Written by Amy @inkwells_bookshelf
There is something so exciting about looking ahead at books. New year, new books is such a good excuse. I don’t mean the ones already stacked on your bedside table or glaring at you from your Kindle app, but the ones that don’t exist in your hands yet. The ones that feel like promises, that future you will thank you for pre-ordering (or, even better, adding to your Christmas list).
So, consider this my first half of 2026 reading wish list. Books I’m already counting down to. There’s a thread running through them too. Questions of womanhood, desire, performance, class, intimacy, faith, and the stories we tell about ourselves to survive.
Let’s get into it.
Chosen Family by Madeleine Gray
Releasing January 2026
Chosen Family follows Nell and Eve from adolescence through adulthood. Friendship, queerness, confusion, jealousy, intimacy, and the decision to keep choosing each other again and again. As friends. As lovers. As something that refuses easy definition.
What’s interesting here is the long view. The way it seems the relationships evolve, fracture, heal, and resettle. The honesty of loving someone deeply without the language, or permission, to name it properly. This sounds like a book about attachment, about growing up alongside someone, about the quiet devastation of knowing someone in all their versions.
I can already tell this will be a book I recommend with strong “trust me” energy, and if you loved Green Dot, this one will be a hit.
Half His Age by Jennette McCurdy
Releasing January 2026
Jennette McCurdy does not write to make you comfortable, and that’s precisely why this is unmissable.
Half His Age centres on a seventeen-year-old girl and her desire for her creative writing teacher, but this is not a romance. It’s a study of longing, power, loneliness, class, and the deep human need to be seen. Waldo is raw and messy and perceptive, and the novel sounds unafraid to sit in the moral discomfort of that desire without simplifying it.
What I love about McCurdy’s writing is her refusal to flatten female yearning into something palatable. This book feels like it will ask hard questions about agency, exploitation, and the stories we tell ourselves when we want something we’re not supposed to want.
Sad, funny, unsettling. The holy trinity.
Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke
Releasing April 2026
If there is one book on this list that feels engineered to live rent-free in my brain, it’s Yesteryear.
Described as trad wife fiction, Stepford Wives meets The Handmaid’s Tale. This novel takes influencer culture, conservative femininity, and performance-as-identity, then does something deliciously cruel with them. Natalie Heller Mills is perfect at being alive, or at least, at selling it. A wholesome farmhouse aesthetic. A handsome husband. Six children. Raw milk. Jam jars. Eight million followers. A lifestyle that looks both aspirational and faintly terrifying.
Until she wakes up in 1805.
What I’m obsessed with here isn’t just the premise, though waking up in a historically accurate pioneer nightmare after monetising faux-trad life is inspired, but the way this book seems to interrogate choice. What does it mean to choose tradition if you can always opt out? What happens when the performance becomes reality and the fantasy demands blood, labour, and pain?
Darkly funny, deeply unsettling, and apparently unafraid to go there, Yesteryear feels like exactly the kind of book I’ll want to underline, argue with, and immediately thrust into other people’s hands.
Don’t Fall in Love With Me by Paige Toon
Releasing April 2026
Sometimes you want a book that feels like summer sunlight through leaves. Warm, aching, and emotionally risky. Paige Toon does this better than almost anyone.
This story of first love, second chances, French summers, old friendships, and emotional crossroads feels tailor-made for late nights and racing hearts. Grace has loved Jackson since she was fifteen. He married someone else. Then suddenly, he’s back, and so is the version of her that never quite moved on.
What I’m drawn to here is the tension between nostalgia and possibility. The danger of loving the idea of someone versus the reality. The way secrets, Étienne’s in particular, threaten to destabilise everything.
Romantic, bittersweet, and unapologetically emotional, this feels like a book that understands how love can be both a comfort and a reckoning.
John of John by Douglas Stuart
Releasing May 2026
Douglas Stuart writing another novel already feels like a gift, but John of John sounds quietly devastating in the way he does best.
A young man returning home to the Hebridean island of Harris. A father steeped in faith, masculinity, and expectation. A grandmother acting as both buffer and fuse. The familiar ache of coming back to a place that shaped you and no longer quite fits.
What draws me here is Stuart’s ability to render place as pressure. The way community can be both shelter and suffocation. How queerness, faith, and masculinity collide not in big dramatic gestures but in glances, silences, and disappointments. Lambing seasons and church pews. The unbearable weight of being known.
If Shuggie Bain broke your heart and Young Mungo stitched it back together just enough to hurt again, this feels like Stuart working at a deeper, quieter register. I am ready to be emotionally undone by it.
I Want You to Be Happy by Jem Calder
Releasing in July 2026
I have a weakness for novels about modern relationships that are excruciatingly honest. The ones that understand how romance, ambition, money, and self-worth get tangled together in small, ugly ways.
This debut looks as though it ticks every box.
An age-gap relationship. A man who once wanted to be a writer and now corrects himself to “lead copywriter.” A woman who dreams of poetry while counting tips and crumbs in her bed. The illusion of possibility that comes with meeting someone new, and the quiet dread of realising you might not want the same future at all.
The comparisons to Sally Rooney make sense, but what excites me most is the focus on illusion versus intention. How often we mistake comfort for love. How often we perform happiness because it’s easier than interrogating it. Tender, witty, and sharp, this feels like a book that will hurt in exactly the right places.
I can’t wait; will you be adding these to your 2026 TBR?
Written by
Amy @inkwells_bookshelf
A thirty-something, bookish, gingham-and-gaudy-mug-obsessed girl, and a firm believer that the best stories are read under a cosy duvet, with a strong coffee and a sleepy dog at your feet.
Image by @flossys_wonderland
