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The 10 Best Fiction Books of 2021

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T he year 2021 was poised to be a great one for established, fan-favorite authors. We were blessed with new work from a buzzy roster of titans, from Colson Whitehead to Lauren Groff to Kazuo Ishiguro . But while they, along with several others, did not disappoint (see TIME’s list of the 100 Must-Read Books of 2021 ), it was debut authors who truly shined. In an industry that has long been criticized for exclusion—and where it’s increasingly difficult to break out from the crowd—a crop of bright new voices rose to the top. From Anthony Veasna So to Torrey Peters to Jocelyn Nicole Johnson and more, these writers introduced themselves to the world with fiction that surprised us, challenged our perspectives and kept us fulfilled. Here, the top 10 fiction books of 2021.

10. Klara and the Sun , Kazuo Ishiguro

The eighth novel from Nobel Prize–winning author Kazuo Ishiguro, longlisted for the Booker Prize, follows a robot-like “Artificial Friend” named Klara, who sits in a store and waits to be purchased. When she becomes the companion of an ailing 14-year-old girl, Klara puts her observations of the world to the test. In exploring the dynamic between the AI and the teen, Ishiguro crafts a narrative that asks unsettling questions about humanity, technology and purpose , offering a vivid view into a future that may not be so far away.

Buy Now: Klara and the Sun on Bookshop | Amazon

9. Open Water , Caleb Azumah Nelson

In his incisive debut novel, Caleb Azumah Nelson tells a bruising love story about young Black artists in London. His protagonist is a photographer who has fallen for a dancer, and Nelson proves masterly at writing young love, clocking the small and seemingly meaningless moments that encompass longing. In just over 150 intimate pages, Nelson celebrates the art that has shaped his characters’ lives while interrogating the unjust world that surrounds them.

Buy Now: Open Water on Bookshop | Amazon

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8. Afterparties , Anthony Veasna So

The nine stories that constitute Anthony Veasna So’s stirring debut collection, published after his death at 28, reveal a portrait of a Cambodian American community in California. One follows two sisters at their family’s 24-hour donut shop as they reflect on the father who left them. Another focuses on a high school badminton coach who is stuck in the past and desperate to win a match against the local star, a teenager. There’s also a mother with a secret, a love story with a major age gap and a wedding afterparty gone very wrong. Together, So’s narratives offer a thoughtful view into the community that shaped him, and while he describes the tensions his characters navigate with humor and care, he also offers penetrating insights on immigration, queerness and identity.

Buy Now: Afterparties on Bookshop | Amazon

7. Cloud Cuckoo Land , Anthony Doerr

The five protagonists of Anthony Doerr’s kaleidoscopic and remarkably constructed third novel, all living on the margins of society, are connected by an ancient Greek story. In Cloud Cuckoo Land, a National Book Award finalist, a present-day storyline anchors a sweeping narrative: in a library, an ex-prisoner of war is rehearsing a theatrical adaptation of the Greek story with five middle schoolers—and a lonely teenager has just hidden a bomb. Doerr catapults Cloud Cuckoo Land forward and back from this moment, from 15th-century Constantinople to an interstellar ship and back to this dusty library in Idaho where the impending crisis looms. His immersive world-building and dazzling prose tie together seemingly disparate threads as he underlines the value of storytelling and the power of imagination.

Buy Now: Cloud Cuckoo Land on Bookshop | Amazon

6. The Life of the Mind , Christine Smallwood

The contemporary fiction landscape is full of protagonists like Christine Smallwood’s Dorothy: white millennial women who are grappling with their privilege and existence in a world that constantly feels like it’s on the verge of collapse. Plot is secondary to whatever is going on inside their heads. But Dorothy, an adjunct English professor enduring the sixth day of her miscarriage, stands apart. In Smallwood’s taut debut, this charming yet profound narrator relays amusing observations on her ever-collapsing universe. Languishing in academia, Dorothy wonders how her once-attainable goals came to feel impossible, and her ramblings—which are never irritating or tiring, but instead satirical and strange—give way to a gratifying examination of ambition, freedom and power.

Buy Now : The Life of the Mind on Bookshop | Amazon

5. The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois , Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

The debut novel from poet Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, longlisted for a National Book Award, is a piercing epic that follows the story of one American family from the colonial slave trade to present day. At its core is the mission of Ailey Pearl Garfield, a Black woman coming of age in the 1980s and ’90s, determined to learn more about her family history. What Ailey discovers leads her to grapple with her identity, particularly as she discovers secrets about her ancestors. In 800 rewarding pages, Jeffers offers a comprehensive account of class, colorism and intergenerational trauma. It’s an aching tale told with nuance and compassion—one that illuminates the cost of survival.

Buy Now: The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois on Bookshop | Amazon

4. Detransition, Baby , Torrey Peters

Reese is a 30-something trans woman who desperately wants a child. Her ex Ames, who recently detransitioned, just learned his new lover is pregnant with his baby. Ames presents Reese with the opportunity she’s been waiting for: perhaps the three of them can raise the baby together. In her delectable debut novel, Torrey Peters follows these characters as they become entangled in a messy, emotional web while considering this potentially catastrophic proposition—and simultaneously spins thought-provoking commentary on gender, sex and desire.

Buy Now: Detransition, Baby on Bookshop | Amazon

3. My Monticello , Jocelyn Nicole Johnson

Jocelyn Nicole Johnson’s searing short-story collection is one to read in order. Its narratives dissect an American present that doesn’t feel at all removed from the country’s violent past, and they build to a brutal finish. The unnerving standout piece—the titular novella—follows a group of neighbors who seek refuge on Thomas Jefferson’s plantation while on the run from white supremacists. Johnson’s narrator is college student Da’Naisha, a Black descendant of Jefferson who is questioning her relationship to the land and the people with whom she’s found herself occupying it. The story is as apocalyptic as it is realistic, a haunting portrait of a community trying to survive in a nation that constantly undermines its very existence.

