunatic is perhaps less fantastical than the plot itself at times. Throughout the book, elements from a talking fish to a possibly reincarnated dog exist alongside the bleak reality of a country so downtrodden and occupied that even its cartography isn’t in its own language. Somehow, without reducing anyone to pure stereotype (except, perhaps, for the greedy local Anglo-Irish viscount, who deserves it), O’Farrell weaves in mythology, traditional music, humble foodways and several Irish wolfhounds to demonstrate that the land belongs to no one, at least no human, and will endure despite all that humans take from it.
— B.P.
Crash Into Me
By Robinne Lee
St. Martin’s Press
(July 7)
When I’m making good decisions this spring I’m going to read a book from Verso called “The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy: Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the West,” by a scholar named A.J.A. Woods, but when I’m off the clock, I want to crawl inside a sexy novel about people I don’t know and contemplate my bad decisions. I sometimes need to be judgy and compassionate at the same time. So I’m looking out for a new book by Robinne Lee that promises to be not only sexy but “sizzling,” even, and also smart and a little bit mean. My Los Angeles is populated by working people just trying to muddle through, but I like to visit the Other Los Angeles, the one with enough ease and access that it seems both safer and nastier. I like that Lee threw some elbows to insist that her last novel, about an older woman’s affair with the lead singer of a boy band, was not generically a “romance,” thankyouverymuch. I’m interested in the way Lee takes people who might be actively blowing up their lives quite seriously. No one is above making serious mistakes for something hot but impermanent.
— M. Chihara
Triage
By Claudia Rankine
Graywolf Press
(Aug. 4)
Claudia Rankine is fearless. Her astounding bestseller, “Citizen: An American Lyric,” blended poetry, art and cultural criticism and brought her brilliant mind to the masses. In her last book, “Just Us,” she traveled around the nation asking white men in airports, dinner parties and theaters, among other shared spaces, what they thought about privilege. There’s a reason she was granted a MacArthur Fellowship — a.k.a. the “genius grant” — several years back. 2026 is already rife with racial tension; we need her. I’m eager to read what she has to say in her new book, “Triage,” which some consider to be one of her most personal works. In it, she dabbles in fiction, examines hardships in Gaza and continues to bend literary genres. “No matter our posture,” she writes “we are all among the rubble.”
— S.K.
Girlhood, Translated
By Suzanne Garfinkle-Crowell
Penguin
(Sept. 8)
Social media has been particularly unkind to teenage girls, putting rocket fuel onto the ordinary adolescent stressors of physical awkwardness, the sadness of comparison and the fireworks of inter-friendship conflicts. Medical professionals can sometimes do more harm than good by putting bleak-sounding labels on the distress — depression, anxiety, OCD, ADHD — and making it all seem chronic. This book takes aim at what the author calls the “therapy-speak” that means well but creates an unhelpful shorthand for the more complicated problems crying out for a better means of expression. The inner life of a teenage girl was an uncrackable mystery to me when I was a teenage boy. Now that I’m a parent of a young daughter, I hope to understand better what I failed to grasp back then.
— T.Z.
Though it’s still early 2026, the turbulence of the last few weeks is overshadowing its novelty. We are finding refuge in books, both to make sense of the bad news vortex and to welcome escape. It’s a big year for books. Gov. Gavin Newsom has a memoir out next month, many millennials are foaming at the mouth anticipating the release of Lena Dunham’s new memoir, and there are also big drops from Michael Connelly, Michael Pollan and hit sci-fi novelist Mike Chen. (What a year to be a Michael). Our list of 20 books calls out reads you might have missed among these powerhouse titles, including highly anticipated works from Tayari Jones, Emily Nemens, Álvaro Enrigue, Claudia Rankine, T.C. Boyle and others.
We asked a prolific author, local professors, book critics, literary folks about town and a self-described “sailor punk rat” to make their picks personal. After all, is there anything more personal than absorbing a book for days at a time while the laundry stays undone and dishes pile high in the sink? Our list features neo-noir, studies on female friendship and works that speak to our current moment confronting race and border tension, along with a few narratives that weave in hope. Something we could all use more of.
— Sophia Kercher
If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.
Tangerinn
By Emanuela Anechoum
Europa Editions
(Out now)
This is a debut novel, translated from the Italian. It is a novel about a woman in her early 30s trying to figure herself out as she returns home to the Calabrian coast and tries to help her sister run their father’s bar. This sounds like both a fantasy and a serious meditation on belonging to me, and I’m ready to go. Now. For many reasons, for too many reasons, all I want to think about for as long as possible in the new year is something like this novel: belonging while running away, a gathering place for all the runaways and outcasts, and a nice bar on the coast.
— Michelle Chihara
Salvation
By C. William Langsfeld
Counterpoint Press
(Feb. 3)
We don’t usually think of pastors as wobbly in their own faith, but doubt stalks them just as much as it does any ordinary human being. This debut novel gives an important role to the Rev. Morris Green, a devout Lutheran who has begun to question the meaning of the universe and the validity of his own spiritual authority. A harsh kind of answer seems to come in the form of a young visitor to his door who has killed his own best friend and is on the run from the law. That it’s set on the Western Slope of the Colorado Rockies makes it even more appealing. There are echoes here of Thornton Wilder’s “The Eighth Day” about a flight away from a homicide that shakes up a small mining town and also of John Updike’s “In the Beauty of the Lilies,” in which religious questions keep echoing through generations. I like thrillers that work a little theology into the plot: the mysteries of a crime — not just whodunit, but a whydunit — can throw a little light on the mysteries of creation and existence.
— Tom Zoellner
Clutch
By Emily Nemens
Tin House
(Feb. 3)
I’ve only recently stumbled upon Emily Nemens, which surprises me. The writer has a storied career as a literary genius and editor. Her debut novel, “The Cactus League,” received praise by NPR, the New York Times and is a favorite among my smartest friends.
Speaking of friends, her new novel follows five college friends converging in Palm Springs after leading vastly different lives across the country. The women have each endured private struggles and have come together to “reconcile professional ambition with personal tumult.” The novel has been described as beautiful, moving and absorbing — perhaps “White Lotus” with more sincerity and heart. I’m so hypnotized by stories of female friendship, especially the way they complicate and evolve over time. I’m thrilled to dive in.
— Maddie Connors
Warning Signs
By Tracy Sierra
Viking/Pamela Dorman Books
(Feb. 10)
“Nighwatching,” Tracy Sierra’s acclaimed 2024 debut, features a young mother who must overcome withering self-doubt and grief to save herself and her children from a sadistic, murderous intruder. In “Warning Signs,” Sierra has set up an even more suspenseful tale centered on fathers, sons and the toxic masculinity that surrounds them. After learning the risks and dangers of the Colorado Rockies’ backcountry from a loving but complicated mother, Zach Fisher, a sensitive 12-year-old, joins Bram, his hypercritical father, on a father/son ski trip. First, an animal’s carcass is found, eviscerated in a way no predator could. Then, after the various men, all potential investors in Bram’s business venture, and their sons assemble, Ginny, Bram’s assistant, goes missing. As an avalanche and dead bodies ratchet up the suspense, Zach must lean on his mother’s wisdom to fight for his life while deciphering a confusing undercurrent of danger, violence and betrayal among the survivors. “Warning Signs” promises to be even more of a nail-biter than Sierra’s debut, a deepening of her examination of families in extremis, which should earn it a top spot in readers’ TBR list.
— Paula L. Woods
I Am the Ghost Here
By Kim Samek
Dial Press
(Feb. 24)
The debut by Pushcart-winning short story writer Kim Samek blends subversive humor with the absurd in a memorable collection of stories written during the COVID-19 pandemic. These weird tales, some of which are set in L.A. where Samek has worked as an Emmy-nominated TV writer and producer, reflect that strange and unsettling time: A man reveals to his family that’s he’s being controlled by a puppeteer, a new mother turns into an egg, and a grieving widow joins a reality show for wives who’ve lost their husbands in tragic accidents. Recommended for fans of Ben Loory and Aimee Bender, whom Samek will be in conversation with at Vroman’s in Pasadena on March 17.
— Jim Ruland
Kin
By Tayari Jones
Knopf:
(Feb. 24)
Tayari Jones excels at writing novels that, regardless of how big the social issues surrounding them may be, are firmly centered on human relationships. After the international success of “An American Marriage,” which focuses on a nuanced, triangulated relationship that arises out of a Black man’s wrongful conviction for raping a white woman, Jones turns her attention to two motherless young women from Honeysuckle, La., whose paths and fortunes diverge when Vernice attends Atlanta’s Spelman College, where she finds sisterhood and a different kind of inequality, while Annie searches for the mother who abandoned her, sending her on a path of adventure but also grave danger. Although their paths seem to be widely divergent, Vernice and Annie’s common desire for love, connection and purpose resonates deeply, which promises to make “Kin” a balm for readers’ fractured spirits in these divided times.
— P.L.W.
Now I Surrender
By Álvaro Enrigue
Riverhead Books
(March 3)
Translated into English, Álvaro Enrigue’s novel reimagines the American West through historical fiction. Enrigue has a long career of writing brilliant and gripping literary accounts of Mexico’s history with a daring flair. His work is a moving and complex love letter to Mexico, mesmerizing anyone who has ever been awestruck by the country. His novel “You Dreamed of Empires” was described by NPR as a “counterfactual history of Hernan Cortés’ arrival at Moctezuma’s court. It’s also a drug novel. Moctezuma is high on mushrooms for the whole book.”
His next translated book, “Now I Surrender,” is equally ambitious, telling the story of a woman fleeing an Apache raid on the Mexican-American border. The historical fiction imagines the Mexican and American armies fighting for control of the West — part myth, fact and fiction spanning the past and present. It’s a slice of bloody American history with a timely edge.
— M. Connors
The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on the End of the World
By Rebecca Solnit
Haymarket Books
(March 3)
After Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential win, Rebecca Solnit’s slim volume “Hope in the Dark” nearly became a sacred text to those reeling from the election results. The long, lyrical essay, originally written during the Bush years at the height of the second Iraq war, directly challenges the idea that “nothing ever changes.” In it, Solnit examines history to show how small, often forgotten actions led to massive cultural and political shifts. What I like about Solnit’s work is that she never promises to be the final authority and instead invites dialogue. (It’s worth mentioning that she helped popularize the term “mansplaining,” after all). Her new work, “The Beginning Comes After the End” is what Solnit calls the sequel to “Hope in the Dark.” In it she leans into how interconnected humanity is and, again, offers what she calls her “freakish hope” for readers. Last year on the podcast “How to Survive the End of the World,” she announced: “We’re not hopeless, we’re not losers, and we’re not living in a static world which nothing can change.” This new volume expands on that sentiment, serving as another urgent manifesto for our tumultuous time.
