It’s the second day of the week! It’s also time for a Top 5 Tuesday update. Top 5 Tuesdays was initially created by Shanah @ the Bionic Bookworm but is now currently being hosted by Meeghan @ Meeghan Reads.

This week’s topic: Top 5 anticipated reads for Q1 2026

This is just going to be a reiteration of my previous posts. I have already published my list of 2026 Top 10 Books I Look Forward To. I have also featured my Most Anticipated 2026 Books In Translation in a separate post. Still, here are some of the books I am looking forward to in the first quarter of the new year.

Title: Vigil
Author: George Saunders
Expected Release: January 27

Synopsis: 

A wise, playful, electric novel from the #1 New York Times bestselling, Booker Prize–winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo, taking place at the bedside of an oil company CEO, in the twilight hours of his life, as he is ferried from this world into the next.

Not for the first time, Jill “Doll” Blaine finds herself hurtling toward earth, reconstituting as she falls, right down to her favorite black pumps. She plummets towards her newest charge, yet another soul she must usher into the afterlife, and lands headfirst in the circular drive of his ornate mansion.

She has performed this sacred duty three hundred and forty-three times since her own death. Her charges, as a rule, have been greatly comforted in their final moments. But this charge, she soon discovers, isn’t like the The powerful K.J. Boone will not be consoled, because he has nothing to regret. He lived a big, bold life, and the world is better for it. Isn’t it?

Vigil transports us, careening, through the wild final evening of an epic, complicated life. Crowds of people and animals—worldly and otherworldly, alive and dead—arrive, clamoring for a reckoning. Birds swarm the dying man’s room, a black calf grazes on the loveseat, a man from a distant drought-ravaged village materializes, two oil-business cronies from decades past show up with chilling plans for Boone’s post-death future.

With the acuity and explosive imagination we’ve come to expect, George Saunders takes on the gravest issues of our time—the menace of corporate greed, the toll of capitalism, the environmental perils of progress—and, in the process, spins a tale that encompasses life and death, good and evil, and the thorny question of absolution. (Source: Goodreads)

Title: Everyday Movement
Author: Gigi Leung
Expected Release: February 10

Synopsis: 

A powerful, award-winning novel that follows the lives of two women as democracy starts to crumble in Hong Kong.

On a weekend morning, college roommates, Ah Li and Panda, wake up with very different reactions to the night before. They have been chased and tear-gassed in the streets of their city after joining tens of thousands of others to protest a national security law that would effectively spell the end of democracy in Hong Kong. Ah Li couldn’t get out of bed, her heart heavy with the lingering images of the police and the violence on the streets, and her worries about the future of her hometown. Panda, whose resistance is no less ardent, put on a sundress, lines her eyes and urges Ah Li to join her for brunch.

While the demonstrations rage, the routine of life also persists for Ah Li, Panda and people in their orbits. They attend family gatherings, fight with their mothers, try and fail to focus at work on Mondays, and make time for dinner dates and app hookups. But the looming political tension and anxiety for the future transform such everyday encounters. In the span of a few months, life as they know it seems to become a the comfort of air-conditioned shopping malls is disrupted by bloodshed; tear gas and sounds of rubber bullets amid neon signs strangely evoke happier memories of summer night fireworks.

Leung Lee Chi’s visceral novel Everyday Movement reveals existential questions that interrupt normal belonging, patriotism, the meaningfulness of an electoral democracy as well as the pampering sense of norm created by consumerism. Fiery and tender, Leung’s writing captures the heartbreak, turmoil and rebirth in bearing witness to and engaging with a shattering reality. (Source: Goodreads)

Title: This is Not About Us
Author: Allegra Goodman
Expected Release: February 10

Synopsis: 

A kaleidoscopic portrait of a modern American family—steadfast, complicated, begrudging, and loving—from the bestselling author of Isola

Was this just a brief skirmish, or the beginning of a thirty-year feud? In the Rubenstein family, it could go either way.

When their beloved sister passes away, Sylvia and Helen Rubinstein are unmoored. A misunderstanding about apple cake turns into a decade of stubborn silence. Busy with their own lives—divorces, dating, career setbacks, college applications, bat mitzvahs and ballet recitals—their children do not want to get involved. As for their grandchildren? Impossible.

With This Is Not About Us, master storyteller Allegra Goodman—whose prior collection was heralded as “one of the most astute and engaging books about American family life” (The Boston Globe)—returns to the form and subject that endeared her to legions of readers. Sharply observed and laced with humor, This Is Not About Us is a story of growing up and growing old, the weight of parental expectations, and the complex connection between sisters—a big-hearted book about the love that binds a family across generations. (Source: Goodreads)

Title: The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts
Author: Kim Fu
Expected Release: March 3

Synopsis: 

An eerie, spellbinding novel of grief, ghosts, apocalyptic rain, and slowly splintering reality, from an author who “writes with a pen as sharp and precise as a lancet.” —PEN/Hemingway Award judges’ citation

In the aftermath of her mother’s death, Eleanor is unmoored. For years, her mother orchestrated every detail of her life—from meals, to laundry, to finances—as Eleanor focused on her career as an online therapist. Left to navigate the world on her own, Eleanor clings to her mother’s final directive: use her inheritance to buy a house.

Desperate to obey her mother one last time, Eleanor impulsively buys a model home in a valley-turned-construction site, a picturesque development steeped in a shadowy history. It feels like a fresh start, until the rain comes—an endless, torrential downpour. As water seeps in through the house’s cracks, the line between what is real and what is not begins to blur. Haunted by the stories of her clients, a stream of workmen and bureaucrats she can’t trust, and visions of ghosts from her past and present, Eleanor’s reality unravels, and she is forced to reckon with the secrets she’s buried and the choices she’s made. (Source: Goodreads)

Title: Sisters in Yellow
Author: Mieko Kawakami
Release Date: March 17

Synopsis: 

Rising star Mieko Kawakami reaches new heights in this pacy, thrilling novel, a Japanese Breaking Bad, in which a group of friends fight for freedom, independence, and survival in Tokyo of the 1990s, a world rapidly dividing into haves and have-nots.

All of them are fleeing something. Growing up without a father, Hana’s tired of the pity in her classmates’ eyes, and finds a flashier mother figure in Kimiko. Kimiko is older than Hana’s mother but seems much younger, chatting easily about school and boys and wanting a better life. Fate throws them together with two more young women—bruised but not broken by life. Together the four set out to remake their lives, fighting predatory lenders, organized criminals, and plain bad luck as they open a bar called Lemon.

Keeping the business going, and trying to take care of each other, forms the core of this enrapturing novel. It is a story of startling reversals and vivid portraits of the matriarchy of Tokyo nightlife and its adjacent criminal underclasses. From the bar owners to the aging hostesses to the young street touts coaxing people off the street to places like Lemon, everyone wants a chance at renewal, but can everyone get it?

Narrated by Hana in Kawakami’s trademark evocatively poetic style and paced like a noir, Sisters in Yellow will be the literary blockbuster of the season. This epic of friendship and betrayal is the kind of book one longs to return to when away from a world until itself, and a book that makes you think while it produces immensities of feeling. It is a major novel that, like so many of the best recent phenomena—from Donna Tartt to Hanya Yanigahara—explores how we survive (or don’t) together. (Source: Goodreads)