Looking for the popular books in 2026 that the cool girls are reading?

These six reads share one thing: they are all deeply, specifically interested in what it means to be a woman navigating institutions, relationships, power, and other people’s expectations of who you should be. Some will make you laugh, some will make you furious, at least one will make you put the book down and stare at the ceiling for a while.

All of them are worth it.

Yesteryear

Caro Claire Burke | Satirical Thriller | 400 pages | 2026

TLDR: Imagine if Ballerina Farm woke up and lived in 1800, but without the billionaire money

Natalie Heller Mills is perfect at being alive. She has the farmhouse, the handsome husband, the six children, and the millions of social media followers who tune in every week to watch her live out her gorgeous, grain-fed, God-fearing tradwife life — right up until the morning she wakes up in 1855 and realizes that actually living that life, without the cameras or the industrial ovens or the nannies, is a completely different proposition. Burke’s debut is a biting, darkly funny, genuinely unhinged satire that takes the tradwife aesthetic apart at the seams and examines what is actually inside it. It is getting compared to The Handmaid’s Tale and The Stepford Wives, and the comparisons are not wrong, but it is also its own thing entirely — sharper and stranger than either of them.

Ashli’s take: “I finished this in two sittings and spent the third one texting everyone I know. Natalie is one of the most repellent and fascinating narrators I have read in years. The ending broke my brain in the best possible way.”

The Compound

Aisling Rawle | Dystopian Fiction | 304 pages | 2025

TLDR: Love Island but with the stakes turned up a notch, as whoever stays the longest gets the house

Twenty contestants wake up on a remote desert compound to compete in a reality show where the last person standing wins everything. The world outside is falling apart — wars, collapse, the kind of vague civilizational unraveling that makes the compound feel almost reasonable — and Lily, the protagonist, is not entirely sure she wants to leave. Rawle’s debut is Love Island meets Lord of the Flies, which sounds like a blurb someone made up but is genuinely the most accurate description available. It is an Animal Farm for the age of reality television, a sharp, propulsive, deeply unsettling examination of what people will do for safety, attention, and a front door.

Ashli’s take: “I kept telling myself one more chapter. I lied to myself about this repeatedly. The questions it raises about desire, survival, and how much we perform for an audience stayed with me long after I finished.”

Margo’s Got Money Troubles

Rufi Thorpe | Literary Fiction | 352 pages | 2024

TLDR: A young broke college student gets pregnant and keeps the baby, so she starts OnlyFans.

Margo Millet is twenty years old, newly a mother after an affair with her married English professor, unemployed, and three weeks from eviction. What she does next — which involves OnlyFans, her ex-pro wrestler father, and a level of resourcefulness that should probably be taught in business schools — is the subject of one of the funniest, most warm-hearted, most surprisingly profound novels in recent memory. Thorpe is a writer who makes chaos feel tender, and Margo is the kind of heroine who is doing everything wrong by conventional metrics and everything right by her own. The Apple TV adaptation with Elle Fanning and Nicole Kidman is already generating buzz, which means you want to have read it first.

Ashli’s take: “This book made me laugh out loud in public and then immediately feel something suspiciously close to tears. Margo is one of those characters who just walks off the page and into your life. I think about her a lot.”

Kin

Tayari Jones | Literary Fiction | 368 pages | 2026

TLDR: Fall in love with these 2 girls as they mourn their separate mothers and live much different lives.

Vernice and Annie are cradle friends, raised together in Honeysuckle, Louisiana, motherless daughters who take entirely different paths into adulthood — Vernice into the world of Spelman College, Black affluence, and the specific pressures that come with both, and Annie into something stranger and more dangerous in pursuit of the mother who abandoned her. Jones, who wrote An American Marriage, brings the same emotional precision and deep feeling to this novel about female friendship, Black womanhood in the American South, and the ways love and loss can pull lives in opposite directions. Oprah called it a masterpiece, Ann Patchett called it Jones’s very best work, and they are both correct.

Ashli’s take: “I ugly cried. I am not going to pretend otherwise. The friendship between Vernice and Annie is one of the most real and heartbreaking relationships I have read in fiction. This is the kind of book that makes you want to call your oldest friend.”

My Husband

Maud Ventura | Psychological Thriller | 224 pages | 2023

TLDR: If Gone Girl and Netflix’s YOU had a baby, it’d be this crazy obsessed wife lol

Our unnamed narrator has an enviable life — the house, the career, the beautiful children, and most importantly, the perfect husband she has been desperately in love with for fifteen years. The problem is that she is never quite sure he loves her back with the same ferocity, and so she watches him, tests him, punishes him for small infractions he does not know he has committed, and prepares every interaction with the kind of meticulous theatrical calculation that would be impressive if it were not so deeply unsettling. Ventura’s debut, translated from the French and a bestseller across Europe before it reached American readers, is a darkly funny, claustrophobic, razor-sharp dissection of marriage, obsession, and the exhausting performance of being a perfect wife. The ending is divisive. Read it anyway.

Ashli’s take: “I was uncomfortable for most of this book in a way that felt very intentional and very earned. The narrator is awful and I could not stop reading her. It made me think about how much performance goes into being a wife in ways I am still turning over.”

This Story Might Save Your Life

Tiffany Crum | Mystery / Romance | 368 pages | 2026

TLDR: A podcast host goes missing and her co-host is on a mission to find her.

Benny and Joy host one of the most beloved podcasts in the world — a comedy survival show where they pitch each other impossible scenarios and figure their way out. They have been saving each other’s lives, they like to say, since the moment they met. Until the morning Benny arrives at Joy’s house to record and finds it empty, a window shattered, and Joy and her husband gone without explanation. What follows is part thriller, part love story, part examination of what happens when the people closest to us keep secrets that change everything. Crum’s debut is a genre-bender that should not work as well as it does, and completely does — the kind of book that gets described as unputdownable in a way that is usually hyperbolic but in this case is just accurate.

Ashli’s take: “I started this on a Tuesday night and I have no memory of Wednesday. The friendship between Benny and Joy is exactly the kind of relationship I want to read about — funny and lived-in and real — and the mystery underneath it kept me turning pages in a near-frenzy. One of my favorites of the year.”

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