We are almost halfway through 2026 and I would venture to say that we’re having a pretty good year in books. There is so much chatter around books with a few authors releasing certified bangers (I’m talking about you, Tayari Jones). I love this for us. And we’re only just getting started.

I’m here today to look ahead into the next six months of books and flag the titles I am most excited about. If you’re not familiar with me, I am Traci Thomas and I host the book podcast The Stacks. I am a big fan of narrative nonfiction, main characters making horrible choices, and books that people tend to describe as “intense”.

This list below reflects my tastes and the books I am truly excited about and planning to read (my anticipated list for the start of 2026 features 39 books and I have read into 28 of them), even if that means that some buzzier books don’t make the list. For the last few years I have dropped only my annual list of books I’m looking forward to, but with so much good stuff coming the second half of this year, you’re getting a bonus midyear re-upping of the list.

The Great Wherever by Shannon Sanders (July 7)

After the death of her father, a woman goes south to claim her family’s home and encounters some gossipy ghosts. For those wondering no, the ghosts are not scary, they’re funny and charming and chatty. A fresh take on a family novel.

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Good Morning Means I Love You by Kendra Allen (July 7)

This book was described to me as what it would be like if Sula had a daughter and that daughter had a novel. This is the first novel from a celebrated poet that centers around a woman who is raising her two children from two different men together as one unconventional family.

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False Prophet by Afsheen Farhadi (July 7)

Jal is an actor whose life gets thrown out of wack when his mother dies and he attempts to write her story, except the story he writes—about her life in Guyana during Jonestown—is full of lies. The book goes viral and Jal is totally screwed.

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Catch the Devil: A True Story of Murder, Deception, and Injustice on the Gulf Coast by Pamela Colloff (July 14)

This book sounds absolutely unhinged, hooray! It is investigative journalism about a conman who, once in jail, claimed the other men he was locked up with confessed their crimes to him. He used these “confessions” to work with the prosecutor to get the men convicted and earn his freedom. He ran this con to the point of getting one man locked up for murder, a crime he did not commit. Tell me you don’t want to read this book.

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Triage by Claudia Rankine (August 4)

A new book from legendary writer and poet, Claudia Rankine. Experimental and thought provoking, the book centers around two friends whose whole lives have been a meditation on collapse.

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Hiroshima 8:15 by Kiyoshi Tanimoto (August 4)

This is a newly discovered first hand account from a survivor of the atomic bomb dropping on Hiroshima in 1945.

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Whyteface by A. Igoni Barrett (August 4)

A satire about a Nigerian man who wakes up to find himself white, except his butt, and a few years later finally decides to leave Nigeria for a European vacation. Which, as you can imagine, leads to all sorts of situations of the comedic variety.

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Etna by Paul Yoon (August 4)

I can’t believe I am including a novel narrated by a dog on one of my anticipated lists. But there is a little buzz around this book, and I sorta want to give it a try. Etna is a military dog who decides to leave the war and head home. It has been described to me as brutal and intense, so like, I can look past a K9 to get to the devastation. I hope.

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Capitalism is Sexism by Doortje Smithuijsen translated by Erica Moore (August 11)

I fear I have to read this book because it is described by the publisher as “A bold and incisive personal manifesto on the ways sexism is used in capitalist systems to exploit women, using algorithms that pressure them into spending money on a distorted ideal of beauty, motherhood, and success.” I think we all need to read this.

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Seasons of Fury: Four Families and the Rise of Islamophobia in America by Rozina Ali (August 25)

This is a reported narrative history of the United States’ relationship to Muslim Americans as told through the story of four families. This book spans eight decades to fully explore the relationship between a country and its citizens and the lies and broken promises left along the way.

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The Castle: Adventures in a World of Unraveling Men by Jon Ronson (September 1)

If I am being honest, I have had a really hard time reading books about men and whatever is going on with them these days. But, when I heard Jon Ronson had a new book about masculinity with some mystery and intrigue, I was sold. I feel like if anyone can do a “what’s going on with men” narrative nonfiction thriller type thing, I think it’s Ronson.

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American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump by Kai Bird (September 1)

Roy Cohn, the infamous attorney, is getting the serious biography treatment from the man who wrote American Prometheus (the book about Robert Oppenheimer) and I for one, can’t wait. Cohn is known as being a ruthless lawyer, a mentor to Donald Trump, and a closeted homosexual who died of AIDS in the 1980s.

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The Bed Trick: Sex and Deception on Trial by Izabella Scott (September 1)

This book sounds a little unhinged in the best way. It is a true story about a woman who falls in love with a man online, and is told she has to wear a blindfold to have sex with him, and after years of this arrangement she takes off the blindfold to find her best friend. This results in a court case about deception and assumptions, and doesn’t that sound sorta great?

