From the forty-five books I read from April through June 2026, I’ve picked the five that brought me the most reading pleasure as my Best Reads.
The books were published between 2017 and 2025. One is a thriller, one is a mainstream novel written and set during COVID, and three are Science Fiction novels. I picked these books because they engaged my imagination, my curiosity and my emotions.
Below, you’ll find a description of each book, a brief sumary of what I enjoyed about it, a link to my review of the book and a short biography of the author.
I hope you’ll find at least one book among these five that calls to you
An impossible crime has occurred. A Treasury officer has disappeared into thin air – abducted from his quarters in a building whose entrances and exits are all sealed.
The brilliant and mercurial investigator, Ana Dolabra, and her assistant Dinios Kol have been called in to crack the case.
Before long, Ana discovers that they’re actually investigating a murder. Worse, the adversary seems to be able to pass through warded doors like a ghost, and can predict every one of Ana’s moves as though they can see the future.
Ana’s solved impossible cases before. But this time, with the stakes higher than ever and the investigators seemingly a step behind their adversary at every turn, has Ana finally met an enemy she can’t defeat?
A Drop of Corruption’ (2025) is the sequel to ‘The Tainted Cup’ (2024), which won the 2025 Hugo Award for Best Novel. It was one of my favourite reads in 2025. It was stunningly original, exotic, exciting, and delivered a solid mystery. I’m happy to say ‘A Drop Of Corruption’ was just as breathtaking as ‘The Tainted Cup’. It’s shortlisted for the 2026 Hugo Best Novel award. I hope that it wins.
Robert Jackson Bennett kept the story fresh by setting it in a province outside the empire, and by continuing to develop the relationship between and the characters of, the eccentric Ana Dolabra and her memory-enhanced assistant Dinios Kol. The biochemical engineering in this book was even stranger than in the first, and the twisty plot was saturated in every form of corruption that it’s possible to imagine.
Robert is the author of the Hugo Award-winning novel The Tainted Cup and its sequel A Drop of Corruption, as well as The Divine Cities trilogy and The Founders Trilogy.
His work has received the Edgar Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the Phillip K. Dick Citation of Excellence, and he has been shortlisted for the World Fantasy, British Fantasy, and Locus Awards. He also dug a very good french drain in his backyard back in 2019.
He lives in Austin with his wife and two sons, one of whom is very large and one of whom is very loud, and he focuses on writing and not maintaining his website. He is probably worried right now.
She’s a revolutionary. Humanity is running out of options. Habitable planets are being destroyed as quickly as they’re found and Naira Sharp knows the reason why. The all-powerful Mercator family has been controlling the exploration of the universe for decades, and exploiting any materials they find along the way under the guise of helping humanity’s expansion. But Naira knows the truth, and she plans to bring the whole family down from the inside.
He’s the heir to the dynasty. Tarquin Mercator never wanted to run a galaxy-spanning business empire. He just wanted to study rocks and read books. But Tarquin’s father has tasked him with monitoring the mining of a new planet, and he doesn’t really have a choice in the matter.
Disguised as Tarquin’s new bodyguard, Naira plans to destroy his ship before it lands. But neither of them expects to end up stranded on a dead planet. To survive and keep her secret, Naira will have to join forces with the man she’s sworn to hate. And together they will uncover a plot that’s bigger than both of them.
This was intense. There was so much in this novel: vivid, textured world-building, big themes related to contagion, betrayal and the abuse of power, a tense, twisty, action-packed plot, some original and powerful ideas on enhancing humans through bio-engineering and memory mapping, and an enemies-to-lovers thread that avoided all the cliches and became gut-wrenchingly painful and surprising rather than predictably romanti
Megan E. O’Keefe was raised amongst journalists, and as soon as she was able joined them by crafting a newsletter which chronicled the daily adventures of the local cat population. She lives in the Puget Sound area of Washington, and spends her free time tinkering with anything she can get her hands on.
Her fantasy debut, Steal the Sky, won the Gemmell Morningstar Award and her space opera debut, Velocity Weapon was nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award
Source: https://www.meganokeefe.com/
Megan O’Keefe is best known for three trilogies:
The Scorched Continent series (2016 -18), a fantasy with heist themes about a magically gifted con artist on a desert world. The first book is Steal the Sky.
The Protectorate series (2019- 21), a space opera with themes of identity, memory, and interstellar conflict. The first book is Velocity Weapon .
The Devoured Worlds series (2023 -24), a space opera with themes of ecological collapse, technology-enhanced humans, and colonial, expansionist corporations. The first book is The Blighted Stars.
Eleven-year-old Polly McClusky is shy, too old for the teddy bear she carries with her everywhere, when she is unexpectedly reunited with her father, Nate, fresh out of jail and driving a stolen car.
He takes her from the front of her school into a world of robbery, violence, and the constant threat of death.
And he does it to save her life.
