Top Ten Tuesday; Most Anticipated Books Releasing in the Second Half of 2026

It's Tuesday, which means it's time for another Top Ten Tuesday post courtesy of That Artsy Reader Girl and the theme of the week is most anticipated books releasing in the second half of 2026.

Here's my ten picks.

Meet Me in the Garden by Nina LaCour

Description from Goodreads

From bestselling author Nina LaCour comes a sweeping family saga that wrestles with themes of self-discovery and love in all forms, inspired by the author's own Creole family

New Orleans, 1944. Odette has always been one of the Honore sisters, glamorous and admired in their Creole community. But while Odette’s older sisters are content to be wives and mothers, Odette has always wanted something else. It is only with her beloved cousin, Delphine, that Odette can tell her secret: she is in love with a woman, and she longs to be an artist. Delphine has a secret lover, too, a white man. In the hidden garden they’ve discovered, Odette and Delphine can dream of futures full of passion and freedom.

But five years later, Odette's life is nothing like what she'd planned. She's a widowed mother, living in Los Angeles, and she and Delphine, who is passing as white, have spiraled away from each other. When Delphine reaches a breaking point, Odette must make a shattering choice to try to hold her family together.

Profound and expansive, a story of love and longing, art and motherhood, friendship and desire, Meet Me in the Garden is a decades-spanning tour de force, inspired by the author’s family and tracing the history of the Great Migration.

All We Hide by Robyn Gigl

Description from Goodreads

A trans detective working for the District Attorney’s Office takes on the twisty, poignant cold case murder of a local trans woman, and her investigation unravels the threads of a mystery that’s haunted her since she was a child: her mother’s disappearance.

When Lieutenant Lauren Kelly is exiled to the newly created Homicide Cold Case Unit at the DA’s office, she knows they’re sticking her there as punishment, hoping she does nothing for the next two years until she hits twenty-five years on the force and can quietly retire. That way, no one can claim they discriminated against the only trans detective in Donn County.

With her ex-detective father declining with Alzheimer’s, Lauren has a lot on her plate already—but with regards to the cold cases, she has other plans. She reopens the investigation into the death of Sherry Darling, a trans sex worker she went to high school with. As Lauren looks deeper into the events surrounding Sherry’s murder, she uncovers evidence of a cover up with implications beyond anything she could have ever imagined . . . and she becomes more and more convinced that what happened to Sherry is somehow tied to why her own mother disappeared when she was a child.

This brand new investigation from the acclaimed author of the Erin McCabe series is a nesting doll of pulse-pounding mysteries that dig deep into bias, corruption, and local scandal.

Lady X by Molly Fader

Description from Goodreads

The search for a notorious vigilante exposes the secrets between three generations of women in this propulsive novel of female resistance and rage, sweeping from contemporary L.A. to gritty, 1970s New York.

Los Angeles, 2024. After learning that her A-List actor husband sent explicit photos to multiple girls on social media, Margot Cooper runs away from the world—and the paparazzi—by fleeing to her childhood home with her teenage daughter in tow.

But home isn’t the sanctuary Margot was hoping for. In a cardboard box in the corner of the attic, she finds damning evidence of an infamous urban legend, the mysterious vigilante “Lady X”—including a blurry newspaper photo of a woman who looks an awful lot like Margot’s mother.

New York City, 1977. In the midst of an infamous summer, Ginger Daughtry and her two beloved roommates are able to shield each other from the chaos—until one of them is assaulted. Astounded by the lack of response from police, the young women decide to engage in some light payback, signing their handiwork as “Lady X.”

Soon copycats appear, and a movement inspired by acts of vandalism against terrible men spirals out of control, with criminals running amok under the guise of the enigmatic “Lady X.” When a body is found fallen—or pushed—from five stories high, the hunt reaches a boiling point.

But Lady X has vanished into thin air.

Family Friends by Chloë Ashby

Description from Goodreads

A beautifully poised and riveting novel about the intricacies and entanglements of a group of friends holidaying in the south of France. I was gripped from the start' Claire Powell, author of At The Table

'Sultry and very evocative' Jo Hamya, author of The Hypocrite

Since they first met at university twenty years ago, Maggie and Will have spent the last two weeks of every summer in France with their close friends, Lydia and Roland. Both families have been looking forward to this cherished annual ritual – but this year things are different.

