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One of the most anticipated reading lists of the year is here! Barack Obama has announced his 2026 summer reading list, featuring a fantastic mix of fiction and non-fiction from acclaimed authors including Ann Patchett, Tayari Jones and Elizabeth Strout. There’s something for everyone in this brilliant selection of great reads to get stuck into!
A beautiful and warm story about family, motherhood, and friendship. This was my first time reading a Tayari Jones novel and her love and care with her characters was so evident in the two friends and de-facto sisters, Annie and Vernice. Both have lost their mothers in some way, and both are grappling with their journey through life as a Black woman in the American South. The story is bright and vibrant, harrowing and hard to put down. I loved this.
My goodness, this book is so lovely and beautifully written! Whistler is a calm, gentle read, perfect for a sunny winter's day. It's a story about tricky family relationships and confronting the past but with kindness and understanding. I loved the connection between the two main characters, Daphne and Eddie. Like everyone who had the pleasure of meeting Eddie throughout the novel, I found myself wishing I could meet him in real life too! The ending didn't disappoint either. Eddie's advice was exactly what Daphne needed and it was the perfect way to end such a beautiful story.
The Things We Never Say completely won me over! Elizabeth Strout’s writing is as beautiful as ever and Artie Dam is a character I won’t forget anytime soon. This is one of those books that makes you wonder how your own life might have changed if you’d crossed paths with someone like Artie. I especially loved the classroom scenes and his interactions with his students, as well as the quietly evolving relationship with his son Rob. It’s a thoughtful novel reminding you of the quiet impact one person can have on the lives around them. I can't wait for everyone to meet Artie Dam!
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Colson Whitehead, an exuberantly entertaining novel that brings 1980s New York to vivid, unforgettable life. 1981. New York City is beginning to emerge from financial ruin and decline, energized by rampant real estate development and a Wall Street unchained by Reagan-era predatory capitalism. Up in Harlem, successful business owner and master fence Ray Carney has just been named Sterling Furniture's Dealer of the Month. When the banks won't give his beloved wife, Elizabeth, a loan for her new travel agency, Carney gambles on one last heist and finds himself entangled with a legendary criminal mastermind. 1983. To some, Carney's friend and partner in crime, Pepper, is a stone-cold sociopath. To others, a top thief with...
Pre-order the latest book from the Booker Prize–winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo – a playful, wise, electric novel taking place at the bedside of an oil company CEO, in the twilight hours of his life, as he is ferried from this world into the next. 'He will be read long after these times have passed' Zadie Smith What a lovely home I found myself plummeting toward... Not for the first time – in fact, for the 343rd time – Jill ‘Doll’ Blaine finds herself crashing down to earth, head-first, rear-up, to accompany her latest charge into the afterlife. She soon realises, however, that this man is not quite like the others. For powerful oil tycoon K.J. Boone will not be consoled, because he has nothing to...
From the best-selling author of How to Change Your Mind, a pioneering search for consciousness in the brain and beyond. When it comes to consciousness, there is one point scientists, philosophers, and artists all agree on: it feels like something to be ourselves. And yet, the fact that each and every one of us has a subjective experience of the world continues to be one of the greatest mysteries in nature. How is it that our mental operations are accompanied by feelings, thoughts, and a sense of self? What would studying the inner life scientifically even look like? What began for Michael Pollan as a startling awareness of his own consciousness soon evolved into a deeper fascination with this strange and elusive phenomenon. In A World Appears, Pollan...
The first written name in human history was neither a god nor a king, but an accountant. From clay tablets to the algorithmic state, this groundbreaking 11,000-year global history argues that information has always been the seed of power. Long before writing existed, at the dawn of civilisation in Mesopotamia, rulers pressed marks into clay to keep track of land, people and grain. To rule, they had to keep count. It is no accident, then, that the first written name in human history was neither a god nor a king, but an accountant. As ships and navigation expanded our horizons, a new age of European empires took control of more than 80 per cent of the world's surface, using censuses, maps and ledgers to decide who belonged, who...
America’s getting old. It’s soon to celebrate its 250th birthday. But it’s getting harder and harder for its citizens to find anything to agree on. Students pull down statues of Abraham Lincoln, while others rally around Confederacy symbols. In one version of the story, the first ‘Americans’ are brave pioneers; in another, they are settler colonialists. For some, the Founding Fathers are national heroes; for others, they’re enslavers and hypocrites at best. Award-winning historian Beverly Gage takes us on an all-American road trip, stretching from New York to California, through the Rust Belt and the Deep South, in search of America’s national story. From the Battle of Alamo to the West Virginia Mine Wars, Gage dives into America’s messy contradictions and discovers a country we still can love....
BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL. One ordinary morning, in an unexceptional town, every mobile phone lights up with the same emergency alert. In this compelling, darkly funny and moving debut novel, each of Vincent Yu's utterly relatable, flawed characters is given a choice: in the face of mutually assured destruction, do we reach for grace and mercy or do we hold on to hate and fear? Seventeen minutes later the town learns via text that it was a false alarm and the question changes. Can we forgive each other for what's been said and done when the world didn't actually end? Seek Immediate Shelter challenges the readers to explore the depths of human nature in times of crisis, providing a nuanced look...
Camille Bordas is an invaluable new voice — George Saunders A young woman takes stock following a burglary. A teenager becomes obsessed with the obituaries in a weekly magazine. Grandchildren mourn the grandparents who loved them and the ones who didn't. Painters and almost-painters try to distinguish Good Art from Bad Art. People grapple with life-altering illness, unrequited love and promises they have every intention of keeping. Some win the lottery. Some don't. In this prismatic new collection, One Sun Only, Camille Bordas's complex, wry, sometimes dark and always self-aware stories open a window onto the truths and misapprehensions of our shared, flawed humanity.
The narrator of Ben Lerner's new novel has travelled to Providence, where he is to conduct what will be the final published interview with Thomas, his ninety-year-old mentor, and the father of his college friend, Max. But after the narrator drops his smartphone in the hotel sink, he arrives at Thomas's house with no recording device, a fact he is mysteriously unable to confess. What unfolds from this dreamlike circumstance is both the unforgettable story of the triangle formed by Thomas, Max, and the narrator, and a brilliant meditation on those technologies that enrich or impoverish our connection to each other, that store or obliterate the memories that make us who we are.
