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The Radiance
Not yet published
Expected 29 Sep 26A 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.
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.
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.
- GenresFictionLiterary Fiction
304 pages, Hardcover
Expected publication September 29, 2026
About the author
Ayad Akhtar
17 books958 followersAyad Akhtar is a playwright, novelist, the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is the author of American Dervish (Little, Brown & Co.), published in over 20 languages and named a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2012. As a playwright, he has written Junk (Lincoln Center, Broadway; Kennedy Prize for American Drama, Tony nomination); Disgraced (Lincoln Center, Broadway; Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Tony nomination); The Who & The What (Lincoln Center); and The Invisible Hand (NYTW; Obie Award, Outer Critics Circle John Gassner Award, Olivier, and Evening Standard nominations). As a screenwriter, he was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for Best Screenplay for The War Within. Among other honors, Akhtar is the recipient the Steinberg Playwrighting Award, the Nestroy Award, the Erwin Piscator Award, as well as fellowships from the American Academy in Rome, MacDowell, the Sundance Institute, and Yaddo, where he serves as a Board Director. Additionally, Ayad is a Board Trustee at PEN/America and New York Theatre Workshop.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
April 2, 2026
Thanks to Cam via Simon & Schuster for this advanced reader copy of Ayad Akhtar's new novel dropping in fall of 2026.
After reading, and loving, Akhtar's 2020 novel Homeland Elegies I was utterly delighted to find a copy of The Radiance in the mail. I think it's worth mentioning at the top that this novel does reference his last in a fashion that is additive having read both books. If you're considering this novel later in the year, I'd say you'd be smart to give Homeland Elegies a read first.
Like Homeland Elegies, The Radiance brings the reader the autofictional life of Ayad Akhtar. What's real and what's fiction is blurry at best and the novel's strongest passages feel like reading someone's diary. In the novel's opening pages Akhtar is struck in a hit and run while out for a bike ride that leaves him without a spleen. During the acute care of his injury and his subsequent convalescence, Akhtar is unmoored from his worry-ridden frame and left with a constellation of strange neurological symptoms. Akhtar's journey through his expanding empathy, absent anxiety, and search for understanding of his experience forms the spine of The Radiance.
From there, the novel moves in a number of different directions. There's a subplot that seeks to understand the hit and run and uncover the perpetrator while a second recurring topic is a family trauma Akhtar becomes aware of after a dinner with his cousin. Meanwhile, we are introduced to a professor at an upscale university with whom Akhtar becomes intellectually and, potentially, romantically entangled. This professor convinces our narrator to teach a creative writing course at the university where his students then become involved in the larger narrative.
It's to Akhtar's credit that this giant, messy story feels so vital and true to life and not a hodgepodge of topics. There's an oneiric quality to the writing, themes, and conflicts that occur over a compact 300 pages. Even if the connection feels at first tenuous, Akhtar leaves subtle and overt ties between the subjects here creating a web of experience rather than a simple point A to point B plot. I know this is not going to be for everyone, but it worked exceedingly well for me.
This is in no small part due to Akhtar's splendid--dare I say radiant--writing. There's a flow here that many writers aspire to but few achieve. Shifting between the insular and incredibly personal to huge cultural and societal changes at institutions of higher learning shouldn't be as smooth as Akhtar makes it here. Akhtar's internal experience could have read like an extended micro-dose mushroom trip, but instead feels expansive and strives towards a larger understanding of human experience.
Like a stew's component parts before being cooked, The Radiance looks like it shouldn't all go together, but once you've had a proper taste, it's richness and complexity unveils itself. I loved reading this book and came away, as I did with Homeland Elegies, feeling smarter and in awe of what can still surprise in literature. This is really great stuff.
[4.5 Stars]
After reading, and loving, Akhtar's 2020 novel Homeland Elegies I was utterly delighted to find a copy of The Radiance in the mail. I think it's worth mentioning at the top that this novel does reference his last in a fashion that is additive having read both books. If you're considering this novel later in the year, I'd say you'd be smart to give Homeland Elegies a read first.