Buy Now: My Monticello on Bookshop | Amazon

2. The Prophets , Robert Jones, Jr.

At a plantation in the antebellum South, enslaved teenagers Isaiah and Samuel work in a barn and seek refuge in each other until one of their own, after adopting their master’s religious beliefs, betrays their trust. In The Prophets, a National Book Award finalist, Robert Jones, Jr. traces the teens’ relationship, as well as the lives of the women who raised them, surround them and have been the backbone of the plantation for generations. In moving between their stories, Jones unveils a complex social hierarchy thrown off balance by the rejection of the young mens’ romance. The result is a crushing exploration of the legacy of slavery and a delicate story of Black queer love.

Buy Now: The Prophets on Bookshop | Amazon

1. Great Circle , Maggie Shipstead

The beginning of Maggie Shipstead’s astounding novel , a Booker finalist, includes a series of endings: two plane crashes, a sunken ship and several people dead. The bad luck continues when one of the ship’s young survivors, Marian, grows up to become a pilot—only to disappear on the job. Shipstead unravels parallel narratives, Marian’s and that of another woman whose life is changed by Marian’s story, in glorious detail. Every character, whether mentioned once or 50 times, has a specific, necessary presence. It’s a narrative made to be devoured, one that is both timeless and satisfying.

Buy Now: Great Circle on Bookshop | Amazon

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The Award-Winning Novels of 2021

The year's big literary prize-winners.

The wait for a return to the raucous, glitzy literary awards ceremonies and afterparties of yesteryear goes on. Yes, for the second season running, statuettes were delivered by mail, speeches were made over zoom, and victorious authors donned formalwear to get tipsy in their apartments when they should have been spotlit at auditorium podiums, drinking in the cacophonous applause of their peers.

Still, a prize is no less prestigious for having been awarded in abstentia, and it’ll take more than a protracted global pandemic to stop up from tipping our caps to the year’s literary champs.

From the Pulitzer to the Booker, the Nebula to the Edgar, here are the winners of the biggest book prizes of 2021.

Congratulations to all!

Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

Awarded for distinguished fiction published in book form during the year by an American author, preferably dealing with American life. Prize money: $15,000

Louise Erdrich, The Night Watchman (Harper)

“In this season of literary wildfires, when cultural borrowings have unleashed protests that have shaken the publishing industry, the issue of authenticity is paramount. Erdrich retakes the lead by offering the reader the gifts of love and richness that only a deeply connected writer can provide. You never doubt these are her people. The author…delivers a magisterial epic that brings her power of witness to every page. High drama, low comedy, ghost stories, mystical visions, family and tribal lore—wed to a surprising outbreak of enthusiasm for boxing matches—mix with political fervor and a terrifying undercurrent of predation and violence against women. For 450 pages, we are grateful to be allowed into this world … I walked away from the Turtle Mountain clan feeling deeply moved, missing these characters as if they were real people known to me. In this era of modern termination assailing us, the book feels like a call to arms. A call to humanity. A banquet prepared for us by hungry people.”

–Luis Alberto Urrea ( The New York Times Book Review )

Finalists: Daniel Mason, A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth  (Little, Brown and Company) Percival Everett, Telephone (Graywolf)

* National Book Award

Recognizes an outstanding work of literary fiction by a United States citizen. Prize money: $10,000

James Mott, Hell of a Book (Dutton)

“There’s an intimacy to Jason Mott’s fiction, retained even when the scope of his narrative widens. But even by these standards, his fourth novel is a uniquely tight, personal story that digs into deeply emotional territory. Through two interwoven storylines unfolding in a witty, often devastatingly incisive style, Hell of a Book is a journey into the heart of a very particular American experience, one that far too many don’t live to tell … You may think you see where these two stories are headed, where they will converge and knit together, and what they will have to say at the end, but you don’t. And even if you could, Mott’s bittersweet, remarkably nimble novel would still keep you turning the pages … a masterwork of balance, as Mott navigates the two narratives and their delicate tonal distinctions. A surrealist feast of imagination that’s brimming with very real horrors, frustrations and sorrows, it can break your heart and make you laugh out loud at the same time, often on the same page. This is an achievement of American fiction that rises to meet this particular moment with charm, wisdom and truth.”

–Matthew Jackson ( BookPage )

Finalists: Anthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land (Scribner) Lauren Groff, Matrix (Riverhead) Laird Hunt, Zorrie (Bloomsbury) Robert Jones Jr., The Prophets (G.P. Putnam’s Sons)

* Man Booker  Prize

Awarded for the best original novel written in the English language and published in the UK. Prize money: £50,000

Damon Galgut, The Promise (Europa Editions)

“Damon Galgut’s remarkable new novel, The Promise , suggests that the demands of history and the answering cry of the novel can still powerfully converge. As a white South African writer, Galgut inherits a subject that must feel, at different times, liberating in its dimensions and imprisoning in its inescapability … The Promise is drenched in South African history, a tide that can be seen, in the end, to poison all ‘promise’ … Galgut’s novel most closely resembles the work of predecessors like Woolf and Faulkner in the way it redeploys a number of modernist techniques, chiefly the use of a free-floating narrator. Galgut is at once very close to his troubled characters and somewhat ironically distant, as if the novel were written in two time signatures, fast and slower. And, miraculously, this narrative distance does not alienate our intimacy but emerges as a different form of knowing … His new novel exercises new freedoms. One is struck, amid the sombre events, by the joyous, puckish restlessness of the storytelling, which seems to stick to a character’s point of view only to veer away, mid-sentence … Galgut uses his narrator playfully, assisted by nicely wayward run-on sentences … Galgut outsources his storytelling, handing off a phrase or an insight to an indistinct community of what seem to be wise elders, who then produce an ironically platitudinous or proverbial commentary … Galgut’s narrator skims across his spaces, alighting, stinging, moving on to the next subject. As the novel proceeds, his narrator seems to grow in adventurous authority.”

