26 best books for your book club in 2026

What We Can Know Ian McEwan

A literary thriller set between a lost past and a submerged future, this novel follows a scholar chasing the truth behind a lost poem. A quest, a thriller, and a love story, What We Can Know is a masterpiece that reclaims the present from our sense of looming catastrophe, and imagines a future world where all is not quite lost.

This dual-timeline novel is a strong book club pick with the narrative inviting reflecting around climate, culture and what survives.

The Correspondent Virginia Evans

Told entirely through her letters, we come to know the life of Sybil Van Antwerp: stubborn, cantakerous, opinionated, always steadfast in her belief in the written word. As she reflects on her past, she begins to put her life in order and confront what she's left unresolved.

A great pick for book clubs, with plenty to discuss around voice and how we make sense of change later in life.

For more inspiration, find our book club questions here!

The Other Catherine Lauren Keenan

Two worlds, two women, one story... The Other Catherine moves across seas and generations, following two women as they reclaim their own family histories and place wāhine at the centre of stories that once left them out. Grounded in real historical pressures, it still makes space for hope and agency.

A thoughtful book club pick, especially for conversations about who gets to tell a story and how history is shaped.

For more inspiration, find our book club questions here!

Kin Tayari Jones

From the bestselling, award-winning author of An American Marriage, this is a novel that sparkles with wit, intelligence and deep feeling about two lifelong friends whose worlds collide in the face of a devastating tragedy. A profound story about mothers and daughters, friendship and sisterhood, and the complexities of being a woman in the American South.

Kin is a perfect book club pick — exuberant, emotionally rich and impossible to put down!

Seed Elisabeth Easther

Seed follows four women navigating friendship, ambition, and the complicated realities of motherhood at different stages of life. While fertility and motherhood sit at the heart of the novel, this isn't a guidebook on reproductive health. It stays close to lived experiences, balancing humour with harder moments, and resists offering easy answers.

This is a strong book club pick for its relatability and the range of conversations it naturally opens. 

For more inspiration, find our book club questions here!

The Safekeep Yael van der Wouden

Set in post-war Europe, The Safekeep follows Isabel whose controlled, solitary life is disrupted by an unexpected houseguest. Over one summer, the tension deepens into something more charged, drawing out questions of desire and buried history.

A great pick for book clubs, with room to explore memory, power, and accountability.

Flesh David Szalay

A propulsive, hypnotic novel about a man slowly coming undone as his life moves from an isolated adolescence in Hungary into the worlds of money and power in London. Spare and penetrating, Flesh is the finest novel yet by a master of realism. 

The 2025 Booker Prize Winner is a strong book club pick for the questions it raises about what drives a life and what ultimately unravels it.

Audition Katie Kitamura

Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She's an actress in rehearsals. He's attractive, troubling and young. What follows quietly shifts our understanding of who they are to each other, and how much of any relationship is shaped by performance.

A solid book club pick, with room to discuss identity, perception, and the roles we slip into without noticing.

Doppelganger Naomi Klein

When Naomi Klein finds herself repeatedly mistaken for a public figure with radically opposing views, it opens into a wider exploration of identity, media, and online culture. What begins as a strange mix-up becomes a way into the uncanny mirror world of our polarised culture, where the line between self and projection is harder to hold.

It's a strong book club pick for the conversations it opens up about how we navigate identity and reality in a digital age. 

Orbital Samantha Harvey

Set aboard the International Space Station, a group of astronauts orbit the earth, watching it turn beneath them as they carry out their work. From that distance, the planet comes into focus in a new way, its beauty, its volatility, and the lives unfolding far below. So far from earth, they have never felt more part – or protective – of it. They begin to ask, what is life without earth? What is earth without humanity?

This is a reflective book club pick that stays with you, opening up questions about connection, responsibility and what it means to belong.

Wild Dark Shore Charlotte McConaghy

On a remote island near Antarctica, Dominic Salt and his children are the last caretakers of a vast seed bank, holding steady as rising seas close in. Isolation has reshaped their lives, leaving each of them slightly unmoored. When a woman washes ashore after a storm, her arrival unsettles the fragile rhythm of the household and brings long-held tensions to the surface.

A novel of heartstopping twists, Wild Dark Shore is a story about the impossible choices we make to protect the people we love, even as the world is ending.

A Different Kind of Power Jacinda Ardern

In this personal memoir, Jacinda Ardern reflects on her path to leadership and her time as New Zealand’s prime minister. She writes openly about the pressures of governing through crisis, the realities of leading in public, and the role empathy played in her approach.

A Different Kind of Power is more than a political memoir; it’s an insight into how it feels to lead, ultimately asking: What if you, too, are capable of more than you imagined?

For more inspiration, find our book club questions here!

The Bee Sting Paul Murray

The Barnes family is in trouble, and each of them is coping in ways that only deepen the distance between them. What begins as a financial crisis gradually opens into something broader, as the past starts to press in on the present.

