2026 reading list: All the books everyone will be talking about this year

If Salman Rushdie returned to fiction in The Eleventh Hour: A Quintet of Stories, Arundhati Roy published her first memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me, a raw and intimate account of her complex, lifelong relationship with her formidable mother, Mary Roy. Jeet Thayil, Amitava Kumar, Amitav Ghosh, Amitabha Bagchi, Anuradha Roy, Rahul Bhattacharya had all their books out. There were too many biographies, books on history, constitution and economy to count. As you and I ring in the new year, let me take you through the most anticipated books of 2026 and what they are all about:

Non-fiction

A book that I’m keen to read this year is Mark Tully’s memoir, A Very Lucky Man: The Memoirs of a Radio-wala, which recounts his life from Calcutta to international journalism with the BBC. Interwoven with political history — from the 1960s to the 1990s — the book narrates events such as the 1971 war, Emergency, and shifting governments through personal encounter and long-range observation.

Equally interesting to read will be Rana Dasgupta’s After Nations: The Making and Unmaking of a World Order The author of Capital: A Portrait of Twenty-First Century Delhi examines how the traditional nation-state — the primary unit of governance, citizenship, law, and collective belonging for centuries — is weakening under the pressures of corporate power, global capital flows, new forms of citizenship, legal pluralism, and economic transformation. Dasgupta positions this not as a symptom of disorder but as a structural shift in how authority and belonging are organised. The book promises layered analysis of macro trends — law, economy, corporate influence, mobility — without abandoning the human dimension of history in motion.

Renowned musician and cultural commentator T.M. Krishna examines national identity in We, the People of India: Decoding A Nation’s Symbols. Moving beyond slogans and constitutional text, the book maps how Indian identity is experienced, challenged, contested, and remade across linguistic, regional, caste, and class lines. Krishna’s earlier work blurred art and politics; in his latest, he situates culture — music, language, social practice — as the terrain where Indianness is lived, not merely imagined. The book asks what it means to belong to India when identities are multiple, uneven, and sometimes in conflict. Diplomat Navtej Sarna’s A Flag to Live and Die For traces the Indian tricolour from its earliest precursors (“dhvajas”) through its adoption in 1947 and subsequent evolution as a national symbol. Sarna examines the legal, political, and emotional dimensions of the flag, situating it within the freedom struggle and ongoing civic life.

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In Nathuram Godse: The True Story of Gandhi’s Assassin, Dhaval Kulkarni situates Godse within the ideological currents of early 20th-century India. Rather than mythologising the act of assassination, the book examines the psychological, political, and social forces that shaped Godse’s outlook. It traces his indoctrination, influences, and his alleged involvement in prior conspiracies against Gandhi. Brahma Prakash’s The He-art of Hindutva (tentative title) decodes how Hindutva moved from political fringe to mainstream cultural force through symbols, aesthetics, memes, music, and everyday imagery rather than ideology alone. The book interrogates how feeling and belonging are produced and how cultural language shapes political power in contemporary India.

Parakala Prabhakar, economist, political commentator and husband of Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, took on the Narendra Modi government in his candid book, The Crooked Timber of New India: Essays on a Republic in Crisis (2023). He’s back with another book, Twin Malaise, that analyses the intersections between majoritarian politics and inequality in India. Prabhakar situates economic stratification within political trends that reinforce exclusion and social division, arguing that inequality and majoritarianism are mutually reinforcing phenomena.

Journalist and co-founder of FactorDaily, Pankaj Mishra critiques dominant startup culture in Bootstrapped Nation. The author Against the Grain and All In: Memoirs of the Freshworks Founder turns to the reality of Indian entrepreneurship beyond rhetoric: the founders in small towns who build enduring, profitable businesses without venture capital, valuations, or hype cycles. Mishra contrasts these “quiet builders” with the globalised startup narrative: fast money, rapid scaling, exit-driven incentives.