–James Wood ( The New Yorker )

Finalists : Anuk Arudpragasam, A Passage North  (Hogarth) Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This  (Riverhead) Nadifa Mohamed, The Fortune Men (Knopf) Richard Powers, Bewilderment (W. W. Norton) Maggie Shipstead, Great Circle (Knopf)

* Man Booker International Prize

Awarded for a single book in English translation published in the UK. Prize money: £50,000, divided equally between the author and the translator

David Diop, tr. from French by Anna Moschovakis,  At Night All Blood is Black (FSG)

“… astonishingly good … Alfa understands that his revenge is growing ghoulish; he understands that France as a colonial force is exploiting his bravery and his grief; he understands, even, that he is in part responsible for Mademba’s suffering, which is perhaps the novel’s most harrowing thread. But Alfa’s understanding cannot free him. He is, in effect, doomed by his own comprehension. Diop’s prose, which is at once swift and dense, captures that effect well. He and his translator, Anna Moschovakis, wall the reader into Alfa’s mind and his story, refusing even the smallest glimmer of light.”

–Lily Meyer ( NPR )

Finalists : Mariana Enríquez, tr. from Spanish by Megan McDowell, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed  (Hogarth) Olga Ravn, tr. from Danish by Martin Aitken, The Employees  (New Directions) Benjamín Labatut, tr. from Spanish by Adrian Nathan West, When We Cease to Understand the World (New York Review of Books) Maria Stepanova, tr. from Russian by Sasha Dugdale, In Memory of Memory (New Directions) Éric Vuillard, tr. from French by Mark Polizzotti, The War of the Poor  (Other Press)

* National Book Critics Circle Award 

Given annually to honor outstanding writing and to foster a national conversation about reading, criticism, and literature. Judged by the volunteer directors of the NBCC who are 24 members serving rotating three-year terms, with eight elected annually by the voting members, namely “professional book review editors and book reviewers.”

Maggie O’Farrell, Hamnet (Knopf)

“… told with the urgency of a whispered prayer—or curse … Unintimidated by the presence of the Bard’s canon or the paucity of the historical record, O’Farrell creates Shakespeare before the radiance of veneration obscured everyone around him. In this book, William is simply a clever young man—not even the central character—and O’Farrell makes no effort to lard her pages with intimations of his genius or cute allusions to his plays. Instead, through the alchemy of her own vision, she has created a moving story about the way loss viciously recalibrates a marriage … This is a richly drawn and intimate portrait of 16th-century English life set against the arrival of one devastating death. O’Farrell, always a master of timing and rhythm, uses these flashbacks of young love and early marriage to heighten the sense of dread that accumulates as Hamnet waits for his mother … None of the villagers know it yet, but bubonic plague has arrived in Warwickshire and is ravaging the Shakespeare twins, overwhelming their little bodies with bacteria. That lit fuse races through the novel toward a disaster that history has already recorded but O’Farrell renders unbearably suspenseful.”

–Ron Charles ( The Washington Post )

Finalists: Martin Amis, Inside Story (Knopf) Randall Kenan, If I Had Two Wings (W.W. Norton) Souvankham Thammavongsa, How to Pronounce Knife (Little, Brown) Bryan Washington, Memorial (Riverhead)

* Kirkus Prize

Chosen from books reviewed by  Kirkus Reviews  that earned the Kirkus Star. Prize money: $50,000

Joy Williams, Harrow (Knopf)

“Williams’ tone is caustic and discomfiting; it brings to mind the moment in which we are living, when matters of science and public health are regularly ridiculed or redirected in favor of political or economic platitudes…At the same time, her vision is too capacious for Harrow to be read so narrowly … The implication is that chaos is both our invention and our destiny, which means there can be no solace or forgiveness for our collusion with it. This is the source of Williams’ fierce and unrelenting anger, and it invests Harrow with a potent moral weight … a piece of writing in the vein of Samuel Beckett or Franz Kafka, its humor weaponized by rage … ‘Before the eyes can see, they must be incapable of tears,’ Williams tells us—excavating, as she does throughout this magnificent and moving novel, the middle distance between silence and experience.”

–David L. Ulin ( The Los Angeles Times )

Finalists: Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois (Harper) Colson Whitehead, Harlem Shuffle (Doubleday) Jocelyn Nicole Johnson, My Monticello (Henry Holt) Mariana Enríquez (tr. by Megan McDowell), The Dangers of Smoking in Bed  (Hogarth) Pajtim Statovci (tr. by David Hackston), Bolla (Pantheon)

* Women’s Prize for Fiction

Awarded to a female author of any nationality for the best original full-length novel written in English and published in the United Kingdom.

Susanna Clarke, Piranesi (Bloomsbury)

“… the sweetness, the innocence of Piranesi’s love for this world is devastating to read. Clarke’s writing is clear, sharp—she can cleave your heart in a few short words. In these brief but gut-wrenchingly tender interactions we are felled by the loneliness Piranesi can’t fully grasp. The concept is gone from his mind of what he longs for the most … This crossing of realms—the magical and scientific; the mystical and profane—in both Jonathan Strange and Piranesi is an alluring combination. As if Marie Curie meets Cleopatra on Mary Anning’s beach. The mystery of Piranesi unwinds at a tantalizing yet lightening-like pace—it’s hard not to rush ahead, even when each sentence, each revelation makes you want to linger … Humans seek connection and knowledge—but how do we define those quests? How do we approach those paths? Both worlds in this enthralling, transcendent novel come with magic and reason, beauty and warmth, danger and destruction. However ill-gotten, Piranesi has achieved an equilibrium, a delicate peace with the contradictions of pain and love. How do we do the same? How do we bear the pain of our limits, and what must we give up to survive?”

–Vikki Valentine ( NPR )

Finalists: Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half (Riverhead) Claire Fuller, Unsettled Ground (Tin House) Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom (Knopf) Cherie Jones, How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House (Little, Brown) Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This (Riverhead)

* PEN/Faulkner Award

Awarded to the author of the year’s best work of fiction by a living American citizen. Prize money: $15,000

Deesha Philyaw, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies (West Virginia University Press)

“… juicy goodness bursts from every page … While continually acknowledging the importance of the church in the Black community, Philyaw sees the contradictions it creates with clarity, sometimes painful, sometimes hilarious … This collection marks the emergence of a bona fide literary treasure. As one of Philyaw’s characters might say, praise the Lord.”

