Veronica Roth opens a dystopian romantasy series with a prophecy that names two enemy soldiers, both women: one is promised victory, one a love story. It never says which fate belongs to whom, or which belongs to the man standing at the center of both. The uncertainty is the engine.

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Adam Savage, longtime Mythbusters host, puts the maker mindset on the page. Forty-plus years of hands-on building become a practical creativity guide, and the real move is how it translates shop-floor thinking into lessons anyone who makes things, with their hands or their head, can actually put to use.

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How much does it cost to self-publish a book in 2026? A real line-item budget breakdown — editing, cover design, formatting, ISBNs, and marketing — with honest total tiers from $200 to $15,000 and where your money should actually go.

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Chris Whitaker sets All the Colors of the Dark in 1975 Missouri and builds it around aftermath instead of incident. The vanishing girls and the predator are the frame. What fills it is a love story carrying real moral weight, the kind where saving someone and losing them turn out to be the same act.

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Annie Jacobsen reconstructs what happens after a single nuclear launch, minute by minute, from the first detection to the full cascade. The reporting is meticulous and the effect is genuinely terrifying: she shows exactly how little time, and how few people, stand between civilization and its end.

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Two friends win tickets to Solstice, a midsummer festival pitched deep in the Welsh hills, and find the heat, the crowd, and the too-smooth organisers all feel subtly off. Louise Mumford's folk-horror-tinged thriller turns a getaway sour by degrees, until the real problem isn't getting in. It's getting back out.

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Beth Revis kicks off her novella trilogy with a fast, flirty space heist: Ada Lamarr, a salvage thief with a hole in her ship, talks her way onto a government vessel and into a staring contest with the man running it. Funny, claustrophobic, and built on the pleasure of two people lying at each other.

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How to outline a novel in 2026: a calm, non-dogmatic guide to plotter vs. pantser and the novel outline methods that actually work — the story spine, the 7-point structure, Save the Cat beats, the Snowflake method, index cards, and reverse outlining.

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Snowden Wright's The Queen City Detective Agency drops a jaded ex-cop turned private investigator into 1985 Meridian, Mississippi, where a real-estate developer's murder and a Dixie Mafia affiliate's suspicious jailhouse death pull her into a web of old-guard corruption — a Southern noir that earns its atmosphere…

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Among the Hunted by Caytlyn Brooke is a Greek mythology fantasy that follows Kaitaini, a nymph warrior carrying a century of guilt, as she sets out to do the unthinkable — kill an immortal god. It's a revenge story with real emotional stakes, built inside a dual-realm world that moves between the ethereal and the…

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Lev Grossman picks up the Arthur legend at its lowest moment — the king dead, Camelot in ashes — and hands the salvage operation to the misfits. The Bright Sword is a melancholy, talky, often funny epic about second-string knights trying to rebuild a world that's already lost its meaning.

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Our editors’ summer reading list 2026: the best new books of summer 2026, from literary fiction and thrillers to romance, romantasy, and one gripping work of nonfiction — every pick a real June–August release worth preordering.

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The Moonflowers is a literary mystery set in Appalachian Kentucky, where a young artist commissioned to paint her grandfather's portrait begins excavating decades of family secrets through conversations with the elderly woman still institutionalized for his murder — a novel about women protecting each other across…

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Jack Carr's debut thriller The Terminal List introduces Navy SEAL James Reece, who returns home to discover that the ambush that killed his entire team traces back through layers of American institutional power — a revenge narrative driven by genuine military authenticity, relentless forward momentum, and a…

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Phil Elwood's memoir All the Worst Humans is a self-implicating insider account of Washington's PR industry, written by a former operative who ran influence campaigns for clients including Gaddafi, Assad, and the government of Qatar — and who eventually had to reckon, in a very concrete way, with what that actually…

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Rebecca Yarros's Fourth Wing drops readers into a war college where a dragon is just as likely to kill you as bond with you — a high-stakes fantasy with a heroine whose physical fragility shapes every tactical choice she makes, and enough romantic tension to make the lore feel urgent rather than academic.

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Anna Akbari's There Is No Ethan is a hybrid true-crime memoir about three educated women who independently fell for the same fabricated online persona in 2011, then found each other and exposed the deception — a story that doubles as a serious inquiry into how digital intimacy makes smart people vulnerable.

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How to market your book in 2026: a calm, practical guide for first-time authors — building an author platform and email list, BookTok and Bookstagram, reviews, metadata, and a launch that keeps selling.

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How to edit your novel in 2026: a step-by-step self-editing guide — resting the draft, the developmental edit, line editing, copyediting and proofreading, and when to hire a pro.

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Reggie Fils-Aimé, the Nintendo of America boss who became a fan favorite, turns his career into a leadership memoir in Disrupting the Game. It traces a path from the Bronx to the E3 2004 stage where he introduced himself to gamers, packaging hard-won management lessons inside a genuinely improbable rise. Best for…

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In her first novel, Half His Age, Jennette McCurdy follows Waldo, a ravenous seventeen-year-old who fixes her want on a married creative writing teacher. It's a coming-of-age character study with teeth: funny, mortifying, and angry, for readers who want their literary fiction raw rather than tidy.