Meet Polly: eleven years old and smart beyond her years. But she’s a loner, always on the outside, until she is unexpectedly reunited with her father.
Meet Nate: fresh out of jail and driving a stolen car, Nate takes Polly from the safety of her quiet existence into a world of robbery, violence and the constant threat of death.
And he does it to save her life.
‘She Rides Shotgun’ is an astonishingly good debut novel – no wonder it won the Edgar Award For Best First Novel (2018). It’s propulsive, violent, and engaging. The writing is fresh and effortlessly accomplished. The plot delivers an escalating threat, leading to a crescendo of violence, yet it avoids being a celebration of violence, keeping it always as a tool to be used with control and purpose, rather than surrendered to. This novel is structured as a bildungsroman with a twist. It focuses on how her experience of violence shapes who eleven-year-old Polly McClusky, the girl with the gunslinger eyes and the watermelon hair, will choose to become.
Jordan Harper is an American author and writer. He is a co-showrunner and executive producer on the Amazon Original crime drama Criminal.
Harper knew from a young age he wanted to be a writer, having made his own book of monster stories during his youth, as well as reading the bulk Stephen King’s short stories and novels.
He is best known for his 2017 Edgar-Award winning novel She Rides Shotgun, about a girl marked for death who has to fight and steal in order to survive.
He’s received recognition for his writing of Love and Other Wounds and Everybody Knows as well.
Outside of his work as an author, Harper has also been known to write and producer for television series, namely The Mentalist, Gotham, and Hightown.
.
Joan is a thirty-something ICU doctor at a busy New York City hospital. She is intensely devoted to her work and happily solitary, but she sometimes wonders where her true roots lie: at the hospital, where her white coat makes her feel needed, or with her family, who try to shape her life according to their cultural and social expectations.
After moving to the United States to secure the American dream for their children, Joan’s parents have returned to China, hoping to spend the rest of their lives in their homeland now that Joan and her brother are well established in their careers.
But when her father suddenly dies, a series of events sends Joan spiralling out of her comfort zone, forcing her to consider her life anew.
‘The book takes place after in a period when Joan is reflecting on the life she’s made for herself and the ways in which her brother, her sister-in-law and even her extrovert, gregarious neighbour are urging her to change it so that she can be more… well… more like them and less like an oddity who makes them uncomfortable
What I liked most about the book was that Joan listens to the people around her and then makes up her own mind. She lives in her rich, successful brother’s house for a while and sees his life with his wife and his children up close. She talks with her neighbour. She’s not dismissive of either of them. She just knows that what makes them happy and what makes her happy are not the same things. She leaves the surprise housewarming party her neighbour throws for her in Joan’s own flat. She leaves her brother’s house with a sense of relief. It’s not that she’s walking away from the world or choosing isolation; she’s walking into the place where she belongs and can be useful, while sustaining the solitude she needs without letting go of human connection. That felt like a happy ending to me.
Weike Wang is the author of 4 novels, the most forthcoming IRIS (Riverhead 2027).
She is the recipient of a Pen Hemingway, a Whiting award and a National Book Foundation 5 under 35.
Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, Best American Short Stories and has won two O. Henry Prizes.
She earned her MFA from Boston University and her other degrees from Harvard.
She currently lives in New York City and has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, Barnard College and Boston University.
Bio taken from: https://www.weikewangwrites.com/
Nearly ten years after Inez Kato sustained a career-ending injury during a military exercise gone awry, she lies, cheats, and seduces her way to the very top, to destroy the fleet that she was once a part of, even at the cost of her own life.
Ennis Rezál, Third Daughter of the Rule, has six months left to live. She is desperate to end the twenty-year war she was birthed to fight. But when she brings Inez aboard the mothership, a chess game of manipulation and double-crossing begins to unfold, and the Rule doesn’t stand a chance.
No wonder this won the Nebula Award for Best Novella (2024). It was intense, inventive, tricky, edgy and written with an effortless immediacy that left almost no gap between the protagonist, Inez, and the reader.
I felt as if Inez was standing so close to me I could feel her heat and smell the sweat in her hair. Yet, Inez was so complex, so secretive, and so intense that even with that proximity, it took the whole novella to unwrap her desires and discover her true intent.
‘The Dragonfly Gambit’ is a perfect example of how intensely powerful a Science Fiction novella can be.
I’m looking forward to reading A. D. Sui’s debut novel ‘The Iron Garden Sutra’ (2026)
“A. D. Sui is a Ukrainian-born, internationally raised speculative writer, Nebula winner, and Aurora, and Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award finalist.
They are the author of The Dragonfly Gambit (2024), The Iron Garden Sutra (2026), and more than two dozen short stories.
A failed academic and retired fencer, they spend most days wrangling their two dogs and tending to their myriads of tropical plants.
You can find them on most social media platforms as @thesuiway.”
Quoted from the A. D. Sui website.
Mike Finn's Fiction 