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The Art of Fighting: The Transformative Power of Conflict by Priya Parker (September 15)

I found Priya Parker’s first book, The Art of Gathering, to be life changing. It reshaped how I thought about community, society, and my role in it. I can’t wait for this new book about how to be in conflict with one another in a way that is not harmful. We need a book that guides folks into useful and generative disagreements.

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Live Laugh Love: The Secret History of White Christian Women and the World They Made by Kobes Du Mez (September 15)

I am a pretty well documented hater of Yesteryear, mainly because the book felt like it didn’t deliver on the satirized cultural commentary around white evangelical femininity. Live Laugh Love might just be the nonfiction book that can deliver the bite with the substance I am looking for. This book gets into the ways conservative Christian culture from Hallmark movies to MLM function to further a religious aesthetic and agenda, and the history behind how we got here.

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Desperate Bodies: Stories by Lydia Mathis (September 15)

I know nothing about this short story collection, but that cover got me. And sometimes, a good cover is enough for me to get hyped about a book.

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All Hours: Crazy Good Food for Whatever, Whenever by Kwame Onwuachi (September 22)

You know it isn’t a Traci Thomas list without one random cookbook! And this year I am really excited about Kwame Onwuachi’s because he has become such a star in the culinary world especially after his NYC restaurant Tatiana got the world buzzing. His restaurants are pretty elevated so I’m looking forward to seeing what he has on offer for the at home chef. Especially since the cookbook is billed as good food and no fuss.

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American Hagwon by Min Jin Lee (September 29)

I have done everything I can not to learn a single thing about this novel from Lee, her first since Pachinko. I just want to go into it complete blind and see what she does. She is the kind of skilled author who has earned that level of trust from her readers.

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Man in the Mirror: Hope, Struggle, and Belonging in an American City by Anand Giridharadas (September 29)

The first book on the 2023 murder of Jordan Neeley on the New York City subway at the hands of Daniel Penny. This case shook the city and the country, and I’m hopeful Giridharadas will give us a better understanding of what happened both on that train and in its aftermath.

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How Bright the Path Grows: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the March on Washington by Marcia Chatelain (September 29)

There are so many pieces of Black history that have gone undertold for decades, and the women behind the March on Washington certainly fall into the category. Chatelain won a Pulitzer Prize for her last book Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America, which has me even more excited this one.

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Bad Boy for Life: The Rise and Fall of Sean Combs by Cheyenne Roundtree (September 29)

We are finally getting a true biography of Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs. I can’t wait. This man has been a menace and monster for his whole career and a book that delves into all of it, is exactly what I’ve been craving.

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The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman by Deesha Philyaw (September 29)

Philyaw’s debut book, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, was a National Book Award Finalist and now she is back with her first novel about a messy pastor’s wife who is up to no good.

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The Names of the New World by Kawai Strong Washburn (October 6)

This is the second book from the author of Sharks in the Time of Saviors, a book that so many people I love, absolutely adored. It’s climate fiction about three people who come together in the wake of a superstorm in the midwest and the way that their lives remain interconnected for decades to come.

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The Four Wives and Five Deaths of Richard Milford by Nafissa Thompson-Spires (October 13)

New Nafissa Thompson-Spires is very exciting because her debut, a short story collection, The Heads of the Colored People was fantastic! This novel, a bit of a mystery, is about the death of a womanizing moonshiner in 1920s Oklahoma. The body is found, but nobody knows who killed him, maybe one of his four wives?

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Everything’s Not Lost by Frederick Joseph (October 20)

A new YA novel about a bipolar Black girl whose whole world is rocked after the sudden death of her sister. Joseph is really great at dealing with the melancholy in life for young audiences and this feels like exactly that.

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The Glass Box: The Shocking True Story of How CrossFit Broke the Rules, Made Millions, and Changed Fitness Forever by Calum Marsh (October 27)

Crossfit has always been a fascinating fitness enigma and having Marsh pull the curtain back on what goes on in those “boxes” is a story I’ve been waiting for. How did Crossfit even become a thing? Why are people so obsessed with it? And what secrets does the brand hold?

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Humpty Dumpty by Harold Rodgers (November 10)

This is one of those novels where I am trying to only vaguely know the premise so I can read it and watch the story reveal itself to me. Here is what I do know; a high school football star is involved in some horrific crime, big-time small town fallout ensues.

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Mona: An Immodest Memoir of Race and Rebellion by Azra Liaqat Khan (November 17)

Raised in a strict Muslim household Khan (a pseudonym) moves to New York and becomes a stripper, “Mona the Stripper” to pay her way through grad school. Now an academic who focuses on the intersections of race, this memoir is about her double life and the intersections of sex, money, race, and culture.

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From Infinite World: The Sound of the Hammond Organ and the Tragedy of AIDS in the Black Church by Ashon Thomas Crawley (December 1)

This book is pitched as “an urgent story about how AIDS fundamentally changed gospel music and the sound of the church”. I am looking forward to understanding the relationship of Black queer artists, AIDS, and the Black church.

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