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The Best Books of Fall 2026

Ten titles you’ll need to get your hands on

The Walrus presents the Best Books of Fall 2026. All year, we anticipate the bounty of titles that the season delivers. When the books arrive, we go on a months-long reading spree, signing up for work by authors we admire, stories that intrigue us, reporting we believe urgent. We talk as we go, trade volumes, talk again, read some more. We encounter books much as we do people—each one a whole other world and our relationship with it wholly unique. Every so often, sometimes in the blink of an eye, a book becomes essential, part of our lives. We read in pursuit of such moments. This year, these are the books that made them happen.

Humanitarienne: A Doctor’s Stories from the Conflict Zone by Kirsten Johnson

Douglas & McIntyre Publication Date: September 1, 2026

Imagine, at seventeen, before even finishing high school, hustling various jobs to survive and then travelling overseas alone to Israel for six months—you don’t know anyone there; you’re not Jewish. That was Kirsten Johnson in 1989. She eagerly traded home life back in Victoria, British Columbia—her mother was checked out and her stepfather demeaning and physically threatening—for what she thought would be an Indiana Jones adventure. The sweltering archaeological dig—one of the reasons she was in Israel to begin with—was not at all like the movies, but that didn’t dampen Johnson’s impulse to travel. She returned home, eventually went to medical school, and by the time she became a doctor at thirty, her wanderlust was fuelled—at least in part—by altruism. She was in Darfur in the aftermath of the second Sudanese civil war; in Kenya, auditing HIV/AIDS programs in the mid-aughts; and in Haiti following the massively destructive earthquake in 2010. Johnson ventures beyond the tragedies and relief efforts to address truths about Western aid. She tells the stories of overzealous doctors, fresh off their private jets, eating pizza in front of starving patients and then amputating the leg of a nine-year-old boy, without anesthesia, who didn’t survive. She’s honest about her own missteps, like going into an Inuit community intent on addressing people’s experiences of child sexual abuse without considering the impact of asking them to talk about trauma. Johnson’s candour about the realities of humanitarian work makes even the most unfathomable stories believable.

—Marina Black, Chawkers Fellow

Heatstroke by Meredyth Cole

Doubleday Canada Publication Date: September 29, 2026

“Heartbreak really is a misunderstanding—someone tries to insist that you are not the person you know yourself to be, that you are less precious,” says January, the twenty-five-year-old narrator of this debut novel by Vancouver writer Meredyth Cole. Following a bad breakup, January, a wannabe screenwriter, travels to California with her best friend. There, she neglects her freelance marketing work, yearns for her ex-girlfriend, and becomes increasingly uncertain about whether she is, in fact, the person she knows herself to be. Heatstroke evokes the work of Ottessa Moshfegh in its mastery of the off-kilter and disturbing and of Mona Awad with its sharp literary references. The plot turns are so bizarre that you can’t tell whether they’re actually happening or are symptoms of January’s undiagnosed post-concussion syndrome. To its core, Heatstroke is “weird girl lit”—a popular subgenre centring “a young woman who is kind of losing it”—but the novel never feels like part of a marketing trend. For all its absurdity, the book successfully captures two states of being nearly everyone is familiar with: being young and being heartbroken.

—Amarah Hasham-Steele, former Power Corporation of Canada BIPOC Fellow

My Friend Kim Jong Un by Keum Suk Gendry-Kim, translated by Janet Hong

Drawn & Quarterly Publication Date: October 27, 2026

Cartoonist Keum Suk Gendry-Kim lives on Ganghwa Island, South Korea, not far from the border with North Korea. Plagued with fear of another war breaking out, she set out to research North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. Her sharp, exquisite renderings convey poignant details—from........

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