A NEW YORK TIMES NOVEL EVERYONE WILL BE TALKING ABOUT IN 2026 • A TIME MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2026

‘Simply put, a work of genius.’ Abraham Verghese, author of The Covenant of Water

A mysterious accident along a country road sparks an awakening and an investigation in Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright and acclaimed novelist Ayad Akhtar’s most daring work yet-a visionary novel of spiritual transformation in an age of fracture- ‘bordering at times on the ineffable’ (Mary Gaitskill).

When a hit-and-run shatters more than his body, a writer is caught between revelation and madness as an uncanny pull toward a brilliant campus colleague ensnares him in a scandal that threatens to destroy them both. What begins as a provocative portrait of academic and cultural warfare deepens into erotic entanglement, the exposure of a family secret, and the mystery surrounding the narrator’s accident-both the violence and its aftermath.

Moving between rural America and Europe, Islam and Christianity, the intimate and the metaphysical, The Radiance is of our American moment and beyond it-asking not only what has broken, but what radiance remains.