This novel is a tour de force about family, fortune, and the struggle to be a good person while the world is falling apart.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow Gabrielle Zevin

This is the story of Sam and Sadie. It’s not a romance, but it is about love. What follows is a story of friendship and rivalry, fame and creativity, betrayal and tragedy, perfect worlds and imperfect ones. And, ultimately, our need to connect: to be loved and to love.

This is a very different kind of love story, elevated and energised by being set in the world of creativity and video gaming.

The Secret History Donna Tartt

At an elite New England college, a group of students fall under the influence of a charismatic classics professor and begin to shape their lives around a shared, insular way of thinking. What starts as intellectual curiosity gradually crosses into something more dangerous, with lasting consequences.

Both compelling and unsettling, The Secret History is a strong book club pick that invites discussion about morality, influence, and the limits people are willing to test.

Lessons in Chemistry Bonnie Garmus

Elizabeth Zott is a chemist working in a field that has little interest in making space for her. Forced to leave her job at the institute, she finds herself the reluctant star of America’s most beloved cooking show. But as her following grows, not everyone is happy. Turns out, she isn’t just teaching women to cook. She’s daring them to change the status quo.

This is an engaging book club pick, with plenty to discuss around gender, work, and the ways change can take hold.

The Silver Book Olivia Laing

‘It is dangerous to want someone this much. He has always known it, from the very first night.’

This novel is at once a queer love story and a noirish thriller, set in the dream factory of cinema. It’s a fictional account of real things, and an investigation into the difficult relationship between artifice and truth, illusion and reality, love and power.

The Underworld Sofie Laguna

Martha Mullins is a misfit. Academic and shy, she finds herself fascinated by the underworld and its divine inhabitants, providing her a place of refuge, escape, imagination and desire. But Martha also finds joy in friendship and connection as shown by her band of friends. Until things go wrong.

Funny, brave, insightful and clever, Martha will break your heart – then mend it – many times over.

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny Kiran Desai

When Sonia and Sunny glimpse each other on an overnight train, attraction is tempered by the memory of a failed family matchmaking. Uncertain of their future, they embark on a search for happiness together as they confront the many alienations of our modern world.

Moving between India and America, this is a sweeping love story of fate, family, and the forces that shape a life.

The Elements John Boyne

The Elements brings together four interconnected lives, each offering a different way into a single crime and its aftermath. As the story unfolds, it shifts how responsibility and blame are understood, staying close to the human detail rather than easy judgement.

A great book club pick, with plenty to discuss about guilt, complicity, and what it means to be accountable.

The Predicament William Boyd

Gabriel Dax is drawn back into a life of espionage he can’t quite leave behind. What begins as an assignment in Guatemala pulls him deeper into political unrest and shifting loyalties, Gabriel must navigate deceit and danger.

William Boyd weaves a masterful tale of suspense, loyalty, love and dark temptations of spy craft in the sequel to the bestselling espionage trilogy starring Gabriel Dax.

Mother Mary Comes to Me Arundhati Roy

Arundhati Roy’s first memoir is a soaring account of how the author became the person and writer she is, shaped by circumstance, but above all, her relationship to her extraordinary, singular mother Mary, who she describes as ‘my shelter and my storm’.

This is an ode to freedom, a tribute to thorny love and savage grace – a memoir like no other.

The Passengers on the Hankyu Line Hiro Arikawa

Set along a railway line between Kyoto and Osaka, this novel follows a group of passengers whose lives briefly intersect over the course of two journeys. In these small, everyday encounters, moments of change begin to take shape.

This is a gentle, reflective book club pick that opens conversation around connection and personal turning points.

1985 Dominic Hoey

It’s 1985, and Obi is on cusp of teenagehood, growing up in a world shaped by poverty, dysfunctional family dynamics, and (dis)organised crime and violence. When he and his best friend stumble across a map promising something better, it sets him on a path that quickly outgrows the games he’s used to.

Set in pre-gentrification Auckland, this is a grounded-coming-of-age story for the underdogs, the disenfranchised and the dreamers.

A Far-flung Life M.L. Stedman

One ordinary day, a split-second decision on a remote road shatters the MacBride family. What follows is a chain of consequences that pulls them further from the lives they knew, forcing difficult choices that can’t be undone.

A Far-flung Life explores the lives of a handful of isolated souls and the secrets they shield to survive. It is ultimately about people trying to do their best while seeking shelter from the storm of life.

The Emperor of Gladness Ocean Vuong

One late summer evening in the town of East Gladness, nineteen-year-old Hai is ready to jump on the edge of a bridge when he hears someone shout across the river. The voice belongs to Grazina, an elderly widow.

Over the course of the year, Hai’s story takes an unexpected turn, as his life-altering bond with Grazina transforms his relationship to the community, his family, and most powerfully of all, himself.