16 Must-Read Books for Summer 2026

Caro Claire Burke’s debut novel couldn’t have had a better reception. The buzzy satire is a number-one bestseller and already has a big-screen adaptation in the works, with Anne Hathaway set to star and produce. Yesteryear is about Natalie, a tradwife influencer with eight million followers, who wakes up one day in 1855 and is forced to face the reality of the fantasy she’s been selling.

Come for the Girls gossip, stay for the vulnerable, clear-eyed reckoning with the cost of fame. Lena Dunham’s second memoir, published seven years after Girls ended and she became one of the most controversial voices of her generation, covers the years following her instant rise to fame at 23. She goes deep on her chronic illness and her relationships—including with figures like Jack Antonoff, Adam Driver, and Jenni Konner—with the ruthless self-deprecation and wry wit that made her a lightning rod in the first place.

Anna Dorn’s follow-up to Perfume and Pain has all the trappings of a great 2026 novel: a niche pop star named Blue Velour, a songwriting retreat in the redwoods, and an obsessive Reddit subreddit dedicated to tracking said pop star’s every move. American Spirits explores the dark side of hard-worn fame through the dangers of parasocial relationships and the violence that can erupt when the distance between fan and star collapses and expectations clash with reality.

Frieze editor-in-chief Andrew Durbin wrote the first full dual biography of photographer Peter Hujar and sculptor Paul Thek. The pair—whose downtown New York art world included Susan Sontag, Andy Warhol, Fran Lebowitz, and David Wojnarowicz—were lovers, rivals, and frequent collaborators, and died within a year of each other in the late 1980s from AIDS-related complications. The book arrives at a moment of great renewed interest in Hujar in particular, including the release of Ira Sachs’s 2025 film, Peter Hujar’s Day, and the publication of a book of previously unseen contact sheets of his work, accompanied by an exhibition at The Morgan Library.

The co-creator of Hulu’s Pen15—the cult classic series in which she and Maya Erskine played middle-school versions of themselves as thirty-something adults—brings that same humor and uncanny ability to channel her childhood voice to her debut memoir. The coming-of-age story centers the reappearance of Konkle’s estranged father and the way we can never truly escape our past, no matter how much we might try. This one arrives just in time for Mother’s and Father’s Day.

Brooklyn-based psychotherapist and cultural theorist MJ Corey built her viral Kardashian Kolloquium platform by applying media theory and postmodern frameworks to the family that has shaped our image-saturated social media era. This book is the long-form version of that project, using the Kardashians as the organizing principle for how Western media has evolved over the past 50 years. From the old Hollywood studio system to TikTok, media has become increasingly disjointed and self-referential, and Corey charts the rise of the Kardashian reality TV empire to explore exactly how and why that’s happened.

The Booker Prize-winning author of Shuggie Bain returns with his third novel, following a broke art school graduate who returns to his family’s land on the Isle of Harris, caught between his sheep-farmer father and his own secrets. The Scottish writer once again weaves a tale about the unspoken threads that threaten to unravel between generations and the costs of keeping one’s true identity, queer or otherwise, hidden.

The first woman and first Black writer to win the National Book Award for Fiction twice—for Salvage the Bones and Sing, Unburied, Sing—Jesmyn Ward publishes her first essay collection with On Witness and Respair. The pieces move through grief (especially in light of Ward’s partner dying on the eve of the pandemic), motherhood, and her creative relationship with literary heroes like Toni Morrison, Octavia E. Butler, and Richard Wright.

For her follow-up to 2024’s Didion & Babitz, which charted the long-term relationship between the two writers and their influence on American culture, Lili Anolik returns to her project of restoring Babitz to her rightful place in the literary canon. This time, it’s with the full archive of Babitz’s correspondence, including her diaristic letters to Annie Leibovitz, Joan Didion, and Steve Martin—some of which were sent, most of which weren’t. Along the way, Anolik adds context with illuminating commentary.

The author of Hamnet—winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction and The National Book Critics Circle Award, and recently Oscar-nominated for her screenplay adaptation alongside director Chloé Zhao—returns with a sweeping historical novel set in post-famine Ireland. Land follows a father and son as they map the ruined country for the British Ordnance Survey in 1865, until a disturbing encounter changes everything.

Allie Rowbottom follows up her 2022 debut novel Aesthetica, which took on plastic surgery and female self-erasure with unflinching clarity, with a novel set in the adult filmmaking industry of 1980s Los Angeles. Two teenagers and best friends navigate the alluring glamour and dangerous perils of life on the margins: dancing at a Sunset Strip club, dating older men, going on drug binges, and participating in stickups. Ultimately, Lovers XXX is a love story between the two women, who find themselves and each other on their quest for self-actualization beyond survival.

Author, editor, and journalist Mary H.K. Choi is back with a new novel that delves into complicated mother-daughter relationships that are still filled with love. Stevie, a recent college dropout, can’t afford to make her Hollywood dreams come true, so she moves in with her mother, Moon. “Moon is many things: an out-of-work actress, a recovering addict, whatever a mistress becomes when she’s widowed,” Choi writes. Still reeling from her lover (and TV husband’s) death, Moon wrestles with her grief. Meanwhile, she’s living in a glass-wall pool house in the backyard with Stevie, while their home is rented out to pay the bills. But when Adam, Moon’s former TV son and Stevie’s forever crush, arrives for the funeral, the three “are pulled into a messy orbit.” Although this book comes out in June, it has already found fans in Roxane Gay (who picked it for her Audacious Book Club reading list) and Michelle Zauner, aka Japanese Breakfast, who described the narrative as “Grey Gardens set against the tarnished glitz of the Hollywood C-list.”

The bestselling duo behind Literacy and Longing in L.A. and Freud’s Mistress, Karen Mack and Jennifer Kaufman, return with a propulsive thriller about a woman summoned back to her family’s crumbling casino empire after her father’s sudden death. She soon finds she’s faced with a Succession-style chess match for her inheritance with not only her brothers, but the FBI, the Las Vegas mob, and a rival casino owner.

The two-time Pulitzer Prize winner—for The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys—closes out his Harlem Trilogy with a novel set in 1980s New York, a decade in which rampant economic growth and real estate development collided with the violent undercurrents running the city. Whitehead’s main character, Ray Carney, a furniture dealer turned master fencer, navigates both as he takes on one last big job and tries to rescue his cousin’s son from the city’s worst forces.

The Mexican author of modern classics including Lost Children Archive and Tell Me How It Ends publishes her latest novel with Beginning Middle End. Set during a trip to Sicily, the book follows a mother and teenage daughter as they try to reconstruct their lives after the collapse of a marriage. The road novel weaves together four generations of women through archaeology, mythology, and the natural world, using Luiselli’s characteristic “documentary fiction” style of storytelling—for which she was awarded the MacArthur Fellowship in 2019.

Over a decade after publishing Big Little Lies—the novel that would go on to become the megahit HBO series starring Nicole Kidman, Reese Witherspoon, Laura Dern, Shailene Woodley, and Zoë Kravitz—Liane Moriarty is returning with the long-awaited sequel she once said she had no interest in writing. The book picks up ten years after the events of the first book, with Madeline, Celeste, Jane, Renata, and Bonnie’s children now in high school and a new crisis descending on Monterey. (The book will also serve as the basis for season three of the HBO series, with the original cast expected to return.)