Here are the latest ones:
Happy 2026, PW Picks subscribers! If you got a break over the holidays, I hope it was restful; if you didn't, I hope you get one soon.
This week's newsletter is all about looking forward. First up is a list of the releases our editors are most excited about in Q1 of 2026. Also on the docket is a feature that highlights books about money management, in case your New Year's resolutions are of the financial sort. In between, we've got interviews with novelists and nonfiction writers about southern gothics, historical homophobia, and more.
On the recommendation beat, our editors highlight a fascinating study of scoring systems, a subtle French novel about family and memory, and a religiously tinted thriller set in the grungy clubs of New Orleans. Happy reading!
—Conner Reed
9 Books That Should Be On Your Radar in 2026The first quarter of the year is bursting with new books. These are the titles you should pick up. MORE
Death Becomes HerThe bestselling author’s new novel is a modern gothic thriller about murder and extreme weather in the American South. MORE
Sara Levine’s Got JokesIn her latest novel, the author aims to upend horror conventions, explore human interdependence, and—most importantly—make readers laugh. MORE
‘Black Children Don’t Have to Be Broken to Be Valuable’: PW Talks with Katie Benner and Erica L. GreenThe journalists’ Miracle Children exposes abuses at T.M. Landry, a Louisiana prep school once widely acclaimed for helping Black students get into elite colleges. MORE
Income Inequality’s Ancient Connection to Homophobia: PW Talks with Harry TannerIn The Queer Thing About Sin, the classicist argues that ancient history reveals a connection between homophobia and economic inequality. MORE
Personal Finance Books for Today’s EconomyNew titles help readers navigate a changing financial picture. MORE
Divine Ruin: A Sister Holiday MysteryBy Margot Douaihy (Zando/Flynn)
Douaihy's gritty series starring tatted bisexual New Orleans nun/gumshoe Holiday Walsh has yet to disappoint. This installment finds Sister Holiday tapping back into her roots as a party girl to go undercover and trace the flow of fentanyl through NOLA after one of her students dies of an accidental overdose. If you, like me, got a kick out of Wake Up Dead Man over the holiday season, here's an equally potent blend of genre thrills and spiritual searching. —Conner Reed, mystery and memoir reviews editor
The Score: How to Stop Playing Someone Else's GameBy C. Thi Nguyen (Penguin Press)
Nguyen makes game philosophy surprisingly accessible with this colorful look at scoring systems—how they enhance individual game playing, but harm society in clumsily attempting to quantify metrics like happiness that can't be accurately measured. It's an intriguing philosophical investigation with plenty of smart suggestions for navigating our increasingly data-obsessed culture. —Miriam Grossman, religion and self-help reviews editor
By Elisa Shua Dusapin, trans. by Aneesa Abbas Higgins (Summit)
The author’s lean and lyrical books take place in a wide range of settings: a remote Korean resort, a Tokyo pachinko parlor, a Russian circus. I’ve loved all of them, and I’m excited to dive into her latest, about two sisters who reunite when they return to their family home in rural France. —David Varno, literary fiction reviews editor
1 Theo of Golden |
2 The Housemaid |
3 |
4 Murder at Holly House |
5 Mom, I Want to Hear Your Story (Expanded Edition): A Mother's Guided Journal to Share Her Life & Her Love (Revised) |
6 |
7 The Atomic Habits Workbook: Official Companion to the #1 Worldwide Bestseller |
8 The Guy She Was Interested in Wasn't a Guy at All, Vol. 3 |
9 The Surrogate Mother |
10 |
Download a printable PDF of this bestsellers list.
For more PW bestsellers lists, click here.
 |  |  |  |
This is it, folks, our final PW Picks of 2025, and it's a good one. First, PW’s editors shout out nine books from 2025 that shouldn't be overlooked, and we round up a list of romance novels infused with seasonal spice.
As a major Roberto Bolaño fan, it was a treat to get a list of five favorites from my predecessor on the fiction desk, Gabe Habash (turns out Gabe and I only diverge on one slot). Email us at the link below if you want to discuss the choices.
Lastly, we hear from authors Julian Brave NoiseCat and Abraham Verghese on the literature that inspired their work, and PW’s reviews editors recommend books hitting the shelves this month.
We'll be back on January 9th. Until then, happy holidays, and see you in the new year!