Like Homeland Elegies, The Radiance brings the reader the autofictional life of Ayad Akhtar. What's real and what's fiction is blurry at best and the novel's strongest passages feel like reading someone's diary. In the novel's opening pages Akhtar is struck in a hit and run while out for a bike ride that leaves him without a spleen. During the acute care of his injury and his subsequent convalescence, Akhtar is unmoored from his worry-ridden frame and left with a constellation of strange neurological symptoms. Akhtar's journey through his expanding empathy, absent anxiety, and search for understanding of his experience forms the spine of The Radiance.
From there, the novel moves in a number of different directions. There's a subplot that seeks to understand the hit and run and uncover the perpetrator while a second recurring topic is a family trauma Akhtar becomes aware of after a dinner with his cousin. Meanwhile, we are introduced to a professor at an upscale university with whom Akhtar becomes intellectually and, potentially, romantically entangled. This professor convinces our narrator to teach a creative writing course at the university where his students then become involved in the larger narrative.
It's to Akhtar's credit that this giant, messy story feels so vital and true to life and not a hodgepodge of topics. There's an oneiric quality to the writing, themes, and conflicts that occur over a compact 300 pages. Even if the connection feels at first tenuous, Akhtar leaves subtle and overt ties between the subjects here creating a web of experience rather than a simple point A to point B plot. I know this is not going to be for everyone, but it worked exceedingly well for me.
This is in no small part due to Akhtar's splendid--dare I say radiant--writing. There's a flow here that many writers aspire to but few achieve. Shifting between the insular and incredibly personal to huge cultural and societal changes at institutions of higher learning shouldn't be as smooth as Akhtar makes it here. Akhtar's internal experience could have read like an extended micro-dose mushroom trip, but instead feels expansive and strives towards a larger understanding of human experience.
Like a stew's component parts before being cooked, The Radiance looks like it shouldn't all go together, but once you've had a proper taste, it's richness and complexity unveils itself. I loved reading this book and came away, as I did with Homeland Elegies, feeling smarter and in awe of what can still surprise in literature. This is really great stuff.
[4.5 Stars]
2026
March 11, 2026ANHPI TBR
📱 Thank you to NetGalley and S&S/Summit Books
📱 Thank you to NetGalley and S&S/Summit Books
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February 23, 2026Review TK.
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March 9, 2026Whew - this felt very meta - an autofiction novel about a writer named Ayad who writes and teaches autofiction. Akhtar has a prodigious vocabulary (I had to look up several words throughout). His story includes a deep understanding and analysis of current cultural trends, especially on college campuses. The author, and the main character, are clearly deep thinkers. Another way of saying it is that I didn't always understand everything he was saying but it was still an interesting read. The 'action' takes place a couple years before and after Ayad is critically injured when hit by a truck while riding his bicycle. The accident necessitated the removal of his spleen but also seemed to change his brain and body chemistry at least for some time. He seemed to feel everything, including other people's emotions, more deeply and he felt more connected to the universe/a higher power/something than ever before. All of this 'weirdness'/'wonderfulness' affects his relationships with friends, women, students etc. There is a lot to think about and absorb in this novel which, for me, will require subsequent re-reads.
Review of advance copy received from Shelf Awareness Pro
Review written By Eva HD.
"Ayad Akhtar is a writer with a very forceful sense of what is. The fact that he comfortably inhabits the world of the mystical, the liminal, the felt-but-not-understood, the fundamentally irrational, is, paradoxically, as much an earmark of his writing as his workmanlike, scrubbed clean behind the ears, all-American pragmatism.
