The Song of Stork and Dromedary

This is my favorite book of 2026, and I doubt that anything I read in the next three months will knock it off the tippy top of my yearly top ten list. I feel like this book was written for me—and anyone with a lasting passion for the Victorian literary lionesses. In fact, the story begins with sisters who resemble the Brontës, and each succeeding chapter focuses on the life of someone connected to them. While those links become more tenuous as we move through time and space from early 19th-century Yorkshire, thematic echoes and layerings bring us closer to revealing the original mystery. And the rich storytelling never flags, gaining momentum and meaning until the last word. This book is also for people who think that—at least sometimes—“true literature engages what is concealed in fate and hidden in the human soul; it exists in metaphysical realms.”* —Liz
*Aharon Appelfeld, The Story of a Life