— S.K.
Day Care
By Nora Lange
Two Dollar Radio
(April 7)
Nora Lange’s follow-up to her Los Angeles Times bestselling novel “Us Fools” is a collection of short fiction that confronts family dynamics while cozying up to the surreal. These short, dense stories are clotted with information — personal quirks, relationship histories, family lore — and simmer with sexual tension that is often joyously perverse. Lange rarely sticks with one timeline or point of view and the result is a unique and unpredictable collection that elevates the fatigue of simply trying to exist at the quarter pole of the 21st century to an art form.
— J.R.
American Spirits
By Anna Dorn
Simon & Schuster
(April 14)
If you’ve been to a literary event in the last few years in Northeast Los Angeles, you’ve likely seen Anna Dorn coolly reading poetry off her iPhone about a woman’s freakish inner life — creepy, lonely, a throbbing desire to die. (I mean this as a compliment.) Dorn’s writing feels unique in its portrayal of Los Angeles in all its sleazy, cigarette-stained, voice-fried glory. This spring, Dorn returns with “American Spirits,” described as a novel following a pop star and her fan-turned-assistant in isolation together during the pandemic. The work is a meditation on fandom, fame and pop music. I imagine the book as a Lynch film with a score by Lana Del Rey — disturbing, weird and poignant. Plus, I’ll read anything about a crazy woman — let alone two.
— M. Connors
The Complete Works of Ricardo Reis
By Fernando Pessoa
New Directions
(April 21)
Is Fernando Pessoa the most fascinating writer ever? Best known for “The Book of Disquiet,” a fragmented masterpiece of urban ennui, the bulk of Pessoa’s literary output wasn’t discovered until after his death in 1935 at age 47. He left behind a massive steamer trunk full of manuscripts, many of which were attributed to artists not named Fernando Pessoa.
These works were penned by Pessoa’s heteronyms, a term he came up with to describe the scores of distinct authorial entities he invented. More than a pseudonym, these poets and writers had different backgrounds and influences. Some even held controversial views that Pessoa himself didn’t share.
Pessoa created 75 of these personas (my favorite name of the bunch is Alexander Search), but three of them — Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos, and Ricardo Reis — wrote volumes of poems, enough for several books. Since 2020 New Directions has been putting out bilingual editions of these poems, with “The Complete Works of Ricardo Reis” being the latest. This all sounds very experimental as befitting the James Joyce of Portugal, but does it amount to more than a literary leg-pull? Pessoa possesses a genius for keeping the reader close and when I read Reis’ poems, I feel like the authors are peering over my shoulder and reflecting on the horrors of this distracted age: “Master, how serene / Are all the hours / We waste / If, as we waste them, / We place them in a vase / Like flowers.”
— J.R.
No Way Home
By T.C. Boyle
Liveright Publishing
(April 21)
Beloved both by book clubs and spirited Reddit threads, the prolific T.C. Boyle is called a literary “American master” for a reason. With the release of his 20th novel, Boyle invites readers into a tequila-soaked love triangle with scenes that volley from high-stakes L.A. hospital drama to desert rats slamming beers in a Nevada small town. The main character grapples with the untimely death of his mother as he navigates a new, possibly treacherous, relationship. A complicated love story told by one of Southern California’s literary giants? Count me in. I grew up in a mixed reading household. My mom swallowed self-help books and the occasional memoir as my dad tucked into the latest Michael Connelly. Meanwhile, my sister collected cookbooks and fantasy tomes as I finished the final chapters of yet another Jane Austen classic. But we all found ourselves pulled toward one of Boyle’s books at some point. I’m glad he keeps gracing my bookshelf.
— S.K.
A Violent Masterpiece
By Jordan Harper
Mulholland Books
(April 28)
“Everybody Knows” was Harper’s 2023 incendiary take on Hollywood fixers. Now comes a second neo-noir that has us primed for an epic excavation beneath the foundations on which the industry stands. Among the players in Harper’s ninth circle of Hollywood Hell: a well-connected pedophile who mysteriously “commits suicide” just before naming his accomplices; a young woman whose disappearance, then very existence, is erased despite its possible connection to a serial killer; and the L.A. Ripper himself, who hides clues in graphic crime scenes. Three Hollywood insiders — the pedophile’s scrappy attorney, an underground concierge serving the uber wealthy’s every dark whim and a bottom-feeding live streamer who sees L.A. as a Frankenstein’s monster of felonies sewn together into a city — race to uncover the conspiracy that links the crimes, no matter the risks. This walk on Hollywood’s very dark side highlights one of Harper’s great gifts making readers care about even the most compromised among us. Do the allusions and shout-outs to current events and personalities seem a little too close for comfort? I certainly hope so!
— P.L.W.
John of John
By Douglas Stuart
Grove Press
(May 5)
On the Scottish island of Harris, the setting for this novel, expensive tweeds are a costly commodity. John-Calum Macleod, or “Cal,” has returned to the cramped, emotionally suffocating family home he left behind, now shared with his father and maternal grandmother. Like the protagonists in Stuart’s previous novels, Shuggie Bain and Mungo Hamilton, Cal is gay. Though he found freedom in Glasgow’s queer community, he couldn’t make a living there. His father, a fire-and-brimstone-spouting church elder, ordered him back, demanding he care for his grandmother, Ella, with the stark insistence: “She’s not my responsibility. It’s not fair of you to put the burden on me.” Cal’s mother, Grace, is estranged from the family, having left her terrifyingly pious and physically abusive husband, as well as her own mother, who appears complicit in her son-in-law’s behavior. Cal slowly begins to reconnect with old friends while actively defying his father’s dictates. When John commands Cal to cut his long hair, Cal rebels by dyeing it platinum and trimming it into a chin-length bob. This unshakable belief in his own self-sovereignty offers a welcome contrast to the islanders’ inherent fear of change. Stuart, demonstrating an almost anthropological understanding of his homeland, reveals how the Hebridean culture has been maintained for centuries and continues to thrive today. This preservation is ensured through strict weavers’ guild regulations, a vigilant (both positive and negative) neighborliness, and careful resource management. However, John and Cal’s relationship involves more than just weaving and loom maintenance. As Cal tells his former best friend, Isla, her Fair Isle sweater boasts 29 different shades. This detail highlights the complexity of color, mirroring how tweeds that appear predominantly green or brown are, in fact, woven from a rich spectrum of threads, including yellow and fuchsia — all the colors of the rainbow.
— Bethanne Patrick
Backtalker: An American Memoir
By Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw
Simon & Schuster
(May 5)
Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw has been rightly known until now for her immense scholarly work, establishing terms like “intersectionality” and “critical race theory” that now have grown into entire fields of study. Regardless of pushback, these vital ideas have moved beyond academia; the general public now understands that feminism cannot be described uniformly for all groups, and that racism is a social construct, not an accident. With “Backtalker,” Crenshaw turns personal. Her stories are well-told, relevant and often searing, detailing an elementary-school teacher’s slight, a hometown swimming-pool reckoning and chauvinism from an Ivy League club. She clearly had exceptional, publicly supportive parents (witness her mother’s activism at that swimming pool) and possesses a maverick’s temperament. “Being a backtalker is like being lactose intolerant,” she writes in “A Note From Kim.” “There are things that I cannot digest. To accept anything close to second-class status as the price of belonging sickens me.” The book’s three sections — “Raising a Backtalker,” “Becoming a Backtalker” and “Being a Backtalker” — reinforce the author’s belief that questioning the system to change it requires education, experience and community. The epilogue is particularly powerful, opening with Crenshaw visiting Selma, Ala., in 2025 for the 60th anniversary of Bloody Sunday. Seeing its bridge painted with the words “Selma: A Nice Place to Live,” she ponders: “I wondered whether those bold letters presided over the scene on that fateful day in 1965 when police officers, under the direction of Alabama’s segregationist governor, brutally beat scores of African Americans, injuring some for life.” The fight is far from over. We are fortunate to have warriors like Crenshaw who refuse to accept second-class status.
— B.P.
On Witness and Respair: Essays
By Jesmyn Ward
Scribner
(May 19)
Jesmyn Ward’s work has always gutted me. Her 2011 novel “Salvage the Bones,” set in Mississippi during Hurricane Katrina, immerses the reader in a world full of suffering but telegraphs something profound about human dignity and care. There is nothing romanticized about the pain her characters experience. And yet, the communities and ecosystems that come alive in Ward’s work make you want to be with her people and creatures. Images from that novel come to me unbidden when I’m alone making ramen, leaning into a cold wind or calming down my hypervigilant Doberman mutt.
Ward’s partner died suddenly in 2020, and she has said in interviews that she almost stopped writing. Lucky for us, she did not. “Let Us Descend” is a majestic novel set among enslaved people in Louisiana (2023). This upcoming book is a collection of essays, speeches and creative nonfiction. “On Witness and Respair” defines that last word as: “Respair (noun, obsolete), fresh hope after despair.” Her sentences carry real wisdom, and wisdom seems in short supply. If she can find a path to collective resilience in these dark times, I’d better suit up and buckle down.
— M. Chihara
Land
By Maggie O’Farrell
Knopf
(June 2)
Deep within this important new novel from O’Farrell, the widely praised author of “Hamnet” (to which, full disclosure, I gave a rave review in 2020), a brief love affair between two New World emigres recalls John Donne’s famous line describing his lover as “O My America, my new-found land.” It’s a reminder that although Land begins and ends with “the dog-shaped island” of Ireland — its story begins even further in the past (before that of the Neolithic girl Brith who walks the same territory) and ends far into the future. We meet Tomás and his son Liam in the late 19th century as they work for “the redcoats” to make a detailed map of their area, which shelters a copse and a deep, warm spring that seems to turn Tomás into a lunatic. That Tomás, who has already survived the Great Hunger as well as a cruel workhouse, isn’t already a lunatic is perhaps less fantastical than the plot itself at times. Throughout the book, elements from a talking fish to a possibly reincarnated dog exist alongside the bleak reality of a country so downtrodden and occupied that even its cartography isn’t in its own language. Somehow, without reducing anyone to pure stereotype (except, perhaps, for the greedy local Anglo-Irish viscount, who deserves it), O’Farrell weaves in mythology, traditional music, humble foodways and several Irish wolfhounds to demonstrate that the land belongs to no one, at least no human, and will endure despite all that humans take from it.
— B.P.
