Books of Autumn 2026: Spies, Artificial Intelligence, War, the Body, and a World That Once Again Needs Explaining

Books of Autumn 2026: Spies, Artificial Intelligence, War, the Body, and a World That Once Again Needs Explaining

This autumn’s new books come together to form a portrait of a world that has lost its sense of stability. The story of a Soviet spy takes us back to the origins of modern Iran. Kai-Fu Lee proposes rebuilding companies around artificial intelligence. Charlotte Higgins views Ukrainian culture as a means of survival during wartime. Novels by Marlon James and Hisham Matar show how political violence enters private life.

This is neither a ranking nor a universal list for everyone. These are nine books that give us a language for discussing the main conflicts of 2026: power and freedom, technological acceleration and responsibility, war and culture, the body and social norms, memory and the right to have a home.

Ben Macintyre – Redwood: A Spy Story Whose Consequences Outlived the Cold War

Cover: Crown / Penguin Random House

On September 15, Redwood: The Untold Story of the Cold War’s Most Extraordinary Spy by Ben Macintyre was released. Crown describes it as a true espionage story about KGB Major Vladimir Kuzichkin, who worked in Iran after the 1979 revolution and eventually began cooperating with Britain’s MI6.

Macintyre knows how to turn archives into a thriller, but here the spy intrigue is not important in itself. After the 1979 revolution, Iran had not yet become the state we know today, while the Soviet Union, Britain, and the United States were already trying to determine its future. Through the story of a double agent, the author shows how decisions made behind closed doors continue to shape events decades later.

Kai-Fu Lee – AI Native: When AI Becomes Not a Tool but the Architecture of a Company

Cover: Crown Currency / Penguin Random House

The electronic edition of Kai-Fu Lee’s AI Native was released on September 15. This is not a book about how to add a chatbot to a company. Its central idea is far more radical: organizations must be rebuilt for a world in which intelligence becomes an inexpensive and readily available resource.

Kai-Fu Lee views this transformation simultaneously as a researcher, former president of Google China, and head of Sinovation Ventures. His AI-native company is not an ordinary business with a few chatbots, but an organization in which people and autonomous agents work as a single system, and the company’s knowledge becomes its core infrastructure.

For the media, this argument is particularly important. The debate over whether AI can write an individual article is already behind the times. The real question is different: how should a newsroom be structured if monitoring, checking large data sets, localization, SEO, distribution, and some technical processes can operate continuously? The book is interesting precisely as a blueprint for transformation, rather than yet another collection of prompts.

Charlotte Higgins – Ukrainian Lessons: A Culture That Refuses to Disappear

Charlotte Higgins’s Ukrainian Lessons: Art in a Time of War was released on August 20 and has already made the longlist for the 2026 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction.

Higgins, The Guardian’s chief culture writer, came to Ukraine after the full-scale invasion began not to compile a list of exhibitions and premieres. She was interested in what happens to art when an enemy seeks to destroy not only cities but the very right of a country to its own history. The book thus became an account of culture as a practice of survival, memory, and resistance.

For international readers, this is an opportunity to see Ukraine through more than battlefield reports. War is present on every page, yet the focus remains on the people who write, perform, preserve collections, and restore memory. This daily work shows that culture during wartime is neither decoration nor luxury, but one of the forms of defense.

Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor – End Times Fascism: An Argument That Must Be Examined

End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World was released on September 15. Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor offer their own conception of the contemporary radical right: an alliance of parts of the technological elite, religious fundamentalism, and ethnonationalism against a backdrop of climate, social, and geopolitical crises.

Klein and Taylor write from an explicitly left-wing position, so the book should not be treated as a neutral map of political reality. It is a polemical text, strong when it raises uncomfortable questions and vulnerable when its broad concept replaces the differences between countries and movements. It is best read as an argument–carefully, with fact-checking and a willingness to disagree.

