According to our favorite literary reviewer, Bethanne Patrick, these are the seven books that “will really matter” in 2026:

* Land [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/678944/land-by-maggie-ofarrell/] by Maggie O’Farrell [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/678944/land-by-maggie-ofarrell/] https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/678944/land-by-maggie-ofarrell/— The Hamnet author returns with a luminous novel set in 1865 Ireland, two decades after the Great Famine. A father and son survey their region for the British—mapping the land in English when their hearts speak Gaelic. O’Farrell explores post-famine trauma, colonialism, and the mysterious pull of place, weaving in neolithic history and Irish wolfhounds that feel almost magical. As some characters emigrate to the New World, the novel asks what it means when land becomes identity, when a nation is defined not by commerce but by the places that feed our souls.

* The Fire Agen [https://www.spiegelandgrau.com/the-fire-agent]t by David Baerwald [https://www.spiegelandgrau.com/the-fire-agent] — A stunning debut from the Grammy-winning songwriter behind Sheryl Crow’s Tuesday Night Music Club. This 600-page thriller is based on Baerwald’s own family history: his grandfather Ernst was sent to Tokyo as the purported sales director for IG Farben, the company complicit in the Holocaust. The novel spans continents and decades, from a 1920s throuple to Wild Bill Donovan’s OSS becoming the CIA, complete with family photographs. Patrick calls it “a knockout”—not a potboiler, but a wild, scary ride where almost everything actually happened.

* A Tender Age [https://www.simonandschuster.com.au/books/A-Tender-Age/Chang-rae-Lee/9781398562950] by Chang-rae Lee [https://www.simonandschuster.com.au/books/A-Tender-Age/Chang-rae-Lee/9781398562950] — The Pulitzer finalist delivers what his publisher calls “a spellbinding exploration of American masculinity and family dynamics.” Through an unforgettable Asian-American protagonist, Lee examines what it means to grow up with “double consciousness”—always aware of how the dominant culture perceives you, your family, your chances. Patrick places him alongside Jesmyn Ward as one of America’s finest novelists.

* Witness and Respair [https://www.simonandschuster.com.au/books/On-Witness-and-Respair/Jesmyn-Ward/9781668064283] by Jesmyn Ward [https://www.simonandschuster.com.au/books/On-Witness-and-Respair/Jesmyn-Ward/9781668064283] — The two-time National Book Award winner collects her nonfiction, including the devastating Vanity Fair essay about her husband’s death from COVID at 33. “Respair” is Ward’s resurrection of an archaic word: the repair that comes after despair. These crystalline essays on the American South, racism, and grief reveal the deep thought behind her remarkable fiction. Patrick sees it as essential reading for 2026—a creative grappling with everything America must face.

* Backtalker [https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Backtalker/Kimberle-Williams-Crenshaw/9781982181000] by Kimberlé Crenshaw [https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Backtalker/Kimberle-Williams-Crenshaw/9781982181000] — A memoir from the architect of “intersectionality” and “critical race theory,” now under attack in the current administration. Structured in three parts—raising a back talker, becoming a back talker, being a back talker—it begins with young Kimberlé desperate to play Thornrose in a

Your 2026 Reading List: Seven Books You Won't Want to Miss

Pay attention to this interview. Because, you see, attention is seriously expensive — the Silicon Valley industry being worth $17 trillion, at least according to the Princeton historian D. Graham Burnett [https://dgrahamburnett.net/], co-editor of a new manifesto entitled Attensity [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/782387/attensity-by-the-friends-of-attention/]. For Burnett and his friends in the Attention Liberation Movement, the attention industry is "fracking" the human out of us. Liberating ourselves from its exploitative grasp, then, is an existential challenge. "If we take our attention away," he warns, "it collapses into sand." And so will we. So paying attention involves more than simply putting down our phones. It means joining the Attensity movement and challenging the central attention economy principles of 21st century capitalism.

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Human Fracking: The $17 Trillion War for Your Attention

New books are like London buses. You wait and wait and then a handful comes at the same time. Take, for example, histories of the New York City vigilante Bernie Goetz. Last week, we featured the CNN legal analyst Elliott Williams who has a new book out on Goetz. And now we have another uncannily timely book on Goetz. This one from the Pulitzer-Prize winning historian, Heather Ann Thompson [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/59065/heather-ann-thompson/]. Entitled Fear and Fury [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/771433/fear-and-fury-by-heather-ann-thompson/], Thompson focuses on the 1984 New York City case in the genealogy of white rage in America, tracing the Goetz shootings back to the Reagan Eighties as well as white vigilantes in the Trump era like Kyle Rittenhouse. What ties Goetz and Rittenhouse together, Thompson argues, is the inversion of victim and villain in a brutal haze of violence. And, of course, we can now see this tragic narrative repeated on the streets of Minneapolis. It’s as if Bernie Goetz and Kyle Rittenhouse are now working for ICE.



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Fear and Fury: From Bernie Goetz to Kyle Rittenhouse

This is the final conversation from DLD. And the most optimistic - at least from a European perspective. John Thornhill [https://www.ft.com/john-thornhill], the FT’s Innovation Editor and founder of Sifted [https://sifted.eu/author/johnthornhill], has a quite different take on Europe’s tech scene from our other guests. Yes, he acknowledges, the regulatory environment is complex. And, yes, late-stage capital is thin. But Thornhill sees something the doomsayers miss: resilience. A new generation of founders isn’t building “European champions” — they’re building global ones. Innovation hot spots are popping up across the continent: London, Berlin, Stockholm, Tallinn, Lisbon. Paris (of all places) is enjoying a renaissance. And deep tech — biological computing, synthetic biology, materials science — may finally give Europe’s research strength a viable path to commercialization. So who needs Silicon Valley Goliaths when you have an army of European Davids?