In her biography of Begum Samru, a courtesan who became a ruler and military leader in late eighteenth-century north India, Ira Mukhoty, known for Heroines and Daughters of the Sun, reconstructs the queen’s political life with close attention to diplomacy, patronage, and survival in a violent colonial landscape. Begum Hazrat Mahal by Rosie Llewellyn-Jones will piece together the portrait of yet another formidable woman of history. Hazrat Mahal ruled Awadh during the critical phase of the 1857 Revolt against the British East India Company. A consort of Nawab Wajid Ali Shah, she assumed leadership during a period of military and political crisis. Llewellyn-Jones’ account seeks to reposition Begum Hazrat Mahal as a strategist and political actor, rather than a romanticised symbol of rebellion.

French professor of Middle East and the author of Gaza: A History (2014), Jean-Pierre Filiu brings his deep knowledge of the Gaza region to a personal narrative in A Historian in Gaza, born of a month spent in Gaza amid intense conflict. A historian familiar with the land, the language, and the longue durée of regional politics, Filiu confronts warfare not as abstraction but as lived reality for civilians, families, and communities. In China’s Wars: The Politics and Diplomacy Behind Its Military Coercion, former Indian foreign secretary Vijay Gokhale examines China’s use of military coercion across decades, analysing diplomatic strategy, political narrative, and decision-making. The book situates China’s grey-zone tactics within historical patterns, offering analysis for policymakers, scholars, and strategic readers.

Chennai-based chef Krish Ashok follows Masala Lab: The Science of Indian Cooking (2020), with Masala Lab prequel, a deep dive into the origins of ingredients that structure Indian cooking. Where his earlier book focused on technique and science, this volume traces trade routes, climate, cultivation, and cultural adaptation, showing how everyday flavours carry centuries of exchange and improvisation. Anahita Dhondy’s The Grain Kitchen explores the history, culture, and culinary future of staples like rice, wheat, and millets that anchor Indian kitchens. Combining research with personal memory and recipes, the book places grains at the centre of sustainability, identity, and taste.

Novelist Diksha Basu turns her observational acuity to parenthood in Return of the Mother, a memoir that explores the experience of raising two half-Indian children from infancy toward school age. Known for fiction that combines social satire with emotional insight (The Windfall), Basu approaches motherhood with humour and exactitude. She writes candidly about postpartum depression, anxiety, and the small crises of daily life: sibling conflict, mountains of children’s artwork, the emotional labour of caregiving. Veteran film journalist Khalid Mohamed turns his acute eye to his own life and the world of Hindi cinema in Not Quite Family. The memoir features portraits of icons such as Smita Patil, Shah Rukh Khan, and Rekha, revealing the glamour, contradiction, and social currents underlying Bollywood’s global presence.

Stephen Alter’s The Fragrance of Rain is an extended meditation on the Indian monsoon: its geographical sweep, ecological impact, cultural resonance, and intimate influence on memory. The book is a love letter to the season that shapes landscapes, lives, and literary imagination across the subcontinent. Ruskin Bond’s elegy The Ghost of Indian Small Towns reflects on the decline of small towns as residents migrate to cities. The book traces what is being lost—landscape, social rhythms, local memory—while maintaining an attentive record of lived place.

In The Sage Who Reimagined Hinduism, Shashi Tharoor profiles Sree Narayana Guru, a social and spiritual reformer who reshaped thinking about caste, belonging, and religion in south India. The book situates Guru’s teachings within broader social movements, mapping intellectual and spiritual lineage. Harbans Singh's A Statesman and a Seeker: The Life and Legacy of Dr Karan Singh charts the public life of Dr Karan Singh, from regent of Jammu & Kashmir to decades in Indian politics and diplomacy.

In his memoir, Triumph of the Indian Republic: My Life, My Struggles, Ram Nath Kovind, India’s 14th President traces his journey from Paraunkh village to Rashtrapati Bhavan, offering a measured, insider view of constitutional power, governance, and crisis management. The book reflects on key moments of his presidency, including Covid-19 and Centre–state tensions, with emphasis on duty, restraint, and institutional responsibility. Told through candid conversations, The Dream Girl’s Dream Run: A Memoir by Hema Malini, with Anirudh Chawla, looks back at Hema Malini’s life across Hindi cinema, classical dance, politics, and family. Moving beyond glamour, it captures the personal rhythms of fame, discipline, faith, and longevity in public life.

