The nonfiction shelf has stayed busy in 2026, with books that move from true crime to memoir to literary criticism and back again. Some titles have drawn strong sales and Hollywood attention, while others have found readers through the force of their subject matter and the authors behind them. Taken together, these five books show how much range the genre can still hold. ALSO READ: Rwanda’s public monuments: How art preserves history and identity London Falling — Patrick Radden Keefe Patrick Radden Keefe returns with investigative nonfiction built around a single death that opens into a larger story about money, deception and crime in London. In London Falling, Keefe looks at the 2019 death of 19-year-old Zac Brettler, who fell from a luxury apartment building on the Thames. As Keefe reconstructs the case, he follows the trail into a hidden world shaped by a false identity, a shady businessman and a violent gangster. The book is Keefe’s latest work from the author of Say Nothing and Empire of Pain, titles that established him as one of the sharpest narrative reporters working in nonfiction. What makes the book stand out is the way it uses one family’s loss to expose a wider failure of institutions. Keefe has said he was drawn to the tragedy because it pointed to larger questions about power and accountability in a city where status and secrecy can blur together. That gives the book the pace of a thriller without losing the weight of a serious reporting project. Famesick — Lena Dunham Lena Dunham’s second memoir follows the years after Girls made her famous, but it is also a book about illness, dependence and the cost of living inside public attention. Famesick traces Dunham’s life in three acts, moving from the rise of Girls to the years that followed, while taking in endometriosis, Ehlers-Danlos syndrome and addiction to opioids and benzodiazepines. Penguin Random House describes it as “a frank, deeply personal reflection on fame, illness and the strain between the two.” The memoir has the kind of confessional energy Dunham has long been known for, but the subject here is heavier than celebrity nostalgia. What emerges is a story about how success can complicate private life and how the body can become its own battleground. The book was published in April and quickly drew attention as one of the more closely watched memoir releases of the year. Strangers — Belle Burden Belle Burden’s Strangers begins with the abrupt end of a marriage and expands into a portrait of betrayal, identity and survival. The memoir follows Burden after her husband leaves during the early months of the pandemic, forcing her to rethink both the relationship she thought she knew and the assumptions she had carried about family and intimacy. The book has also become a film project. Netflix won the rights after a competitive auction, with Gwyneth Paltrow attached to star and executive produce, while playwright Heidi Schreck is set to write the screenplay. That adaptation news has widened interest in the memoir, but the book itself is already built around the quieter work of making sense of loss and reconstruction on the page. Light and Thread — Han Kang Han Kang’s Light and Thread is her first work of nonfiction published in English, and it reads as a bridge between her writing life and her inner one. The book gathers essays, poems, photographs and diary entries, including her Nobel lecture, into a collection that shows how her literary imagination works across forms. For readers who know Han mainly through The Vegetarian or Human Acts, the appeal here lies in the chance to see the contours of her thinking more directly. The book offers a different kind of intimacy, one rooted less in plot than in voice, reflection and image. It is a useful companion to her fiction, but it also stands on its own as a record of a major writer thinking aloud about language, memory and attention. On Morrison — Namwali Serpell Namwali Serpell’s On Morrison is a work of criticism, but it has drawn the kind of notice more often reserved for major novels and memoirs. The book examines Toni Morrison’s writing through close reading rather than biography, and Serpell approaches Morrison as a craftsperson whose work changed the terms of modern literature. That focus gives the book its edge. Instead of treating Morrison as a monument, Serpell looks at the tools behind the work, asking how the novels operate and why they continue to matter. For readers who already love Morrison, On Morrison offers a deeper way in. For those coming to the subject fresh, it serves as a reminder that literary criticism can be as engaging as the books it studies.