Francine Berman – Better Tech: Why Digital Security Cannot Be an Optional Extra

In Better Tech, Francine Berman asks a simple question: why have we accepted data breaches, surveillance, disinformation, and the harmful behavior of digital platforms as almost a natural price of technological progress?

Berman proposes treating social networks, search engines, and AI chatbots as digital critical infrastructure. Bridges, power grids, and food systems cannot justify danger by claiming that they are innovative. Technological platforms on which society already depends must likewise meet standards of reliability, transparency, and accountability.

In this selection, Better Tech serves as a necessary counterweight to AI Native. Kai-Fu Lee asks how to rebuild an organization around artificial intelligence. Berman reminds us that speed without safeguards merely scales up mistakes faster. These two books are worth reading alongside each other.

Marlon James – The Disappearers: Jamaica, Violence, and the Right Not to Disappear

Cover: Riverhead Books / Penguin Random House

Marlon James’s The Disappearers is the most notable work of fiction in this selection. The American edition was released on September 1. It marks the writer’s return to Jamaica, the setting that earned him the Booker Prize for A Brief History of Seven Killings.

At the center of the novel are eight gay men in Kingston in 1988, an attack on their theater group, and the murder of one of them. James combines a crime story with an exploration of community, sexuality, fear, and memory. Official history recedes; instead, we see people whom society tries to make invisible–and who nevertheless fight for the right to be heard.Daria Anisimova – “Saints, Sinners, and the Naked”: Who Taught Us to Be Ashamed of Our Bodies

Cover: Vikhola Publishing House

Among the new Ukrainian releases, “Saints, Sinners, and the Naked” by Daria Anisimova, published by Vikhola, stands out. It is a work of nonfiction about how different eras shaped our attitudes toward the body, sexuality, nudity, and what society calls “normal.”

Ancient erotic graffiti, phallic symbols, the history of clitoral research, masturbation, racial stereotypes, beauty standards, and OnlyFans are not presented in this book as a collection of provocations. Through them, Anisimova raises a much more serious question: which ideas about our own bodies have we truly chosen, and which have we inherited from religion, medicine, the state, advertising, and culture?

“Kvitky”: The Ukrainian Home as an Archive That Nearly Disappeared

Photos and materials: Old Khata Project / Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty

“Kvitky. The Big Book of House Paintings” by the Old Khata Project is an entirely different kind of publication. It is a large illustrated study of the tradition of painting Ukrainian homes on the outside and inside in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The main point here is not the beauty of the ornament itself. House painting was part of the everyday environment, not a museum exhibit. The Holodomor, Soviet modernization, and changing ways of life brought this tradition to an end in many regions. “Kvitky” can therefore be read simultaneously as an art album, an ethnographic study, and an attempt to bring a lost Ukrainian space back into view.

Hisham Matar – “My Friends”: The Dictatorship That Takes Up Residence Inside a Person

Cover of the Ukrainian edition: MEGOGO BOOKS

Hisham Matar’s novel “My Friends” has also been published in Ukrainian. Its protagonist, Khaled, is a Libyan student who attends a demonstration against Muammar Gaddafi’s regime in London in 1984. The event outside the Libyan Embassy changes his life and turns exile into a condition from which it is almost impossible to return.

In Matar’s work, a dictatorship does not have to appear in every scene to control the protagonist’s life. It enters friendship, love, memory, and the feeling of home. The novel’s most painful question is not only whether an exile can return, but whether there is still a place to which he longs to return.

There seems to be no common theme linking a Soviet spy in Tehran, an AI-native company, Ukrainian house painting, and a Libyan émigré. Yet all these stories explore systems that try to define people in their place.

The state decides who is allowed to return home. Ideology determines whose life is considered normal. Technology reshapes work. War attacks memory. Culture preserves what was meant to disappear.

That is the pulse of the autumn 2026 publishing season.

Some authors explain how systems change. Others show how people preserve themselves within those systems. The most interesting books do both at once.

That is why even books about the body, art, or friendship turn out to be political–not through partisan slogans, but through questions about power, the boundaries of freedom, and the right to remain oneself.