25. "Progress, not perfection."
First newsletter of 2026: reads, releases, recommendations, and a reintroduction
Dear reader,
My first instinct was to type out happy new year before I realised that while this may be the first newsletter of the new year, said year is already more than halfway done, so no wishes for you. Is it only me or is the usually-feels-like-a-whole-year-rolled-into-one January galloping past (so far) this time around? I’m trying some element of reverse psychology here too, so that the second half of the month feels slower.
Anyway, the tagline of today’s issue is borrowed from the October 2025 issue of V.E. Schwab’s most excellent newsletter: The Visible Life of V.E. Schwab (subscribe here) and the advice is something I need to remember every time I forget—who else is with me? Also it just struck me that it’s a play on her 2020 novel, The Invisible Life of Addie La Rue. Sigh. Can you tell that my brain still isn’t top braining yet post the last burnout?
Speaking of things just striking me (read: far too late but better late than never, am I right), it took me nearly a week to realise that out of the first three books I’ve read so far in 2026, two had a Poppy as protagonist—what were those odds?!
More about those books shortly. Before that I wanted to share some of the new releases I’m looking forward to this month. All descriptions are excerpted from the publisher’s blurbs.
But before even that, a quick shoutout to a dear friend, a mega-talented musician and top all-round human being, whose original track is keeping me company as I write this issue, calming all of the current mental noise like magic. So say “thank you, Felix” everyone!
https://open.spotify.com/album/4XGB5yCf2IKxlazwWRDPSe?si=iZLlw-9BQZCI82ds5Mun1Q
New releases: January edition
Through Gates of Garnet and Gold by Seanan McGuire
A new installment of the author’s Hugo Award-winning Wayward Children series.
After Nancy was cast out of the Halls of the Dead and forced to enroll at Eleanor West's School for Wayward Children, she never believed she'd find her door again, and when she did, she didn't look back. She disappeared from the school to resume her place in the Halls, never intending to return.
Years have passed. A darkness has descended on the Halls, and the living statues who populate them are dying at the hands of the already dead. The Lord and Lady who rule the land are helpless to stop the slaughter, forcing Nancy to leave the Halls again, this time on purpose, as she attempts to seek much-needed help from her former schoolmates.
But who would volunteer to quest in a world where the dead roam freely?
And why are the dead so intent on adding to their number?
The Starseekers by Nicole Glover
In the 1960s, Cynthia Rhodes is a brilliant arcane engineer at NASA’s Ainsworth Research Labs. Talented in math and magic, she hosts a magical educational show... a job she took mostly for a chance to regularly see the dashing Theodore Danner, a professor of arcane archeology.
She is also an amateur sleuth—something that has run in her family for generations
This standalone historical fantasy set in the world of the author’s Conductors series is another rip-roaring adventure for the Rhodes family, who have been using magic to aid their community and solve mysteries since before the Civil War. The times may have changed, but a Rhodes once again finds themselves thrust into a world of murders, theft, sabotage, and curses, and this time the stakes extend to the stars themselves.
Departure(s) by Julian Barnes
The new book from the Booker Prize-winning Julian Barnes, about looking back, facing the future, and coming to the end of life.
Departure(s) is a book about many things: A man called Stephen and a woman called Jean, who fall in love when they are young and again when they are old; a Jack Russell called Jimmy, famous for his good behaviour; the mischievous nature of memory; the aging body, and how it begins to fail; taking our chances, facing our fate; how we find happiness in this life; how a departure can also be an arrival; and when it is time to say goodbye.
Nine Goblins by T. Kingfisher
No one knows exactly how the Goblin War began, but folks will tell you that goblins are stinking, slinking, filthy, sheep-stealing, henhouse-raiding, obnoxious, rude, and violent. Goblins would actually agree with all this, and might throw in “cowardly” and “lazy” too for good measure.
But goblins don't go around killing people for fun, no matter what the propaganda posters say. And when a confrontation with an evil wizard lands a troop of nine goblins deep behind enemy lines, goblin sergeant Nessilka must figure out how to keep her hapless band together and get them home in one piece. Unfortunately, between them and safety lies a forest full of elves, trolls, monsters, and that most terrifying of creatures…a human being.
If I Ruled the World by Amy Dubois Barnett
It’s 1999, and Nikki Rose is the only Black editor on the staff of a prestigious fashion magazine she once thought would be her ticket to becoming a respected editor-in-chief. But after being told one too many times by her boss that “Black girls don’t sell magazines,” she walks away to take over Sugar, a struggling hip-hop music and lifestyle magazine with untapped potential.
