Goodreads Just Released Their Top Books of the Year So Far, Here’s What Made the List
It may seem a little early in the year for those “Best of 2026” lists to start rolling out. But hey, who says you have to wait until December to start giving five-star books the flowers they deserve? Goodreads is on board, and they’ve just gifted us the most popular books of the year so far, according to readers. Just in time for your summer beach vacation, we have a list of 15 books that are sure to remain at the top of everyone’s reading lists for the rest of the year. Ready your carry-ons and beach totes because, from thrillers to fantasy to memoirs and everything in between, these are the best books of the year so far, according to Goodreads.
Claire Burke
We’ve seen Yesteryear everywhere, so it’s no surprise it’s topping the list. Natalie lives a traditional lifestyle. So what if there are nannies and producers behind the scenes, her kitchen hiding industrial-grade fridges and ovens, her husband the heir to a political dynasty? What Natalie’s followers—all 8 million of them—don’t know won’t hurt them. Until one morning, she wakes up in a life that isn’t hers. Her kitchen is warmed by a sputtering fire rather than electricity, her children are dirty and strange, and her soft-handed husband is suddenly a competent farmer. When Natalie suffers a brutal injury in the woods, she realizes two things: This is not her beautiful life, and she must escape by any means possible.
Belle Burden
Belle Burdens shocking divorce memoir has ruled our bookshelves for the first half of 2026. In March 2020, Belle Burden was safe and secure with her family at their house on Martha’s Vineyard, navigating the early days of the pandemic together—building fires in the late afternoons, drinking whisky sours, making roast chicken. Then, with no warning or explanation, her husband of twenty years announced that he was leaving her. Overnight, her caring, steady partner became a man she hardly recognized. He exited his life with her like an actor shrugging off a costume.
Freida McFadden
Freida McFadden never misses, and this novel only proves it. Debbie Mullen has been running a neighborly advice column, Dear Debbie, for the wives of New England for years. She’s helped countless women through their struggles of being ignored, belittled, or abused by their husbands. Now, she’s just lost her job. Something strange is happening with her teenage daughters. And her husband has been keeping secrets. She’s done being reasonable, practical, grounded. It’s time to take her own advice and get back at all the people in her life who have wronged her.
Carley Fortune
Carley Fortune is an auto-buy author for so many, so it’s only natural she continues to capture hearts with this release. In Our Perfect Storm Frankie and George have been best friends since they were eight years old. But it’s the eve of Frankie’s wedding weekend, and she doesn’t know if George will even show up. In walks George, and for one glorious evening, Frankie’s life is finally perfect—until her fiancé dumps her the next morning. George has a plan—he wants her to go on her honeymoon. With him. Frankie agrees, seeing the trip as one last chance to repair their friendship. Even if it means unearthing secrets and long-buried feelings neither knows how to handle.
Alice Feeney
Thriller girlies have been raving about this one from Alice Feeney. Eden Fox sets off for a run before her first exhibition. When she returns to the home she recently moved into, Spyglass, nothing is as it should be. Her key doesn’t fit. A woman, eerily similar to her, answers the door. And her husband insists that the stranger is his wife. Six months earlier, a reclusive Londoner called Birdy inherits Spyglass. This unexpected gift brings her to the pretty seaside village of Hope Falls. But then Birdy stumbles upon a shadowy London clinic that claims to be able to predict a person’s date of death. Secrets start to unravel, and Birdy feels compelled to right some old wrongs.
Kathryn Stockett
Back with her first novel since The Help, The Calamity Club is topping bestseller lists. Abandoned by her mother, 11-year-old Meg Lefleur has learned the hard way to rely on no one. Now one of the unadoptable “big girls” at the Lafayette County Orphan Asylum, she fights each day to keep her spirit unbowed. Birdie Calhoun, unmarried and outspoken, has come to Oxford to ask her socialite sister to help the struggling family she’s left behind. But as the Depression tightens its grip, Birdie discovers her sister’s seemingly charmed life is a tapestry of lies. Then, Birdie encounters Charlie, a woman running low on luck with little left to lose. When their fates—and Meg’s—converge, Charlie comes up with an audacious plan for them to take control of their lives. But in a place and time where hypocrisy is rife and women’s freedom is fragile, even the smallest act of defiance can have dangerous consequences.