–Marion Winik ( The Star Tribune )

Finalists: Matthew Salesses, Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear (Little a) Rufi Thorpe, The Knockout Queen (Knopf) Robin Wasserman, Mother Daughter Widow Wife (Scribner) Steve Wiegenstein, Scattered Lights  (Cornerpost Press)

* PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction

Awarded to an exceptionally talented fiction writer whose debut work represents distinguished literary achievement and suggests great promise. Prize money: $25,000

Michael X. Wang, Further News of Defeat (Autumn House Press)

Finalists: Dima Alzayat, Alligator & Other Stories (Two Dollar Radio) Miriam Cohen, Adults and Other Children: Stories   (Ig Publishing) Mary South, You Will Never Be Forgotten: Stories (FSG Originals) Shruti Swamy, A House Is a Body: Stories (Algonquin Books)

* Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction

Awards established in 2012 to recognize the best fiction and nonfiction books for adult readers published in the U.S. in the previous year. Administered by the American Library Association.

Prize money: $5,000 (winner), $1,500 (finalists)

James McBride, Deacon King Kong (Riverhead)

“… a feverish love letter to New York City, people, and writing. The prose is relentless and McBride’s storytelling skills shine as he drags readers at breakneck speed trough a plethora of lives, times, events, and conversations. The novel is 370 pages, but McBride has packed enough in there for a dozen novellas, and reading them all mashed together is a pleasure … fast, deep, complex, and hilarious. McBride’s prose is shimmering and moving, a living thing that has its own rhythm, pulls you in from the first page and never lets go. His story focuses on the people that make the Big Apple what it is: the strange, the poor, the insane, the mobsters. He also showcases the city’s wonderful diversity, filling his pages with Puerto Ricans, African Americans, Italians, and Irish folks … McBride has a talent for writing about big ensembles … full of heart, humor, and compassion. It contains page-long sentences that sing and individual lines that stick to your brain like literary taffy. This is a narrative about flawed, poor people navigating an ugly, racist world and trying their best with the help of God, each other, or the bottle; their stories are unique, but the struggles are universal—and that makes this a novel about all of us. In Deacon King Kong , McBride entertains us, and shows us both the beauty and the ugliness of humanity. I say we give him another National Book Award for this one. It’s that good.”

–Gabino Iglesias ( NPR )

Finalists: Ayad Akhtar, Homeland Elegies (Little Brown) Megha Majumdar, A Burning (Knopf)

* International DUBLIN Literary Award

An international literary award presented each year for a novel written in English or translated into English. Prize money: €100,000

Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive (Knopf)

“I wrote down the microchemical raptures I was having, one after the next, from beginning to end of this revelatory novel … The Lost Children Archives [is] a semi-autobiographical gloss that Lueselli skillfully crafts without dipping into the pedantic accumulations that sometimes overwhelm such books … It is a breathtaking journey, one that builds slowly and confidently until you find yourself in a fever dream of convergences. The Lost Children Archive is simply stunning. It is a perfect intervention for our horrible time, but that fleeting concurrence is not why this book will be read and sampled and riffed on for years to come … The Lost Children Archive contains multitudes, contradictions, and raises difficult questions for which there are no easy answers. It is a great American novel. It is also a great human novel.”

–Rob Spillman ( Guernica )

Finalists: Bernardine Evaristo, Girl, Woman, Other (Grove) Colum McCann, Apeirogon (Random House) Fernanda Melchor, Hurricane Season (New Directions) Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (Penguin Press) Colson Whitehead, The Nickel Boys (Doubleday)

* Center for Fiction First Novel Prize

An annual award presented by The Center for Fiction, a non-profit organization in New York City, for the best debut novel. Prize money: $10,000

Kirsten Valdez Quade, The Five Wounds (W. W. Norton)

“In three parts that unfold over the course of a year in the aptly named New Mexico town of Las Penas, The Five Wounds is a knife-sharp study of what happens to a family when accountability to other people goes out the window. Quade’s characters are experts at pushing love away, especially when intimate connection is most necessary … As each member of the Padilla family battles their personal demons, hope shimmers like a mirage over everyday life, a sweet what-if that Quade expertly suspends above the text … it is a treat to see the author’s exceptional command of pacing on display in a novel. Proof that what you say is just as important as how you say it, her precise lines are wanting in neither substance nor style, and her darkly hilarious, tender, gorgeous use of language is one of the crowning pleasures of the novel … an irreverent 21st-century meditation on the restorative powers of empathy.”

–Elena Britos ( BookPage )

Finalists: Priyanka Champaneri, The City of Good Death (Restless Books) Linda Rui Feng, Swimming Back to Trout River   (Simon & Schuster) Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois   (Harper) Violet Kupersmith, Build Your House Around My Body (Random House) Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This (Riverhead) Jackie Polzin, Brood   (Doubleday)

* Los Angeles Times Book Prize

Recognizes outstanding literary works as well as champions new writers. Prize money: $1,000

(Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction)

“… a collection of luminous stories populated by deeply moving and multifaceted characters … No saints exist in these pages, just full-throated, flesh-and-blood women who embrace and redefine love, and their own selves, in powerfully imperfect renditions. Tender, fierce, proudly Black and beautiful, these stories will sneak inside you and take root.”

Finalists: Maisy Card, These Ghosts Are Family (Simon & Schuster) Meng Jin, Little Gods (Custom House) Douglas Stuart, Shuggie Bain (Grove) Shruti Swamy, A House is a Body (Algonquin)

David Diop, tr. by Anna Moschovakis,  At Night All Blood is Black (FSG)

“From the very first pages, there is something beguiling about At Night All Blood Is Black, a slim, delicate novel by the Senegalese-French writer David Diop … This transgression against the dead—or the delusion of such—fills the story with a mythic affliction that recalls the old sailor’s in Samuel Coleridge’s epic poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The narrative voice brims with innuendoes and habitual repetitions like ‘I know, I understand’ and ‘God’s truth,’ which imbue the character with an edgy eccentricity … But this book is about more than a lone man’s spiritual burden. Diop realizes the full nature of war—that theater of macabre and violent drama—on the page. He takes his character into the depths of hell and lets him thrive there … As violent and disturbing as these encounters are, they are rendered with such artistic grace that one derives a strange pleasure in reading about even the bloodiest of nights. The novel, though originally written in French, is grounded in the worldview of Senegal’s Wolof people, and the specificity and uniqueness of that culture’s language comes through even in Anna Moschovakis’s translation … By the time we reach its shocking yet ultimately transcendent ending, the story has turned into something mystical, esoteric; it takes a cyclic shape … More than a century after World War I, a great new African writer is asking these questions in a spare yet extraordinary novel about this bloody stain on human history.”

