This content contains affiliate links. When you buy through these links, we may earn an affiliate commission. Once in a rare while, a book comes along that redefines a genre for you, or challenges your understanding of effective storytelling, or compels you to stare down the unthinkable to deepen your understanding of trauma and systemic ills. Even more rarely, a book does all of the above. I’m recommending one such title and it happens to be one of my most anticipated books of 2026 . It took me longer than expected to finish this much-discussed literary mystery novel because sexual assault and abuse of minors is the open wound at its center and the content can be triggering. I’m a mom of two daughters; you bet I had to take breaks to ensure I was ready for the next unblinking look at assault through a child’s eyes. Whidbey by T Kira Madden T Kira Madden’s debut memoir Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls put the diasporic Kanaka ʻŌiwi writer in the white, hot spotlight when it published in 2019.…