Emma Brodie
Our team cannot stop raving about this romance, and I’m so glad to see Goodreads users feel the same. AJ Graves is stuck working in a video rental store, with slim odds of escaping her small town. Then in walks Noah Drew, the heir of the Drew acting dynasty, and her life changes forever. The two forge a deep bond first as friends, then as acting partners—until one day, Noah disappears without a word. Seven years later in New York City, AJ finds herself cast in the same TV production as Noah, by then a well-known Hollywood heartthrob. Unable to stay away from each other, AJ and Noah are forced to confront the truth of what happened years ago—and the devastating secret that will send their lives careening apart, even as fate continues to draw them together.
Tayari Jones
I’ll read anything Oprah co-signs, and it seems like I’m not alone based on Kin‘s popularity. Vernice and Annie, two motherless daughters raised in Louisiana, have been best friends and neighbors since early childhood, but are fated to live starkly different lives. Raised by a fierce aunt determined to give her a stable home in the wake of her mother’s death, Vernice leaves Honeysuckle at eighteen for Spelman College, where she joins a sisterhood of powerfully connected Black women and discovers a world of affluence, manners, aspiration, and inequality. Annie, abandoned by her mother as a child and fixated on the idea of finding her and filling the bottomless hole left by her absence, sets off on a journey that will take her into a world of peril and adversity, as well as love and adventure, culminating in a battle for her life.
Rachel Hochhauser
Period piece fans will love this one. Twice-widowed, Lady Etheldreda Verity Isolde Tremaine Bramley is solely responsible for her two children, a stepdaughter, a peregrine falcon, and a crumbling manor. Fierce and determined, Ethel clings to the respectability her deceased husband’s title affords her, hoping it will secure her daughters’ future through marriage. When a royal ball offers the chance to change everything, Ethel risks her pride in pursuit of an invitation for all three of her daughters—only to see her hopes fulfilled by the wrong one. As an engagement to the future king unfolds, Ethel discovers a sordid secret hidden in the depths of the royal family, forcing her to choose between the security she craves and the well-being of her stepdaughter.
Matt Haig
Fans of The Midnight Library are thrilled about this release. No one can change the past, but the Midnight Train can take you there. The chance to re-live the moments that meant most. To see what kind of person you really were. For Wilbur his best days were with Maggie, the love of his life. On his honeymoon in Venice. Before he gave it all away. He wishes he could go back and live differently. But to do so risks everything…
Sadeqa Johnson
This sweeping historical fiction has been capturing reader’s across the globe. Ethel Gathers is living in Occupied Germany in the 1950s. After discovering a local orphanage filled with the abandoned mixed-race children of German women and Black American GI’s, Ethel feels compelled to help find these children homes. Philadelphia-born Ozzie Phillips volunteers for the recently desegregated army in 1948. While serving in Manheim, Germany, he meets a local woman, Jelka, and the two embark on a relationship that will impact their lives forever. In 1965, Maryland, Sophia Clark is given an opportunity to attend a prestigious all white boarding school and escape her heartless parents. While at the school, she discovers a secret that upends her world and sends her on a quest to unravel her own identity. Toggling between the lives of these three individuals, Keeper of Lost Children explores how one woman’s vision will change the course of countless lives.
Matt Dinniman
The Dungeon Crawler Carl series has been the talk of the town lately, and in the explosive eighth book, mass panic spreads outside the dungeon in the wake of Faction Wars. Carl and Donut find themselves on the tenth floor, where they’re forced to compete in a surprisingly normal set of tasks. Get from point A to point B, and don’t come in last. After each race, they pick an upgrade for their vehicle and the track gets more challenging. Ignore those strange glitches that are occurring with increasing frequency. Don’t listen to those whispers about what’s happening on the mysterious eleventh floor, something the system AI calls A Parade of Horribles. Nobody, not even the showrunners, knows what that means. Just that the AI has ominously dubbed it “a coming-out party for the ages.”