Crash Into Me
By Robinne Lee
St. Martin’s Press
(July 7)
When I’m making good decisions this spring I’m going to read a book from Verso called “The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy: Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the West,” by a scholar named A.J.A. Woods, but when I’m off the clock, I want to crawl inside a sexy novel about people I don’t know and contemplate my bad decisions. I sometimes need to be judgy and compassionate at the same time. So I’m looking out for a new book by Robinne Lee that promises to be not only sexy but “sizzling,” even, and also smart and a little bit mean. My Los Angeles is populated by working people just trying to muddle through, but I like to visit the Other Los Angeles, the one with enough ease and access that it seems both safer and nastier. I like that Lee threw some elbows to insist that her last novel, about an older woman’s affair with the lead singer of a boy band, was not generically a “romance,” thankyouverymuch. I’m interested in the way Lee takes people who might be actively blowing up their lives quite seriously. No one is above making serious mistakes for something hot but impermanent.
— M. Chihara
Triage
By Claudia Rankine
Graywolf Press
(Aug. 4)
Claudia Rankine is fearless. Her astounding bestseller, “Citizen: An American Lyric,” blended poetry, art and cultural criticism and brought her brilliant mind to the masses. In her last book, “Just Us,” she traveled around the nation asking white men in airports, dinner parties and theaters, among other shared spaces, what they thought about privilege. There’s a reason she was granted a MacArthur Fellowship — a.k.a. the “genius grant” — several years back. 2026 is already rife with racial tension; we need her. I’m eager to read what she has to say in her new book, “Triage,” which some consider to be one of her most personal works. In it, she dabbles in fiction, examines hardships in Gaza and continues to bend literary genres. “No matter our posture,” she writes “we are all among the rubble.”
— S.K.
Girlhood, Translated
By Suzanne Garfinkle-Crowell
Penguin
(Sept. 8)
Social media has been particularly unkind to teenage girls, putting rocket fuel onto the ordinary adolescent stressors of physical awkwardness, the sadness of comparison and the fireworks of inter-friendship conflicts. Medical professionals can sometimes do more harm than good by putting bleak-sounding labels on the distress — depression, anxiety, OCD, ADHD — and making it all seem chronic. This book takes aim at what the author calls the “therapy-speak” that means well but creates an unhelpful shorthand for the more complicated problems crying out for a better means of expression. The inner life of a teenage girl was an uncrackable mystery to me when I was a teenage boy. Now that I’m a parent of a young daughter, I hope to understand better what I failed to grasp back then.
— T.Z.
Though it’s still early 2026, the turbulence of the last few weeks is overshadowing its novelty. We are finding refuge in books, both to make sense of the bad news vortex and to welcome escape. It’s a big year for books. Gov. Gavin Newsom has a memoir out next month, many millennials are foaming at the mouth anticipating the release of Lena Dunham’s new memoir, and there are also big drops from Michael Connelly, Michael Pollan and hit sci-fi novelist Mike Chen. (What a year to be a Michael). Our list of 20 books calls out reads you might have missed among these powerhouse titles, including highly anticipated works from Tayari Jones, Emily Nemens, Álvaro Enrigue, Claudia Rankine, T.C. Boyle and others.
We asked a prolific author, local professors, book critics, literary folks about town and a self-described “sailor punk rat” to make their picks personal. After all, is there anything more personal than absorbing a book for days at a time while the laundry stays undone and dishes pile high in the sink? Our list features neo-noir, studies on female friendship and works that speak to our current moment confronting race and border tension, along with a few narratives that weave in hope. Something we could all use more of.
— Sophia Kercher
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Tangerinn
By Emanuela Anechoum
Europa Editions
(Out now)
This is a debut novel, translated from the Italian. It is a novel about a woman in her early 30s trying to figure herself out as she returns home to the Calabrian coast and tries to help her sister run their father’s bar. This sounds like both a fantasy and a serious meditation on belonging to me, and I’m ready to go. Now. For many reasons, for too many reasons, all I want to think about for as long as possible in the new year is something like this novel: belonging while running away, a gathering place for all the runaways and outcasts, and a nice bar on the coast.
— Michelle Chihara
Salvation
By C. William Langsfeld
Counterpoint Press
(Feb. 3)
We don’t usually think of pastors as wobbly in their own faith, but doubt stalks them just as much as it does any ordinary human being. This debut novel gives an important role to the Rev. Morris Green, a devout Lutheran who has begun to question the meaning of the universe and the validity of his own spiritual authority. A harsh kind of answer seems to come in the form of a young visitor to his door who has killed his own best friend and is on the run from the law. That it’s set on the Western Slope of the Colorado Rockies makes it even more appealing. There are echoes here of Thornton Wilder’s “The Eighth Day” about a flight away from a homicide that shakes up a small mining town and also of John Updike’s “In the Beauty of the Lilies,” in which religious questions keep echoing through generations. I like thrillers that work a little theology into the plot: the mysteries of a crime — not just whodunit, but a whydunit — can throw a little light on the mysteries of creation and existence.
— Tom Zoellner
Clutch
By Emily Nemens
Tin House
(Feb. 3)
I’ve only recently stumbled upon Emily Nemens, which surprises me. The writer has a storied career as a literary genius and editor. Her debut novel, “The Cactus League,” received praise by NPR, the New York Times and is a favorite among my smartest friends.
Speaking of friends, her new novel follows five college friends converging in Palm Springs after leading vastly different lives across the country. The women have each endured private struggles and have come together to “reconcile professional ambition with personal tumult.” The novel has been described as beautiful, moving and absorbing — perhaps “White Lotus” with more sincerity and heart. I’m so hypnotized by stories of female friendship, especially the way they complicate and evolve over time. I’m thrilled to dive in.
— Maddie Connors
Warning Signs
By Tracy Sierra
Viking/Pamela Dorman Books
(Feb. 10)
“Nighwatching,” Tracy Sierra’s acclaimed 2024 debut, features a young mother who must overcome withering self-doubt and grief to save herself and her children from a sadistic, murderous intruder. In “Warning Signs,” Sierra has set up an even more suspenseful tale centered on fathers, sons and the toxic masculinity that surrounds them. After learning the risks and dangers of the Colorado Rockies’ backcountry from a loving but complicated mother, Zach Fisher, a sensitive 12-year-old, joins Bram, his hypercritical father, on a father/son ski trip. First, an animal’s carcass is found, eviscerated in a way no predator could. Then, after the various men, all potential investors in Bram’s business venture, and their sons assemble, Ginny, Bram’s assistant, goes missing. As an avalanche and dead bodies ratchet up the suspense, Zach must lean on his mother’s wisdom to fight for his life while deciphering a confusing undercurrent of danger, violence and betrayal among the survivors. “Warning Signs” promises to be even more of a nail-biter than Sierra’s debut, a deepening of her examination of families in extremis, which should earn it a top spot in readers’ TBR list.
— Paula L. Woods
I Am the Ghost Here
By Kim Samek
Dial Press
(Feb. 24)
The debut by Pushcart-winning short story writer Kim Samek blends subversive humor with the absurd in a memorable collection of stories written during the COVID-19 pandemic. These weird tales, some of which are set in L.A. where Samek has worked as an Emmy-nominated TV writer and producer, reflect that strange and unsettling time: A man reveals to his family that’s he’s being controlled by a puppeteer, a new mother turns into an egg, and a grieving widow joins a reality show for wives who’ve lost their husbands in tragic accidents. Recommended for fans of Ben Loory and Aimee Bender, whom Samek will be in conversation with at Vroman’s in Pasadena on March 17.
— Jim Ruland
Kin
By Tayari Jones
Knopf:
(Feb. 24)
Tayari Jones excels at writing novels that, regardless of how big the social issues surrounding them may be, are firmly centered on human relationships. After the international success of “An American Marriage,” which focuses on a nuanced, triangulated relationship that arises out of a Black man’s wrongful conviction for raping a white woman, Jones turns her attention to two motherless young women from Honeysuckle, La., whose paths and fortunes diverge when Vernice attends Atlanta’s Spelman College, where she finds sisterhood and a different kind of inequality, while Annie searches for the mother who abandoned her, sending her on a path of adventure but also grave danger. Although their paths seem to be widely divergent, Vernice and Annie’s common desire for love, connection and purpose resonates deeply, which promises to make “Kin” a balm for readers’ fractured spirits in these divided times.
— P.L.W.
Now I Surrender
By Álvaro Enrigue
Riverhead Books
(March 3)
Translated into English, Álvaro Enrigue’s novel reimagines the American West through historical fiction. Enrigue has a long career of writing brilliant and gripping literary accounts of Mexico’s history with a daring flair. His work is a moving and complex love letter to Mexico, mesmerizing anyone who has ever been awestruck by the country. His novel “You Dreamed of Empires” was described by NPR as a “counterfactual history of Hernan Cortés’ arrival at Moctezuma’s court. It’s also a drug novel. Moctezuma is high on mushrooms for the whole book.”
His next translated book, “Now I Surrender,” is equally ambitious, telling the story of a woman fleeing an Apache raid on the Mexican-American border. The historical fiction imagines the Mexican and American armies fighting for control of the West — part myth, fact and fiction spanning the past and present. It’s a slice of bloody American history with a timely edge.
— M. Connors
The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on the End of the World
By Rebecca Solnit
Haymarket Books
(March 3)
After Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential win, Rebecca Solnit’s slim volume “Hope in the Dark” nearly became a sacred text to those reeling from the election results. The long, lyrical essay, originally written during the Bush years at the height of the second Iraq war, directly challenges the idea that “nothing ever changes.” In it, Solnit examines history to show how small, often forgotten actions led to massive cultural and political shifts. What I like about Solnit’s work is that she never promises to be the final authority and instead invites dialogue. (It’s worth mentioning that she helped popularize the term “mansplaining,” after all). Her new work, “The Beginning Comes After the End” is what Solnit calls the sequel to “Hope in the Dark.” In it she leans into how interconnected humanity is and, again, offers what she calls her “freakish hope” for readers. Last year on the podcast “How to Survive the End of the World,” she announced: “We’re not hopeless, we’re not losers, and we’re not living in a static world which nothing can change.” This new volume expands on that sentiment, serving as another urgent manifesto for our tumultuous time.
— S.K.
Day Care
By Nora Lange
Two Dollar Radio
(April 7)
Nora Lange’s follow-up to her Los Angeles Times bestselling novel “Us Fools” is a collection of short fiction that confronts family dynamics while cozying up to the surreal. These short, dense stories are clotted with information — personal quirks, relationship histories, family lore — and simmer with sexual tension that is often joyously perverse. Lange rarely sticks with one timeline or point of view and the result is a unique and unpredictable collection that elevates the fatigue of simply trying to exist at the quarter pole of the 21st century to an art form.
— J.R.
