📚 Vibes-based front-runners

Early predictions for the 2026-2027 book awards season

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May 12, 2026 | View Online | Join All Access | Listen

💰 Protein-maxxing and cryotherapy aren’t the only ways you can try to live forever. For a couple hundred bucks, you can have a famous writer name a character after you in their next book.

Sarah MacLean, Rebecca Makkai, Jodi Picoult, and David Baldacci are among the authors offering up naming rights in an auction benefitting PEN America’s new Author Safety Program, which helps protect writers facing harassment, threats, and intimidation both online and in person. We wish that didn’t have to exist, but <waves hands at 2026>.

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THE HEADLINE

The Goodreads guide to summer reading

Photo by Radek Grzybowski on Unsplash

Whatever your vibe for summer reading, Goodreads has you covered. The social reading site has a whole bunch of new lists to keep your beach bag, carry-on, and bedside table all stocked up.

✈️ Escape on a holiday, from a cult, to a different timeline, into nature, or out of the modern era

✅ Keep up with the most anticipated new releases of the season

🌶️ Spice it up with 69 (we see you, Goodreads) romances and romantasies

🍿 Take a vacation in Adaptation Nation to read these books before you watch the movie or series

🚀 Seek a new reality with the biggest sci-fi, fantasy, and horror reads

📓 ICYMI: we ran down the 10 buzziest books of May.

NEW RELEASES

The return of Veronica Roth

Veronica Roth is having a big year. The Divergent author’s new romantic dystopian fantasy series for adults kicks off today with Seek the Traitor’s Son, which Kirkus hailed as "a standout genre-bending adventure with a tender romantic streak."

Roth also made headlines at last month’s BookCon event with the announcement that she’ll be returning to YA shelves—and the Divergent universe—this fall with The Sixth Faction, the first in a new duology.

Also hitting shelves today:

A Parade of Horribles by Matt Dinniman: The adventures of Dungeon Crawler Carl continue with the eighth book in the blockbuster series

Coyoteland by Vanessa Hua: Scandals abound when a Chinese American family moves to the suburbs of Berkeley in a novel earning comps to Little Fires Everywhere

How to Not Know by Simone Stalzoff: An acclaimed journalist explores "the value of uncertainty in a world that demands answers"

New Skin by Sarah Wang: Mother-daughter frenemies with a plastic surgery addiction find themselves in a dangerous spiral

🔓 Unlock our New Release Index and track all of the most interesting forthcoming releases when you join All Access.

TOGETHER WITH THE NATURALS

Criminal Minds for the BookTok generation.​

The FBI has a classified program that recruits exceptional teens to crack cold cases. Seventeen-year-old Cassie can read anyone in seconds. She didn’t think she was special until they came for her.

From #1 bestselling author Jennifer Lynn Barnes, The Naturals series has sold over two million copies and built a devoted following among fans of Holly Jackson and Criminal Minds. Books 1-4 are now available in deluxe limited edition hardcovers with foiled covers, stenciled edges, printed endpapers, and ribbon bookmarks. Book 5, Dangerous Impulses, arrives this fall.

Get yours while supplies last.

ZERO TO WELL-READ

Level-up your reading skills

The #1 listener request since we launched the Zero to Well-Read podcast last fall has been for some kind of book club or community reading experience.

Today, we’re thrilled to announce Zero to Well-Read Guided Read-Alongs, which are designed to help you tackle books you’ve always meant to read and enjoy them more deeply without turning reading into homework.

How It Works:

📆 4 times per year: we’ll select a title to read together. Classics, award winners, surprise literary phenomena, you name it.

🎁 Title reveals: 4-6 weeks out, we’ll announce the title and give you plenty of time to acquire a copy or request it from the library.

🧭 Pre-Reading Guide: 2-4 weeks out, members will get an exclusive mini-episode about how to prepare for the read, what to pay attention to and anything else you need to know before you dive in.

💬 Chat with us and other members as you read in a dedicated chat space. We’ll be in the chat throughout the read, offering prompts, context, and conversation as we go.

🙋‍♀️ Read-alongs are exclusively available to members of the Zero to Well-Read Patreon. Join today, and watch for the first title reveal later this month.

AWARDS

Way-too-early 2026 book award predictions

With the 2026 Pulitzer Prizes in the rear-view mirror, it’s time (finally) to turn our attention to what books might win the major 2027 awards (for books published in 2026. I know, it’s nuts. I don’t make the rules). Below are my completely vibes-based front-runners for a few of the high-profile fiction accolades up for grabs this year.

The National Book Award: Kin by Tayari Jones

Jones won the Women’s Prize in 2019 for An American Marriage, but an NBA would be a major step up in awareness. Kin is published by Knopf after Jones’s previous couple of books were with Algonquin. Could this follow Percival Everett’s Big 5 switch that saw him win the NBA for James?

The Pulitzer Prize: One Leg on Earth by ’Pemi Aguda

I loved Aguda’s short story collection, Ghostroots, and am pumped to read her high-concept debut novel, One Leg on Earth. Ghostroots was shortlisted for the NBA, a relative rarity for a short story debut, so she is in the conversation already.

The National Book Critics Circle Award: Transcription by Ben Lerner

The NBCC is probably closest to awarding the kind of books that I like to read the most—and sometimes that is it, the NBCC and me. Transcription by Ben Lerner is finding a readership that is a little bigger than that, which is tremendous for a strange little book that doesn’t have a plot and jumps quite abruptly right in the middle. But real ones know. The real ones being me and presumably the NBCC.

