Publishers Weekly Names Its Best Books of 2026

Publishers Weekly has published its Best Books of 2026, a list of 150 titles chosen by its reviews editors. The list went up on October 23, with a top 10 and separate category lists. Ben Lerner's novel Transcription is the cover book.

The magazine's reviews director, David Adams, writes in his introduction that the editors began the weeks-long selection process last month over a long lunch. He calls this year's top 10 one that "might be the strongest in recent memory," and says it could easily have been expanded with titles from the category longlists and from the 50 selections for children and teens.

The top 10

The top 10 page lists these books:

• The AGI Chronicles: The Inside Story of the Race to Create an Artificial Superintelligence, by Kevin Roose (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• The Castle: Adventures in a World of Unraveling Men, by Jon Ronson (Riverhead)
• Cool Machine, by Colson Whitehead (Doubleday)
• The Danger to Be Sane: Creativity and the Eccentric Mind, by Rosa Montero, translated from the Spanish by Lindsey Ford (Europa)
• The Disappearers, by Marlon James (Riverhead)
• The Palm House, by Gwendoline Riley (New York Review Books)
• Public Access Afterworld, by Jane Schoenbrun (Hogarth)
• The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, by Jill Lepore (Liveright)
• This Vast Enterprise: A New History of Lewis & Clark, by Craig Fehrman (Avid Reader)
• Transcription, by Ben Lerner (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

What the editors said about them

Two of the ten are about artificial intelligence. The editors call Roose's book an "entertaining and essential account" of the race inside leading AI companies. They say Lepore argues that AI governance is the final form of Hannah Arendt's "totalitarian state," while also predicting its fall.

Cool Machine concludes Whitehead's Harlem Trilogy, and the editors call it one of the best novels of New York City in recent memory. Of Transcription, they write that its story involves a broken smartphone and is driven by "ageless concerns about technology's effects on art, consciousness, and human relationships." James's novel runs about 600 pages; the editors single out his ability to sustain a thought across all of them.

Montero's book begins as a study of the psychology of great writers and turns into an account of her pursuit of an impostor who posed as her for years. Ronson's starts with a steel heir's attempt to set up a harem in a New England castle and widens into what the editors describe as an inquiry into men driven into very public, career-ending spirals.

The categories

Beyond the top 10, the site sorts the picks into fiction, mystery, romance, SF/fantasy/horror, poetry, comics, nonfiction, religion, lifestyle, picture books, middle grade, and young adult.

Why it matters for authors and publishers

Year-end lists from trade reviewers feed library orders, bookstore tables, and holiday buying guides, and this one is among the first of the season. Nine of the top ten are by authors writing in English, and one, Montero's, is a translation, from Europa Editions. Two of the ten are about AI, and both come from writers who are not technologists: a tech reporter and a historian.

Sources

• Publishers Weekly: Best Books 2026
• Publishers Weekly: Best Books 2026, Top 10