A fast-paced, juicy debut novel that peeks behind the curtain at the cutthroat world of hip-hop music and the glamorous magazine scene in the late 1990s, written by the ultimate insider. A smart, utterly immersive romp through one of the most dynamic eras in pop culture history—a story of ambition, friendship, love, and the journey to finding your own voice.
What I’m reading
I started the year with a slow reread of Persuasion, my favourite Austen, which I first read in the summer of 2019 and have since then not returned to. I’m enjoying savouring this, sentence by sentence, and the only time I’m allowing myself to read it is just before bed so that I won’t be tempted to gulp it down again.
The honour of 2026’s first completed book goes to my advanced review copy of The Tricky Business of Faerie Bargains by Reena McCarthy.
Poppy Hill (formerly Cook) was snatched very young and spirited away to the Faerie realm, the Otherside. A few decades later, she has been Returned to Reality, and while she navigates the new-to-her world in three short years on this side of the curtain, she works at the most exclusive Faerie bargain company in the world, which specifically hires Returnees like her for their Otherworld expertise, and offers them rehabilitation and a fresh start. But when a very important (and super confidential) bargain goes wrong, Poppy must return to a world and life (and people) she feared she had left behind forever.
This starts slow, though not for a lack of action (and a certain amount of scattered info dumps that take some getting our heads around), and the misled marketing tag of cozy didn’t help me settle into the new surroundings any faster—if this is cozy, then it is one with teeth (just to clarify, I am very much here for it but readjusting my expectations when I realised took some time)—but once I caught on and shifted my perception, the immersion was much easier and more enjoyable. In any case, I’d argue that it doesn’t truly get going until about a third of the way in, but after that I could not put it down.
Poppy, similarly, grows on you as more and more about her and her past comes into focus, to her as much as us, and I found her a compelling lead, and her personal trauma and grief journey nuanced and realistic. Suitably trickster Fae and Othersiders are supporting cast, and political and bureaucratic machinations galore, along with interesting world building, though we got to explore only the Wild Lands. There looks to be a second book, though this doesn't end on a cliffhanger, and I will be reading that too! Longer commissioned review incoming, stay tuned.
I then travelled to the shores of Lake Geneva sometime in the 1950s with Anita Brookner’s Booker-winning Hotel du Lac. A local friend’s book club are reading this in January and I figured it was the perfect push to pick up a book that had been on my TBR for a few years.
This is a very slim novel with elegant writing and tons of atmosphere, both through just the right amount of observational detail. Edith Hope writes romance novels under a pseudonym. Sent to the lakeside Hotel du Lac in the offseason by friends who think they are being well-meaning following an Incident, she has to reckon with unexpected insights about herself and her life and choices, and decide how she will live it going forward.
To be perfectly honest, the unfurling of her past and her eventual (but uncertain until the end) coming of age was the only thing that kept me reading this slow, quiet story which despite being under 150 pages does sag in the middle. There are a host of supporting characters from her fellow hotel guests, but barring one, I quickly tired of the rest.
Not a new favourite, but a book I am glad I read, and I am looking forward to the discussion at the end of the month!
After that I became practically a globetrotter with People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry.
This was only my second by the author. I didn’t fare well at all (like, at ALL) with Book Lovers a few years ago so I wanted a clean break before I attempted another. The recent Netflix adaptation put this one across my radar, and the blurb convinced me to give it a shot. I’m glad I did because I enjoyed it, even if it felt neverending and repetitive from around the midpoint of the final third (I understood why they initially hesitated so much to be vulnerable about their feelings to the other, but after a point, just admit your very obvious-except-to-each-other feelings already, will you!!!). I did however appreciate the accountability that Henry thrusts on especially Poppy but also Alex once they realise that not only have they hurt each other when thinking that they were protecting the other, they have also hurt other people in their lives that they care about, whether individually or together.
Polar opposites Poppy and Alex become unlikely friends as they share a ride home together in his car after their freshman year of college. It evolves into a best-friends-ship, the kind that, among many other things, means a Summer Trip every year (yes, it’s capitalised because that’s how they refer to it). Nearly ten years worth of summer trips, until Something happens in the last one (the Something was pretty easy to guess, at least in terms of the general vicinity of what happened, but with the intense buildup until it was finally revealed, it felt pretty anticlimactic). Now, they haven’t even spoken in two years, and Poppy decides that she’s going to invite him on one last Summer Trip to try and fix everything.
