My favourite time of the reading year… book prize longlists are here!

Our top reading recommendations from the 2026 longlists of the Women’s Prize and the International Booker Prize.

Every year, the announcement of the Women’s Prize and the International Booker Prize longlists puts me into a spin. I love these lists because they always introduce me to new authors and books that would otherwise remain unknown to me.

The Women’s Prize introduced me to Anne Enright, Patricia Lockwood and Naomi Alderman. And the International Booker introduced me to Still Born by Guadalupe Nettel, Mariana Enriquez (MY QUEEN) and Han Kang. All these authors are incredibly different and rich reading experiences that I still think about.

So, in honour of the longlists being announced, here are some of our top reading recommendations.

Women’s Prize for Fiction 2026 longlist...

Heart the Lover by Lily King

Look, I don’t want to bang on about it (again), but we have been raving about Heart the Lover for months so if you haven’t read it what are you waiting for? Go. Now. Don’t even finish this article…

The story follows a narrator who, as a university student, is pulled into a magnetic friendship with two dazzling classmates, Sam and Yash. What begins as shared intellectual obsession (big ideas, late nights, card games) slowly becomes tangled with first love, longing and choices that feel thrilling in the moment but complicated later. Years later, the narrator is now a successful writer with a family and a sudden reappearance from that past forces her to reckon with what really happened and who she might have been.

This book gives you all the first-love feelings, that strange, electric time when love feels like fire and water and air all at once, completely overwhelming and impossible to hold onto. King writes with such emotional precision that you feel every flicker of desire, regret and memory as if it were your own. If you love beautifully written, character-driven novels that leave you staring into space after the final page, you’ll love this.

Moderation by Elaine Castillo

This is not your average ‘angsty girl novel about modern life’. Girlie, a Filipinx-American in her thirties, works in the kind of job most of us try not to think about: she moderates the absolute worst content the internet has to offer. Can you even imagine?

Girlie is cool, detached and emotionally armoured, all qualities which make her very good at her job, so when her tech company offers her a huge promotion to oversee the moderation inside their new virtual-reality theme parks it feels like a dream come true. But as she steps deeper into these hyper-real digital worlds, she begins to sense that something isn’t quite right, not just in the code that shapes these spaces, but in her complicated, unexpected connection with her new boss.

This is sharp, funny and quietly unsettling, really capturing what it actually feels like to live online and exploring all those icky blurred boundaries between performance and reality, intimacy and surveillance, connection and exhaustion.

Now, on the Women’s Prize for non-fiction longlist...

Nation of Strangers by Ece Temelkuran

Ece Temelkuran is a Turkish journalist, novelist and political commentator and in this book she is at her bold, brilliant best. This is a provocative and deeply human exploration of what ‘home’ means in a world defined by movement, instability and constant change.

Drawing on her own experience of exile, she challenges the clichés we attach to migration and homelessness, reframing them not just as stories of loss but as sources of moral insight for navigating the 21st century. This book asks us to rethink how we live together (politically, emotionally and ethically) and how we might build lives that are resilient and humane. Urgent, intellectually energising and globally minded, this is big brain stuff that is absolutely essential right now!

To Exist as I Am by Grace Spence Green

At 22, Grace Spence Green’s spine was broken in a devastating fall, transforming her overnight from hospital caregiver to patient. This book is an intimate account of her return to the wards and to herself, looking deeply at how recovery, independence and wellbeing are reshaped by lived experience.

This is an emotional read about how one moment can change our lives forever but how even in the painful rebuilding of a new life, there is hope and joy to be found.

And on the International Booker Prize 2026 longlist try…

The Deserters by Matthias Énard

This haunting novel moves between two seemingly distant stories: a war-weary soldier fleeing across Mediterranean scrubland in search of refuge, and a scientific gathering honouring an East German mathematician whose life was shaped by ideology, survival and the collapse of a political world. These narratives subtly orbit each other another to explore the moral ambiguities of conflict and the ways war reshapes identity at the most intimate level.

This is translated from French by Charlotte Mandell and a philosophical and immersive reading experience that rewards slow reading and deep thought.

The International Booker Prize 2026 winner will be announced May and the winners of the Women’s Prize for fiction and non-fiction will be announced in June.