–Chigozie Obioma ( The New York Times Book Review )

Finalists: Peter Cameron, What Happens at Night (Catapult) Akwaeke Emezi, The Death of Vivek Oji (Riverhead) Danielle Evans, The Office of Historical Corrections (Riverhead) Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, Likes   (Riverhead)

* Edgar Award

Presented by the Mystery Writers of America, honoring the best in crime and mystery fiction.

(Best Novel)

Deepa Anappara, Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line (Random House)

“In Jai, Anappara has created a boy vivid in his humanity, one whose voice somersaults on the page. Rich with easy joy, Anappara’s writing announces the arrival of a literary supernova … Telling a story from the perspective of a child always risks a descent into sentimentality. There’s not a lick of it here … We marvel at…threads, so vibrantly woven by Anappara … This is the power of this novel, how it keeps us grounded—not in the flats of the hi-fi dwellers but in something closer to India’s heart, which she locates in the minds of children with bony shoulders and dirty feet.”

–Lorainne Adams ( The New York Times Book Review )

Finalists: Caroline B. Cooney, Before She Was Helen (Poisoned Pen Press) Richard Osman, Thursday Murder Club (Pamela Dorman Books) Ivy Pochoda, These Women (Ecco) Kwei Quartey, The Missing American (Soho Crime) Heather Young, The Distant Dead (William Morrow)

(Best First Novel)

Please See Us by Caitlin Mullen (Gallery Books)

“What Mullen’s debut gives readers is a wrenchingly detailed, utterly credible story of women whose peril comes from poverty … Mullen is brilliant at depicting their points of view … Mullen builds almost unbearable suspense about whether the two friends will join the women in the marshes.”

–Connie Fletcher ( Booklist )

Finalists: Nev March, Murder in Old Bombay (Minotaur Books) Elisabeth Thomas, Catherine House (William Morrow) David Heska Wanbli Weiden, Winter Counts (Ecco) Stephanie Wrobel, Darling Rose Gold (Berkley)

* Nebula Award

Given each year by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America for the best science fiction or fantasy novel.

Martha Wells, Network Effect (Tor)

“Like the series-to-full-length movie format it follows, everything is a bit wider and a bit heavier, but all the hallmarks of the series are there. We get a return of some beloved characters, more dodgy corporate interlopers, more robots-on A.I.-on-robot…action, and a bigger mystery. But now, with a little more room to breathe, Wells draws out all of those elements in a way that extends the enjoyable experience of the novellas, yet doesn’t drag. Network Effect is more than twice the size of All Systems Red , but you’ll come to the final pages and hardly notice … what makes it all stand out is the way Wells writes Murderbot’s engagements with the world and the humans that inhabit it. It feels legitimately the way I imagine a sentient computer system that is smarter than all of us—but also watches a lot of trash TV—would view the world … The other strength of the series is a bit more subtle; it lies in the way Murderbot approaches gender …This approach continues in Network Effect, with what appears to be the beginnings of a non-traditional romantic relationship that has been bubbling since early in the series, and that I hope Wells will give us more of. And that’s the hallmark of any good series—it leaves you wanting more. Murderbot and the world it inhabits constantly leave you wanting more, in the best possible way … Network Effect is a wonderful continuation of the series, and I highly recommend it if you enjoyed the first books. But if you haven’t read those yet, you really should before trying this on for size. It’s OK, we’ve got time. Not done yet? Sigh … humans.”

–Steve Mullis ( NPR )

Finalists: Susanna Clarke, Piranesi (Bloomsbury) N. K. Jemisin, The City We Became (Orbit) Silvia Moreno Garcia, Mexican Gothic (Del Rey) C. L. Polk, The Midnight Bargain (Erewhon) Rebecca Roanhorse, Black Sun (Saga)

* Hugo Award

Awarded for the best science fiction or fantasy story of 40,000 words or more published in English or translated in the prior calendar year.

“As always, Wells is deftly skilled with her characters, showing us compelling people with very human needs and fears—even when some of them aren’t human. But she’s even defter with humour: perhaps my favourite part of Network effect happens after Murderbot ends up freeing another SecUnit from its governor module … And, as always, Wells has written some really great, tense action. This is a perfectly paced space opera adventure novel, one in which Murderbot continues to grow as a person. An enormously relatable person. The conclusion is deeply satisfying while also holding out the possibility of more Murderbot stories to come. I could read about Murderbot all week. While I recommend Network Effect highly, and while I suspect that a reader could start here and still enjoy the story, this is a novel that will work best in the context of what has come before.”

–Liz Bourke ( Locus )

Finalists: Rebecca Roanhorse, Black Sun (Saga) N. K. Jemisin, The City We Became (Orbit) Tamsyn Muir, Harrow the Ninth (Tor) Susanna Clarke, Piranesi (Bloomsbury) Mary Robinette Kowal, The Relentless Moon (Tor)

* Bram Stoker Award

Presented by the Horror Writers Association for “superior achievement” in horror writing for novels.

Stephen Graham Jones, The Only Good Indians (Gallery/Saga Press)

“Jones, a Blackfeet writer who has published more than 20 books, ‘likes werewolves and slashers,’ according to his author bio, but he has also spent a lifetime interpreting Native American culture and mythology for contemporary readers. So he does here, exploring Native American deer and elk mythology and delving into the importance of elk ivory … Jones writes in clear, sparkling prose. He’s simultaneously funny, irreverent and serious, particularly when he deploys stereotype as a literary device … The Only Good Indians is splashed with the requisite amounts of blood and gore, but there’s much more to it than that.”