American Spirits
By Anna Dorn
Simon & Schuster
(April 14)
If you’ve been to a literary event in the last few years in Northeast Los Angeles, you’ve likely seen Anna Dorn coolly reading poetry off her iPhone about a woman’s freakish inner life — creepy, lonely, a throbbing desire to die. (I mean this as a compliment.) Dorn’s writing feels unique in its portrayal of Los Angeles in all its sleazy, cigarette-stained, voice-fried glory. This spring, Dorn returns with “American Spirits,” described as a novel following a pop star and her fan-turned-assistant in isolation together during the pandemic. The work is a meditation on fandom, fame and pop music. I imagine the book as a Lynch film with a score by Lana Del Rey — disturbing, weird and poignant. Plus, I’ll read anything about a crazy woman — let alone two.
— M. Connors
The Complete Works of Ricardo Reis
By Fernando Pessoa
New Directions
(April 21)
Is Fernando Pessoa the most fascinating writer ever? Best known for “The Book of Disquiet,” a fragmented masterpiece of urban ennui, the bulk of Pessoa’s literary output wasn’t discovered until after his death in 1935 at age 47. He left behind a massive steamer trunk full of manuscripts, many of which were attributed to artists not named Fernando Pessoa.
These works were penned by Pessoa’s heteronyms, a term he came up with to describe the scores of distinct authorial entities he invented. More than a pseudonym, these poets and writers had different backgrounds and influences. Some even held controversial views that Pessoa himself didn’t share.
Pessoa created 75 of these personas (my favorite name of the bunch is Alexander Search), but three of them — Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos, and Ricardo Reis — wrote volumes of poems, enough for several books. Since 2020 New Directions has been putting out bilingual editions of these poems, with “The Complete Works of Ricardo Reis” being the latest. This all sounds very experimental as befitting the James Joyce of Portugal, but does it amount to more than a literary leg-pull? Pessoa possesses a genius for keeping the reader close and when I read Reis’ poems, I feel like the authors are peering over my shoulder and reflecting on the horrors of this distracted age: “Master, how serene / Are all the hours / We waste / If, as we waste them, / We place them in a vase / Like flowers.”
— J.R.
No Way Home
By T.C. Boyle
Liveright Publishing
(April 21)
Beloved both by book clubs and spirited Reddit threads, the prolific T.C. Boyle is called a literary “American master” for a reason. With the release of his 20th novel, Boyle invites readers into a tequila-soaked love triangle with scenes that volley from high-stakes L.A. hospital drama to desert rats slamming beers in a Nevada small town. The main character grapples with the untimely death of his mother as he navigates a new, possibly treacherous, relationship. A complicated love story told by one of Southern California’s literary giants? Count me in. I grew up in a mixed reading household. My mom swallowed self-help books and the occasional memoir as my dad tucked into the latest Michael Connelly. Meanwhile, my sister collected cookbooks and fantasy tomes as I finished the final chapters of yet another Jane Austen classic. But we all found ourselves pulled toward one of Boyle’s books at some point. I’m glad he keeps gracing my bookshelf.
— S.K.
A Violent Masterpiece
By Jordan Harper
Mulholland Books
(April 28)
“Everybody Knows” was Harper’s 2023 incendiary take on Hollywood fixers. Now comes a second neo-noir that has us primed for an epic excavation beneath the foundations on which the industry stands. Among the players in Harper’s ninth circle of Hollywood Hell: a well-connected pedophile who mysteriously “commits suicide” just before naming his accomplices; a young woman whose disappearance, then very existence, is erased despite its possible connection to a serial killer; and the L.A. Ripper himself, who hides clues in graphic crime scenes. Three Hollywood insiders — the pedophile’s scrappy attorney, an underground concierge serving the uber wealthy’s every dark whim and a bottom-feeding live streamer who sees L.A. as a Frankenstein’s monster of felonies sewn together into a city — race to uncover the conspiracy that links the crimes, no matter the risks. This walk on Hollywood’s very dark side highlights one of Harper’s great gifts making readers care about even the most compromised among us. Do the allusions and shout-outs to current events and personalities seem a little too close for comfort? I certainly hope so!
— P.L.W.
John of John
By Douglas Stuart
Grove Press
(May 5)
On the Scottish island of Harris, the setting for this novel, expensive tweeds are a costly commodity. John-Calum Macleod, or “Cal,” has returned to the cramped, emotionally suffocating family home he left behind, now shared with his father and maternal grandmother. Like the protagonists in Stuart’s previous novels, Shuggie Bain and Mungo Hamilton, Cal is gay. Though he found freedom in Glasgow’s queer community, he couldn’t make a living there. His father, a fire-and-brimstone-spouting church elder, ordered him back, demanding he care for his grandmother, Ella, with the stark insistence: “She’s not my responsibility. It’s not fair of you to put the burden on me.” Cal’s mother, Grace, is estranged from the family, having left her terrifyingly pious and physically abusive husband, as well as her own mother, who appears complicit in her son-in-law’s behavior. Cal slowly begins to reconnect with old friends while actively defying his father’s dictates. When John commands Cal to cut his long hair, Cal rebels by dyeing it platinum and trimming it into a chin-length bob. This unshakable belief in his own self-sovereignty offers a welcome contrast to the islanders’ inherent fear of change. Stuart, demonstrating an almost anthropological understanding of his homeland, reveals how the Hebridean culture has been maintained for centuries and continues to thrive today. This preservation is ensured through strict weavers’ guild regulations, a vigilant (both positive and negative) neighborliness, and careful resource management. However, John and Cal’s relationship involves more than just weaving and loom maintenance. As Cal tells his former best friend, Isla, her Fair Isle sweater boasts 29 different shades. This detail highlights the complexity of color, mirroring how tweeds that appear predominantly green or brown are, in fact, woven from a rich spectrum of threads, including yellow and fuchsia — all the colors of the rainbow.
— Bethanne Patrick
Backtalker: An American Memoir
By Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw
Simon & Schuster
(May 5)
Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw has been rightly known until now for her immense scholarly work, establishing terms like “intersectionality” and “critical race theory” that now have grown into entire fields of study. Regardless of pushback, these vital ideas have moved beyond academia; the general public now understands that feminism cannot be described uniformly for all groups, and that racism is a social construct, not an accident. With “Backtalker,” Crenshaw turns personal. Her stories are well-told, relevant and often searing, detailing an elementary-school teacher’s slight, a hometown swimming-pool reckoning and chauvinism from an Ivy League club. She clearly had exceptional, publicly supportive parents (witness her mother’s activism at that swimming pool) and possesses a maverick’s temperament. “Being a backtalker is like being lactose intolerant,” she writes in “A Note From Kim.” “There are things that I cannot digest. To accept anything close to second-class status as the price of belonging sickens me.” The book’s three sections — “Raising a Backtalker,” “Becoming a Backtalker” and “Being a Backtalker” — reinforce the author’s belief that questioning the system to change it requires education, experience and community. The epilogue is particularly powerful, opening with Crenshaw visiting Selma, Ala., in 2025 for the 60th anniversary of Bloody Sunday. Seeing its bridge painted with the words “Selma: A Nice Place to Live,” she ponders: “I wondered whether those bold letters presided over the scene on that fateful day in 1965 when police officers, under the direction of Alabama’s segregationist governor, brutally beat scores of African Americans, injuring some for life.” The fight is far from over. We are fortunate to have warriors like Crenshaw who refuse to accept second-class status.
— B.P.
On Witness and Respair: Essays
By Jesmyn Ward
Scribner
(May 19)
Jesmyn Ward’s work has always gutted me. Her 2011 novel “Salvage the Bones,” set in Mississippi during Hurricane Katrina, immerses the reader in a world full of suffering but telegraphs something profound about human dignity and care. There is nothing romanticized about the pain her characters experience. And yet, the communities and ecosystems that come alive in Ward’s work make you want to be with her people and creatures. Images from that novel come to me unbidden when I’m alone making ramen, leaning into a cold wind or calming down my hypervigilant Doberman mutt.
Ward’s partner died suddenly in 2020, and she has said in interviews that she almost stopped writing. Lucky for us, she did not. “Let Us Descend” is a majestic novel set among enslaved people in Louisiana (2023). This upcoming book is a collection of essays, speeches and creative nonfiction. “On Witness and Respair” defines that last word as: “Respair (noun, obsolete), fresh hope after despair.” Her sentences carry real wisdom, and wisdom seems in short supply. If she can find a path to collective resilience in these dark times, I’d better suit up and buckle down.
— M. Chihara
Land
By Maggie O’Farrell
Knopf
(June 2)
Deep within this important new novel from O’Farrell, the widely praised author of “Hamnet” (to which, full disclosure, I gave a rave review in 2020), a brief love affair between two New World emigres recalls John Donne’s famous line describing his lover as “O My America, my new-found land.” It’s a reminder that although Land begins and ends with “the dog-shaped island” of Ireland — its story begins even further in the past (before that of the Neolithic girl Brith who walks the same territory) and ends far into the future. We meet Tomás and his son Liam in the late 19th century as they work for “the redcoats” to make a detailed map of their area, which shelters a copse and a deep, warm spring that seems to turn Tomás into a lunatic. That Tomás, who has already survived the Great Hunger as well as a cruel workhouse, isn’t already a lunatic is perhaps less fantastical than the plot itself at times. Throughout the book, elements from a talking fish to a possibly reincarnated dog exist alongside the bleak reality of a country so downtrodden and occupied that even its cartography isn’t in its own language. Somehow, without reducing anyone to pure stereotype (except, perhaps, for the greedy local Anglo-Irish viscount, who deserves it), O’Farrell weaves in mythology, traditional music, humble foodways and several Irish wolfhounds to demonstrate that the land belongs to no one, at least no human, and will endure despite all that humans take from it.
— B.P.
Crash Into Me
By Robinne Lee
St. Martin’s Press
(July 7)
When I’m making good decisions this spring I’m going to read a book from Verso called “The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy: Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the West,” by a scholar named A.J.A. Woods, but when I’m off the clock, I want to crawl inside a sexy novel about people I don’t know and contemplate my bad decisions. I sometimes need to be judgy and compassionate at the same time. So I’m looking out for a new book by Robinne Lee that promises to be not only sexy but “sizzling,” even, and also smart and a little bit mean. My Los Angeles is populated by working people just trying to muddle through, but I like to visit the Other Los Angeles, the one with enough ease and access that it seems both safer and nastier. I like that Lee threw some elbows to insist that her last novel, about an older woman’s affair with the lead singer of a boy band, was not generically a “romance,” thankyouverymuch. I’m interested in the way Lee takes people who might be actively blowing up their lives quite seriously. No one is above making serious mistakes for something hot but impermanent.