Lena Dunham
Lena Dunham’s memoir has been in every headline lately, and readers are still eating it up. For the last decade, as she’s spent countless hours in doctor’s waiting rooms searching for diagnoses, treatments, and relief, being the owner and operator of Lena Dunham’s body has felt, as she puts it, “like towing a wrecked car across town at midnight.” It’s not easy dragging a wrecked car anywhere, much less to the set of the hit show that you—as a 25-year-old—are writing, directing, producing, and starring in. But Dunham does it—even if it means interminable hospital stays, vomiting in the bathroom, or terrifying those closest to her—because she can no longer tell the difference between fighting to do what she loves and being a servant to her own ambition.
Sarah Damoff
If you need a cathartic cry, readers can’t put this one down. When April and Leo’s house burns in the middle of the night, they escape with their two young children and the quiet knowledge that the fire is not the only thing threatening their family. As the family reckons with the aftermath—grief, guilt, logistics, and memories scorched and intact—the fire exposes the cracks already forming in April and Leo’s marriage. The novel unfolds in alternating perspectives: from April, who feels the crushing weight of motherhood, marriage, and self-blame; from Leo, a high school history teacher shaped by a lonely, fractured childhood; from Deb, April’s generous and no-nonsense mother who has to contend with her husband’s recent Alzheimer’s diagnosis; and from flashbacks that trace April and Leo’s relationship from its earliest days of connection to the devastating decisions that led them here.
Ann Patchett
Audiences have been dying for another Ann Patchett release since racing through Tom Lake, and Whistler is living up to the hype. When Daphne Fuller and her husband Jonathan visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art, they notice an older, white-haired gentleman following them. The man turns out to be Eddie Triplett, her former stepfather, who had been married to her mother for just over a year when Daphne was nine. Daphne and Eddie haven’t seen each other since the fateful event that changed the direction of both their lives. While their relationship was brief, it had a profound impact on them both, and now that they are reunited, they have no intention of ever being separated again.
Maggie O’Farrell
On the heels of Hamnet‘s Oscars campaign, Maggie O’Farrell is back with another story. On a windswept peninsula stretching out into the Atlantic, Tomás and his son, Liam, are working for the great Ordnance Survey project to map the whole of Ireland. The year is 1865, and in a country not long since ravaged and emptied by the Great Hunger, the task is not an easy one. The British soldiers in charge are due to arrive any day, expecting the work to be completed, but Tomás is unexpectedly sent off course by an unsettling encounter in a copse. Liam is terrified by the sudden change in his taciturn father. What was it that caused such cracks to open in Tomás, and how is Liam, aged only ten, going to finish the mapping and get them both home?
Marcus Kliewer
If you want to sleep with the lights on, this favorite thriller is the read for you. Macy Mullins can’t say why the job posting for a caretaker grabbed her attention—it had the pull of a fisherman’s lure, barbed hook and all—vaguely ominous. But after an endless string of failed job interviews, she’s not exactly in the position to be picky. Besides, it’s only three days’ work…Three days, cooped up in a stranger’s house, surrounded by Oregon Coast wilderness. What starts as a peculiar side gig soon becomes a waking nightmare. An incomprehensible evil may dwell on this property—and Macy Mullins might just be the only thing standing between it, and the rest of humanity.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lauren Blue, Associate Editor & Book Club Co-Host
As an Associate Editor for The Everygirl, Lauren ideates and writes content for every facet of our readers’ lives, from must-read books and behind-the-scenes interviews to beauty products she can’t live without. When she isn’t sitting in an AMC watching the latest buzzy release, she can be found scouring Goodreads for the perfect pick for The Everygirl Book Club. There, she co-hosts discussions with members, debating plotlines, fancasting characters, and, of course, tossing in her own recommendations.
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Diterbitkan : 2026-06-16 00:30:00
sumber : theeverygirl.com