–Martha Anne Toll ( The Washington Post )

Finalists: Alma Katsu, The Deep (G. P. Putnam’s Sons) Silvia Moreno Garcia, Mexican Gothic (Del Rey) Todd Keisling, Devil’s Creek (Silver Shamrock Publishing) Josh Malerman, Malorie (Del Rey Books)

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Literary fiction dominates Maureen Corrigan's 2021 Best Books list

Maureen Corrigan

This was a spectacular year for literary fiction, so my "Best Books" list is exclusively composed of novels and short story collections — and I wish I could triple its length, but I'll keep it to 10.

Klara and the Sun

by Kazuo Ishiguro

Klara and the Sun takes pride of place in this list. As he did in his 2005 novel Never Let Me Go , Kazuo Ishiguro here explores what it means to be human through the perspective of a being who's regarded as merely "humanlike." Ishiguro is the master of slowly deepening our awareness of fragility and the inevitability of death — all that, even as he deepens our awareness of what temporary magic it is to be alive in the first place.

Cloud Cuckoo Land

by Anthony Doerr

Of all our contemporary literary fiction writers, Anthony Doerr is the one whose novels seem to be the most full-hearted response to the primal request, "Tell me a story." Doerr's latest, Cloud Cuckoo Land , spans eight centuries and dramatizes how an ancient tale gives light and hope to five young people, each living in dangerous times, with correspondences to our own.

Light Perpetual

by Francis Spufford

Francis Spufford's historical novel, Light Perpetual , is a miracle not only of art, but of empathy. It opens with a real-life incident: the dropping of a V-2 rocket on a Woolworths in London one Saturday in 1944. What follows is a narrative that unsentimentally imagines the lives that five of the victims, all children, might have lived. Light Perpetual is a resonant novel about chance, as well as a God's-eye meditation on mutability and loss.

by Lauren Groff

Don't be misled by the title, Lauren Groff 's historical novel Matrix is no dystopian thriller, but rather a radiant novel about the 12 th -century poet and mystic Marie de France, about whose life we know almost nothing. No matter. Groff richly imagines Marie's decades of exile in a royal convent, which she eventually leads. A charged novel about female ambition, Matrix also dramatizes Marie's canny political insight that: "most souls upon the earth are not at ease unless they find themselves safe in the hands of a force far greater than themselves."

Harlem Shuffle

by Colson Whitehead

I'm beginning to think that any year Colson Whitehead brings out a new novel I should just reserve a spot on my "Best Books" list for it. Harlem Shuffle is a crime story in the sardonic style of Chester Himes ' classic Cotton Comes to Harlem, crossed with every film noir ever made about a good man caught up in a bad situation. Ray Carney, a family man, sells used furniture in the New York of the late 1950s and early '60s: You can smell the dust on the blond wood console radios he's trying to unload as TV sets are taking over. When Ray's cousin lures him into a heist at the Hotel Theresa — the so-called "Waldorf of Harlem" — Ray's hard-won respectability threatens to crumble.

Afterparties

by Anthony Veasna So

Afterparties , by the late Anthony Veasna So, was one of the big buzz books this year and it exceeded and upended my expectations. So, who died at the age of 28 before the book came out, was a queer first-generation Cambodian American who wrote smart, flip, rude, funny, sexually explicit and compassionate stories about the Cambodian refugee community in Stockton, Calif.

My Monticello

by Jocelyn Nicole Johnson

The title novella of Jocelyn Nicole Johnson 's collection, My Monticello , is set in the near future when a group of mostly African American characters takes a last stand against the forces of racism high atop the "little mountain" that gives Thomas Jefferson's plantation its name. That novella is a rich, eerie riff on American mythology.

by Yoon Choi

The eight stories in Yoon Choi's collection, Skinship , splinter out to touch on decades of family history shaped, sometimes warped, by immigration. Choi takes that familiar topic and makes her characters' predicaments vivid and nuanced.

Oh William!

by Elizabeth Strout

In Oh William! Elizabeth Strout returns to her writer character, Lucy Barton, who, with her ex-husband, goes on a road trip that carries them deep into the wilderness of their failed marriage and personal pasts. That summary sounds grim, but if you know Strout you know that she compresses into the most ordinary conversations epiphanies about love, parenting and the untold ways we humans mess up.

We Run the Tides

by Vendela Vida

Finally, I want to give one last plug to a novel that I don't think has yet gotten all the recognition it deserves: Vendela Vida 's We Run the Tides . Set in the mid-1980s in the Sea Cliff neighborhood of San Francisco that's perched on the very edge of the Pacific, the novel follows a squad of four 13-year-old girls also perched on the very edge of things. Haunted, tough and exquisite, this sliver of a novel summons up a world of female adolescence that I, for one, wanted to remain lost in — and yet also felt relieved to have outgrown.

Check Out NPR's 2021 Book We Love!

NPR's Book We Love returns with 360+ new books handpicked by NPR staff and critics — including recommendations from Maureen Corrigan and Fresh Air staffer Molly Seavy-Nesper. Click to find your next great read. NPR hide caption

NPR's Book We Love returns with 360+ new books handpicked by NPR staff and critics — including recommendations from Maureen Corrigan and Fresh Air staffer Molly Seavy-Nesper. Click to find your next great read.

A guide to the must-read 2021 National Book Award winners and finalists

Here’s what this year’s best in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, translated literature, and young people’s literature is all about.

If you buy something from a Vox link, Vox Media may earn a commission. See our ethics statement.

by Vox Staff

Every year, the National Book Foundation nominates 25 books for the National Book Award. A celebration of the best of American literature, the nominations span fiction, nonfiction, poetry, translated literature, and young adult books. And every year since 2014 , we at Vox read them all to help our readers figure out which ones they might want to check out. Here are our thoughts on the 2021 nominees and winners.

Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr

Cloud Cuckoo Land is so skillfully crafted that reading it feels a little like prying open a watch to admire the clockwork. It’s not always clear what you’re looking at, but it’s undeniably impressive that someone was able to put all those cogs and gears together.

There are five main characters in this book, and they exist on four different timelines. We start on a spaceship in the 22nd century. Flip the page, and you’re in the Midwest in 2019. Flip the page again, and you’re in 15th-century Istanbul. Flip the page again, and you’re in Korea during the war.

Doerr’s clever plot eventually brings these characters and timelines together. But even before the satisfying conclusion, they’re united by a single theme. Each of our protagonists lives at what they understand to be the end of the world. They each seek refuge in the same book: a lost comedy from ancient Greece that keeps emerging into history through luck and happenstance.

Doerr’s built an elegant structure. It’s also much too long: In the time it takes for all five plotlines to cohere, a lot of urgency has drained out of the book, leaving the book’s long middle feeling circuitous, rambling, and badly in need of a point. The author moreover seems palpably uncomfortable when it comes to writing women, even when they are minor characters. Still, Doerr’s tribute to the perseverance of life and books in the face of apocalypse is moving — and no matter what, it’s quite a sight to open the covers of Cloud Cuckoo Land and watch that clockwork tick. — Constance Grady, book critic

Matrix by Lauren Groff

Lauren Groff’s Matrix , about a group of nuns who build a utopian community in 12th-century England, is the most purely sensual book I’ve read all year. Every line is rich with physical details, precise and exquisite: apricot flesh with “a little give to it like the firm thigh of a girl;” the voices of nuns as they read aloud “mixing so beautifully that the impression is not a tapestry of individual threads but a solid sheet like pounded gold.” 

Matrix , which takes its title from the Latin word for mother, is built around the real-life French poet Marie de France. Groff’s Marie is a painfully awkward girl of 17 when the novel begins, ugly and ill-mannered but possessing both great strength and great ambition. She’s shipped off to an impoverished abbey in middle-of-nowhere England on the grounds that she’s too ugly to marry but decent at managing an estate. Out of sheer force of will, she transforms the abbey from hovel into an Eden of sorts: a safe haven for women, replete with art and sheltered from violence, but always troubled by both the demands of encroaching men and Marie’s relentless plans for more, more, more.

Marie’s ferocious, boundless ambition is the force that powers Matrix forward and keeps you turning the pages. But it’s her insistence on experiencing life through her body that truly makes this novel special: The way Marie revels in her physical strength, in good food, in sex, in cool water after a hot flash. She’s an unforgettable character, and Groff evokes her point of view so strongly that it takes over your whole body. You don’t read this novel so much as immerse yourself in it, as though you’re being baptized.  —Constance Grady, book critic

Zorrie by Laird Hunt

Can you capture a whole life in a slim little book? Hunt has tried — and succeeded, beautifully — in Zorrie , a deceptively simple book about the curious forces that shape a life. The title character, Zorrie Underwood, lives nearly her whole life in a farming community in Indiana, first as an orphan raised by an uncaring aunt, then as a drifter during the Depression, a wife, and finally a young widow living next door to her neighbor Noah, who harbors a tragedy in his heart. Hard work is all she’s ever known, but it’s far from the sum of who she is. Zorrie takes pleasure in the home she crafts in Indiana: “the dirt she had bloomed up out of, it was who she was, what she felt, how she thought, what she knew.” 

A key, brief moment in Zorrie’s life — the one that comes back to both bless and haunt her — is two months she spends in Illinois as a young woman, working for the Radium Dial Company painting clocks with glow-in-the-dark numbers. She and the other young women there, especially her friends Jane and Marie, often lick their paintbrushes, coated with a substance not yet known to be a potent carcinogen. The glowing of that powder follows Zorrie through her life, marking her hopes, her fears, and ultimately her sense of meaning. Hunt’s novel reads like poetry, evoking writers like Paul Harding and Marilynne Robinson, and radiates the heat of a beating heart. —Alissa Wilkinson, film critic

The Prophets by Robert Jones Jr.

Robert Jones Jr.’s debut novel The Prophets is a powerful story of forbidden love between Isaiah and Samuel, two enslaved men in the antebellum South. “The two of them” can exist in the world they create for themselves in the barn at the edge of the plantation until they are ultimately betrayed. Jones Jr.’s work has garnered considerable praise for revealing what queer love may have been like for enslaved people.

But it’s the gravitational force of his prose — lyrical, alarmingly clear, with the ability to evoke moments intimate or grand in scale — that sets his work apart. It’s evident in the way Jones Jr. describes Isaiah and Samuel when they are alone together: “every separate motion building upon the other to form something that seemed to sway to its own music, back and forth, like the sea.”

Nearly every review of The Prophets mentions the late James Baldwin — and for good reason. Baldwin’s last wish was that someone might be able to find something in the “wreckage” he left behind, in other words, that other authors could find inspiration in his work. In the acknowledgments for  The Prophets , Jones Jr. thanks Baldwin and writes: “We did that.” Baldwin was nominated four times for a National Book Award but never won. It would be inspiring to see Robert Jones Jr., who stands squarely on Baldwin’s shoulders, take home the prize.  —Jariel Arvin, former Vox foreign fellow

Hell of a Book by Jason Mott — WINNER

Hell of a Book is a hellish journey, dark and rife with unease. Half of the book is stream-of-consciousness narration by an unnamed bestselling author who tells the reader he’s been haunted by hallucinations since childhood. The other half tells the story of a dark-skinned boy (who may, or may not, be dead) referred to only by the name given to him by bullies: Soot.

The unnamed author’s tenuous grasp on reality gives the book a dreamlike quality: It’s unclear if what you’re reading is actually happening, an ambiguity heightened by the fact that many of the author’s encounters seem too fantastic to be real. Chief among these are his regular visits from Soot, who becomes the author’s connection to the horrors of police brutality, something he would prefer to ignore. 