— M. Chihara
Triage
By Claudia Rankine
Graywolf Press
(Aug. 4)
Claudia Rankine is fearless. Her astounding bestseller, “Citizen: An American Lyric,” blended poetry, art and cultural criticism and brought her brilliant mind to the masses. In her last book, “Just Us,” she traveled around the nation asking white men in airports, dinner parties and theaters, among other shared spaces, what they thought about privilege. There’s a reason she was granted a MacArthur Fellowship — a.k.a. the “genius grant” — several years back. 2026 is already rife with racial tension; we need her. I’m eager to read what she has to say in her new book, “Triage,” which some consider to be one of her most personal works. In it, she dabbles in fiction, examines hardships in Gaza and continues to bend literary genres. “No matter our posture,” she writes “we are all among the rubble.”
— S.K.
Girlhood, Translated
By Suzanne Garfinkle-Crowell
Penguin
(Sept. 8)
Social media has been particularly unkind to teenage girls, putting rocket fuel onto the ordinary adolescent stressors of physical awkwardness, the sadness of comparison and the fireworks of inter-friendship conflicts. Medical professionals can sometimes do more harm than good by putting bleak-sounding labels on the distress — depression, anxiety, OCD, ADHD — and making it all seem chronic. This book takes aim at what the author calls the “therapy-speak” that means well but creates an unhelpful shorthand for the more complicated problems crying out for a better means of expression. The inner life of a teenage girl was an uncrackable mystery to me when I was a teenage boy. Now that I’m a parent of a young daughter, I hope to understand better what I failed to grasp back then.
— T.Z.
Though it’s still early 2026, the turbulence of the last few weeks is overshadowing its novelty. We are finding refuge in books, both to make sense of the bad news vortex and to welcome escape. It’s a big year for books. Gov. Gavin Newsom has a memoir out next month, many millennials are foaming at the mouth anticipating the release of Lena Dunham’s new memoir, and there are also big drops from Michael Connelly, Michael Pollan and hit sci-fi novelist Mike Chen. (What a year to be a Michael). Our list of 20 books calls out reads you might have missed among these powerhouse titles, including highly anticipated works from Tayari Jones, Emily Nemens, Álvaro Enrigue, Claudia Rankine, T.C. Boyle and others.
We asked a prolific author, local professors, book critics, literary folks about town and a self-described “sailor punk rat” to make their picks personal. After all, is there anything more personal than absorbing a book for days at a time while the laundry stays undone and dishes pile high in the sink? Our list features neo-noir, studies on female friendship and works that speak to our current moment confronting race and border tension, along with a few narratives that weave in hope. Something we could all use more of.
— Sophia Kercher
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Tangerinn
By Emanuela Anechoum
Europa Editions
(Out now)
This is a debut novel, translated from the Italian. It is a novel about a woman in her early 30s trying to figure herself out as she returns home to the Calabrian coast and tries to help her sister run their father’s bar. This sounds like both a fantasy and a serious meditation on belonging to me, and I’m ready to go. Now. For many reasons, for too many reasons, all I want to think about for as long as possible in the new year is something like this novel: belonging while running away, a gathering place for all the runaways and outcasts, and a nice bar on the coast.
— Michelle Chihara
Salvation
By C. William Langsfeld
Counterpoint Press
(Feb. 3)
We don’t usually think of pastors as wobbly in their own faith, but doubt stalks them just as much as it does any ordinary human being. This debut novel gives an important role to the Rev. Morris Green, a devout Lutheran who has begun to question the meaning of the universe and the validity of his own spiritual authority. A harsh kind of answer seems to come in the form of a young visitor to his door who has killed his own best friend and is on the run from the law. That it’s set on the Western Slope of the Colorado Rockies makes it even more appealing. There are echoes here of Thornton Wilder’s “The Eighth Day” about a flight away from a homicide that shakes up a small mining town and also of John Updike’s “In the Beauty of the Lilies,” in which religious questions keep echoing through generations. I like thrillers that work a little theology into the plot: the mysteries of a crime — not just whodunit, but a whydunit — can throw a little light on the mysteries of creation and existence.
— Tom Zoellner
Clutch
By Emily Nemens
Tin House
(Feb. 3)
I’ve only recently stumbled upon Emily Nemens, which surprises me. The writer has a storied career as a literary genius and editor. Her debut novel, “The Cactus League,” received praise by NPR, the New York Times and is a favorite among my smartest friends.
Speaking of friends, her new novel follows five college friends converging in Palm Springs after leading vastly different lives across the country. The women have each endured private struggles and have come together to “reconcile professional ambition with personal tumult.” The novel has been described as beautiful, moving and absorbing — perhaps “White Lotus” with more sincerity and heart. I’m so hypnotized by stories of female friendship, especially the way they complicate and evolve over time. I’m thrilled to dive in.
— Maddie Connors
Warning Signs
By Tracy Sierra
Viking/Pamela Dorman Books
(Feb. 10)
“Nighwatching,” Tracy Sierra’s acclaimed 2024 debut, features a young mother who must overcome withering self-doubt and grief to save herself and her children from a sadistic, murderous intruder. In “Warning Signs,” Sierra has set up an even more suspenseful tale centered on fathers, sons and the toxic masculinity that surrounds them. After learning the risks and dangers of the Colorado Rockies’ backcountry from a loving but complicated mother, Zach Fisher, a sensitive 12-year-old, joins Bram, his hypercritical father, on a father/son ski trip. First, an animal’s carcass is found, eviscerated in a way no predator could. Then, after the various men, all potential investors in Bram’s business venture, and their sons assemble, Ginny, Bram’s assistant, goes missing. As an avalanche and dead bodies ratchet up the suspense, Zach must lean on his mother’s wisdom to fight for his life while deciphering a confusing undercurrent of danger, violence and betrayal among the survivors. “Warning Signs” promises to be even more of a nail-biter than Sierra’s debut, a deepening of her examination of families in extremis, which should earn it a top spot in readers’ TBR list.
— Paula L. Woods
I Am the Ghost Here
By Kim Samek
Dial Press
(Feb. 24)
The debut by Pushcart-winning short story writer Kim Samek blends subversive humor with the absurd in a memorable collection of stories written during the COVID-19 pandemic. These weird tales, some of which are set in L.A. where Samek has worked as an Emmy-nominated TV writer and producer, reflect that strange and unsettling time: A man reveals to his family that’s he’s being controlled by a puppeteer, a new mother turns into an egg, and a grieving widow joins a reality show for wives who’ve lost their husbands in tragic accidents. Recommended for fans of Ben Loory and Aimee Bender, whom Samek will be in conversation with at Vroman’s in Pasadena on March 17.
— Jim Ruland
Kin
By Tayari Jones
Knopf:
(Feb. 24)
Tayari Jones excels at writing novels that, regardless of how big the social issues surrounding them may be, are firmly centered on human relationships. After the international success of “An American Marriage,” which focuses on a nuanced, triangulated relationship that arises out of a Black man’s wrongful conviction for raping a white woman, Jones turns her attention to two motherless young women from Honeysuckle, La., whose paths and fortunes diverge when Vernice attends Atlanta’s Spelman College, where she finds sisterhood and a different kind of inequality, while Annie searches for the mother who abandoned her, sending her on a path of adventure but also grave danger. Although their paths seem to be widely divergent, Vernice and Annie’s common desire for love, connection and purpose resonates deeply, which promises to make “Kin” a balm for readers’ fractured spirits in these divided times.
— P.L.W.
Now I Surrender
By Álvaro Enrigue
Riverhead Books
(March 3)
Translated into English, Álvaro Enrigue’s novel reimagines the American West through historical fiction. Enrigue has a long career of writing brilliant and gripping literary accounts of Mexico’s history with a daring flair. His work is a moving and complex love letter to Mexico, mesmerizing anyone who has ever been awestruck by the country. His novel “You Dreamed of Empires” was described by NPR as a “counterfactual history of Hernan Cortés’ arrival at Moctezuma’s court. It’s also a drug novel. Moctezuma is high on mushrooms for the whole book.”
His next translated book, “Now I Surrender,” is equally ambitious, telling the story of a woman fleeing an Apache raid on the Mexican-American border. The historical fiction imagines the Mexican and American armies fighting for control of the West — part myth, fact and fiction spanning the past and present. It’s a slice of bloody American history with a timely edge.
— M. Connors
The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on the End of the World
By Rebecca Solnit
Haymarket Books
(March 3)
After Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential win, Rebecca Solnit’s slim volume “Hope in the Dark” nearly became a sacred text to those reeling from the election results. The long, lyrical essay, originally written during the Bush years at the height of the second Iraq war, directly challenges the idea that “nothing ever changes.” In it, Solnit examines history to show how small, often forgotten actions led to massive cultural and political shifts. What I like about Solnit’s work is that she never promises to be the final authority and instead invites dialogue. (It’s worth mentioning that she helped popularize the term “mansplaining,” after all). Her new work, “The Beginning Comes After the End” is what Solnit calls the sequel to “Hope in the Dark.” In it she leans into how interconnected humanity is and, again, offers what she calls her “freakish hope” for readers. Last year on the podcast “How to Survive the End of the World,” she announced: “We’re not hopeless, we’re not losers, and we’re not living in a static world which nothing can change.” This new volume expands on that sentiment, serving as another urgent manifesto for our tumultuous time.
— S.K.
Day Care
By Nora Lange
Two Dollar Radio
(April 7)
Nora Lange’s follow-up to her Los Angeles Times bestselling novel “Us Fools” is a collection of short fiction that confronts family dynamics while cozying up to the surreal. These short, dense stories are clotted with information — personal quirks, relationship histories, family lore — and simmer with sexual tension that is often joyously perverse. Lange rarely sticks with one timeline or point of view and the result is a unique and unpredictable collection that elevates the fatigue of simply trying to exist at the quarter pole of the 21st century to an art form.
— J.R.
American Spirits
By Anna Dorn
Simon & Schuster
(April 14)
If you’ve been to a literary event in the last few years in Northeast Los Angeles, you’ve likely seen Anna Dorn coolly reading poetry off her iPhone about a woman’s freakish inner life — creepy, lonely, a throbbing desire to die. (I mean this as a compliment.) Dorn’s writing feels unique in its portrayal of Los Angeles in all its sleazy, cigarette-stained, voice-fried glory. This spring, Dorn returns with “American Spirits,” described as a novel following a pop star and her fan-turned-assistant in isolation together during the pandemic. The work is a meditation on fandom, fame and pop music. I imagine the book as a Lynch film with a score by Lana Del Rey — disturbing, weird and poignant. Plus, I’ll read anything about a crazy woman — let alone two.