This one had great banter and near-instant crackling chemistry between the lead pair (and SO. MUCH. MUTUAL. YEARNING. my word). You could see why they worked so well together despite being so different. Them being Poppy-and-Alex and Alex-and-Poppy were my favourite parts of the book. I wasn’t too crazy about the flashbacks to present time to flashbacks and so on structure of the narrative, as I felt like many of the flashbacks (actually, all of them, now that I think about it) were more fleshed out as they were complete memories, while present day was still unfolding and hence, for me, required more page time to develop. But the general enjoyment overrode that and it helped that both of them were fully realised characters on their own merit.
Three short stories followed—one a very cute bonus epilogue for Cat Sebastian’s We Could Be So Good which I’d loved, and two stories from an Amazon Originals series from 2020 that I had meant to check out (always a sucker for fairytale retellings and reimaginings) where I fared increasingly badly, but you can’t win them all.
Another ongoing read that I started post the Brookner and pre the Henry is of the advance review copy of The Apple and the Pearl by Rym Kechacha which is out next month and a most anticipated new release. Set across All Souls Day as a travelling ballet troupe of lost souls gets ready for yet another performance of The Apple and the Pearl, an ancient dance. Their audience? The dangerous Faerie Realms who could snatch any of them away per their own whims. I am already intoxicated, I tell you!
A reintroduction
… for those who don’t know me and are new here.
This was my first instagram post for 2026 because I hadn’t done an About Me for a while and I have since had many new followers in that space. As the same’s true for the newsletter and its continually expanding community of subscribers, thought I’d share it here as well.
~ I'm a Mumbai-based author, editor, and publishing professional who has studied and worked abroad for a decade between England, Spain, and the US.
~ My book coverage (reviews, articles, author interviews, and essays) can be found in online and in print at HT Brunch, Hindustan Times Books, the Hindu Sunday Magazine, Strange Horizons, Write or Die, Tint Journal etc.
~ My editorial work spans the range from developmental to copyediting to proofreading. Shoot me a message or an email if you have something you'd love to collaborate on or a project that needs an experienced editor's eye.
~ For more than two decades, I have written about football for Football Paradise (where I also worked as an editor) and other outlets. As of June 2025, this has been on pause, but will hopefully resume sometime. On the fan side, I'm The Arsenal for life ❤️🤍
~ 'Heartland', my first professional story sale, was published in Between Worlds, the inaugural IF Anthology of New Indian SFF edited by Gautam Bhatia for Westland Books in August 2025. You can purchase the anthology here and here. The submissions call for the second issue of the anthology is open until March 1, 2026.
~ I have a novelette (Summer Melody) and a micro-fiction collection (55 Words) published by US-based indie presses, and I've self-published a fantasy flash (‘Ruby Whispers’) and a CNF travel chapbook (Pomegranate Summer). You can buy all of them here (same link but with your country’s Amazon URL depending on where you’re based): https://www.amazon.com/stores/Anushree-Nande/author/B09NSJXDPJ. You can read excerpts from all of them below—
~ If you asked me about my all-time favourite book, that honour forever rests with The Lord of the Rings.
~ I read a lot of fantasy, but you'll also find literary fiction and other genre fiction on my shelves, along with football and travel non-fiction, among others.
~ Big sportsball fan in general. I also need my regular workouts to remain sane.
~ Music, art, stories give me life.
Do we have anything in common? Tell me something about you!
From the archives
The final issue from last year, in case you haven’t read it yet and want to catch up.
If you’ve enjoyed today’s issue, here’s a few things you can do:
click on the heart to like it
turn this into a conversation by leaving a comment below or dropping me a line via email, even just to say hi—I always love hearing from you 😊
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Let me know what you’re currently reading and watching, send me rants/ramblings/recommendations/excited monologues, GIFs and memes (especially them) 🤓 and let me know if there is anything you’d like me to write about.
Stay well and see you back here on February 1!
Anu
*the book buying links I share on here are affiliate links (barring the links for my own published work for which I will earn royalties instead), which means that if you make any purchases through those links, I will receive a small commission from the sale at no additional cost to you.
Dear Anu, the sheer range of your reading makes me speechless. Keep up the good work. And Happy Half New year. :)