Will has been hiding something from his wife, and is struggling to keep his deceit from seeping into the cracks in their marriage. Maggie is worried about their withdrawn teenage son. Roland is grappling with grief over the death of his first wife. Lydia is trying to ignore past chemistry with an old friend while learning to play second fiddle to a ghost.

Into this conflicted fray steps Issy, Roland’s beguiling, irrepressible daughter from his first marriage. And as the August heat beats down, and the children find new ways to entertain themselves, it starts to feel as if the fault lines in these relationships might widen; that it might be harder to hide secrets here, under the bright sun.

Family Friends is a deeply atmospheric, sophisticated and compelling novel about what happens when the ties of love and loyalty are stretched to breaking point, how relationships change (and don’t change) over time, and how we navigate the challenges thrown at us in every season of life.

The Shadows Tomorrow by Noëlle Michel

Description from Goodreads

Sea of Tranquility meets Dark Matter in this dizzying speculative thriller following a clan of Neanderthals living in isolation on a nature reserve and the scientists who care for them.

A clan of humans—they hunt and gather, they have lovers and rivals, their own society. They pass on the legends of their ancestors and celebrate festival nights. Their world is the forest which feeds them, and, aside from the fierce cold and illness, the only thing they have to fear is the Beast who prowls the impassable Bounds. They do not know that beyond it an entirely different world exists: our world.

Set in the near future, the Neanderthal race has been recreated from fragments of DNA and reintroduced on a nature reserve where they are observed and studied, ultimately becoming the subjects of a hit documentary series. Following a cast of characters across time: Blood Moon, the leader of the Neanderthal clan who is mourning the death of her partner, Blizzard; Eva and Noah, scientists in modern-day Paris hired to work on a top-secret project; Jules, a teenager growing up in a secluded mountain town with a suspiciously pronounced brow; Adam, an actor brought to appear on NeanderTales for the first time; and finally, the man behind the project—but is he Sapien or Neanderthal?

A reeling suspense novel with shocking surprises that also sheds light on our ethical and moral considerations in and out of nature, showing the other human we could have been, The Shadows Tomorrow will grip you until the very end.

Kitten by Stacey Yu

Description from Goodreads

A magnetic, stirring debut novel about an adrift young woman whose growing fascination with her boyfriend’s cat ushers her into the possibilities of her own life—but not without first threatening to unravel it.

Katie is far from home and fresh out of college, desperate to skirt adulthood’s demands, and all too willing to let her wealthy boyfriend James make decisions for them both. It doesn’t help that she’s no longer speaking to her mother. Or that her roommate has abruptly moved out of their New York City apartment. But when James takes Katie on vacation to his family’s seaside house, he brings Silver, his childhood cat, and Katie discovers a sudden, strange, and giddy sense of connection.

Silver doesn’t mind that Katie can’t seem to get a job, hold her own at dinner parties, or make amends with her mother. Silver, who gets to lie around all day, misbehave spectacularly, be cute, gross, and still get fed, seems to have the life Katie increasingly longs for. Soon enough, they’re inseparable, and something inside Katie begins to crack open, or maybe just…crack.

Because if Katie has learned anything from her estranged mother, it’s that devotion comes at a price. As Katie’s affection for Silver deepens, all of her other relationships begin to falter. Soon, Katie must confront what it is she desires from her life, and what she might have to risk to get it.

Both darkly playful and unexpectedly heartfelt, this debut from a major new voice in fiction is a timeless reckoning with the uncertainty of becoming a person in a world that is as disorienting as it is full of hope and promise.

Please Don't Touch the Body by Emily Doyle

Description from Goodreads

“A magnificent debut” (Laila Lalami) that explores loneliness and community, religion and repression, and the pleasure and pain of being a woman.

"In these carefully crafted stories, lonely people come face to face with the strange or the unsettling, leading to messy, horny, funny, and ultimately profound complications." -Laila Lalami, author of The Dream Hotel and The Other Americans

The 11 stories in Please Don't Touch the Body are at once dry and comic, grounded and surreal as they play deftly with genre and expectation to explore human alienation.