—David Varno
Starred Reviews Releasing Next WeekCheck out all the books to receive starred PW reviews that are hitting shelves next week. MORE
9 Books from 2025 You Shouldn't OverlookAs our editors continue to look back on the books published this year, we thought it would be worth shouting out these under-appreciated gems. MORE
10 Holiday RomancesAn advent calendar of classic Christmas movies, 12 days of Christmas sex toys, and stories of fake dating and second chances round out this year's notable romances. MORE
The Best of Roberto BolañoWith fresh Bolaño reprints flooding shelves and winning accolades for their new covers, we asked novelist Gabe Habash to pick his favorite works by the late, great Chilean author. MORE
Writers Talking Writers: Julian Brave NoiseCat on Herman Melville and Abraham Verghese on Ernest HemingwayThe Academy Award nominee and National Humanities Medal recipient discuss the long shadows of two literary giants. MORE
Frostlines: A Journey Through Entangled Lives and Landscapes in a Warming ArcticBy Neil Shea (Ecco)
I was totally transported reading this Arctic travelogue from National Geographic writer Shea. Journeying from Alaska and Canada to Greenland and Norway, he gives an up-close look at how climate change is affecting landscapes, wildlife, and Indigenous communities. His vivid encounter with wolves in particular has stuck with me; it’s equally moving and unsettling. —Marisa Charpentier, science and pop culture reviews editor
Love Letters for Other PeopleBy Shaylin Gandhi (Canary Street)
This is an emotional contemporary romance with a clever Cyrano de Bergerac–inspired twist: heroine Aubrey MacLean falls for Gallant Nobel because of his swoon-worthy love letters, not realizing that he's been buying the missives from her ex-boyfriend's letter-writing service. It's a juicy setup for a tender second-chance romance. —Phoebe Cramer, SFF, horror, and romance reviews editor
Only SingBy John Berryman, edited by Shane McCrae (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Each time I open my 1969 clothbound edition of The Dream Songs, I’m captured by Berryman’s destabilizing breaks in logic, striking images, and gut-punching lines. Catherine Lacey made a whole novel out of “nobody is ever missing,” which also became the title of an episode of Succession. Despite that line’s ubiquity, its power still hits me when I encounter it on the page. I’m happy to add this new volume to the shelf, and I admire McCrae’s fresh view into Berryman’s work in the intro, where he calls the songs a uniquely American epic, one with an “unheroic hero” at its center. —David Varno, literary fiction reviews editor
1 Dog Man: Big Jim Believes: A Graphic Novel (Dog Man #14): From the Creator of Captain Underpants |
2 Partypooper: a Side-Splitting Birthday Disaster from the #1 International Bestselling Diary of a Wimpy Kid Series (Book 20) |
3 |
4 Stop, in the Name of God: Why Honoring the Sabbath Will Transform Your Life |
5 |
6 From Crook to Cook: Platinum Recipes from Tha Boss Dogg's Kitchen (Snoop Dogg Cookbook, Celebrity Cookbook with Soul Food Recipes) |
7 The Secret of Secrets |
8 Eric Carle: Around the Farm |
9 |
10 |
For more PW bestsellers lists, click here.
| | | |
Send editorial questions about this e-newsletter to David Varno.
Send advertising questions about this e-newsletter to Joe Murray.
For additional assistance, contact us by email or at the address below.
Publishers Weekly,
49 West 23rd Street
Ninth Floor
New York, NY 10010
Phone 212-377-5500
Copyright 2025, PWxyz, LLC. PUBLISHERS WEEKLY and the PW Logo are trademarks of PWxyz, LLC.
This week, our editors recommend a diverse trio of titles rooted in the past. In one of the novels, a Polish woman becomes obsessed with a 14th-century saint; the other braids the story of a lovestruck baker with a similar romance decades earlier. Rounding things out is an ambitious memoir that plays similar time tricks, with the author considering how her husband's family history intersects her own.
The backward glances keep coming in chats with Gyles Brandreth about his biography of Winnie-the-Pooh mastermind A.A. Milne, and Chris Hauty, whose latest thriller puts a decidedly original spin on the JFK assassination.
Happy reading!
—Conner Reed
Starred Reviews Releasing Next WeekCheck out all the books to receive starred PW reviews that are hitting shelves next week. MORE
Kristi DeMeester Is Screaming on the InsideThe author’s horror fiction lays bare dark truths about the real world with grand ambition—just don’t call it literary. MORE
Winnie-the-Pooh at 100: PW Talks with Gyles BrandrethIn Somewhere, a Boy and a Bear, the biographer explores the complicated life of A.A. Milne and his Winnie-the-Pooh stories. MORE
Inflection Points: PW Talks with Chris HautyA disgraced Secret Service agent and a Jesuit priest set out to solve the JFK assassination in Dead Ringer, the author’s paranoid new thriller. MORE
Marion Winik on 12 Memoirs of WidowhoodThe author of First Comes Love, recently reissued by Vintage with a new audiobook, reflects on the spate of widow memoirs that have appeared in the years since she first published the book in 1996. MORE
House of Day, House of NightBy Olga Tokarczuk, trans. by Antonia Lloyd-Jones (Riverhead)
A confession: for some reason, I haven’t been able to find traction with Tokarczuk’s work. Maybe it’s the airiness of the fragmentary style, or my exhaustion with the subject of Christianity. Whatever the case, I’m not even in a minority. I’m alone. My Tokarczuk-nut friends all shake their heads at me. So I’m going to try again with this one, which, from what I’ve read so far, feels refreshingly grounded and purposefully mysterious in ways that just might grab me. —David Varno, literary fiction reviews editor
By Alexis Hall (Sourcebooks Casablanca)
I've been a fan of Hall's Winner Bakes All series, a trio of incandescently witty queer rom-coms set behind the scenes of a Great British Bake Off-style reality show, since the very start. This final installment, which twines contemporary and historical love stories, sounds like the most ambitious yet. —Phoebe Cramer, SFF, horror, and romance reviews editor
By Janice Page (Pegasus)
I'm eager to dive into this ambitious debut from Washington Post editor Page, which shape-shifts from an account of her bumpy Boston childhood and romance with her Taiwanese husband, James, into a sweeping history of James's family fleeing political persecution in China during the Cold War. —Conner Reed, mystery and memoir reviews editor
1 Dog Man: Big Jim Believes: A Graphic Novel (Dog Man #14): From the Creator of Captain Underpants |
2 Partypooper: a Side-Splitting Birthday Disaster from the #1 International Bestselling Diary of a Wimpy Kid Series (Book 20) |
3 |
4 The Elf on the Shelf: A Christmas Tradition [With Light Girl Doll] |
5 The Elf on the Shelf: A Christmas Tradition [With Light Boy Doll] |
6 |
7 Crowntide (Lightlark #4) |
8 The Book of Unusual Knowledge |
9 Until He Comes: 365 Daily Devotions as We Await His Return |
10 The Secret of Secrets |
For more PW bestsellers lists, click here.
| | | |
No comments:
Post a Comment