Highlights of the Season AUTUMN/WINTER 2026 £15 AUTUMN/WINTER 2026 £15 AUTUMN/WINTER 2026 £15 ゲ Introducing the Autumn/Winter 2026 Buyer’s Guides: your essential guides to the season ahead Welcome. Introduction
Continuation novels, sequels and gifty short stories are in store
Among this season’s highlights are new novels from Louise Kennedy, Barbara Kingsolver, Audrey Niffenegger, Bonnie Garmus, Marlon James and Min Jin Lee
B Our expert
Alice O’Keeffe Alice is head of books at The Bookseller. An avid reader and experienced interviewer, she interviews authors for print and at events and is overall chair of the Books of the Year for The British Book Awards, as well as chairing the individual Debut and Fiction judging panels.
Autumn/Winter 2026
ooksellers may get a familiar feeling as they cast their eyes over the next six months in fiction: publishers are betting on continuation novels, bringing beloved characters to the
attention of a new readership. Lucy Foley was approached to write the first Miss Marple continu- ation novel, and the result is the wintry Murder at the Grand Alpine Hotel (HarperCollins). With surely an eye to fans of Netflix’s runaway hit Bridgerton, the Georgette Heyer estate has given the stamp of approval to Henrietta (Century), as Sophie Irwin continues the work of the writer dubbed the Queen of Regency romance (fun fact: Irwin wrote her undergraduate thesis on Heyer). With The Golden Hours (Mantle), Louisa Young continues the family saga of the Cazalet Chronicles. The original five volumes by Elizabeth Jane Howard took the Cazalets from the late 1930s to the ’50s; this latest instalment picks up the story in 1962. Finally, James Bond is no stranger to the spin-off (see also Vaseem Khan’s The Man with the Golden Compass, the second in the series featuring Q, from Zaffre) but King Zero (Michael Joseph) is the first adult Bond novel from Charlie Higson, writer of the Young Bond series for Puffin.
Moving on to a continuation of another sort:
Our guide to The Guides
The titles listed in the Buyer’s Guides are divided into categories, with sub- divisions according to format. Apart from the Highlights of the Season, which are organised by publication month, entries are listed alphabetically by author name. The books included
were submitted by publishers via the online database hosted at Bookseller
BuyersGuide.co.uk. Publishers were given a 30-word limit to describe each title. If a title is an audiobook or has an audio edition, it is stated in the title’s metadata. Other formats
are as follows: hb
pb tpb
hardback paperback
trade paperback
pbo paperback original
mmpb mass-market paperback
eb e-book
the sequel! Three look particularly exciting. Big Little Lies was a global bestseller, and an addictive, award-winning TV series, and in the sequel, Big Little Truths (Michael Joseph), Liane Moriarty returns to those school mums, 10 years on. Back in 2004, everyone was glued to The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger, a time-travelling love story like no other, and a full 22 years later we now have the sequel: Life Out of Order (Chatto). And fans of Janice Hallett’s ingenious cosy-crime debut The Appeal, which told of sinister goings-on within an am-dram group via emails, will be delighted with The Silent Appeal (Viper), a sequel that features a new play and another murder… With Christmas in mind, there are some giftily
packaged novellas and short stories. My top pick here would be Susanna Clarke’s The Bishop of Durham Attempts to Surrender the City, illus- trated by Victoria Sawdon (Bloomsbury Circus), set in 1110AD, this a “long-lost” chapter from her magnum opus Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (also published in 2004 – what a year!). Also from Bloomsbury, a Greek myth reimagined in Mestra, the new short story in hardback from The Song of Achilles author Madeline Miller. The Winter Guest (Picador) by Sarah Moss is set on Christmas Eve and features two strangers sharing secrets, and Rev Richard Coles is back with a festive novella in his Canon Clement mystery series: A Carol and a Killing (W&N). Last, but certainly not least, the next six
months in literary fiction are simply spectacular. Among the many highlights (too many for my Top 10): Partita (Faber) from Barbara Kingsolver, her first novel since the Women’s Prize and Pulitzer Prize-winning Demon Copperhead; Peck & Peck (Manilla Press), Bonnie Garmus’ simply delightful follow-up to Lessons in Chemistry; Min Jin Lee’s American Hagwon (4th Estate), another epic family saga, which follows Pachinko; and Marlon James’ The Disappearers (Hamish Hamilton). But for me, two are extra-specially unmissable: Louise Kennedy’s Stations (Bloomsbury), a tender masterpiece of love, loss and the Irish in London, and AK Blakemore’s Doom Painting (Granta), an exhilarating tour- de-force set over the 16 days of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. Happy bookselling!
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