May We Feed The King (2026)
May We Feed The King is framed by the story of a present-day curator, who is tasked with preparing and dressing the private quarters and dining tables of a historic medieval palace for public display. Seeking distraction from the emotional emptiness of her personal life and a recent separation, she throws herself entirely into the material textures of the past. As she arranges hyper-realistic replica artifacts into tableaus of half-eaten replica meals and other evocations of the day-to-day reality of the one of the palace’s unheralded rulers. she becomes profoundly fixated on this King’s inner life.
The Things We Never Say (2026)
The Things We Never Say is set in Strout’s familiar New England, but with an entirely new cast of characters. It follows Artie Dam, a high school history teacher in his late 50s, in the months leading up to the 2024 US presidential election. Artie is married to Evie, a therapist who comes from a different social background, and they have an adult son named Rob. Some time prior to the events of the book, Rob was the driver in a car accident that killed his girlfriend; although he survived, he has been withdrawn and somewhat distant ever since. Artie himself is depicted as experiencing severe internal isolation, is emotionally disconnected from Evie, and is distressed by thoughts of the potential impact of the upcoming election. The weight of all of these concerns lead him to thoughts of suicide.
The End of Everything (2026)
The End of Everything is set in a near-future Britain in which some disaster, or combination of disasters, seems to have occurred, and yet its inhabitants continue to attempt to maintain some semblance of their old routines and rituals. Infrastructure has mostly collapsed, the political landscape is dysfunctional, Europe appears to be ‘missing’ and Britain is shadowed by a vaguely understood but seemingly ongoing crisis associated with an enigmatic, ostensibly “alien” presence referred to as the "iGhetti." The primary narrative follows Phillip Tennent, a man living on the Kent coast who makes his living as a beachcomber, searching the shoreline for washed-up objects of potential value. Early in the book, Phillip discovers an unusual ‘artefact’, which while compared to organic matter and possessing infant-like qualities, it is generally ill-defined other than by its potential sale value, and Phillip initially focuses on trying to find a buyer for the ‘object’.
Black Bag (2026)
Black Bag follows an unnamed struggling actor whose career highlights to date have largely involved performing mid-meal mystery theatre to crowds of indifferent rich folks. He accepts a bizarre performance-based job posted by a university professor named Dr. Blend. Modeled on a real-life 1967 social experiment, the job requires him to zip himself inside a large black leather bag, and sit in silence at the back of a lecture theatre during Blend’s psychology classes. He is strictly forbidden from speaking or interacting with the students, serving merely as an anonymous object for the class to react to. As the experiment progresses, the protagonist finds comfort in the anonymity of the bag, eventually choosing to wear it outside of his required hours and adapting to its practical challenges and potential for social alienation. His fellow students, as proposed by the original experiment’s premise, after going through a phase of resenting his presence, ultimately come to respect and even like ‘Black Bag’.
John of John (2026)
John of John focuses on John-Calum (“Cal”) McLeod, a recently graduated textiles student living in Edinburgh. He’s called back to his home in a remote Hebridean croft by his devout Presbyterian preacher father John, under the guise of helping look after his ailing maternal grandmother, Ella, who has lived with the pair since Cal’s mother left. Cal is gay, but very much not openly so, and his outsider status and ‘mainlander’ style and manner immediately cause conflict with his father. As the book progresses, we learn that Cal isn’t the only one in the family with secrets. (Spoilers ahead!)
The Disappearers (2026)
The Disappearers takes as its starting point a 1988 clandestine theatre group, a rather disparate selection of local gay men who answered the coded call to audition for a production of Canadian playwright John Herbert's prison-set drama, Fortune and Men's Eyes, directed by the veteran Cambridge-educated Havelock Titus. Its first section is narrated by the white-passing Belgian-Jamaican youth Eddy Porteous, who has (compared at least to his peers) a relatively straightforward home life, and sits kind of on the periphery of the group, some of whom have prior connections and are at least generally more immersed in the real-world realities of living as a gay man in Jamaica. He develops a fascination with the beautiful half-Chinese Mat Chin, and begins to notice the difficulties experienced by another fellow actor, Jordan Brown. By a quirk of fate, Porteous misses the rehearsal on the night when it is overrun by a bloodthirsty homophobic mob, inspired by (and ring-led by) the local dancehall artist Streggeh Don, whose hate-filled hit ‘Batty is not Pussy’ has become something of an anthem for many of the worst elements of Jamaican society.