Stuart Kelly: 'These are the books I'm looking forward to reading (and re-reading) in 2026'
The new year promises much from some of the most interesting writers in Scotland and beyond, writes Stuart Kelly, but there will also be opportunities to re-read a few old favourites thanks to reissues from Penguin Classics
Any kind of preview can give precious little in terms of cast-iron guarantees. Each year, there will be disappointments from previous favourites and unexpected gems, as well as just the terribly predictable; although I have indulged in daydreaming that George Martin’s editor has suggested a completely different ending to the novel series A Song of Ice and Fire compared to the TV series Game of Thrones.
What I can promise relates to re-reading. Last year, for Lent, I re-read Dante in multiple translations – Dorothy Sayers, Mark Musa, Alasdair Gray, Clive James, Henry Longfellow, DM Black, Michael Palma, Ciaran Carson and several modern imitations and homages. It was such a joyous experience. I then re-read Ibsen and a fair swatch of Goethe. Constantly surfing the crest of the contemporary does detach a critic from the joy in reading that started her or him on that path. So this year, I plan on tackling George Bernard Shaw, whom I last read as a teenager, and Thomas Mann, as Penguin Classics are publishing new translations, including the epic Joseph and his Brothers.
The news which most whets my appetite is that China Miéville will be publishing an epic, The Rouse. Little is known about it, except that it is 1,200 pages long and he has been working on it for over a decade (taking time off to collaborate with Keanu Reeves and writing a study of Das Kapital). That he narrowly missed the age restriction for the Granta Best of Young British Novelists in the year I judged it still rankles. The title alone intrigues: I’m calling the revolutionary “Wachet auf” now.
Closer to home we can expect Ali Smith’s Glyph, a companion piece to last year’s Gliff. As with her seasonal quartet and previously the topsy-turvy How To Be Both, it will be curious to see if it is more than the sum of its parts. Jenni Fagan’s new novel, The Delusions, features a protagonist who works in the most human of human resources departments – processing new arrivals in the afterlife. I rather suspect this will be a more political version of George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo (he has a new work, Vigil, out soon) rather than a less comedic version of Beetlejuice. Whether this is the sequel to The Panopticon mentioned in Creative Scotland’s grant awards is not wholly clear.
James Meek is a writer – a bit like Rupert Thomson or Andrew Miller – who never seems to quite get the accolades he deserves. Your Life Without Me balances a widower’s grief with his curiosity about a former family friend with terrorist connections. Damage in search of an impossible ideal has been a consistent theme in Meek’s work, and I still have a deep fondness for his more surreal early works: The Museum of Doubt should be reissued.
Christopher Brookmyre is releasing Quite Ugly One Evening, a book to tie in with the 30th anniversary of Quite Ugly One Morning, and a return for Jack Parlabane, this time in a locked room murder mystery with himself as chief suspect on board a cruise liner. Fun fact: “Parlabane’s back” is the opening sentence of Robertson Davies’ The Rebel Angels. He’s another author I’d like to reread: I loved his work at 17.
There’s no confirmed date for the publication of The Book of Risk by Kirsten Innes, the six-figure purchase of which nearly a year ago caused a few ripples. Risk is a fictional town setting, and the novel involves “eight babies born within two weeks of each other in 1980”. McMidnight’s Bairns? We shall see, but I will personally tar and feather any reviewer who lazily writes “Since Lanark”. Elle Machray’s Havisham and Hester Musson’s The Night Hag might be ones to watch.
In non-fiction, I would think that James Bailey’s biography of the “slippery Spark” will be pounced on. There seems a strange queasiness about Spark’s legacy, with various memoirs and biographies falling foul in one way or another. Perhaps better to read Spark herself. Time is the great sifter, and Spark, alongside writers like Mantel, Byatt, Fitzgerald, Bainbridge and perhaps especially Iris Murdoch (who is very much on my re-reading list) seems to improve with each re-reading; in a way that I find the young Turks of the period – Rushdie, Amis, Swift, Ishiguro – increasingly dated.
There are too many other interesting books to do justice to them – but Rana Dasgupta’s After Nations, arguing that post-nation may be more significant than post-imperial, and that certain universalisms are strained as never before – ought to be interesting (I remember his rather good novels). Nobody a decade ago could tell me if an independent Scotland would be free from Google / AI / X – the question is more pressing now. And Adrian Woolfson’s On the Future of Species: Authoring Life by means of Artificial Biological Intelligence looks essential in terms of deep thinking.
A few quick nudges to end. Joanna Kavenna’s new novel, Seven, is an absolute delight, proving that the cerebral and the satirical, the poignant and the preposterous can sit easily. Lost Lambs by Madeline Cash had me entranced, aghast and laughing immediately. When the fire is banked up over Christmas, I have Will Self’s The Quantity Theory of Mortality, its title evoking his debut, The Quantity Theory of Insanity. On finishing it, I will put the finishing touches to my TARDIS, travel back to 2012, replace one of that year’s Booker Prize judges and award the prize to Self. Because he bloody well deserved it.
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