— M. Connors
The Complete Works of Ricardo Reis
By Fernando Pessoa
New Directions
(April 21)
Is Fernando Pessoa the most fascinating writer ever? Best known for “The Book of Disquiet,” a fragmented masterpiece of urban ennui, the bulk of Pessoa’s literary output wasn’t discovered until after his death in 1935 at age 47. He left behind a massive steamer trunk full of manuscripts, many of which were attributed to artists not named Fernando Pessoa.
These works were penned by Pessoa’s heteronyms, a term he came up with to describe the scores of distinct authorial entities he invented. More than a pseudonym, these poets and writers had different backgrounds and influences. Some even held controversial views that Pessoa himself didn’t share.
Pessoa created 75 of these personas (my favorite name of the bunch is Alexander Search), but three of them — Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos, and Ricardo Reis — wrote volumes of poems, enough for several books. Since 2020 New Directions has been putting out bilingual editions of these poems, with “The Complete Works of Ricardo Reis” being the latest. This all sounds very experimental as befitting the James Joyce of Portugal, but does it amount to more than a literary leg-pull? Pessoa possesses a genius for keeping the reader close and when I read Reis’ poems, I feel like the authors are peering over my shoulder and reflecting on the horrors of this distracted age: “Master, how serene / Are all the hours / We waste / If, as we waste them, / We place them in a vase / Like flowers.”
— J.R.
No Way Home
By T.C. Boyle
Liveright Publishing
(April 21)
Beloved both by book clubs and spirited Reddit threads, the prolific T.C. Boyle is called a literary “American master” for a reason. With the release of his 20th novel, Boyle invites readers into a tequila-soaked love triangle with scenes that volley from high-stakes L.A. hospital drama to desert rats slamming beers in a Nevada small town. The main character grapples with the untimely death of his mother as he navigates a new, possibly treacherous, relationship. A complicated love story told by one of Southern California’s literary giants? Count me in. I grew up in a mixed reading household. My mom swallowed self-help books and the occasional memoir as my dad tucked into the latest Michael Connelly. Meanwhile, my sister collected cookbooks and fantasy tomes as I finished the final chapters of yet another Jane Austen classic. But we all found ourselves pulled toward one of Boyle’s books at some point. I’m glad he keeps gracing my bookshelf.
— S.K.
A Violent Masterpiece
By Jordan Harper
Mulholland Books
(April 28)
“Everybody Knows” was Harper’s 2023 incendiary take on Hollywood fixers. Now comes a second neo-noir that has us primed for an epic excavation beneath the foundations on which the industry stands. Among the players in Harper’s ninth circle of Hollywood Hell: a well-connected pedophile who mysteriously “commits suicide” just before naming his accomplices; a young woman whose disappearance, then very existence, is erased despite its possible connection to a serial killer; and the L.A. Ripper himself, who hides clues in graphic crime scenes. Three Hollywood insiders — the pedophile’s scrappy attorney, an underground concierge serving the uber wealthy’s every dark whim and a bottom-feeding live streamer who sees L.A. as a Frankenstein’s monster of felonies sewn together into a city — race to uncover the conspiracy that links the crimes, no matter the risks. This walk on Hollywood’s very dark side highlights one of Harper’s great gifts making readers care about even the most compromised among us. Do the allusions and shout-outs to current events and personalities seem a little too close for comfort? I certainly hope so!
— P.L.W.
John of John
By Douglas Stuart
Grove Press
(May 5)
On the Scottish island of Harris, the setting for this novel, expensive tweeds are a costly commodity. John-Calum Macleod, or “Cal,” has returned to the cramped, emotionally suffocating family home he left behind, now shared with his father and maternal grandmother. Like the protagonists in Stuart’s previous novels, Shuggie Bain and Mungo Hamilton, Cal is gay. Though he found freedom in Glasgow’s queer community, he couldn’t make a living there. His father, a fire-and-brimstone-spouting church elder, ordered him back, demanding he care for his grandmother, Ella, with the stark insistence: “She’s not my responsibility. It’s not fair of you to put the burden on me.” Cal’s mother, Grace, is estranged from the family, having left her terrifyingly pious and physically abusive husband, as well as her own mother, who appears complicit in her son-in-law’s behavior. Cal slowly begins to reconnect with old friends while actively defying his father’s dictates. When John commands Cal to cut his long hair, Cal rebels by dyeing it platinum and trimming it into a chin-length bob. This unshakable belief in his own self-sovereignty offers a welcome contrast to the islanders’ inherent fear of change. Stuart, demonstrating an almost anthropological understanding of his homeland, reveals how the Hebridean culture has been maintained for centuries and continues to thrive today. This preservation is ensured through strict weavers’ guild regulations, a vigilant (both positive and negative) neighborliness, and careful resource management. However, John and Cal’s relationship involves more than just weaving and loom maintenance. As Cal tells his former best friend, Isla, her Fair Isle sweater boasts 29 different shades. This detail highlights the complexity of color, mirroring how tweeds that appear predominantly green or brown are, in fact, woven from a rich spectrum of threads, including yellow and fuchsia — all the colors of the rainbow.
— Bethanne Patrick
Backtalker: An American Memoir
By Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw
Simon & Schuster
(May 5)
Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw has been rightly known until now for her immense scholarly work, establishing terms like “intersectionality” and “critical race theory” that now have grown into entire fields of study. Regardless of pushback, these vital ideas have moved beyond academia; the general public now understands that feminism cannot be described uniformly for all groups, and that racism is a social construct, not an accident. With “Backtalker,” Crenshaw turns personal. Her stories are well-told, relevant and often searing, detailing an elementary-school teacher’s slight, a hometown swimming-pool reckoning and chauvinism from an Ivy League club. She clearly had exceptional, publicly supportive parents (witness her mother’s activism at that swimming pool) and possesses a maverick’s temperament. “Being a backtalker is like being lactose intolerant,” she writes in “A Note From Kim.” “There are things that I cannot digest. To accept anything close to second-class status as the price of belonging sickens me.” The book’s three sections — “Raising a Backtalker,” “Becoming a Backtalker” and “Being a Backtalker” — reinforce the author’s belief that questioning the system to change it requires education, experience and community. The epilogue is particularly powerful, opening with Crenshaw visiting Selma, Ala., in 2025 for the 60th anniversary of Bloody Sunday. Seeing its bridge painted with the words “Selma: A Nice Place to Live,” she ponders: “I wondered whether those bold letters presided over the scene on that fateful day in 1965 when police officers, under the direction of Alabama’s segregationist governor, brutally beat scores of African Americans, injuring some for life.” The fight is far from over. We are fortunate to have warriors like Crenshaw who refuse to accept second-class status.
— B.P.
On Witness and Respair: Essays
By Jesmyn Ward
Scribner
(May 19)
Jesmyn Ward’s work has always gutted me. Her 2011 novel “Salvage the Bones,” set in Mississippi during Hurricane Katrina, immerses the reader in a world full of suffering but telegraphs something profound about human dignity and care. There is nothing romanticized about the pain her characters experience. And yet, the communities and ecosystems that come alive in Ward’s work make you want to be with her people and creatures. Images from that novel come to me unbidden when I’m alone making ramen, leaning into a cold wind or calming down my hypervigilant Doberman mutt.
Ward’s partner died suddenly in 2020, and she has said in interviews that she almost stopped writing. Lucky for us, she did not. “Let Us Descend” is a majestic novel set among enslaved people in Louisiana (2023). This upcoming book is a collection of essays, speeches and creative nonfiction. “On Witness and Respair” defines that last word as: “Respair (noun, obsolete), fresh hope after despair.” Her sentences carry real wisdom, and wisdom seems in short supply. If she can find a path to collective resilience in these dark times, I’d better suit up and buckle down.
— M. Chihara
Land
By Maggie O’Farrell
Knopf
(June 2)
Deep within this important new novel from O’Farrell, the widely praised author of “Hamnet” (to which, full disclosure, I gave a rave review in 2020), a brief love affair between two New World emigres recalls John Donne’s famous line describing his lover as “O My America, my new-found land.” It’s a reminder that although Land begins and ends with “the dog-shaped island” of Ireland — its story begins even further in the past (before that of the Neolithic girl Brith who walks the same territory) and ends far into the future. We meet Tomás and his son Liam in the late 19th century as they work for “the redcoats” to make a detailed map of their area, which shelters a copse and a deep, warm spring that seems to turn Tomás into a lunatic. That Tomás, who has already survived the Great Hunger as well as a cruel workhouse, isn’t already a lunatic is perhaps less fantastical than the plot itself at times. Throughout the book, elements from a talking fish to a possibly reincarnated dog exist alongside the bleak reality of a country so downtrodden and occupied that even its cartography isn’t in its own language. Somehow, without reducing anyone to pure stereotype (except, perhaps, for the greedy local Anglo-Irish viscount, who deserves it), O’Farrell weaves in mythology, traditional music, humble foodways and several Irish wolfhounds to demonstrate that the land belongs to no one, at least no human, and will endure despite all that humans take from it.
— B.P.
Crash Into Me
By Robinne Lee
St. Martin’s Press
(July 7)
When I’m making good decisions this spring I’m going to read a book from Verso called “The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy: Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the West,” by a scholar named A.J.A. Woods, but when I’m off the clock, I want to crawl inside a sexy novel about people I don’t know and contemplate my bad decisions. I sometimes need to be judgy and compassionate at the same time. So I’m looking out for a new book by Robinne Lee that promises to be not only sexy but “sizzling,” even, and also smart and a little bit mean. My Los Angeles is populated by working people just trying to muddle through, but I like to visit the Other Los Angeles, the one with enough ease and access that it seems both safer and nastier. I like that Lee threw some elbows to insist that her last novel, about an older woman’s affair with the lead singer of a boy band, was not generically a “romance,” thankyouverymuch. I’m interested in the way Lee takes people who might be actively blowing up their lives quite seriously. No one is above making serious mistakes for something hot but impermanent.
— M. Chihara
Triage
By Claudia Rankine
Graywolf Press
(Aug. 4)
Claudia Rankine is fearless. Her astounding bestseller, “Citizen: An American Lyric,” blended poetry, art and cultural criticism and brought her brilliant mind to the masses. In her last book, “Just Us,” she traveled around the nation asking white men in airports, dinner parties and theaters, among other shared spaces, what they thought about privilege. There’s a reason she was granted a MacArthur Fellowship — a.k.a. the “genius grant” — several years back. 2026 is already rife with racial tension; we need her. I’m eager to read what she has to say in her new book, “Triage,” which some consider to be one of her most personal works. In it, she dabbles in fiction, examines hardships in Gaza and continues to bend literary genres. “No matter our posture,” she writes “we are all among the rubble.”
— S.K.