Also read: Notable books of 2025 you can look forward to reading, and adding to your TBR list

Disha Mullick’s The Good Reporter: A Collective Biography tells the story of Khabar Lahariya, one of India’s first feminist rural media platforms. The book rejects inspirational tropes, instead detailing the organisation’s formation, challenges, and strategies for reporting on casteism, patriarchy, and rural life with honesty and depth. Abdul Wahid Shaikh narrates his wrongful arrest, years as an undertrial prisoner in the 7/11 Mumbai blasts case, and eventual exoneration in Wahid Shaikh vs. The State. With journalist Amrit B.L.S., he challenges narratives of guilt and exposes systemic failures in policing, media framing, and justice.

The Book of Indian Art is a collectors’ edition that surveys a century of Indian art, highlighting works that defined movements and challenged established forms. Co-authored by gallery director Roshini Vadehra and art historian Devika Singh, the book combines visual scholarship with historical context, serving as a reference and treasury for contemporary Indian art. In Better Every Day, Arnold Schwarzenegger distills lessons from bodybuilding, public life, and personal discipline into 12 principles of continual improvement. Unlike typical motivational books, it underlines incremental momentum and community as foundations for meaningful change.

Anand Neelakantan’s Vyasa’s Women revisits the Mahabharata through female figures long relegated to the margins, extending his revisionist project. Bulbul Sharma’s Epic Love: Stories retells classical romances with lyrical restraint, moving over polemical urgency. Haruki Murakami’s Abandoning a Cat expands a 2019 New Yorker essay into a full family memoir, using his father’s wartime experiences to examine inheritance, silence, and memory. Faisal Patel’s Ahmed Patel and the UPA is a biography of his father that examines backstage power. Saeed Naqvi’s new memoir offers a panoramic look at the life of the seasoned journalist. Sanjoy Hazarika’s Boy from Zarkawt traces the making of Mizoram.

Fiction and poetry

My top pick in fiction would be Mohammed Hanif’s Rebel English Academy, which is set to bring back the biting political comedy and sardonic humour of A Case of Exploding Mangoes and Red Birds. Set around a language school in a town erupting after a political execution, the novel threads together intelligence officers, dissidents, and fugitives, using humour to expose the absurdities and violences of authority.

Daniyal Mueenuddin, the Pakistani-American writer, marks his return to short fiction after In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, a collection of eight interconnected short stories. Chekhovian in their grasp of detail and subtle character understanding, the stories in his debut anthology portrayed the struggles for survival, status and love of feudal Pakistani society, primarily revolving around the household and family of the aging wealthy landowner K.K. Harouni. His latest, Where the Serpent Lives, like that earlier collection, anatomises a Pakistan in flux: feudal elites clinging to illusion, ruthless modernisers pressing forward, and ordinary lives fractured by power.

Karan Mahajan’s Complex: A Novel follows The Association of Small Bombs in examining how structural violence infiltrates private life. This time, Mahajan turns his attention to ambition, urban anxiety, and moral compromise, continuing his interest in the aftermath rather than event. Geetanjali Shree’s Once Elephants Lived Here, translated by Daisy Rockwell from Yahan Haathi Rehte The, arrives after the global success of Tomb of Sand, which won the International Booker Prize. These stories reveal the same elastic imagination and political intuition, moving fluidly between realism and the surreal to explore memory, displacement, and ecological loss.

Deepa Anappara’s The Last of the Earth marks a bold leap from contemporary urban realism (Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line) to historical fiction. Set in 1869 amid British espionage in Tibet, the novel explores ambition, friendship, and spiritual longing against an imperial backdrop. Meena Kandasamy’s Fieldwork as a Sex Object continues her fierce interrogation of power, sexuality, and race. Centred on an Indian woman in London subjected to online violence, the novel examines shame, visibility, and the politics of the gaze.

Mirza Waheed’s Maryam and Son focuses on a British mother whose son is presumed to have joined ISIS. Like The Collaborator and Tell Her Everything, it explores the collateral damage of ideological war. M.G. Vassanji’s The Apparition turns to the waning days of the Delhi Sultanate, using historical fable to explore faith, authority, and chaos. Jane Borges’ new novel Mog Asundi revisits Goan Catholic life in 1970s Bombay, while Jerry Pinto’s Yuri in the City places its beloved protagonist (from his 2022 novel The Education of Yuri) amid the communal violence following the Babri demolition. The year also brings the completion of Kalki Krishnamurthy’s Ponniyin Selvan (Books 7-10) in Nandini Krishnan’s unabridged translation, finally bringing the epic fully into contemporary English.

