Book Recommendations for 2026

This year, I was missing the experience of discovering new places, and my reading became a form of travel in its own right. At the same time, amid the constant turbulence in the world, I was drawn to books that offered a perspective on how conflicts unfold, linger, and sometimes find their way toward resolution.

1. The Island of Missing Trees – Elif Shafak

   Set against the backdrop of the Turkish and Greek conflict in Cyprus, this novel moves between past and present to tell a story of love, separation, and displacement. One of its most distinctive elements is the presence of an ancient fig tree as a narrator and witness, observing human lives across decades. Initially, I found this very strange, but as the book progressed, I realized just how imaginative a writer’s talent can be in humanizing a tree. Through this lens, the book explores family history, migration, and the long-term effects of political conflict on private lives and nature.

2. Forty Autumns – Nina Willner

   This memoir traces the author’s gradual reconstruction of her family’s life in East Berlin during the Cold War. As a CIA intelligence officer, Willner approaches her family history with both emotional proximity and analytical distance. The book details everyday life under surveillance, the impact of the Berlin Wall on personal relationships, and the long silence that followed reunification. I was born in the Soviet Union and have been reading about its history since the Russian Revolution, but I realized that I was completely ignorant about what happened in East Germany (GDR) after the partition. This book inspired me to visit Berlin for the first time last June.

3. Black Butterflies – Priscilla Morris

   This novel portrays Sarajevo before and during the outbreak of sectarian violence, following an art teacher and the people around her as daily life slowly becomes constrained and dangerous. The story focuses on small, concrete changes such as shortages, damaged buildings, interrupted routines, and increasing fear. Rather than focusing on battle scenes, the book illustrates how war transforms domestic spaces, relationships, and the ability to plan for the future. Art and neighborly connections remain present, even as the city’s social fabric deteriorates. Black Butterflies deeply touched and scared me at the same time, imagining how a modern-day European city, where individuals from different ethnic and religious backgrounds always lived in peace, can so quickly deteriorate and succumb to violent conflict.

4. V13: Chronicle of A Trial – Emmanuel Carrère

   V13, although a nonfiction, reads almost like a novel. Carrère covers something seemingly boring: the trials related to the Bataclan terrorist attacks in Paris. He documents courtroom proceedings over many months, capturing testimonies from victims, families, defendants, and legal professionals. Rather than focusing on the attack alone, the book examines the judicial process as an attempt to impose order, language, and accountability on an act of extreme violence.

5. The Spinoza Problem - Irvin D. Yalom

   The book weaves together the lives of two men born 300 years apart: Alfred Rosenberg, a Nazi ideologue obsessed with antisemitism, racial purity, and Hitler’s approval, yet disturbed by Goethe’s admiration for Spinoza. In contrast, Baruch Spinoza, a 17th-century Sephardic Jew in Amsterdam, pursues a radically rational philosophy that rejects religious dogma, even at the cost of excommunication and personal loss. Together, their stories explore identity and show how rigid in-group and out-group definitions can fuel alienation, demonization, and hatred. This book felt especially current in times where Rosenberg’s musings about “the nature of the Jew” are nonchalantly repeated to incite violence against Jewish people.

   
   

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I read only a handful of business books this year (much of business literature is dreadful), but one stood out:

6. Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World - General Stanley McChrystal et al.

   I picked up Team of Teams because I had to read it for a client culture transformation project, not because I was looking for military leadership lessons. But the book surprised me. McChrystal describes hitting a wall in Iraq, where a rigid hierarchy simply could not keep up with a fast, networked enemy. The response was radical for a military context: dismantling tight control, flooding the system with information, and trusting teams to make decisions without waiting for permission. What hooked me was how practical and uncomfortable that shift was. Less hero leadership, more shared awareness. Less control, more trust. The idea that organizations perform better when they behave as living networks of self-managing teams rather than well-oiled machines has stayed with me, and I am expecting to apply it in other organizations. You can read more about it here.