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Who Needs Goliaths? Don't Write Off Europe's Army of Davids

For media moguls, we are living, to borrow from Dickens, in the best and worst of times. As Nicholas Thompson [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Thompson_(editor)] confessed to me at DLD, The Atlantic CEO is simultaneously “excited” and “terrified” by the power of AI to revolutionize his media industry. On the one hand, Thompson explains, AI represents the best tool journalism has ever had for locating needles in haystacks. On the other hand, AI has the potential to obliterate traditional media’s entire business model. So what’s it to be: extinction or renaissance? For Thompson, a lot depends on the fate of copyright. If our Silicon Valley leviathans pay for the original content that powers their intelligence, then media companies can prosper in the age of AI. If not, then it really will turn out to be the worst of times for high quality, curated publications like The Atlantic.

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Excited and Terrified: The Atlantic CEO on Journalism's AI Reckoning

One of the most bracing presentations at DLD this year was given by Crunchbase's data queen Gene Teare [https://dld-conference.com/speaker/gene-teare]. Breaking down America's VC dominance, Teare's speech might have been entitled "64% and Counting." As Teare told Keith and me in a special Teare family edition of our regular That Was The Week [https://www.thatwastheweek.com/] show, the VC gap between Europe and America is only getting wider. From 2014 to 2023, US share of global venture dipped below 50%. But in 2025, it roared back — with nearly two-thirds of all global VC flowing to America. The foundation model funding disparity tells the story: OpenAI raised $40 billion last year, Anthropic $17.5 billion. The top French AI company? $2 billion. Oh mon Dieu.

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64% and Counting: America's Venture Capital Dominance

Not everything at DLD this year was on the growing US-European economic and technological divide. There were many speeches on the environment including from heavyweights like Kate Raworth. And I had the opportunity to catch up with my favorite advocate of regenerative agriculture, the managing partner at Acton Capital, Jan-Gisbert Schultze [https://www.actoncapital.com/team-members/dr-jan-gisbert-schultze]. According to Schultze, today's deepest problem is our spiritual disconnection from nature. We've lost 50% of our soil carbon, he notes, and with it the fertility that sustains us. We can save ourselves, he says, from the soil up — by embracing regenerative agricultural practices that prioritize local community activation and sustainable farming. Schultze is putting this into practice at Lake Constance, Germany's largest lake, where his Regenerate Forum is working to transform an entire county into what he calls a "climate landscape" — retraining farmers, rebuilding soil, and relocalizing the food system.

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From the Soil Up: Regenerating the Economy

Few speakers at DLD this year were more sombre than The Economist's deputy executive editor Kenneth Cukier [https://mediadirectory.economist.com/people/kenneth-cukier/]. “Civilizations aren’t killed,” Cukier says, “they commit suicide.” It's now "three minutes to midnight" in Europe, he warns, and what he called the priceless "vase" of the liberal order is about to shatter. Borrowing from Hemingway's description of personal bankruptcy, Cukier argues that civilizational suicide comes "slowly, then suddenly". So can anything avert this collapse? Cukier isn't particularly optimistic, but nor is he hopeless. The vase hasn't shattered yet. The hope, he suggests, is with new peaceful technologies that can help reinvent democracy. But if the European clock really is teetering at three minutes to midnight, it's hard to be persuaded by Kenneth Cukier’s abstract promises of ethical technology.

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Three Minutes to Midnight: How Europe is Running out of Time

Few people experienced the Dot-Com bubble with more vertiginous intensity than Bill Gross [https://www.linkedin.com/in/billgrossidealab/], the Pasadena-based founder of Idealab and many many other internet startups over the last 30 years. So when I sat down with Gross at DLD, I couldn’t resist opening with the boom/bubble gambit. How, I asked him, does today’s AI hysteria compare with the Web 1.0 madness of the Nineties? While Gross - whose current ProRata.ai play is focused on protecting creativity in the age of generative AI - doesn’t believe that today’s boom is akin to the Dot-Com bubble, there are similarities. We are at what Gross calls a “Napster moment” in terms of making the big LLMs accountable for all the content they are illegally crawling (ie: stealing). And to get beyond this moment, he says, everyone from Google and OpenAI to Perplexity and Anthropic, needs to move to a “Spotify model” that fairly shares revenue with the human creators of knowledge.

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Why Today's AI Boom Is No Dot-Com Bubble

Yesterday’s show [https://keenon.substack.com/p/why-europe-must-learn-the-language] from the DLD conference was about the need for Europe to relearn the language of power. Today, things get even more dire for our European friends. I asked another DLD speaker, Carl Benedikt Frey [https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/people/carl-benedikt-frey], a Swedish economic historian who teaches at Oxford, whether it’s “game over” for Europe in terms of its ability to compete with American and Chinese big tech. His answer: not yet—but close. Frey’s last book, shortlisted for the 2025 Financial Times business book of the year, is entitled How Progress Ends: Technology, Innovation and the Fate of Nations [https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691233079/how-progress-ends?srsltid=AfmBOoqAw0uI2FCMzuiRVYpaKKzlEpolvjasl0kHj7ebdiBx845QWtKL]. But it’s specifically Europe’s economic progress and the fate of European nations that most concerns Frey. Unless Europeans create a true single market for services, he warns, it really could be the end of the European dream of continent-wide progress. So no more crossroads for a continent perennially at a crossroads. And that single market, Frey explains, is ultimately a matter of political rather than economic will.

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Is It Game Over For Europe?

The daily show about the big ideas, new technologies, books and people changing the world. Hosted by Andrew Keen.