An Avid Lebanese Reader’s Updated List of Book Recommendations

Sometimes an updated reading list is all you need to help you make it through the remainder of 2026. Unless you have your upcoming reads all figured out, here’s an updated list of book recommendations I think deserve a spot on your TBR.

These selections are very political, tacking issues of identity, displacement, queerness, and representation. If that’s your cup of tea, or if you want to find out if it is, then make sure to save this list.

1. Against the Loveless World by Susan Abulhawa

Susan Abulhawa has such a way with words that she can wedge generations’ worth of trauma between the lines, and, obviously, overtly as well. Against the Loveless World, arguably the Palestinian-American author’s most magnificent publication yet, is so deeply moving that I had to stop reading during numerous chapters throughout the novel.

I often found myself trying to catch my breath, not only at her narration of the Palestinian experience, but also at how beautifully she ties her characters to their land, heritage, and each other. The story follows Nahr as she is forcibly displaced from Palestine, experiences the invasion of Kuwait, flees to Jordan with her family, returns to Palestine, and eventually finds herself in an Israeli isolation cell.

2. Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar

Kaveh Akbar’s debut novel is strange, funny, devastating, and deeply philosophical, moving between grief, addiction, faith, family, and the complicated inheritance of being Iranian-American.

Cyrus Shams is a recovering addict and aspiring poet who becomes consumed by the story of his Iranian mother who died aboard Iran Air Flight 655, the commercial passenger jet that was shot down by a U.S. Navy warship. As he digs into the losses that have shaped him, he becomes increasingly obsessed with what it means to be a martyr, hoping to write a book about martyrs and, perhaps, understand his own place among them.

3. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad

Omar El Akkad’s nonfiction debut is a raw, deeply personal reckoning with the West, its promises of freedom and justice, and the violence that exposes how conditional those promises have always been.

What stayed with me most was how personal El Akkad makes something as enormous as political hypocrisy. He writes about Gaza alongside his own experiences as an immigrant, a journalist, and a father. It’s angry, heartbroken, and painfully clear-eyed, but never feels detached from the human cost of what he is writing about.

4. The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (And His Mother) by Rabih Alameddine

If you read out a Rabih Alameddine book to me without telling me it was him, I would be able to tell. His writing style is so distinctly his own that I find myself searching for him on bookshelves. In typical Alameddine fashion, he takes six decades of war, political upheaval, family drama, queerness, and national catastrophe and turns them into something deeply funny, tender, and absurd.

At the center of it all is Raja, a 63-year-old philosophy teacher living in Beirut with his fiercely intrusive mother, Zalfa. It’s quite entertaining when you notice how he writes mothers in all of his novels, often making them deeply pivotal to their children’s upbringing while also making them a source of some of their deepest wounds.

We’d love to hear your recommendations! Make sure to check out the #Bookworms section on our website for more.

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