In 2020’s Homeland Elegies, readers were first introduced to Akhtar’s alter-ego, a writer who shares many biographical details with Ayad Akhtar himself – including his name. Wisconsin-bred, of Pakistani heritage, Ayad-the-narrator is a playwright and novelist of some acclaim who has found himself, at the outset of The Radiance, recently single and spending the pandemic in a sleepy college town in upstate New York, with only, for the most part, a local couple, Lucie and Stanford, for company. Lucie is a professor at the nearby university, and gets Ayad a job as a creative writing instructor there. That Ayad is infatuated with Lucie – whose scholarly work is largely concerned with sex, obsession, and love – and that Lucie is eventually disgraced in a sexual scandal that rocks the campus – is secondary to the inciting concern of the novel: the epiphany Ayad experiences after rupturing his spleen in a cycling accident. What follows is a series of events as emotionally unpredictable as they are, we are given to understand, inevitable.
A tale of exo-spiritual conversion moonlighting as a campus novel, and a meditation on the moldering decay at the heart of US academic and intellectual culture, The Radiance has a breathlessly compulsive quality – mirroring, not accidentally, the broader discourse it excoriates (deftly elegised as a “general atmosphere of not questioning your own motives”). Heart on its sleeve, infatuated with symmetries and confluences and consonances, Ayad’s brisk first-person narration plashes along, glittering like a sonata by Mozart – a discussion of whose genius bookends the novel’s revelations. This leitmotif is anything but incidental; the book’s rush of associations and ideas is wrapped in a structure as comforting and propulsive as the chord progression in a top 40 summertime banger. For amidst the philosophising and the earnest investigation of the political and spiritual uses – and limits – of human sexuality against a backdrop of vertiginous generational divide, there is the robustness of a page-turning romp: this is the most playful of Akhtar’s writing to date. The result is a cumulative – radiant, even – sense of knowing as powerful as the epiphany investigated within its pages.
Consequently, The Radiance is essentially spoiler-proof: we know from the beginning that Lucie is famed for anatomising in essay form a sexual adventure she had with a married professor twenty years prior; that she and her husband Stanford, a doctor, have had run-ins with locals resentful of their politics, class, and race; that Lucie’s pet student, Susan, is the lone freethinking bulwark against the performatively woke herd mentality of the rest of her classmates; and that an interrogation of Ayad’s post-traumatic effulgence will figure substantially in the narrative to come. We also know that any assumptions stitched into these first pages will unravel spectacularly before the book is through. (Clearly, Lucie’s brashly unapologetic, sex-as-power-tool brand of turn of the millennium feminism has aged poorly in the eyes of her students, many of whom see her as little more than a superannuated apologist for abuse.) Akhtar gives us the plot immediately off the top, as clinically as one might conduct an undergrad seminar on how to write a story: he tells us exactly what's on the menu, and then has the wherewithal to astound us with the feast. This is the book's structural, and philosophical, triumph. Like any great prestidigitator, the author knows that saying the magic is happening while making it happen, is the trick itself.
Akhtar is a writer who wears his influences on his sleeve, and nothing is too rarified or plebian for his magpie sensibility: nods to John Williams’ beloved campus classic Stoner and the Symposium by Plato jostle companionably against discussions of Finding Nemo and the Prophet Mohammed. Along the way, we are treated to a colourful cast of extras representing, variously, the confused political orthodoxies of the nativist working class; the adamantine moral chauvinism of righteous youth; the louche sexual mores of the intellectual elite; the bootstrap conservatism of ethnic minorities chafing against the dictates of the dominant culture, master’s tools firmly in hand; the floundering whimsy of the pundit class in the face of comprehensive social collapse; and the identity-starved peregrinations of contemporary American masculinity, at sea. Throughout, we are privy to a sort of irony-laced panegyric to the modern male desperate fumble towards selfhood in a world of wise (if often blinded by their own certitude), powerful, and ambitious women. Amid this feast of human folly, in Dickensian fashion people are regularly revealed, betrayed, and undone by their own features. But the portrait of society, and each struggling, unique human life within it is never ungentle: perhaps most surprising (given a general contemporary callousness in this regard) is Akhtar’s tenderness and attention in describing the very youngest of today’s adults. Ayad’s observations gleaned from the seminar he’s taken on with no small enthusiasm, for example that his students never speak “personally about sex unless it had caused them harm” are exquisitely sensitive and attuned to these young students’ lives and values, while carrying, as the unvarnished truth tends to do, a sting that borders on satire. His eventual realisation that he – along with everyone alive – is, amid the beauty of existence, also dying is all the more poignant.
