The new year is coming. With it, two things. One: a resolution to read more that you will inevitably, if you are anything like me, abandon by March, but then fall back into in December because you feel guilty. And two: absolutely loads of great books to engage in this annual, slightly self-defeating tradition with. Some of them are good enough even to keep you going through April and beyond.

Here’s just a selection of the best books by women releasing in 2026. Best of luck.

Release: 28th April 2026

Frida Slattery As Herself by Ana Kinsella

Irish writer Ana Kinsella’s first novel is a sprawling epic set around the time of the financial crisis and the end of the Celtic Tiger. A less than sexy time, but a very sexy premise. It tells the story of John and Frida, a director and a struggling actor, respectively, who met in a Dublin pub in 2006. Over the next 15 years, the book charts their lives and relationship across London, New York and LA. It’s a love story but also a story about art, which is basically the same thing.

Release: 16th April 2026

My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein by Deborah Levy

Gertrude Stein matters. And the narrator in Deborah Levy’s new book is on a mission to find out why, exactly. So she sets out to Paris on the trail of Stein, who made the city her home while befriending Hemingway and Picasso and declaring herself a genius. Along the way, she meets other complicated and potentially genius women, including Eva, an artist in a long-distance marriage, and Fanny, a sexually adventurous financier. It’s a portrait of friendship which becomes a portrait of Gertrude Stein, too, spanning from the 19th Century to today. You find out why she matters, basically.

Release: 9th July 2026

The Project by Annie Lord

In her capacity as Vogue’s agony aunt, Annie Lord knows relationships. So it makes sense her first novel is about relationships, in all their sticky, messy forms. Her characters Daisy and Maya navigate parties, one-night stands and bad sex — then find that they’re sick of doing that. So they instigate The Project, a radical reinvention of dating. Surprisingly, given the usual meaning of ‘radical reinvention of dating,’ this does not take the form of polyamory. Thank god, honestly.

Release: 2nd June 2026

Land by Maggie O’Farrell

The Irish Famine killed one million people, and a further million emigrated, never to return. It left the landscape of Ireland irrevocably transformed, and families ripped apart. Maggie O’Farrell’s new book takes place in the aftermath of that devastation, as Tomás and his son Liam work in the west of Ireland, mapping the country for the great Ordnance Survey project. It’s a story about family, separation, reunion, tragedy, rebellion and colonisation. O’Farrell’s Hamnet will also be released as a smouldering adaptation starring Paul Mescal in 2026 — a good year to be Maggie O’Farrell.

Release: 20th January 2026

Half His Age by Jeanette McCurdy

Former child star Jeanette McCurdy’s memoir I’m Glad My Mom Died was brutal and eviscerating, and at times funny but mainly very sad. Her first novel sounds similarly spiky, poignant, and perceptive. Billing itself as an incisive study of adolescence – a topic McCurdy has already investigated so well – it introduces us to 17-year-old Waldo, who is wise, impulsive, lonely, angry, naive and horny. Horny for her creative writing teacher, more specifically. I know, what could possibly go wrong in this scenario!

Release: 20th January 2026

Two Women Living Together by Kim Hana and Hwang Sunwoo

The main problem with books these days is that most are written by a single author. Not this one! Kim Hana and Hwang Sunwoo found each other and stopped being what they were – two independent single people in their forties living alone – and instead became a unit, living together in a nice apartment with four cats. It’s in many ways the dream, but it’s also a comment on housing insecurity and an exploration of what makes a family. A rejection of societal norms, this joint memoir is also warm, funny, and full of life.

Release: 7th May 2026

The Leveret by Anna Goldreich

A leveret is another name for a baby hare. It’s also the centrepoint of Anna Goldreich’s book, about a couple – Clare and Phoebe – who move to the countryside together to heal after a miscarriage. Phoebe feels suffocated by the bucolic change of scenery, but Clare finds a new meaning in caring for her leveret surrogate. But it becomes wilder and more unruly, and Clare’s grasp on reality fractures with it. A beautiful but very sad book about grief, love and healing.

Release: 7th May 2026

The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout

After you win a Pulitzer and get nominated for a Booker, where do you have left to go? If you’re Elizabeth Strout, you go to Massachusetts Bay. That’s where her new novel is set. It tells the story of Artie Dam, a high school history teacher with a sailboat and a secret. Isolated and introverted, Artie learns that life has been keeping something from him, and his world is upended. No spoilers.

Kin by Tayari Jones

Kin is Tayari Jones’s first novel in seven years (her last, An American Marriage, won the Women’s Prize for Fiction). It follows two girls, Vernice and Annie, as they grow up in segregated Louisiana in the 1950s and 60s. Both the daughters of absent mothers, they become more than friends and closer to sisters as they leave their small town of Honeysuckle and navigate young adulthood against the backdrop of the growing civil rights movement.

All Grown Up by Daisy Buchanan

Never let anyone fool you into thinking motherhood lasts only eighteen years — Louise is forced to learn otherwise in Daisy Buchanan’s newest novel which is a contemporary retelling of Little Women. Her three adult daughters are back home, each with their own dramas and an inexplicable aversion to emptying the dishwasher. Louise is trying to gently nudge them back out of the nest, all while discovering a few lessons about herself along the way.

Honey by Imani Thompson

This debut novel is deadly — in every sense. Sex and death have been entwined for centuries, just ask the French, who call orgasms ‘un petit mort’ — a little death. Enter Yrsa: the first time she kills, it’s supposed to be an accident. A Cambridge professor has manipulated her friend and stolen her research, so she flicks a bee into his Sanpellegrino. But instead of a sting, he dies — and Yrsa has never felt more alive. Dark, thrilling, and undeniably hot, this novel will leave you gasping for air.

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