A vision lay before him: Fleet Street blanketed with snow, silent, empty, pure white, and, at the end of it, the huge and majestic form of Saint Paul's Cathedral. It was a spellbinding moment: the great thoroughfare temporarily devoid of carts and carriages, the cathedral looming blurrily out of the still-falling snowflakes a real-life snow globe.
The most common titles on hold with the longest waits include The Correspondent by Virginia Evans, Theo of Golden by Allen Levi, Project Hail Mary by Andrew Weir, Heart the Lover by Lily King and Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage by Belle Burden.
What does it mean to subscribe to something? Whether we mean a belief or a magazine, the definition is complicated. I began subscribing to The New Yorker when I was a sophomore in college; more than 30 years later, I have yet to stop and I feel strongly that I never will. Yet during some of those years-okay, many of them-the weekly issues have piled up in my home and gone mostly unread between biannual days of bingeing and purging. If these reading habits could somehow be converted into digital clicks, the resulting "traffic report" might look like I don't want the product at all.
"Race Against Time: A Reporter Reopens the Unsolved Murder Cases of the Civil Rights Era" quickly became one of my favorite nonfiction books written by a journalist. I appreciated how he showed the grueling, day-to-day work local journalism requires, and how many layers of people fought him in revealing the despicable work of the Ku Klux Klan.
If you have to read and reread in order to put together what's happening, then you are a co-creator of that literary experience. She saw this as specifically important for Black literature. Her highest aspiration, as she put it, was to create something at the level of jazz, which she saw as the highest form of Black art.
Dilara, the protagonist of this début novel, is consumed by the absence of a stable home in her life. She and her family flee Turkey, where she is from, after a failed coup in 2016. When they end up in Italy, something inexplicable happens: Dilara's bathroom transforms into a cell in an infamous prison on the outskirts of Istanbul.
Two fiction books about good friends coming from different circumstances. Two biographies of people whose influence on American culture is, arguably, still underrated. One Liza Minnelli memoir. These are just a handful of books coming out in the first few months of 2026 that we've got our eye on. Fiction 'Autobiography of Cotton' by Cristina Rivera Garza, Feb. 3 Garza, who won a Pulitzer in 2024 for memoir/autobiography, actually first published Autobiography of Cotton back in 2020, but it's only now getting an English translation.
Subsequently, runaway children turned the valley into a fortress, surviving on food they could catch or grow, with occasional forays into the towns below. Riley has heard the rumours, but it is only when she sees a green-clad boy or is it a girl? hovering outside her bedroom window offering directions on how to find Nowhere that she realises this might be her chance to escape and save her little brother from their sadistic guardian.
We meet him as a Gumby-like figure, asleep on a dirt floor, with only a jug of water and a toy horse. He has no idea how he got there. When he's around seventeen years old, Kaspar meets his captor, rendered in the book as a shadowy, hatch-marked father: "The Man in Black." The man teaches him to write his name; he teaches him to take a few fumbling goose steps outside.
Punxsutawney Phil has emerged from his cozy underground burrow and spoken: There are still six more weeks of winter ahead to endure. February may bear the unfortunate distinction of being the shortest month of the year, but it has no shortage of new releases hot off the presses. With winter still roaring in full force, this is the perfect time to catch up on the reading you swore you'd do as a New Year's resolution.
What does it mean to dig into the past, to uncover obscure facts about bygone decades or centuries and bring them to light in 2026? There's a lot of that in this rundown of February books, everything from a clear-eyed look at someone who history has depicted as a monster to investigations into the past situated a little closer to home.
Out of the many hundreds of titles that our organization carefully considered this year, these singular and striking finalists rose to the top, NBCC President Adam Dalva said in a statement Tuesday. They interrogate the lives we lead, broaden our creative and social horizons, move us, and continually surprise us. Especially in this difficult time, every one of these writers and translators deserves to be celebrated - and to be widely read.
Not only had young John not written as much as he thought he had; his mother (who was his true soulmate) was now feeling self-conscious because she had written three letters to his every one. Two perfect paragraphs follow these opening sentences, addressing the situation as John has been led to believe the folks back home are experiencing it, after which he writes: