Notable Novels of Fall 2026

Which novels will everyone be talking about this season?

Well, there has already been a huge amount of critical acclaim heaped upon Marlon James’s brand new novel, The Disappearers. James, who became the first Jamaican to win the the Booker Prize in 2015 with A Brief History of Seven Killings, has described his new book—set in the 20th-century Jamaican gay community—as his most personal work yet: “not autofiction,” but “the first novel where I’m drawing so much from my life.” He also interviewed dozens of queer Jamaicans while writing the book, reports Lithub, and has embroidered some of these stories into the text—many of them shocking. (A warning, for those who want one: be prepared for homophobic violence, including a horrifying scene in which a man has his eyes gouged out.)

It is, promises veteran critic Dwight Garner in the New York Times, “a maximalist’s banquet… humane, blood-flecked, disturbing and sustaining”. None of the “small plates” of irony and self-conscious styling we’ve come to expect of contemporary fiction: “With this novel about gay experience and murderous homophobia in Jamaica and elsewhere during the 1980s and ’90s, James has written a masterpiece, the novel of the decade and possibly of the century thus far.” It has already been longlisted for the Booker and I suspect we will hear a lot more about The Disappearers during the upcoming awards season.

Great, yes. What other novels are shortly to be released in fall 2026?

Emily St. John Mandel (author of the oddly beautiful, mega-bestselling post-apocalyptic novel Station Eleven) is to release her latest book, Exit Party, on September 10. If you’ve never read any of her novels, here’s a useful round-up by Bookriot to give you a grounding; if you already are a fan, then you may be excited to learn that Ari, the villain from The Singer’s Gun, turns up in Exit Party as the main protagonist. “She was interesting to me as a character, and I never stopped thinking of her even after all these years,” as St. John Mandel explained to the American Booksellers Association. “I found myself thinking, what would that character be like at a completely different point in her life, after a very long prison sentence?”

The result, reports Publishers Weekly, is “her most ambitious book to date”: a speculative novel set in a near-future Los Angeles, after a bitter civil war has caused the collapse of the United States. “It also involves teleportation, doppelgängers, state surveillance, and spies.” St. John Mandel says she thinks it’s the best book she’s ever written. And if you’re interested in Exit Party, you may also be interested in another new novel about the unravelling of the United States—Kurt Andersen’s The Breakup, which was released at the end of August, explores a dystopian American future through the prism of a divorcing couple in 2045. Gary Shteyngart (author of Five Books favourite Super Sad True Love Story) called it “funny and beautiful.” Sounds promising.

While I have you, there are a few other important new releases I’d like to mention. Firstly, Hernan Diaz (Trust, In the Distance) returns this month with Ply, a high concept speculative novel I’ve seen described “plot heavy” and “cyberpunk.” In Ply, an orphan who siphons electricity into batteries to resell on the black market gets caught up in a shadowy conspiracy whose members aim to tamper with the nature of reality itself. David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas, has described it as inhabiting a “cracked mirror world, a lot like ours; peopled by survivors, a lot like us; sentences so fine they break the skin; a plot that swerves through loss, love, trust, betrayal, art, science, society and control.” 

Yiyun Li, the Pulitzer Prize-winning memoirist and novelist (and one-time Five Books interviewee!), will in October release Music Against the Night, a historical novel inspired by two real-life musicians: Irish composer John Field, creator of the nocturne, and French-Indian piano prodigy Adelaide Percheron. Li “bestows literary immortality on these overlooked musicians,” declared Booklist— “infusing history’s elisions with fascinating layers and lingering resonance.”

And there’s Emma Cline’s Switzy—already longlisted for this year’s Booker Prize—which has been hailed as a “profoundly moving” exploration of memory loss and death. In it, a corporate executive flies in a private plane across the Atlantic towards his death, which is scheduled to take place in a death with dignity facility before his mind deteriorates so much that he becomes unable to consent. The resulting novel, writes Chris Power in the Guardian, “mingle[s] horror, beauty, absurdity, and a sense of profound finality” and  “will probably stay with me for ever.” If you’d like to read an extract before committing to the book, you can find one online here.

Any other personal highlights among the new novels of fall 2026 that you’d like to mention?

Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding, a campus novel set at a private liberal arts college in Wisconsin, is one of my most beloved books of all time. I’ve probably read it ten times or more. Sure, it’s about a college baseball team, and I barely understand even the most basic fundamentals of baseball—could I name a single major league player? no—but that really doesn’t seem to matter when a novel has so much heart, intelligence and wit. I’ve thought about the characters many times over years since I first read it.

What a delight, then to learn that Harbach is to release a much-anticipated follow up this October: The Brightness reunites Henry, Pella, Mike, Owen and other Westish College friends several years later—in the wake of Owen publishing a hit novel called The Art of Fielding, which, in a metafictional flourish, matches the original novel not only in name but plot—as they search for purpose and direction in the wilderness that is one’s twenties. I simply cannot wait.

What’s on your reading list this fall? Let us know on social media the books you’ve got on preorder.