Girlhood, Translated
By Suzanne Garfinkle-Crowell
Penguin
(Sept. 8)
Social media has been particularly unkind to teenage girls, putting rocket fuel onto the ordinary adolescent stressors of physical awkwardness, the sadness of comparison and the fireworks of inter-friendship conflicts. Medical professionals can sometimes do more harm than good by putting bleak-sounding labels on the distress — depression, anxiety, OCD, ADHD — and making it all seem chronic. This book takes aim at what the author calls the “therapy-speak” that means well but creates an unhelpful shorthand for the more complicated problems crying out for a better means of expression. The inner life of a teenage girl was an uncrackable mystery to me when I was a teenage boy. Now that I’m a parent of a young daughter, I hope to understand better what I failed to grasp back then.
— T.Z.
Though it’s still early 2026, the turbulence of the last few weeks is overshadowing its novelty. We are finding refuge in books, both to make sense of the bad news vortex and to welcome escape. It’s a big year for books. Gov. Gavin Newsom has a memoir out next month, many millennials are foaming at the mouth anticipating the release of Lena Dunham’s new memoir, and there are also big drops from Michael Connelly, Michael Pollan and hit sci-fi novelist Mike Chen. (What a year to be a Michael). Our list of 20 books calls out reads you might have missed among these powerhouse titles, including highly anticipated works from Tayari Jones, Emily Nemens, Álvaro Enrigue, Claudia Rankine, T.C. Boyle and others.
We asked a prolific author, local professors, book critics, literary folks about town and a self-described “sailor punk rat” to make their picks personal. After all, is there anything more personal than absorbing a book for days at a time while the laundry stays undone and dishes pile high in the sink? Our list features neo-noir, studies on female friendship and works that speak to our current moment confronting race and border tension, along with a few narratives that weave in hope. Something we could all use more of.
— Sophia Kercher
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Tangerinn
By Emanuela Anechoum
Europa Editions
(Out now)
This is a debut novel, translated from the Italian. It is a novel about a woman in her early 30s trying to figure herself out as she returns home to the Calabrian coast and tries to help her sister run their father’s bar. This sounds like both a fantasy and a serious meditation on belonging to me, and I’m ready to go. Now. For many reasons, for too many reasons, all I want to think about for as long as possible in the new year is something like this novel: belonging while running away, a gathering place for all the runaways and outcasts, and a nice bar on the coast.
— Michelle Chihara
Salvation
By C. William Langsfeld
Counterpoint Press
(Feb. 3)
We don’t usually think of pastors as wobbly in their own faith, but doubt stalks them just as much as it does any ordinary human being. This debut novel gives an important role to the Rev. Morris Green, a devout Lutheran who has begun to question the meaning of the universe and the validity of his own spiritual authority. A harsh kind of answer seems to come in the form of a young visitor to his door who has killed his own best friend and is on the run from the law. That it’s set on the Western Slope of the Colorado Rockies makes it even more appealing. There are echoes here of Thornton Wilder’s “The Eighth Day” about a flight away from a homicide that shakes up a small mining town and also of John Updike’s “In the Beauty of the Lilies,” in which religious questions keep echoing through generations. I like thrillers that work a little theology into the plot: the mysteries of a crime — not just whodunit, but a whydunit — can throw a little light on the mysteries of creation and existence.
— Tom Zoellner
Clutch
By Emily Nemens
Tin House
(Feb. 3)
I’ve only recently stumbled upon Emily Nemens, which surprises me. The writer has a storied career as a literary genius and editor. Her debut novel, “The Cactus League,” received praise by NPR, the New York Times and is a favorite among my smartest friends.
Speaking of friends, her new novel follows five college friends converging in Palm Springs after leading vastly different lives across the country. The women have each endured private struggles and have come together to “reconcile professional ambition with personal tumult.” The novel has been described as beautiful, moving and absorbing — perhaps “White Lotus” with more sincerity and heart. I’m so hypnotized by stories of female friendship, especially the way they complicate and evolve over time. I’m thrilled to dive in.
— Maddie Connors
Warning Signs
By Tracy Sierra
Viking/Pamela Dorman Books
(Feb. 10)
“Nighwatching,” Tracy Sierra’s acclaimed 2024 debut, features a young mother who must overcome withering self-doubt and grief to save herself and her children from a sadistic, murderous intruder. In “Warning Signs,” Sierra has set up an even more suspenseful tale centered on fathers, sons and the toxic masculinity that surrounds them. After learning the risks and dangers of the Colorado Rockies’ backcountry from a loving but complicated mother, Zach Fisher, a sensitive 12-year-old, joins Bram, his hypercritical father, on a father/son ski trip. First, an animal’s carcass is found, eviscerated in a way no predator could. Then, after the various men, all potential investors in Bram’s business venture, and their sons assemble, Ginny, Bram’s assistant, goes missing. As an avalanche and dead bodies ratchet up the suspense, Zach must lean on his mother’s wisdom to fight for his life while deciphering a confusing undercurrent of danger, violence and betrayal among the survivors. “Warning Signs” promises to be even more of a nail-biter than Sierra’s debut, a deepening of her examination of families in extremis, which should earn it a top spot in readers’ TBR list.
— Paula L. Woods
I Am the Ghost Here
By Kim Samek
Dial Press
(Feb. 24)
The debut by Pushcart-winning short story writer Kim Samek blends subversive humor with the absurd in a memorable collection of stories written during the COVID-19 pandemic. These weird tales, some of which are set in L.A. where Samek has worked as an Emmy-nominated TV writer and producer, reflect that strange and unsettling time: A man reveals to his family that’s he’s being controlled by a puppeteer, a new mother turns into an egg, and a grieving widow joins a reality show for wives who’ve lost their husbands in tragic accidents. Recommended for fans of Ben Loory and Aimee Bender, whom Samek will be in conversation with at Vroman’s in Pasadena on March 17.
— Jim Ruland
Kin
By Tayari Jones
Knopf:
(Feb. 24)
Tayari Jones excels at writing novels that, regardless of how big the social issues surrounding them may be, are firmly centered on human relationships. After the international success of “An American Marriage,” which focuses on a nuanced, triangulated relationship that arises out of a Black man’s wrongful conviction for raping a white woman, Jones turns her attention to two motherless young women from Honeysuckle, La., whose paths and fortunes diverge when Vernice attends Atlanta’s Spelman College, where she finds sisterhood and a different kind of inequality, while Annie searches for the mother who abandoned her, sending her on a path of adventure but also grave danger. Although their paths seem to be widely divergent, Vernice and Annie’s common desire for love, connection and purpose resonates deeply, which promises to make “Kin” a balm for readers’ fractured spirits in these divided times.
— P.L.W.
Now I Surrender
By Álvaro Enrigue
Riverhead Books
(March 3)
Translated into English, Álvaro Enrigue’s novel reimagines the American West through historical fiction. Enrigue has a long career of writing brilliant and gripping literary accounts of Mexico’s history with a daring flair. His work is a moving and complex love letter to Mexico, mesmerizing anyone who has ever been awestruck by the country. His novel “You Dreamed of Empires” was described by NPR as a “counterfactual history of Hernan Cortés’ arrival at Moctezuma’s court. It’s also a drug novel. Moctezuma is high on mushrooms for the whole book.”
His next translated book, “Now I Surrender,” is equally ambitious, telling the story of a woman fleeing an Apache raid on the Mexican-American border. The historical fiction imagines the Mexican and American armies fighting for control of the West — part myth, fact and fiction spanning the past and present. It’s a slice of bloody American history with a timely edge.
— M. Connors
The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on the End of the World
By Rebecca Solnit
Haymarket Books
(March 3)
After Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential win, Rebecca Solnit’s slim volume “Hope in the Dark” nearly became a sacred text to those reeling from the election results. The long, lyrical essay, originally written during the Bush years at the height of the second Iraq war, directly challenges the idea that “nothing ever changes.” In it, Solnit examines history to show how small, often forgotten actions led to massive cultural and political shifts. What I like about Solnit’s work is that she never promises to be the final authority and instead invites dialogue. (It’s worth mentioning that she helped popularize the term “mansplaining,” after all). Her new work, “The Beginning Comes After the End” is what Solnit calls the sequel to “Hope in the Dark.” In it she leans into how interconnected humanity is and, again, offers what she calls her “freakish hope” for readers. Last year on the podcast “How to Survive the End of the World,” she announced: “We’re not hopeless, we’re not losers, and we’re not living in a static world which nothing can change.” This new volume expands on that sentiment, serving as another urgent manifesto for our tumultuous time.
— S.K.
Day Care
By Nora Lange
Two Dollar Radio
(April 7)
Nora Lange’s follow-up to her Los Angeles Times bestselling novel “Us Fools” is a collection of short fiction that confronts family dynamics while cozying up to the surreal. These short, dense stories are clotted with information — personal quirks, relationship histories, family lore — and simmer with sexual tension that is often joyously perverse. Lange rarely sticks with one timeline or point of view and the result is a unique and unpredictable collection that elevates the fatigue of simply trying to exist at the quarter pole of the 21st century to an art form.
— J.R.
American Spirits
By Anna Dorn
Simon & Schuster
(April 14)
If you’ve been to a literary event in the last few years in Northeast Los Angeles, you’ve likely seen Anna Dorn coolly reading poetry off her iPhone about a woman’s freakish inner life — creepy, lonely, a throbbing desire to die. (I mean this as a compliment.) Dorn’s writing feels unique in its portrayal of Los Angeles in all its sleazy, cigarette-stained, voice-fried glory. This spring, Dorn returns with “American Spirits,” described as a novel following a pop star and her fan-turned-assistant in isolation together during the pandemic. The work is a meditation on fandom, fame and pop music. I imagine the book as a Lynch film with a score by Lana Del Rey — disturbing, weird and poignant. Plus, I’ll read anything about a crazy woman — let alone two.
— M. Connors
The Complete Works of Ricardo Reis
By Fernando Pessoa
New Directions
(April 21)
Is Fernando Pessoa the most fascinating writer ever? Best known for “The Book of Disquiet,” a fragmented masterpiece of urban ennui, the bulk of Pessoa’s literary output wasn’t discovered until after his death in 1935 at age 47. He left behind a massive steamer trunk full of manuscripts, many of which were attributed to artists not named Fernando Pessoa.
These works were penned by Pessoa’s heteronyms, a term he came up with to describe the scores of distinct authorial entities he invented. More than a pseudonym, these poets and writers had different backgrounds and influences. Some even held controversial views that Pessoa himself didn’t share.