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Debra Deetz's Snowbound Whispers drops a journalist and her golden retriever into a snowbound inn with a locked-room corpse and a houseful of liars. It's a classic cozy puzzle done with fond, fireside warmth — a dog with a good nose, a storm that won't quit, and a cast of suspects who all have something to hide.

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Angeline Boulley's debut Firekeeper's Daughter is a YA crime thriller anchored in an Ojibwe community on Sugar Island, following eighteen-year-old Daunis Fontaine as she's pulled into an FBI investigation of a deadly new drug. What hooked me: she cracks the case using chemistry and traditional Ojibwe medicine, which…

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N.K. Jemisin's The City We Became builds an urban fantasy on a wild premise: when a city grows big and complex enough, it gets born as a living thing with human avatars to defend it. New York gets six of them, one per borough, and something ancient and hostile is bent on stopping that birth.

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R.F. Kuang's Yellowface is a sharp, queasy thriller about a white novelist who steals a dead friend's manuscript and rides it to literary stardom. Narrated by a woman who can rationalize plagiarism, fraud, and grave-robbing of another writer's grief without ever once seeing herself as the villain, it's a satire of…

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Shannon Chakraborty's The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi puts a retired pirate captain back on a ship for a job she can't quite refuse, and it's a rare fantasy adventure that takes a middle-aged heroine seriously. Set in the medieval Indian Ocean and steeped in real maritime history, it's pulpy, funny, and unexpectedly…

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How to get a literary agent for your novel in 2026 — what agents do, how to research and target them, and how to write a query letter, synopsis, and sample pages that get requests.

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A step-by-step guide to self-publishing your first book in 2026 — from editing, covers, and formatting to ISBNs, metadata, choosing a platform, pricing, and your launch.

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Tracy Deonn's Legendborn takes the King Arthur legend and roots it in the American South, following a grieving Black teenager who stumbles into a secret society of knights' descendants. It's a contemporary YA fantasy where the hunt for the truth about a dead mother and the discovery of a buried power turn out to be…

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John Carreyrou's Bad Blood reconstructs the rise and collapse of Theranos, the blood-testing startup that promised a medical revolution and delivered fraud. It's investigative journalism written with the propulsion of a thriller, and a clear-eyed study of how charisma, money, and fear can keep a lie standing far…

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Robert Macfarlane's Underland goes down instead of up: into sea caves, glaciers, and a vault built to hold nuclear waste for a hundred thousand years. It's nature writing of unusual ambition, fusing geology, myth, and reportage to ask what humans bury, hoard, and leave behind in the rock.

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Brandon Taylor's Real Life unfolds over a single late-summer weekend in a Midwestern university town, following Wallace, a Black, queer biochem student from Alabama who has built his life around keeping people at a careful distance. It's a quiet, interior coming-of-age novel about race, desire, and the exhausting work…

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David Grann's The Wager takes a single 18th-century shipwreck and turns it into a study of how survival corrodes order and how empires manufacture their own truth. It braids a sea voyage, an island ordeal, and a court martial into one argument about whose version of events gets to become history.

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Charmaine Wilkerson's debut Black Cake opens with a death, a recipe, and a voice recording, then spirals out into a multigenerational family saga that moves from a Caribbean island to California. It's a tender, slow-burning story about inheritance — of secrets, names, and grief — for readers who love character-driven…

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Annabel Monaghan takes the Pretty Woman blueprint and quietly reroutes it into something warmer in Dolly All the Time, a fake-dating contemporary romance about a single mom who has spent her whole life being the responsible one and the awkward scion who finally makes her want to lean on someone. The pleasure here is…

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Margaret Belle's The Granddaughters: Always returns to the Orange Lake Mystery series with a premise that earns its hook: three older women take in a terrified eight-year-old who can identify a killer but cannot speak a word. The case centers on the child, not the dead mother, and the warmth here comes with a real…

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A practical, craft-first guide for first-time novelists — from premise and structure to character, drafting, revision, and your first steps into publishing.

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Margaret Belle's The Granddaughters drops three older women into a cold case at a lakeside house their grandmother once owned. Part cozy reunion, part amateur-sleuth mystery, it bets that nobody watches the woman everybody underestimates — and lets her use it.

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Liz Tomforde's Mile High opens the Windy City series with a hockey romance built on a satisfying power flip: a flight attendant who works for the team, and the arrogant star who keeps hitting the call button just to get a rise out of her. It's enemies-to-lovers with a real heart under the banter.

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Theo Baker's How to Rule the World follows a tech-obsessed teenager who arrived at Stanford expecting paradise and ended up, as a freshman reporter, breaking the story that toppled the university president. It's a sharp, funny, sometimes anxious account of how elite institutions sort and groom their next generation of…

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