Booker 2026

In a famed but crumbling university city overrun by vegetation, where power is held in a fragile balance between the academics and a contingent of rogue gardeners, Agathe spends her days listlessly propping up the career of her fraudulent professor boss. One day, a campus scandal threatens to rupture her carefully managed life. Adam, a contrarian and the pet student of her boss, comes into heated conflict with a rising young professor, with both men claiming discrimination. As the crisis consumes the university, Agathe remains unmoved. But when her boss instructs her to turn double agent and gather information by befriending Adam, Agathe finds herself both caught up in the events tearing the city apart and increasingly drawn towards the alluring student at the heart of it all. But can anyone be taken at their word in a struggle over the truth?Coursing with icy suspense and rendered with violent precision, The Vivisectors is a new kind of love story for a broken era. Missouri Williams holds up a mirror to humanity’s most intimate contradictions and reflects them back through a novel of blazing spiritual reckoning.Endorsements‘An astonishing novel by an astonishing writer. Playful, digressive, and pulsating with existential energy’ — Michael Magee‘Fun, biting and wise’ — Zoe Dubno‘As brilliant as it is dark … unlike anything I’ve read before’ — Vulture

In Salerno, Italy, Dilara spends her days caring for her aging father and her hypochondriac husband. Since leaving her native Istanbul, she’s been unable to find a job—adrift, she becomes increasingly fixated on domestic improvement, specifically on the renovation of a second bathroom. When the work is completed, she enters and finds herself not in a bathroom but in a prison cell, and a Turkish one at that.As she tries and fails to conceal the unfortunate discovery from her husband, she confronts the prison’s other inhabitants—the buffoonish guards who refuse to believe her conundrum; the other women who begin filling the cells beyond hers—and the strange things that drift through it: the smell of the Bosporus, her mother’s voice, calls to prayer...Has she gone mad? Is she the victim of a terrible prank? Is it a portal, a dream, a simulation? As she burrows deeper into her cell, her life beyond it begins to fall apart—her husband disappears, her father’s grip on reality loosens, political dictatorship threatens to destroy everything worth keeping.A woman discovers that her bathroom has been remodeled into a prison cell—where she is an unlikely inmate—in this surreal novel of exile, grief, memory, and migration. In his slender, disquieting first novel, Kenan Orhan tells a story of modern migration like no other. The Renovation is a tragic comedy of displacement, a story that remodels its own form to the dazzling inevitable end.

A private plane cuts through the winter night, somewhere over Greenland. David, a retired executive, sits back in his leather seat, playing solitaire on his phone. Click. Click. Drag. Click. The notebook in his jacket pocket is filled with familiar phrases, urgent reminders to himself, but he struggles to recognize his own handwriting.A mystery, among many mysteries. The world, once so knowable, has been rendered inscrutable.His assistant, David Cody, asleep in the seat next to him, will shepherd him along the voyage. A stopover in London. Dinner with his adult daughter. A meeting in France with an old friend, estranged for decades.His final destination is Zurich.David glides through hotel rooms and airports and foreign cities, running out the clock on his mortal life. His grasp on the present slips away, and the past rushes in: the Sunday roasts of childhood. The stiff clothes meant only for church. A summer at a school friend’s house. The losses and missteps that punctuate a life.As David’s arrival in Zurich looms, an exquisitely rendered portrait of an unraveling mind emerges, both darkly humorous and profoundly moving. Hypnotic and startlingly original, Switzy probes the depths of human consciousness, revealing what a man is left with when the accomplishments and compromises that have defined him and the illusions he's relied on vanish.A mesmerizing portrait of an aging man’s last pilgrimage.

From Marlon James, author of the Booker Prize–winning A Brief History of Seven Killings: a propulsive novel about the murder of a gay man in 1980s Jamaica and its tragic consequences.In 1988, eight men in Kingston, Jamaica, begin rehearsals for a play. The men are strangers to one another and each has a different reason for being involved. But they all share one inescapable truth: all of them are gay—a "batty man" in Jamaican argot—and all of them must contend with the dangers that such a truth lays bare.One night a mob savagely attacks them, killing one of the men. For the survivors, their recovery is as much emotional as it is physical. As their bodies heal, each man grapples with the violence, the hatred, and the rage that the attack made plain. Some try to ignore what the attack has unearthed, while others double down on retribution.In The Disappearers, Marlon James has written a riveting and deeply human story of men forced to make compromises to survive what the society they live in demands. It is both a dramatic page-turner and an unflinching exploration of queer life in Jamaica during the 1980s and 1990s.

A vivid, moving, and beautifully crafted novel following a young man returning to his Hebridean island home, a portrait of a close-knit community and a fraying family, of a father's expectations and a son's desires.Out of money and with little to show for his art school education, John-Calum Macleod takes the ferry back home to the island of Harris to find that little has changed except for him. In the windswept croft where he grew up, Cal begrudgingly resumes his old life, stuck between the two poles of his childhood: his father John, a sheep farmer, tweed weaver, and pillar of their local Presbyterian church, and his maternal grandmother Ella, a profanity-loving Glaswegian who has kept a faltering peace with her son-in-law for several decades. Cal wonders if any lonely men might be found on the barren hillsides of home, while John is dismayed by his son’s long hair and how he seems unwilling to be saved. As lambing season turns to shearing season, everything seems poised to change as the threads holding together the fragile community become increasingly knotted.EndorsementsBooker Prize–winning author

In The Palm House, Laura's long friendship with Edmund Putnam is tested when he resigns from Sequence magazine—one of the few places he has ever felt he belonged. Putnam repines. His sweet-natured father has recently died, which has not improved his mood. Meanwhile Laura's relentlessly “outward-facing” mother is still at large and toting a new boyfriend as if he were a marotte. Laura, too, needs a new job, and a place to live that doesn't have centipedes in the kitchen.Gwendoline Riley's seventh novel explores acceptance and affinity. Young people don't drink anymore but Laura and Putnam are no longer young. Over wine and crisps the pair reflect on what has brought them to where they are. There are memories of childhood package holidays, teenage friendships and obsessions, peculiar love affairs, bad parties.Life is fleeting. Sequence magazine means something, but what? Might Putnam plot a return? The Palm House looks at what it means to find, understand, and accept where one fits.From the author of My Phantoms and First Love, a droll and quietly evocative novel about work, friendship, family, and the path—so often muddled—toward finding one’s place in life.

Flora is visiting home in Mexico when the family dog leaps up and bites her hand. She winds up in hospital where she undergoes several surgeries under anaesthesia and meets Wilhelmina, an elderly German woman with pneumonia, who collects pre-cinema toys and instruments. The two of them embark on a series of dream-like conversations in the hospital corridors. Wilhelmina puts on a magic lantern show for Flora, leaving her spellbound.When things take an unexpected turn, Flora finds herself entrusted with an important mission. She returns to London, where she resumes her job polishing silver at a jewellery shop, and strikes up a strange friendship with Wilhelmina’s son, Max. As Flora dips in and out of her imagination, she is increasingly aware it’s not only the magic lantern that projects, and her perception of reality is subtly altered.A magnificent work of shadow-play and a meditation on desire, metamorphosis and mortality.Endorsements‘One of our boldest writers’ — Deborah Levy‘One of the most brilliant novelists working in English today’ — Garth Greenwell‘The politics of her prose is existential rather than anecdotal, as it was with Kafka’s’ — Zadie Smith‘A subtle and courageous writer’ — Ali Smith‘Chloe Aridjis is crafting a poetics of the strange’ — TLS

Taking place over the course of one day, Helen of Nowhere introduces an intimate cast: an unnamed man at the end of both his career and marriage, a young realtor showing him an idyllic house in the countryside, and Helen, the mystifying former owner whose spectral presence seems to imbue the house’s every grain of wood. Through stories of the remarkable woman, the man is presented with an alternate way of life. But, as evening fades into black, the specifics of how to live it become more than what he bargained for.Philosophically adventurous, strange, and fascinating, Helen of Nowhere examines the structures that form our identity, staring the reader down to ask the haunting question: What is the cost of true happiness?Endorsements"brilliantly complex" — Jenny Offill