Pessoa created 75 of these personas (my favorite name of the bunch is Alexander Search), but three of them — Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos, and Ricardo Reis — wrote volumes of poems, enough for several books. Since 2020 New Directions has been putting out bilingual editions of these poems, with “The Complete Works of Ricardo Reis” being the latest. This all sounds very experimental as befitting the James Joyce of Portugal, but does it amount to more than a literary leg-pull? Pessoa possesses a genius for keeping the reader close and when I read Reis’ poems, I feel like the authors are peering over my shoulder and reflecting on the horrors of this distracted age: “Master, how serene / Are all the hours / We waste / If, as we waste them, / We place them in a vase / Like flowers.”
— J.R.
No Way Home
By T.C. Boyle
Liveright Publishing
(April 21)
Beloved both by book clubs and spirited Reddit threads, the prolific T.C. Boyle is called a literary “American master” for a reason. With the release of his 20th novel, Boyle invites readers into a tequila-soaked love triangle with scenes that volley from high-stakes L.A. hospital drama to desert rats slamming beers in a Nevada small town. The main character grapples with the untimely death of his mother as he navigates a new, possibly treacherous, relationship. A complicated love story told by one of Southern California’s literary giants? Count me in. I grew up in a mixed reading household. My mom swallowed self-help books and the occasional memoir as my dad tucked into the latest Michael Connelly. Meanwhile, my sister collected cookbooks and fantasy tomes as I finished the final chapters of yet another Jane Austen classic. But we all found ourselves pulled toward one of Boyle’s books at some point. I’m glad he keeps gracing my bookshelf.
— S.K.
A Violent Masterpiece
By Jordan Harper
Mulholland Books
(April 28)
“Everybody Knows” was Harper’s 2023 incendiary take on Hollywood fixers. Now comes a second neo-noir that has us primed for an epic excavation beneath the foundations on which the industry stands. Among the players in Harper’s ninth circle of Hollywood Hell: a well-connected pedophile who mysteriously “commits suicide” just before naming his accomplices; a young woman whose disappearance, then very existence, is erased despite its possible connection to a serial killer; and the L.A. Ripper himself, who hides clues in graphic crime scenes. Three Hollywood insiders — the pedophile’s scrappy attorney, an underground concierge serving the uber wealthy’s every dark whim and a bottom-feeding live streamer who sees L.A. as a Frankenstein’s monster of felonies sewn together into a city — race to uncover the conspiracy that links the crimes, no matter the risks. This walk on Hollywood’s very dark side highlights one of Harper’s great gifts making readers care about even the most compromised among us. Do the allusions and shout-outs to current events and personalities seem a little too close for comfort? I certainly hope so!
— P.L.W.
John of John
By Douglas Stuart
Grove Press
(May 5)
On the Scottish island of Harris, the setting for this novel, expensive tweeds are a costly commodity. John-Calum Macleod, or “Cal,” has returned to the cramped, emotionally suffocating family home he left behind, now shared with his father and maternal grandmother. Like the protagonists in Stuart’s previous novels, Shuggie Bain and Mungo Hamilton, Cal is gay. Though he found freedom in Glasgow’s queer community, he couldn’t make a living there. His father, a fire-and-brimstone-spouting church elder, ordered him back, demanding he care for his grandmother, Ella, with the stark insistence: “She’s not my responsibility. It’s not fair of you to put the burden on me.” Cal’s mother, Grace, is estranged from the family, having left her terrifyingly pious and physically abusive husband, as well as her own mother, who appears complicit in her son-in-law’s behavior. Cal slowly begins to reconnect with old friends while actively defying his father’s dictates. When John commands Cal to cut his long hair, Cal rebels by dyeing it platinum and trimming it into a chin-length bob. This unshakable belief in his own self-sovereignty offers a welcome contrast to the islanders’ inherent fear of change. Stuart, demonstrating an almost anthropological understanding of his homeland, reveals how the Hebridean culture has been maintained for centuries and continues to thrive today. This preservation is ensured through strict weavers’ guild regulations, a vigilant (both positive and negative) neighborliness, and careful resource management. However, John and Cal’s relationship involves more than just weaving and loom maintenance. As Cal tells his former best friend, Isla, her Fair Isle sweater boasts 29 different shades. This detail highlights the complexity of color, mirroring how tweeds that appear predominantly green or brown are, in fact, woven from a rich spectrum of threads, including yellow and fuchsia — all the colors of the rainbow.
— Bethanne Patrick
Backtalker: An American Memoir
By Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw
Simon & Schuster
(May 5)
Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw has been rightly known until now for her immense scholarly work, establishing terms like “intersectionality” and “critical race theory” that now have grown into entire fields of study. Regardless of pushback, these vital ideas have moved beyond academia; the general public now understands that feminism cannot be described uniformly for all groups, and that racism is a social construct, not an accident. With “Backtalker,” Crenshaw turns personal. Her stories are well-told, relevant and often searing, detailing an elementary-school teacher’s slight, a hometown swimming-pool reckoning and chauvinism from an Ivy League club. She clearly had exceptional, publicly supportive parents (witness her mother’s activism at that swimming pool) and possesses a maverick’s temperament. “Being a backtalker is like being lactose intolerant,” she writes in “A Note From Kim.” “There are things that I cannot digest. To accept anything close to second-class status as the price of belonging sickens me.” The book’s three sections — “Raising a Backtalker,” “Becoming a Backtalker” and “Being a Backtalker” — reinforce the author’s belief that questioning the system to change it requires education, experience and community. The epilogue is particularly powerful, opening with Crenshaw visiting Selma, Ala., in 2025 for the 60th anniversary of Bloody Sunday. Seeing its bridge painted with the words “Selma: A Nice Place to Live,” she ponders: “I wondered whether those bold letters presided over the scene on that fateful day in 1965 when police officers, under the direction of Alabama’s segregationist governor, brutally beat scores of African Americans, injuring some for life.” The fight is far from over. We are fortunate to have warriors like Crenshaw who refuse to accept second-class status.
— B.P.
On Witness and Respair: Essays
By Jesmyn Ward
Scribner
(May 19)
Jesmyn Ward’s work has always gutted me. Her 2011 novel “Salvage the Bones,” set in Mississippi during Hurricane Katrina, immerses the reader in a world full of suffering but telegraphs something profound about human dignity and care. There is nothing romanticized about the pain her characters experience. And yet, the communities and ecosystems that come alive in Ward’s work make you want to be with her people and creatures. Images from that novel come to me unbidden when I’m alone making ramen, leaning into a cold wind or calming down my hypervigilant Doberman mutt.
Ward’s partner died suddenly in 2020, and she has said in interviews that she almost stopped writing. Lucky for us, she did not. “Let Us Descend” is a majestic novel set among enslaved people in Louisiana (2023). This upcoming book is a collection of essays, speeches and creative nonfiction. “On Witness and Respair” defines that last word as: “Respair (noun, obsolete), fresh hope after despair.” Her sentences carry real wisdom, and wisdom seems in short supply. If she can find a path to collective resilience in these dark times, I’d better suit up and buckle down.
— M. Chihara
Land
By Maggie O’Farrell
Knopf
(June 2)
Deep within this important new novel from O’Farrell, the widely praised author of “Hamnet” (to which, full disclosure, I gave a rave review in 2020), a brief love affair between two New World emigres recalls John Donne’s famous line describing his lover as “O My America, my new-found land.” It’s a reminder that although Land begins and ends with “the dog-shaped island” of Ireland — its story begins even further in the past (before that of the Neolithic girl Brith who walks the same territory) and ends far into the future. We meet Tomás and his son Liam in the late 19th century as they work for “the redcoats” to make a detailed map of their area, which shelters a copse and a deep, warm spring that seems to turn Tomás into a lunatic. That Tomás, who has already survived the Great Hunger as well as a cruel workhouse, isn’t already a lunatic is perhaps less fantastical than the plot itself at times. Throughout the book, elements from a talking fish to a possibly reincarnated dog exist alongside the bleak reality of a country so downtrodden and occupied that even its cartography isn’t in its own language. Somehow, without reducing anyone to pure stereotype (except, perhaps, for the greedy local Anglo-Irish viscount, who deserves it), O’Farrell weaves in mythology, traditional music, humble foodways and several Irish wolfhounds to demonstrate that the land belongs to no one, at least no human, and will endure despite all that humans take from it.
— B.P.
Crash Into Me
By Robinne Lee
St. Martin’s Press
(July 7)
When I’m making good decisions this spring I’m going to read a book from Verso called “The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy: Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the West,” by a scholar named A.J.A. Woods, but when I’m off the clock, I want to crawl inside a sexy novel about people I don’t know and contemplate my bad decisions. I sometimes need to be judgy and compassionate at the same time. So I’m looking out for a new book by Robinne Lee that promises to be not only sexy but “sizzling,” even, and also smart and a little bit mean. My Los Angeles is populated by working people just trying to muddle through, but I like to visit the Other Los Angeles, the one with enough ease and access that it seems both safer and nastier. I like that Lee threw some elbows to insist that her last novel, about an older woman’s affair with the lead singer of a boy band, was not generically a “romance,” thankyouverymuch. I’m interested in the way Lee takes people who might be actively blowing up their lives quite seriously. No one is above making serious mistakes for something hot but impermanent.
— M. Chihara
Triage
By Claudia Rankine
Graywolf Press
(Aug. 4)
Claudia Rankine is fearless. Her astounding bestseller, “Citizen: An American Lyric,” blended poetry, art and cultural criticism and brought her brilliant mind to the masses. In her last book, “Just Us,” she traveled around the nation asking white men in airports, dinner parties and theaters, among other shared spaces, what they thought about privilege. There’s a reason she was granted a MacArthur Fellowship — a.k.a. the “genius grant” — several years back. 2026 is already rife with racial tension; we need her. I’m eager to read what she has to say in her new book, “Triage,” which some consider to be one of her most personal works. In it, she dabbles in fiction, examines hardships in Gaza and continues to bend literary genres. “No matter our posture,” she writes “we are all among the rubble.”
— S.K.
Girlhood, Translated
By Suzanne Garfinkle-Crowell
Penguin
(Sept. 8)
Social media has been particularly unkind to teenage girls, putting rocket fuel onto the ordinary adolescent stressors of physical awkwardness, the sadness of comparison and the fireworks of inter-friendship conflicts. Medical professionals can sometimes do more harm than good by putting bleak-sounding labels on the distress — depression, anxiety, OCD, ADHD — and making it all seem chronic. This book takes aim at what the author calls the “therapy-speak” that means well but creates an unhelpful shorthand for the more complicated problems crying out for a better means of expression. The inner life of a teenage girl was an uncrackable mystery to me when I was a teenage boy. Now that I’m a parent of a young daughter, I hope to understand better what I failed to grasp back then.
— T.Z.
