Hard to believe it, but it’s that time of year already. For a decade now, I’ve been making a first-half superlatives list. It remains to be seen how many of these will make it onto my overall best-of year rundown, but for now, these are my 15 favourite current-year releases that I’ve read so far (representing the top 23% of the 2026 releases I’ve read this year; or the top 10% of my overall reading so far). It’s been a brilliant year for fiction! Links are to my full reviews where available.

Fiction

Daffodil Days by Helen Bain: Bain’s remarkable debut novel builds a slantwise biographical portrait of Sylvia Plath through her interactions with friends and acquaintances in the last years of her life. It’s everyone from her midwife to her brother to a washing machine salesman. The vignettes proceed backward through the book’s 17-month span: a determined metaphorical move from resignation to optimism. The focus is therefore not on the end of Plath’s life but on the full flow of her genius.

The Half Life by Rachel Beanland: In Beanland’s enchanting third novel, a young Navy wife has a sexual awakening and discovers her scientific vocation while stationed on an Italian island. The title cleverly suggests both nuclear fallout and how secrets constrain people. Beanland adeptly depicts grief, homesickness, and culture shock, and illuminates American and Italian politics. Sensual and intriguing, this belated-coming-of-age story reminiscent of Beautiful Ruins and The Atomic Weight of Love is an absorbing summer read. [Forthcoming from Simon & Schuster on July 14.]

Brawler by Lauren Groff: The nine short stories in Groff’s exceptional eighth book profile women in states of desperation and probe legacies of loss and violence. Themes of midlife reinvention and latent queerness recur. There’s also a startling Jamesian fable; a 1950s Southern gothic black comedy that would do Flannery O’Connor proud; and the masterful novella-length examination of privilege and obsession. The prose is stellar and the endings breathtaking. Groff is a first-rate novelist, but her short stories are truly peerless.

Mare by Emily Haworth-Booth: This work of autofiction circles the question of becoming a mother and posits the writing life and other relationships as partial substitutes for parenthood. The narrator spends three days a week riding at a local stable and tending to a black and white mare. Haworth-Booth makes caring for an animal analogous with motherhood, but doesn’t stop at easy symbolism. Cultivating bodily bonds with other creatures is part of how we find purpose when life is threatened by chronic illness and climate breakdown.

Whistler by Ann Patchett: Patchett is a master on the subject of family dysfunction, and her 10th novel, a stepdaughter-stepfather love story, is as wise as ever on secrets, traumatic memories, and storytelling. The bittersweet tone is perfectly judged. Daphne’s banter with her loved ones is a delight. The plot whisks along, its satisfying full circle returning to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she saw Eddie Triplett for the first time in 40 years, and incorporates a clever metanarrative twist. Quiet but surprising, witty yet heartrending.

Nonesuch by Francis Spufford: A grown-up fantasy book for those of us who were Narnia-obsessed children. It’s a rollicking blend of realistic WWII-set fiction and alternative history, with some magical and time travel elements. I was impressed that Spufford voices a young woman as protagonist and takes her ambitions and sexual desire seriously. There are witty turns of phrase throughout yet never an inappropriate levity. This parallel world is cleverly imagined and carefully reasoned, and the whole is shot through with a clear love of London.

John of John by Douglas Stuart: In Stuart’s superb third novel, set on the Isle of Harris in the 1990s, Cal seeks to reconcile his sexuality and artistic goals with his family’s expectations and his devout upbringing. An absorbing, deliciously melodramatic story is built around the contrast between modernity and the old ways. The characters’ power plays and acts of desperation are heartrending, but mischief and love of colour and crafts lend lightness. Stuart’s every observation is profound; the simplest phrase is memorable for its beauty.

Nonfiction

The Irish Goodbye: Micro-Memoirs by Beth Ann Fennelly: Fennelly takes the same approach as in flash fiction: some of these 45 pieces are as short as one sentence, remarking on life’s irony, poignancy or brevity. Again and again, she loops back to her sister’s untimely death; other topics are her mother’s worsening dementia, her happy marriage, her continuing 28-year friendships with her college roommates, the pandemic, and her ageing body. One of the most in-depth pieces revisits a lonely stint teaching in Czechoslovakia in the early 1990s.

Leaving Home by Mark Haddon: Eighty-seven nonchronological vignettes range across Haddon’s life and his parents’. Most are awful: his cold, invalid mother; his father’s adultery; cruel treatment at boarding school; medical crises. Impressive that he’s a functional person given the lack of love and empathy in his early life, and that he’s so honest about mental health. Haddon is also an artist and there’s a wealth of comics, portraits and family photographs here (plus cynical captions on stock photos to puncture any potential nostalgia).

Ghost Stories by Siri Hustvedt: Paul Auster died of non-small cell lung cancer on April 30, 2024. “I’m living in a haunted house,” his widow writes. This isn’t a straightforward bereavement memoir but moves back and forth between past and present and incorporates various documents, such as e-mail updates she sent to friends and family during Paul’s illness. It’s particularly interesting to learn about their mutual influence on each other’s work. Recommended to fans of either or both authors, as well as those interested in grief stories.

Vessel: The Shape of Absent Bodies by Dani Netherclift: One scorching afternoon in 1993, the author’s father and brother drowned while swimming in an irrigation channel near their Australia home. A joint closed-casket funeral took place six days later. Eighteen at the time, Netherclift witnessed her relatives’ disappearance but didn’t see their bodies. Must one see the corpse to have closure? she wonders. “The presence of absence” is an overarching paradox. The contradictions and ironies of the situation defy resolution.

Emmie Arbel: The Colour of Memory by Barbara Yelin: An illustrated biography of a child Holocaust survivor based on interviews. Survival is not a one-time event because trauma is complex and ongoing. In Emmie’s case, her foster father (himself a Holocaust survivor) molested her for years. The colour palette is appropriately sombre. And yet there is vibrant colour in the depiction of Emmie’s home and garden in Israel. This is a work of real courage, of speaking out in spite of a suspicion that all is bleak and meaningless.

Poetry

Visitations by Julia Alvarez: Like a miniature autobiography in verse, Alvarez’s radiant fifth collection offers snapshots from her life: a childhood in the Dominican Republic, immigration to 1960s New York City, the vicissitudes of adulthood, and the bittersweetness of later-life love. In a prose afterword, she calls the poems “visitations from selves of the past and present.” With its vivid scenes and alliterative phrasing, this gorgeous collection presents food and family, memory and companionship, as talismans to hold against the darkness.

Scrap Book by Nick Martino: Martino’s debut poetry collection draws on his mother’s journals and 1980s Polaroids to capture a family dynamic overshadowed by divorce and his father’s incarceration. The imagery spotlights Midwest farm country. Love and meaning are salvaged from family wreckage in the same way one might “look/ for fugitive beauty in the bulldozed” orchard. Free verse alternates with forms: an unrhymed sonnet, an aubade, and a “duplex.” Alliteration and assonance sparkle, and two poems employ anaphoric rhetoric.

The Way the Water Held Me by Catherine Redford: Redford was 35 with a young child when her wife died of cancer. We don’t hear so much about being widowed early, or in a same-sex partnership. Redford interrogates the expectations of widowhood through biographical poems about Mary Shelley. I loved the archival vocabulary of “Obituary” and how belongings left behind take on outsize significance. The alliteration and nature imagery are just right. From the hardest of circumstances came something tender and lovely.

Have you read any of these, or might you now based on my recommendation? What other 2026 releases should I catch up on?