Your favourite journalists’ favourite books from the first half of 2026

Consider this your snoop inside the collective bedside table of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age newsrooms.

If you truly want to understand someone, skip the Myers-Briggs and look at their bookshelf. You might know our journalists and editors through the stories they write, but what are they reading when they’re off the clock? We asked staff across The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age to share their favourite books published in 2026 so far.

The reading choices were, in some cases, alarmingly on brand – Kate McClymont is still chasing corruption and wrongdoing even in her leisure reading – while elsewhere the newsroom was busy falling for tradwives, medieval knights, literary heartbreak and one particularly memorable goat. Two novels emerged as runaway favourites, becoming this year’s unofficial office book club selections.

Now it’s your turn. At the end of this piece, tell us the best new book you’ve read this year so we can round up readers’ most-loved recommendations.

London Falling by Patrick Radden KeefeA gripping true story about the mysterious circumstances in which a 19-year-old teenager plummeted to his death from the balcony of a luxury apartment on the banks of the Thames. The boy’s grim death in 2019 has as its backdrop the decline of London and the shocking consequences when officialdom turns a blind eye to the rampant corruption flowing from the dirty billions flooding in via Russian oligarchs. Fans of the award-winning Radden Keefe, who writes for The New Yorker, and whose previous works include Empire of Pain (about the Sackler family and America’s opioid crisis) and Say Nothing (about the Troubles in Northern Ireland), will appreciate his latest riveting read. Kate McClymont, SMH chief investigative reporter

Trip to the Moon: Understanding the True Power of Story by John YorkeFor a book about narrative structure and the power of a good yarn, Yorke could have given this a tighter edit. Regardless of the lecturer and telly producer’s fondness for an adjective, Yorke’s second book (after 2014’s bestselling treatise on screenwriting Into the Woods) is full of sharp, sometimes profound, insights regarding the potent role of stories in conspiracy theory, religion and politics. (Hillary Clinton’s “Stronger Together” campaign slogan was doomed against the “masterclass in condensed narrative” of “Make America Great Again”, he says.) There’s plenty of what Yorke calls “domesticated story” analysis, too, linking Tolstoy, Happy Valley and Iron Man 3. You don’t need a background in the filmography of Georges Méliès to pick this up. Callan B