New Releases in 2026 (July-October)

Hey hi hello friends, and welcome back to my blog!

Well, we are halfway through the year, which means it's time for my promise way back in January to be fulfilled. If you read my blog post for my anticipated releases of the year, you'll know that it only went up to June, since release dates for books coming later in the year had not yet been confirmed. And now I'm here to follow up on that post with even more 2026 anticipated releases!

Now, this will only go until October, mostly because there aren't really any books coming out in November or December that I'm all that interested in. Also, you've probably noticed that this year has been kind of slumpy for me. I'm not reading nearly as much as I normally do. This is because of a number of things, but mostly due to severe autistic burnout that I've been struggling with since February, as well as preparing to move across the country, which will be happening next week. Hopefully I can turn things around in the second half of the year once I'm all settled in my new place, but honestly the chances of me getting to all of these books this year is slim to none. These are just the books that have piqued my interest enough to follow updates on. 

Okay, let's get into it!

==========

July

Heartstopper vol. 6 by Alice Oseman
Publishing Jul. 7th

Boy meets boy. Boys become friends. Boys fall in love. The final installment in the bestselling LGBTQ+ graphic novel series about life, love, and everything that happens in between.

Everyone in school knows Nick and Charlie. Everyone knows they’re going to be together forever. But Charlie’s busy with his bid to become head boy. And while Nick is preparing to leave for college, he’s starting to wonder who he’ll be… without Charlie.

I feel like this book needs no introduction, really. Heartstopper is such a staple in the graphic novels department as well as the queer community, and I am beyond excited (and sad) that the final volume is coming out next month. I can't wait to see how Nick and Charlie evolve in this volume!

We Were Forbidden by Jacqueline Harpman
Publishing Jul. 7th

From the author of I Who Have Never Known Men comes a startling new collection of three never-before-translated stories, each plumbing the depths of that most necessary human defiance.

Wandering the forest in the wake of some unfathomable war, a woman and her fellow survivors are forbidden from leaving its boundaries or pausing in their march through its strange depths. As part of her rigid schooling, a teenage girl is barred from questioning the dogma she is taught to believe – her punishment for doing so will be as disturbing as it is disproportionate. Locked in a loveless marriage, a young woman satisfies her husband’s desires, twice-weekly, as directed. She has not yet thought to pursue her own. In varying ways, and across varying worlds, each of these women are trapped. Do they have the will to escape?

I Who Have Never Known Men was one of my favorite books back in 2024 (was it 2024 or 2023?) and it bothers me that so few of Jacqueline Harpman's books have been translated into English. At least now we finally get some more of her works! I know her books are about the human condition more than anything else, and I'm very excited to see what these three short stories have in store for me. 

The Dragon Has Some Complaints by John Wiswell
Publishing Jul. 14th

Garrodigh was once a four-headed dragon, among the most powerful in Kardoša. After an unfortunate incident, he now has three heads, one stump, and a daily whirlwind of internal bickering. Centerhead wants to rain death upon all humanity, Bottomhead is like a feral cat, and Upperhead is under the delicate delusion that he is, in fact, human. When a nearby battle goes awry, Garrodigh sneaks into an elite dragon rider academy, pretending to be tame to get free food and a warm bed. Lucky for him, rider Rania Albright is desperate enough for a dragon of her own that she overlooks his eccentricities. As Garrodigh recovers under Rania’s care, all three heads start to turn, for the first time, in the same direction. Each wants to protect her from the invaders who killed their fourth head—the same invaders who seek to conquer Kardoša. When the academy comes under attack, can this wild dragon and his wilder rider save their homeland together?

John Wiswell wrote Someone You Can Build a Nest In, which I thought was cute but I wasn't completely obsessed with it like how I saw so many other people were. I knew that I wanted to give him another chance, though, so I was very happy when I saw this book announced. It doesn't hurt that dragons are probably my most favorite mythological creatures, and this book seems funny and heartwarming at the same time. 

August

Suffer a Witch: A Memoir by Joy McCullough
Publishing Aug. 18th

Joy McCullough’s earliest memories are of time spent in church, moments when she climbed the steps to recite from the pulpit, just like her preacher father. But when she was a teenager in San Diego in the 1990s, her connection to her family and church were forever altered when a youth pastor groomed and sexually assaulted Joy. In her debut memoir, McCullough pairs achingly raw poems recalling her abuse and its aftermath with hopeful, challenging verses about her life today as she seeks healing and justice in a country that rewards men for sexual abuse and still insists “girls these days will say anything.”  Among the poems, McCullough also weaves prose letters to historical girls and women—from Joan of Arc to Abigail Williams—whose lives and stories were ignored when they were caught in the maelstrom of witchcraft accusations.

