Books to look out for in 2026 - nonfiction

Over the past year we’ve been spoiled for memoirs from high-wattage stars - Cher, Patti Smith and Anthony Hopkins among them. But 2026 begins with a very different true story, from someone who never chose the spotlight, but now wants some good to come of her appalling experiences. After the trial that resulted in her husband and 50 others being convicted of rape or sexual assault, Gisèle Pelicot’s aim is to nurture “strength and courage” in other survivors. In A Hymn to Life (Bodley Head, February) she insists that “shame has to change sides”. Another trial - of the men accused of carrying out the Bataclan massacre - was the subject of Emmanuel Carrère’s most recent book, V13. For his next, Gisèle Pelicot, Stephen Graham, George Michael, Liza Minnelli, Alan Bennett and Gillian Anderson.Illustration: David Newton Photograph: Vintage/PA Photograph: Little, Brown Book Group Photograph: Penguin Books Ltd Photograph: Hodder & Stoughton Kolkhoze (Fern, September), the French master of autofiction turns his unsparing lens back on himself, focusing on his relationship with his mother Hélène, and using it to weave a complex personal history of France, Russia and Ukraine. Family also comes under the microscope in Ghost Stories (Sceptre, May) by Siri Hustvedt, a memoir of her final years with husband Paul Auster, who died of cancer in 2024. Hollywood isn’t totally out of the picture, though: T he Steps (Seven Dials, May), Sylvester Stallone’s first autobiography, follows the star from homelessness in early 70s New York to Rocky’s triumph at the Oscars later that decade. Does achieving your creative dreams come at a price, though? Lena Dunham suggests as much in (4th Estate, April), billed as a typically frank memoir of how how her dramatic early success gave way to debilitating chronic illness. Frankness of a different kind is promised in Famesick More (Bloomsbury, September), actor Gillian Anderson’s follow-up to her bestselling 2024 anthology of women’s sexual fantasies, Want. Likely to be somewhat less racy - though just as acutely observed - Alan Bennett’s diaries Enough Said (Faber, March) span the period 2016-2024, taking in such momentous events as Brexit and the death of the Queen, as well as a plague of molehills in Bennett’s garden. After relinquishing his mantle as host of In Our Time, Bennett’s near contemporary Melvyn Bragg travels back to (Sceptre, February), namely his three years at Oxford in the late 1950s. Curious Incident author Mark Haddon also looks to the past, this time to the 60s and 70s, in his quirkily illustrated coming of age memoir, Another World Leaving Home (Chatto & Windus, February). David Sedaris’s latest collection of essays The Land and Its Peopl (Abacus, July) includes such dispatches from his bucolic existence in Sussex as “I know you can’t hold animals to human standards ... That said, rams are assholes.” e We’ll have to see whether similarly intemperate outbursts are detailed in a major new biography of Gordon Brown (Bloomsbury, February), for which author James Macintyre was allowed “unique” access to the former...

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