Amazon/B&N Best Book of the Year: Whistler by Ann Patchett

Somewhat surprisingly, Patchett hasn’t had a book in the awards mix in a serious way since Bel Canto won both the Orange Prize and the PEN/Faulker Award (and was a finalist for the NBCC). These two retailers select a book of the year that means more to actual sales than any of the awards above (and probably all of them together). Patchett writes the sort of accessible, engrossing, yet still thoughtful kinds of books that are the sweet spot here: books people will like, will feel good about having liked, and then will give as gifts when holiday time rolls around. (And I am not sure why, but I feel like Whistler being horse-forward helps its case.) — JO

TOGETHER WITH W. W. NORTON

Something is happening to the women of Lagos.​

Pregnant women are walking into the water. No one knows why. And the city is holding its breath.

One Leg on Earth , the debut novel from ’Pemi Aguda, author of National Book Award finalist Ghostroots, follows a 23-year-old architecture intern coming of age in a city gripped by dread. Part-fable, part-horror story, One Leg on Earth is eerily atmospheric and impossible to look away from.

LITERARY ACTIVISM

How libraries and library lovers can prepare for Pride Month

Pride Month is coming in June, and with it, the programs, book displays, and conversations about LGBTQ+ identity and history across the USA and beyond. Several years into surging book bans, escalating violence, and swiftly rising fascism, it is important to prepare for the upcoming month of events to anticipate all that has, does, and might arise.

Here are some things to consider in the library as Pride approaches:

🏳️‍🌈 We can’t talk about Pride month in 2026 without talking about the anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ+ bill, House Resolution 7661.

This bill would implement a nationwide book ban on “sexually oriented material,” including materials depicting “gender dysphoria or transgenderism” or “lewd or lascivious dancing” for public schools.

Consider where and how you can provide information to your patrons and how to make sure their voices are heard on the matter with federal representatives.

🏳️‍🌈 Share your stories of Pride censorship in libraries in 2026.

The reports can be of pre-Pride cancellations or quiet censorship, as much as they can be about louder cancellations throughout the month.

🏳️‍🌈 Safety first: Pride should be a month where queer identity and history can be experienced safely.

As you prepare for displays and programs, take time to catch up with the things that came up last year, the year prior, and the year before that during Pride at libraries.

Library workers can find more ideas here.

Patrons: write to your local library board in support of LGBTQ+ books and programming. — KJ

AUTHOR RECOMMENDATIONS

The sacred texts of weird horror

photo credit: Kate Dollarhyde 2023

Sarah Gailey is the author of Make Me Better , out today from Tor Books. Below, they recommend three transgressive horror novels that inspired their work.

Make Me Better is a novel that explores the dynamics of control within a community. It’s about rules and structure and how comforting those things can be to a person who feels lost. It’s about who we are, as defined by the people around us, and what happens when we transgress that communal definition of self.

These are three books I have returned to over and over to anchor myself in what communities can be, and what they’re capable of - for better, and for worse.

Mama Day by Gloria Naylor: One of the finest pieces of postmodern literature ever written, and one of the most petrifying pieces of horror I’ve ever had the pleasure of encountering. Mama Day is deeply grounded in the true friction of tight-knit communities. It explores the violent love and deep-rooted loathing of people whose whole lives have been spent bumping up against each other. It takes place in the body; the body is the community; the community controls the body. It is, to me, a sacred text.

Scapegracers by H.A. Clarke: Sit down with me for ten minutes and I guarantee I will have spent six of those minutes talking about Scapegracers. This is a book that understands the mess and pain and grime of relationships like no other. Clarke is a genius for writing the wounds people inflict on each other, just by being imperfect. It is a book that points to love and points to pain and insists that both are inevitable and necessary.

The Vegetarian by Han Kang, translated by Deborah Smith: This is a book about control, brutality, and the focus required to actually pursue self-definition. The Vegetarian follows the consequences of one woman’s choice to be in charge of her own body. Her community spirals as a result of their inability to force her to fit their understanding of her. Kang’s exploration of the violence of community is shocking and brilliant.

TOGETHER WITH BLOOM BOOKS

The Mummy meets Game of Thrones.

Terror at the Gates, the beloved first book in Scarlett St. Clair’s seductive new romantasy series, is back with exclusive cover art and gorgeous designed edges. This high-heat, high-stakes dark fantasy from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of A Touch of Darkness and Mountains Made of Glass is essential reading for fans of Jennifer L. Armentrout and Sarah J. Maas.

Book two, Coiled at the Roots, is available for pre-order now.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY

Daphne du Maurier, born May 13, 1907

Did you know? When Daphne du Maurier was named Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire, she didn’t tell anyone, and her children only found out when they read it in the newspaper.

CRITICAL LINKING

You are now free to roam about the internet

💔 Find out what happens when people start reading ACOTAR and stop dating bad boyfriends.

🌈 Read great novels about gay life recommended by Douglas Stuart.

📚 Check out these must-read new books out in May—that also complete 2026 Read Harder Challenge tasks.

🚐 Hit the road with the traveling bookstore serving Alabama readers.

📰 Keep up with all the books news by signing up for our Today in Books newsletter.

END NOTES

Written by Rebecca Schinsky, Jeff O’Neal, Kelly Jensen, and Danika Ellis. Thanks to Vanessa Diaz for copy editing.

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