In the collection's first story, a Japanese woman finds healing in a secret life as a sex advice columnist after being fetishized by her white husband for decades, while in the fourth story, Ronald Reagan is reincarnated as a puppy and must cope with being squeezed, dropped, and controlled by his young, queer owner. And in “Thank You No Thank You” a young woman who grew up in a cloistered religious community and escaped to a liberal law school grapples with the rules she learned in childhood, the rules of her new life, and her actual desires as she vacations with her long-term boyfriend.

Together these inventive, emotionally rich stories reveal an incredible new vision and voice and a writer to watch.

Country People by Daniel Mason

Description from Goodreads

A rollicking work of lyricism and humor, about one family’s tumble into the unknown, from the Pulitzer Prize finalist and bestselling author of North Woods

Miles Krzelewski is a devoted husband, a doting father beloved for his outlandish bedtime stories, and the proud owner of a truffle-hunting dog in a land with no truffles. He is also a bit lost, twelve years late with his PhD on Russian folktales, and increasingly haunted by a sense that he's become a disappointment to his family. So when his wife Kate accepts a visiting professorship at a prestigious college in the far away forests of Vermont, he decides that this will be his year to finally move forward with his life.

But Miles is a man of many enthusiasms, one who possesses, in Kate’s words, “a great capacity to fall in with anyone, anywhere.” And no sooner does he arrive than he finds himself entangled with a cast of characters as colorful as any of his folktales, from a ghostly tree surgeon to a scythe-mad biochemist, a Shakespearean temptress and a photographer of snowflakes obsessed with chronicling, on thousands of index cards, the world’s delusions in a “Inventory of Wrong Ideas.”

The new friends, the enchanted woods, the sure, no PhD, but all good fun. Until Miles stumbles upon a bizarre—perhaps ridiculous—local legend, which, he soon suspects, might not be just a legend after all.

Joyous, absurd, and life-affirming, Country People is a luminous exploration of marriage and parenthood, the nature of belief and the power of stories, and the ways in which we find connection in an increasingly fragmented world.

The Disappearers by Marlon James

Description from Goodreads

From Marlon James, author of the Booker Prize–winning A Brief History of Seven Killings: a propulsive novel about the murder of a gay man in 1980s Jamaica and its tragic consequences.

In 1988, eight men in Kingston, Jamaica, begin rehearsals for a play. The men are strangers to one another and each has a different reason for being involved. But they all share one inescapable All of them are gay―a "batty man" in Jamaican argot―and all of them must contend with the dangers that such a truth lays bare.

One night a mob savagely attacks them, killing one of the men. For the survivors, their recovery is as much emotional as it is As their bodies heal, each man grapples with the violence, the hatred and the rage that the attack made plain. Some try to ignore what the attack has unearthed, while others double down on retribution.

In The Disappearers, Marlon James has written a riveting and deeply human story of men forced to make compromises to survive what the society they live in demands. It is both a dramatic page-turner and an unflinching exploration of queer life in Jamaica during the 1980s and 1990s.

Taipei Story by R. F. Kuang

Description from Goodreads

From R.F. Kuang, the acclaimed #1 New York Times bestselling author of Katabasis and Yellowface, comes a wryly humorous and profoundly moving coming-of-age novel that grapples with grief, language, and culture shock—all set against the backdrop of an unforgettable summer in Taipei.

College freshman Lily Chen is off to spend the summer in Taipei at an intensive language program like so many Chinese American students before her, hoping to connect with the culture she inherited but never fully understood. But a promising start quickly unravels. Her classes are grueling, her roommate is driving her insane, and a reckless trip to the hot springs with a guy she barely knows soon has her classmates viciously gossiping. She feels adrift, a foreigner in a country she thought would feel like home.

Then shocking news Lily’s grandfather has passed away. The loss forces her to grapple with now-unanswerable questions about her family history. As Lily grieves, she’s drawn into a journey of self-discovery—piecing together memories, stories, and silences over a series of hilarious and devastating attempts at connection.

Taipei Story What if the diaspora fantasy of homecoming never comes true? What if learning a language can’t bring you any closer to the people you’re trying to reach? What if you search for your family’s history, but your family doesn’t want to share? What if you wait too long to ask the right questions? As Lily struggles for answers, her summer becomes a poignant search for understanding—of herself, her family, and the meaning of home.