An out-of-work actor accepts the role of a lifetime—sitting soundlessly in a lecture theater, zipped into a large leather bag—to aid a professor’s psychological experiment. What could possibly go wrong?In Luke Kennard’s audacious new novel, a penniless and out-of-work actor picks up a job working for Dr. Blend, a university professor who is conducting a psychological experiment. How will Dr. Blend’s students react to someone zipped into an oversized bag, sitting at the back of the lecture hall over a series of Fall lectures? The role, eagerly accepted, soon has unexpected consequences. A professor of post-humanism develops research questions of her own—in particular, can you love someone secreted away inside a black bag?—and the actor’s childhood friend forms a vision for monetizing this new situation...A warped campus novel, an investigation into the crisis of masculinity, and an off-kilter love story, Black Bag is a firework of a blazingly funny and profoundly humane.

Phillip Tennent makes his living at the tideline, collecting artefacts that wash up from the Channel. It's been years since the crisis changed everything, but its exact nature remains obscured. The government barely functions, the seas are full of new creatures, and Europe has been mislaid. It feels like the end.Now Phillip has fished an object out of the water that he can't keep: a creature that keeps changing, an artefact he must take inland before it destroys everything he thinks he knows.

She is a curator, who spends her time dressing the rooms of historic buildings to bring them to life. But in the lush private quarters of a medieval palace, she finds herself so transfixed by the reign of an almost-forgotten King that the edges of her life begin to blur.He is a reluctant ruler with no hunger for power, rushed to the throne after the untimely deaths of his older brothers. But it isn't long before whispers begin to fly around the court. And with the growing belief that the King is not fit for the throne comes the idea that another might rule in his stead.May We Feed the King dances between the lives of a historical subject who risks the future of his kingdom and a woman who turns to the past to hide from her present. Laced with desire and longing, it is a playful, stirring meditation on history and on what makes a King 'Great' and a life meaningful.

Tony Ward has landed back in Lucan with his chest puffed up and a chip on his shoulder. After five years in the UK, staying out of trouble just like he'd been told to do, he's returned home to his west Dublin estate ready to reinstate himself into the gangland scene.But things are different now. Tony's old mentor is dead and his best pal Kenny Boyle has gone on the straight and narrow. That won't do. So when an opportunity to work directly for Darren 'Flute' Walsh, an enforcer of notorious crime boss Aengus Lavelle, presents itself, it seems like a no-brainer.Flute Walsh is a far cry from the meek, quiet boy Tony knew in school. Working as his left-hand man offers a level of security against repercussions for the crimes he'd gone on the run for as well as giving him a way into the life he wants, but none of that stops the big man Lavelle from making it clear that any trouble from his past will be Tony's alone to answer for.Already burned by the empty promises of one dead mentor, Tony is keen to prove himself as his own man, but there is a pull toward Flute Walsh, one he's felt before. With the fragments of his past life still in the rearview and a whole new gang of headbangers to contend with, it is a pull too hard to resist. As Tony turns his back on the paper-thin structures that support him, he looks for stability in his new, brutal surroundings. But where is there room for love in a world like this, where anything that's buried is always unearthed and retribution is never far away?For fans of Lisa McInerney, Gabriel Krauze, and Graeme Armstrong, All Them Dogs is a fizzing debut from one of Ireland's most striking new voices.

The Things We Never Say tells the story of a chance incident that sparks a powerful realization in a beloved teacher’s life—a poignant meditation on loneliness, friendship, parenthood, and the importance of truth in a capsizing world.Artie Dam is living a double life. He spends his days teaching history to eleventh graders, expanding their young minds, correcting their casual cruelties, and lending a kind word to those who need it most. He goes to holiday parties with his wife of three decades, makes small talk with neighbors, and, on weekends, takes his sailboat out on the beautiful Massachusetts Bay. He is, by all appearances, present and alive. But inside, Artie is plagued by feelings of isolation. He looks out at a world gone mad—at himself and the people around him—and turns a question over and over in his mind: 'How is it that we know so little about one another, even those closest to us?'And then, one day, Artie learns that life has been keeping a secret from him, one that threatens to upend his entire world. Once he learns it, he is forced to chart a new course, to reconsider the relationships he holds most dear—and to make peace with the mysteries at the heart of our existence.EndorsementsPulitzer Prize–winning, #1 New York Times bestselling author Elizabeth Strout