Ayad-the-narrator, our writer protagonist, knows that names carry great power—he’s almost moved to tears when a therapist uses his—and selects them, as he himself tells us, with great care. What are we to make of him sharing this essential mark of identity with his canny creator? Again, at last, from the very beginning, his trick—the oldest in the book—is telling us everything."
"Ayad Akhtar is a writer with a very forceful sense of what is. The fact that he comfortably inhabits the world of the mystical, the liminal, the felt-but-not-understood, the fundamentally irrational, is, paradoxically, as much an earmark of his writing as his workmanlike, scrubbed clean behind the ears, all-American pragmatism.
In 2020’s Homeland Elegies, readers were first introduced to Akhtar’s alter-ego, a writer who shares many biographical details with Ayad Akhtar himself – including his name. Wisconsin-bred, of Pakistani heritage, Ayad-the-narrator is a playwright and novelist of some acclaim who has found himself, at the outset of The Radiance, recently single and spending the pandemic in a sleepy college town in upstate New York, with only, for the most part, a local couple, Lucie and Stanford, for company. Lucie is a professor at the nearby university, and gets Ayad a job as a creative writing instructor there. That Ayad is infatuated with Lucie – whose scholarly work is largely concerned with sex, obsession, and love – and that Lucie is eventually disgraced in a sexual scandal that rocks the campus – is secondary to the inciting concern of the novel: the epiphany Ayad experiences after rupturing his spleen in a cycling accident. What follows is a series of events as emotionally unpredictable as they are, we are given to understand, inevitable.
A tale of exo-spiritual conversion moonlighting as a campus novel, and a meditation on the moldering decay at the heart of US academic and intellectual culture, The Radiance has a breathlessly compulsive quality – mirroring, not accidentally, the broader discourse it excoriates (deftly elegised as a “general atmosphere of not questioning your own motives”). Heart on its sleeve, infatuated with symmetries and confluences and consonances, Ayad’s brisk first-person narration plashes along, glittering like a sonata by Mozart – a discussion of whose genius bookends the novel’s revelations. This leitmotif is anything but incidental; the book’s rush of associations and ideas is wrapped in a structure as comforting and propulsive as the chord progression in a top 40 summertime banger. For amidst the philosophising and the earnest investigation of the political and spiritual uses – and limits – of human sexuality against a backdrop of vertiginous generational divide, there is the robustness of a page-turning romp: this is the most playful of Akhtar’s writing to date. The result is a cumulative – radiant, even – sense of knowing as powerful as the epiphany investigated within its pages.
Consequently, The Radiance is essentially spoiler-proof: we know from the beginning that Lucie is famed for anatomising in essay form a sexual adventure she had with a married professor twenty years prior; that she and her husband Stanford, a doctor, have had run-ins with locals resentful of their politics, class, and race; that Lucie’s pet student, Susan, is the lone freethinking bulwark against the performatively woke herd mentality of the rest of her classmates; and that an interrogation of Ayad’s post-traumatic effulgence will figure substantially in the narrative to come. We also know that any assumptions stitched into these first pages will unravel spectacularly before the book is through. (Clearly, Lucie’s brashly unapologetic, sex-as-power-tool brand of turn of the millennium feminism has aged poorly in the eyes of her students, many of whom see her as little more than a superannuated apologist for abuse.) Akhtar gives us the plot immediately off the top, as clinically as one might conduct an undergrad seminar on how to write a story: he tells us exactly what's on the menu, and then has the wherewithal to astound us with the feast. This is the book's structural, and philosophical, triumph. Like any great prestidigitator, the author knows that saying the magic is happening while making it happen, is the trick itself.
