Where to Start With the Booker Prize 2026 Shortlist
Six books, seven weeks until the winner, and one of them runs to six hundred pages. Which of the shortlisted novels to open first, which to save for a group, and which one I think wins.
Where to Start With the Booker Prize 2026 Longlist
Thirteen novels, one shortlist in September, and not enough evenings. Here is what each book on the Booker 2026 longlist actually is, and which one I would open first.
What to Read Before Nolan’s Odyssey
You have a ticket and not much time. Here is what I would actually read before Nolan's Odyssey, sorted by how many free evenings you have between now and the cinema.
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Top 5 This Week
Dive Bar at the End of the Road by Kelley Armstrong
A woman sits at the counter of a backwoods bar in a rainstorm, perfectly dry, with a puddle spreading under her stool. Armstrong's new horror novel gathers six stranded strangers around that riddle and turns each of their private terrors loose in the woods outside.
Dive Bar at the End of the Road by Kelley Armstrong
A woman sits at the counter of a backwoods bar in a rainstorm, perfectly dry, with a puddle spreading under her stool. Armstrong's new horror novel gathers six stranded strangers around that riddle and turns each of their private terrors loose in the woods outside.
Broken Rival by Tessa Bailey
Hot chocolate, corn dogs, a prom proposal over the stadium speakers, and then gunfire three miles north. A girl from the future who has learned to smile through everything finally stops, and a dark, generous love story begins.
Victorious by V.E. Schwab
A careful psychiatrist in Merit learns that one patient's nightmares can draw blood, and the discovery reshapes the agency that hunts people like Victor Vale. Schwab's closing Villains novel finds its horror in a gentle voice and its warmth in a makeshift family, though it takes its time getting there.
The Winter of Our Discontent by John Steinbeck
A likeable man narrates his own corruption in the voice he uses for jokes, and never once admits what he is doing. Steinbeck's final novel is his coldest, and the question it leaves a group with is whether the ending lets him off.
Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck
The book that made Steinbeck's name is also the one his admirers find hardest to defend. A group reading it will spend more time on what the author thinks of his characters than on anything the characters do, and that is the right conversation to have.
Adam and Eve by Jeffrey Archer
Two babies are christened together in a Norfolk church in January 1919. Afterwards one family drinks champagne at the Hall and the other eats ham sandwiches at the pub, and only the vicar and the doctor attend both. Archer's last novel is about who gets to cross that line.
Cannery Row by John Steinbeck
A novel in which almost nothing happens, twice. Steinbeck turns a Monterey back street into an ecosystem and refuses to arrange its people into a story, which is either the most generous thing he ever did or the easiest.
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Broken Rival by Tessa Bailey
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Hot chocolate, corn dogs, a prom proposal over the stadium speakers, and then gunfire three miles north. A girl from the future who has learned to smile through everything finally stops, and a dark, generous love story begins.
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Dive Bar at the End of the Road by Kelley Armstrong
A woman sits at the counter of a backwoods bar in a rainstorm, perfectly dry, with a puddle spreading under her stool. Armstrong's new horror novel gathers six stranded strangers around that riddle and turns each of their private terrors loose in the woods outside.
Broken Rival by Tessa Bailey
Hot chocolate, corn dogs, a prom proposal over the stadium speakers, and then gunfire three miles north. A girl from the future who has learned to smile through everything finally stops, and a dark, generous love story begins.
Victorious by V.E. Schwab
A careful psychiatrist in Merit learns that one patient's nightmares can draw blood, and the discovery reshapes the agency that hunts people like Victor Vale. Schwab's closing Villains novel finds its horror in a gentle voice and its warmth in a makeshift family, though it takes its time getting there.
The Winter of Our Discontent by John Steinbeck
A likeable man narrates his own corruption in the voice he uses for jokes, and never once admits what he is doing. Steinbeck's final novel is his coldest, and the question it leaves a group with is whether the ending lets him off.
Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck
The book that made Steinbeck's name is also the one his admirers find hardest to defend. A group reading it will spend more time on what the author thinks of his characters than on anything the characters do, and that is the right conversation to have.