In translations, S. Hareesh’s August 17, translated from Malayalam by Jayasree Kalathil, anchors its narrative around a single date, using it to examine masculinity, ideology, and everyday brutality. After Moustache, Hareesh once again demonstrates his ability to fuse politics with visceral storytelling. Imayam’s Heartwreck, translated by GJV Prasad, brings Tamil literature’s unsparing realism to a wider audience. Known for chronicling the brutal textures of contemporary Tamizh society, Imayam builds a dark comedy of manners centred on infidelity, denial, and humiliation.

Sarnath Banerjee’s Absolute Jafar is his most ambitious graphic work to date. Moving beyond the urban irony of Corridor, Banerjee uses the story of Bhrigu and his son Jafar to grapple with exile, inheritance, and fractured histories, creating a graphic novel of ideas. In poetry, Shruti Haasan’s Songs Without Music, a collection of more than 40 poems — “on love, relationships, art, identity, mental health, and the loneliness, doubt, and violence one must negotiate in order to be true to oneself” — with illustrations by Santanu Hazarika, will be an interesting read.

In international fiction, I’d look forward to reading George Saunders’ Vigil, a continuation of the ethical project that has defined his career from Tenth of December to Lincoln in the Bardo. Saunders has always been less interested in action than in moral hesitation, the moments when people know what is right and still choose otherwise. Vigil is set in the final hours of K.J. Boone, a powerful oil company CEO who faces death without regret. Told through the voice of an afterlife guide on her 343rd assignment, the book blends the earthly and the otherworldly with restraint and bite.

Nobel laureate Han Kang’s Light and Thread extends the spare, meditative trajectory she began after The Vegetarian and deepened through Human Acts and The White Book. Kang’s recent work has moved away from plot-driven narrative toward philosophical inquiry, using the body and its fragility as a site of memory and resistance. This novel continues that inward turn, treating connection itself as something tenuous, almost breakable.

Also read: The Federal’s 15 notable books (fiction) of the year 2022

Yann Martel’s Son of Nobody represents a shift for a writer best known for the allegorical sweep of Life of Pi. Centred on a classical scholar obsessed with marginal texts, the novel interrogates who history remembers and who it discards. It is a book about belief, but also about scholarship as devotion, and erasure as a cultural act. Elizabeth Strout’s The Things We Never Say returns to the emotional terrain she has mapped across Olive Kitteridge, My Name Is Lucy Barton, and Oh William!. Strout’s brilliance lies in showing how withholding — rather than cruelty — damages relationships.

Maggie O’Farrell’s Land follows the global success of Hamnet, which has been made into a movie by the same name that releases this year, and The Marriage Portrait, continuing her excavation of women shaped by history rather than centred by it. O’Farrell’s fiction is deeply atmospheric, attentive to place and inheritance, and Land explores how geography, property, and memory shape women’s lives across generations. From Ireland, Tana French’s The Keeper reinforces her reputation as the most psychologically acute writer working in crime fiction today. Since the Dublin Murder Squad novels and later standalones like The Searcher, French has been interested in understanding moral corrosion rather than solving crimes.

Departure(s), the new book by Julian Barnes, the author of the Booker Prize-winning novel The Sense of an Ending (2011), is a poignant, autofictional reflection on memory, love, aging, and mortality, centered on a writer narrator (also Julian) recounting the turbulent, decades-spanning relationship of his college friends, Stephen and Jean, while grappling with his own end-of-life reflections and blood cancer.

Colson Whitehead’s Cool Machine brings his Harlem Trilogy to a close. Following Harlem Shuffle and Crook Manifesto, this final instalment recreates 1980s New York with exuberance, blending crime, social history, and politics of race. Whitehead’s gift has always been his ability to write genre fiction that doubles as structural critique, and Cool Machine completes that arc. Japanese writer Michiko Aoyama’s Hot Chocolate on Thursday is a set of 12 interlinked stories set in and around the Marble Café that continue the gentle humanism that made What You Are Looking For Is in the Library (2020) resonate globally. It is fiction concerned with ritual, loneliness, and small acts of recognition.