Edinburgh International Book Festival 2026: Fiction highlights

Britain’s most international book festival has a typically wide-ranging fiction programme this year, writes David Robinson

I was a good lawyer for the first five years,” says John Grisham. “Then I got the writing bug.” This doesn’t generally pay better, but when you have global sales of 500 million and each of your 52 books is a New York Times bestseller, the odds change. The man himself has been on the festival’s wishlist for years, and though his event at the McEwan Hall (25 August) – chaired by Ian Rankin, no less – isn’t in the printed programme, it is a surefire hot ticket.

What are the other top-drawer draws for fiction? Kiran Desai (25 August) was last at the festival 20 years ago, just before her last novel went on to win that year’s Man Booker Prize (her mother Anita Desai was at the inaugural festival in 1983). Kiran returns with The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, an epic (688 pages, 26 hours on audiobook) love story set between India and the US.

American fiction is particularly well represented, with Colson Whitehead (21 August) rounding off his Harlem Trilogy with Cool Machine, a portrait of a hustler at work in 1960s New York for which expectations are sky-high given that the two preceding novels both won Fiction Pulitzers. Then again, the New York Times rates Ben Lerner (29 August) as “the most talented writer of his generation”, and Anne Patchett (29 August) writes the kind of novels (The Dutch House, Tom Lake) that are almost impossible not to enjoy. Meanwhile, if you want tips on how to write character, check out Elizabeth McCracken (30 August), the only editor Patchett allows near her work.

It is hard to imagine an Edinburgh book festival not graced by Ali Smith, Colm Tóibín and Elif Shafak (separate events, 29 August), each of whom ticks the “must-see” box as well as making one realise how so much of the festival’s best fiction is poured into its final weekend. On its last Sunday, for example, not only can you see the writers of two of the novels I have most enjoyed this year – Maggie O’Farrell, author of Land (see feature), and Douglas Stuart, author of John of John (separate events, 30 August) but also André Aciman, author of Call Me By Your Name (a global bestseller still banned in some Florida libraries) whose new book Stowaways is a contemporary twist on Brief Encounter. Douglas Stewart also turns up alongside Jenni Fagan and William Letford for the festival’s penultimate event, a celebration of the work of the late Scottish author Agnes Owens in what would have been her centenary year (30 August).

Although the great Spanish novelist Javier Cercas (30 August) appears on that same fiction-crowded day, other novelists with similarly stellar international reputations are scattered throughout the programme. Mieko Kawakami (27 August) is a literary superstar in Japan – Haruki Murakami calls her his favourite young novelist – while Daniel Kehlmann (25 August), here with a novel, The Director, about filmmaker GW Pabst, has a similarly exalted position in German letters. Both Kawakami and Kehlmann have been shortlisted for the International Man Booker but last month Taiwanese writer Yáng Shuàng-zi and her translator Lin King actually won it, and both will be appearing together (17 August) in what is, as always, Britain’s most international bookfest.

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