Akhtar is a writer who wears his influences on his sleeve, and nothing is too rarified or plebian for his magpie sensibility: nods to John Williams’ beloved campus classic Stoner and the Symposium by Plato jostle companionably against discussions of Finding Nemo and the Prophet Mohammed. Along the way, we are treated to a colourful cast of extras representing, variously, the confused political orthodoxies of the nativist working class; the adamantine moral chauvinism of righteous youth; the louche sexual mores of the intellectual elite; the bootstrap conservatism of ethnic minorities chafing against the dictates of the dominant culture, master’s tools firmly in hand; the floundering whimsy of the pundit class in the face of comprehensive social collapse; and the identity-starved peregrinations of contemporary American masculinity, at sea. Throughout, we are privy to a sort of irony-laced panegyric to the modern male desperate fumble towards selfhood in a world of wise (if often blinded by their own certitude), powerful, and ambitious women. Amid this feast of human folly, in Dickensian fashion people are regularly revealed, betrayed, and undone by their own features. But the portrait of society, and each struggling, unique human life within it is never ungentle: perhaps most surprising (given a general contemporary callousness in this regard) is Akhtar’s tenderness and attention in describing the very youngest of today’s adults. Ayad’s observations gleaned from the seminar he’s taken on with no small enthusiasm, for example that his students never speak “personally about sex unless it had caused them harm” are exquisitely sensitive and attuned to these young students’ lives and values, while carrying, as the unvarnished truth tends to do, a sting that borders on satire. His eventual realisation that he – along with everyone alive – is, amid the beauty of existence, also dying is all the more poignant.
Ayad-the-narrator, our writer protagonist, knows that names carry great power—he’s almost moved to tears when a therapist uses his—and selects them, as he himself tells us, with great care. What are we to make of him sharing this essential mark of identity with his canny creator? Again, at last, from the very beginning, his trick—the oldest in the book—is telling us everything."
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March 13, 2026This book is quite meta and somewhat confusing. I feel conflicted about it. I can’t say that I enjoyed it, but I was still somewhat captivated by it. At times, I found it irritating. What initially attracted me was the language of spiritual awakening used to describe the protagonist's experience following his accident. He examines the mundane, the immanent, and the transcendent. The novel also delves into campus culture and the aftermath of #MeToo, BLM, and the COVID pandemic. Overall, the book unfolds like a fever dream.
Ayad Akhtar discusses “convincing fiction” as “a chain of linked actions” in the book, but much of the book seemed to be linked rather artificially, or it seemed like a vehicle for him to write about the state of the world, his observations on politics, race, etc.
The sections of the book where he discusses his internal, somewhat mystical experiences are richer and more engaging; however, the events feel bizarre and disconnected. It reads like autofiction—the main character's name is the same as the author's.
Thanks to Edelwiess for the ARC
Ayad Akhtar discusses “convincing fiction” as “a chain of linked actions” in the book, but much of the book seemed to be linked rather artificially, or it seemed like a vehicle for him to write about the state of the world, his observations on politics, race, etc.
The sections of the book where he discusses his internal, somewhat mystical experiences are richer and more engaging; however, the events feel bizarre and disconnected. It reads like autofiction—the main character's name is the same as the author's.
Thanks to Edelwiess for the ARC
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
I may be in the minority on The Radiance by Ayad Akhtar, but this one was a struggle for me. I had a hard time connecting with the story because I was never quite sure what the plot actually was. Much of it felt rambling, and I couldn’t tell if I was reading something grounded in reality, leaning into fantasy, or simply following the main character’s wandering thoughts.
