The Radiance

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.