Joy McCullough has written some incredibly beautiful books like Blood Water Paint and We Are the Ashes, We Are the Fire. When I first saw this book announced, I wasn't aware that it was a memoir, but Joy's life already bleeds through her fictional writing so wonderfully that I have no doubt this memoir will be devastating and beautiful. 

September

Our Strange Duet by Erin A. Craig
Publishing Sept. 1st

Inspired by Gaston Leroux’s 1910 novel, Le Fantôme de L’Opéra, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera tells the story of a mysterious masked figure who lurks beneath the Paris Opera House, exercising a reign of terror over all who inhabit it. He falls madly in love with a young soprano, Christine Daaé, and devotes himself to nurturing her extraordinary talents, employing all of the devious methods at his command. Our Strange Duet centres Christine’s emotional journey and her agency within this sweeping, atmospheric opera.

Not gonna lie, I'm a little wary of Phantom of the Opera retellings, just because it's such a well known story and the retellings never seem to live up to it's legacy. But I have faith in Erin A. Craig. This is a slight departure from her usual stuff, up until now she's only ever written dark fairy-tale retellings (like 12 Dancing Princesses with House of Salt and Sorrows, Rumpelstiltskin with Small Favors, and Godfather Death with The Thirteenth Child). Also, the blurb made it clear that this is a retelling of the Broadway musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber, not the original novel by Gaston Leroux. Since they are two very different stories, I feel like that is an extremely important distinction. 

 

Styx: The River by Nikita Gill
Publishing Sept. 1st

The firstborn child of Titans, Styx is revered as the first of her kind – until she is eclipsed and forgotten amid her scores of siblings, the Oceanids and the Potamoi. Coming of age in a world simmering with paranoia and unspoken fear of Kronos, the volatile and unchecked god-king, Styx learns to conceal the rage ignited by her growing disillusionment with her parents and her vain and unkind siblings. Instead, she finds solace and sisterhood in her cousin, Asteria. Together, they train in the arts of creation and magic. And as they seek to learn their divine purpose and their place within the Titanomachy, they discover both the joy sparked by true love and the fierce resilience birthed from motherhood. In this lyrical and heartrending tale of sisterhood, identity, love, and war, Styx must carve her own path to womanhood – and ultimately, godhood.

This is the next installment in Nikita Gill's Underworld Goddesses series, the first one being Hekate: the Witch. I read that earlier this month and honestly wasn't super impressed, but I'm invested in Greek mythology enough to continue on with this series, expectations adjusted accordingly. 

Exit Party by Emily St. John Mandel
Publishing Sept. 15th

Los Angeles, 2031: The first spring after the collapse of the United States, peacekeeping troops withdraw from the city, the Jacaranda trees blossom, and the curfew is finally lifted. Ari Waker and her roommate pass the gauntlet of bomb-sniffing dogs, the shanty towns, and the Red Cross tents as they walk across Silverlake to a party. The mood is ecstatic inside the apartment, people drink and dance, a woman wears a silver dress, pleated like tinfoil. And then: A shift. A bewildered twin, an uncanny doppelganger stumbles through the crowd and out into the night, and Kareem, the party’s host, vanishes into thin air. As Ari Waker unravels the mystery of this inexplicable night, Emily St. John Mandel unfurls a story that takes us from a future America splintered by civil war to the seaside cliffs of Greece where weapons dealers hide in an elegant resort, and from the domed city of Paris to a colony on the moon. An unforgettable literary feat, Exit Party is a novel about the price of safety, the perils of the surveillance state, a requiem for a world not unlike our own, and a breathtaking story of resilience in the face of cataclysmic change.

Emily St. John Mandel hooked me with Station Eleven, and since then I've read all of her more recent books (I know she has quite a backlist, but those all seem to be more lit fic than anything, and it was her sci-fi work that really drew me in). It's been a few years since her most recent novel, The Sea of Tranquility. This upcoming book seems like it might be hitting a little too close to home just like her previous pandemic novel, which was published during COVID. But I'm ready to read it no matter what!

Mestra by Madeline Miller
Publishing Sept. 29th

A cursed father, a gifted daughter. Mestra, daughter of the King of Thessaly, is granted a unique gift by Poseidon: the ability to transform into any being she can imagine. Her father, on the other hand, is cursed: As punishment for disrespecting the goddess Demeter, he is in possession of an unnatural, insatiable hunger. Devoted Mestra suggests using her new gift to help her father. But if his hunger is bottomless, how much will he take from her? Soon she must decide: Will she keep helping her father survive, or finally break free?

The queen Madeline Miller has returned! It's been six years since her last published work, Circe. And while this is only a short story (like Galatea, her other short story), I have every confidence in it. I would read Madeline Miller's grocery list if she were to publish it. 

The Wild Zone by Rick Riordan and Annabelle Oh
Publishing Sept. 29th

Katie Kim may be a newcomer to Camp Half-Blood, but even she knows they weren’t supposed to be running through the Wild Zone—the forest is off-limits to campers and staff. Why, then, did Clarisse, head counselor of the Ares cabin, take her and four other newbies there in the dark of night and tell them to race back to camp by morning? Clarisse’s threat was scary enough, but when Katie’s half-brother Grant goes missing, his disappearance sparks the arrival of vicious monsters and a mysterious curse. It’s up to Katie and the three remaining newbies—the Wild Omada—to brave the Wild Zone again and uncover its dark and deadly secrets.

It's a new series by Uncle Rick! He's once again pulling in other authors to collaborate, which honestly I love. He writes with an attention to detail that is so strong, pulling in diverse authors so his characters always feel authentic and never feel like tokenism (I see you and I appreciate you, Rick Riordan). This series seems to be going back in time to pre-Percy days (or maybe during the first series?) and will be focusing on characters such as Clarisse La Rue, Silena Beauregard, and Charles Beckendorf. I'm confident that I'll love it!

October

Victorious by V.E. Schwab
Publishing Oct. 6th

Eli Ever. Victor Vale.

Two men, first best friends, then mortal enemies, each destined to be the other’s shadow. One left standing—but the game isn't over yet. Against all the years—and the odds—a group of allies and archrivals meet on a chessboard set by an opponent they couldn’t have predicted….to see who will be victorious.

It's the end of an era, the third and final book in the Villains series, starting with the one and only Vicious. Vicious was V.E. Schwab's adult debut and became a cult classic practically overnight. I'm seeing a series reread in my future! I'm pretty sure I've only ever read Vicious and Vengeful once, so it'll be really nice to revisit these characters in preparation for Victorious. 

Off the Reservation by Stephen Graham Jones
Publishing Oct. 13th

Set five years after the massacres on the Blackfeet reservation, Nate Yellow Tail is one of the two survivors of the deadly revenge murders of author Stephen Graham Jones’s breakout bestseller, The Only Good Indians. Listless at twenty and looking for meaning, Nate finds himself in the hospital after a terrible accident that should’ve killed him, that nearly killed his best friend who is hanging onto life in a room a few doors down. His life is out of balance, so when he is given the chance to set a wrong and set it upright, Nate steps up, again. This time it’s into a camper van that is almost as run down as his broken body, filled with four older Blackfeet who are sharing their vision quest with Nate to find the bones of the lone Blackfeet boy who died at the infamous Carlisle Indian Industrial School, and repatriate them home. The problem is, when they get the bones, something comes back with them.

I never would have expected a sequel to The Only Good Indians, but here we are! I, for one, am not complaining, especially because that is my favorite Stephen Graham Jones book that I've read so far. At this point, I do think that he is my favorite horror author. Everything I've read by him has been incredible, and I still have a bunch of his backlist to go through. Again, I do think I'll need to reread The Only Good Indians before I read this book, just to refresh my memory on the characters (the plot is pretty much seared into my brain). 

Scorpion Deep by C.G. Drews
Publishing Oct. 27th

The only thing Jonathan Covey wants from the gloomy, moldering isle of Kelcarrow is to leave it. Summer is ending, and his friends are looking forward to college on the mainland, unaware that Jonathan was not accepted to join them. He'll be left behind with nothing but the ocean's haunts and a rising dread of being abandoned. In an act of wild desperation, Jonathan pays a tithe to Scorpion Deep, an eldritch sea god who many of the locals have dismissed as myth. He wants to forget the past, he wants to follow his friends, and most of all he wants to finally escape. To his shock and horror, the ritual works—Scorpion Deep awakens. And despite his terror, Jonathan can't help but feel drawn toward the ageless entity that seems just as mutually obsessed with him. As scales start growing down his spine and Scorpion Deep's adoration of him turns bloody, Jonathan realizes the only way to end the nightmare is to destroy the monster one way or another. But once a god has awoken, the only way to be free is to pay a price of blood.

I've been very vocal about this book on Instagram, mainly because I'm pretty sure that CG Drews wrote this book especially for me. It features an asexual and biromantic main character (like me) and it's being published on my birthday! Talk about the ultimate birthday present, am I right? Drews's gothic horrors are so amazing and horrific to read, and I expect this one will be no different. 

==========

Another excellent looking list! I think I'm most excited for Heartstopper and Victorious, but all of these books sound great to me.