The novel is set in an academic environment, and while I understand that college can be a time of self-discovery, the heavy focus on sexual exploration—especially in the context of professors and students—felt excessive and, at times, uncomfortable. I’m far from a prude, but the way these themes were presented just didn’t work for me.
I can see this appealing to readers who enjoy more abstract, introspective, or boundary-pushing literary fiction, but it wasn’t my kind of read. I rated it 2.5 stars and rounded up to 3
The novel is set in an academic environment, and while I understand that college can be a time of self-discovery, the heavy focus on sexual exploration—especially in the context of professors and students—felt excessive and, at times, uncomfortable. I’m far from a prude, but the way these themes were presented just didn’t work for me.
I can see this appealing to readers who enjoy more abstract, introspective, or boundary-pushing literary fiction, but it wasn’t my kind of read. I rated it 2.5 stars and rounded up to 3
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
Thanks to Netgalley and S&S/Summit Books for the ebook. An electric novel that mostly takes place in and around a college campus. The locals culturally are fighting the losing battle of trying to keep things as they were in the past and the students envision a new world where norms, both big and small, should be debated daily and from a hundred different angles. We follow a teacher, very much like our author, who doesn’t seem to be able to talk to either side. He has a married colleague that dazzles him, but is in trouble with the school for questionable behavior. He’s also recovering from an accident, which may have happened on purpose, that has opened him up emotionally and spiritually. It has the ideas of a dozen books tucked inside its vital 300 pages.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
The narrator tells his story of the aftermath of a hit and run that he suffered while bicycling that could have repercussions beyond a simple traffic accident. Akhtar gives his narrator his own name, making the reader wonder if this is metafiction or not, and there is enough in the body of the work to make one think so. Having been an Akhtar fan since seeing Disgrace on Broadway, I was unsurprised at the content, and found this novel held me with its excursions into philosophy, history, erotica and personal revelation. Highly recommended. This is going to be one of the premiere publications of the year.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
Insane from start to finish. So, so good.
Review of advance copy received from Edelweiss+
I really need someone who is smarter than me to read this and then we'll drink bourbon and discuss. LOVE.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
Undeniably beautiful writing. The narrator's language and syntax is complicated in the beginning, but over time it eases in complexity without losing its depth -- this clarity of expression and precision in style is intentional and it plays a really interesting role in the narrative. Still, I couldn't avoid the density of some passages and the import of others certainly flew right over my head. But it was totally worth pushing on.
One critique I have of the author's previous book, "Homeland Elegies," is the struggle to say convincingly what it is "about." That book also has undeniably beautiful writing, but I noted the evasive question of its structure (and meaning) as an important aspect that was missing from the narrative, and that signaled to me the novel's only significant weakness.
"The Radiance" fixes this. There are clear events that distinguish one scene from another, a sense of growth (and transcendence!) that is part of how the story is told, and an unfolding sense of time that feels natural and immersive. A lot of things happen in this novel, and it's much easier to describe what it is "about": hope and despondency, desire and malaise, beauty and inspiration, the fragility of youth and the resiliency of young minds, the nature and nurture of mentorship, the flat-lining effects of science and technology, and so much more.
Will definitely read this again before it comes out in the fall. Easily a contender for book of the year.
One critique I have of the author's previous book, "Homeland Elegies," is the struggle to say convincingly what it is "about." That book also has undeniably beautiful writing, but I noted the evasive question of its structure (and meaning) as an important aspect that was missing from the narrative, and that signaled to me the novel's only significant weakness.
"The Radiance" fixes this. There are clear events that distinguish one scene from another, a sense of growth (and transcendence!) that is part of how the story is told, and an unfolding sense of time that feels natural and immersive. A lot of things happen in this novel, and it's much easier to describe what it is "about": hope and despondency, desire and malaise, beauty and inspiration, the fragility of youth and the resiliency of young minds, the nature and nurture of mentorship, the flat-lining effects of science and technology, and so much more.
Will definitely read this again before it comes out in the fall. Easily a contender for book of the year.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews