Alistair Owen's 3 favorite reads in 2026

• 2023
• 2024
• 2025
• 2026

Stephen King’s 1979 novel is perhaps best remembered via David Cronenberg’s 1983 film, which captured the book’s slow-burn suspense and chilly sense of foreboding, while deftly condensing its deceptively sprawling narrative into a series of linked episodes akin to a horror portmanteau. Deceptive because, despite its length, the novel has the precision of a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle: each individual piece, no matter how random it seems, has its exact place in the overall picture.

The Dead Zone isn’t just an impressive feat of plotting, though, it’s also a compelling, haunting tale of love and loss; its structure strong enough to support some heavyweight philosophical conceits, and its story – a damaged young man cursed with psychic powers, on an unwilling collision course with a crazed populist politician – becoming more unnerving and prescient with every revisit.

Heavyweight philosophical conceits are a given with Ian McEwan; the question is always whether he’s found a story accessible enough to deliver them. In this case, the answer is an emphatic yes.

Set simultaneously in a recent past of climate denial and a near-distant future of climate disaster – a partially-submerged dystopia of loosely-connected British isles, not entirely without hope but with increasingly little imagination – What We Can Know is reminiscent of McEwan’s most popular novel, Atonement, with a light-touch sci-fi twist: initially focusing on one particular well-heeled social gathering with a mystery at its core, before broadening to explore the relationship of its guests to each other, of the gathering to society as a whole – and, as with King’s story, of the responsibility we all of us owe both to those with whom we share the world and those to whom we bequeath it.

A consequential social gathering also provides the focal point for Anna Hope’s fifth novel. To reveal those consequences, however, would be to spoil its central revelation: a scene that the story works inexorably towards and away from, and which detonates like a hand-grenade at its very heart.

With its multiple viewpoints and emblematic setting, Albion is unapologetically state-of-the nation (and, indeed, state-of-the-species), but rooted in a perceptive depiction of character, and rendered with a poetic description of place. The place is an English country house, of the type the National Trust might have custody of were it not in private hands; the characters are the aristocratic family who still own the house and estate, along with their staff, partners and other interested parties; and the fears, desires, deceits and betrayals of this disparate group thread together to form a study of property, wealth, class and the stewardship of the land as evocative as it is thought-provoking.