Police brutality becomes a recurring theme in the book, as do other elements of the Black American experience. Among other things, Jason Mott touches on loss, memory, race, colorism, family, love, and the United States. In taking such a wide aim, he isn’t really able to explore any of these subjects in depth. Ideas blur into one another, the way the real and unreal merge for the author narrator. The result is a strange, sad story, one both stylish and meandering. —Sean Collins, news editor

A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance by Hanif Abdurraqib

Hanif Abdurraqib’s prose is always breathtaking, but A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance shines in particular. Divided not into sections or chapters but “movements,” each part of this collection explores Black joy and pain while weaving in his own personal memories and musings of his life, and the lives of other Black people that thread through American culture.

In a section about jazz star Josephine Baker, Abdurraqib writes: “There are streets named after Black people situated throughout America’s cities. Most of the times, the Black people are dead. Sometimes the street bearing the dead Black person’s name doesn’t have many living Black people on it.” Abdurraqib thrives when coupling simple fact with significance, and throughout this book he paints larger-than-life pictures of memory and history.

Black performance presents itself in many ways — not just through music or dance or living life, but in the attempts white folks make at emulating it. A section that discusses the story of William Henry Lane, a minstrel performer that Charles Dickens wrote about, soon gives way to a parallel: how Black people are imitated on the internet, and how this social creepiness has become normal because, well, it’s been normalized since the beginning of time.

The collection speaks to the way Blackness is performed, born, killed, warped, loathed, and loved, with beauty and thoughtfulness. “Anyone who speaks a language inside a language can see when that dialect is presenting a challenge for someone ... or when it is coming from someone who watched a movie with a Black person in it once and then never saw a Black person again,” he writes. “It would be humorous or fascinating if it wasn’t so suffocating. I would laugh if I was not being smothered by the violence of imagination.” —Melinda Fakuade, associate editor, culture and features

Running Out: In Search of Water on the High Plains by Lucas Bessire

The depletion of the Ogallala aquifer, a vast expanse of groundwater lying under the Plains states, is the subject of Lucas Bessire’s Running Out; In Search of Water in the High Plains . But it’s also the device for Bessire’s reconnection to his family roots in western Kansas and his definition of “depletion” in all its forms. Bessire is an anthropologist and a filmmaker, which is evident in his fieldwork approach and his scenic portrayal of the Plains. 

The Ogallala aquifer was once an ancient sea, buried millions of years ago by the formation of the Rocky Mountains. Today, it supports a sixth of the world’s grain output, but maybe not for long: In just 80 years, farmers have been sucking the aquifer dry. Bessire takes us along on an investigation of the short-sighted water management policies that govern industrial-scale agriculture. This pursuit is with the help of his formerly estranged father who serves as his local “fixer,” bringing him to water board meetings and introducing him to local stakeholders.

Bessire also has a reckoning with his family’s role in the aquifer’s depletion: His great grandfather “RW” was one of the first farmers to tap the Ogallala aquifer. What struck me was the way Bessire connects the Ogallala with other forms of natural resource depletion: A childhood memory of finding a buffalo bone on his family’s property introduces a devastating historical account of how buffalo herds once roamed the region, before early Plains settlers hunted them to the point of annihilation. This book left me heartbroken with the knowledge of more ways that human nature, politics, or profit motives have caused a failure in our stewardship of Earth’s irreplaceable resources. —Laura Bult, video producer

Tastes Like War: A Memoir by Grace M. Cho

Food and memory are inextricably linked in Grace Cho’s gut-wrenching memoir, Tastes like War , which explores how different dishes and items embody history and trauma. 

Named after a comment her mother previously made about powdered milk — a food she avoided and despised because it reminded her of what American soldiers distributed to Korean people during their military occupation — the book examines the pain and struggle that food can carry. 

“I can’t stand the taste of it,” [Cho’s mother] said of the powdered milk. “Tastes like war.”

Throughout the book, food — including kimchi, apple pie, and cheeseburgers — are markers of Cho’s personal memories and symbols of everything from the tragedies that people endured during the Korean War to the push to assimilate that many immigrants encounter in the US. A fixation on apple pie, for instance, is representative of how fiercely Cho’s mother attempts to blend in, in her father’s exceedingly homogenous hometown. 

“Baking, for my mother, was a way to become American,” Cho writes. “Baking was a way to forget.”

Powered by sharp, unflinching prose, Cho’s book is as much about her personal history as it is about the history of American hegemony in Asia — and the many scars it has left on the millions of people who have experienced it. By chronicling her own relationship with her mother, who struggled with schizophrenia, and many of the foods they shared, Cho offers an incisive portrait of how haunting these conflicts continue to be.  —Li Zhou, politics reporter

C overed With Night: A Story of Murder and Indigenous Justice in Early America by Nicole Eustace

In 1722, in the Pennsylvania woods, an Indigenous man named Sawantaeney is murdered by two English fur traders. It’s a business deal gone wrong. Covered With Night tells the story of the thwarted negotiation that follows: The colonial government offers capital punishment as justice but ignores Native pleas for restoration, communion, and reparations. The colonists just don’t get that their neighbors aren’t placated by the idea of an eye for an eye. What else, they wonder, could these people possibly want?

A gripping narrative takes us through the tension between punitive proto-American concepts of law and order and the community-focused beliefs of the Haudenosaunee, through Indigenous attempts to see their traditions and ethics honored. While the English of the time didn’t deign to write down — or even, it seems, comprehend the existence of — Native philosophies of fairness, NYU professor Nicole Eustace reads the original documents closely and finds their accidental inclusion. This book is a feat of primary source gathering and close reading. 

While we haven’t learned exactly the right lessons in the intervening 300 years, Covered With Night explains a horrible lot about our past, and offers something of a vision for a brighter future. —Meredith Haggerty, senior editor, culture

All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake by Tiya Miles — WINNER

At a moment when conservative lawmakers want teachers to dial back their instruction on slavery and its lasting impact, author and Harvard historian Tiya Miles gives readers many reasons to keep unearthing and sharing the truth about the cruel institution that shaped America. In All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake , Miles tells the story of survival in the face of unspeakable hardship. 

Rose, an enslaved Black woman in coastal South Carolina in the early 1850s, learns that she or her daughter Ashley will be sold on the auction block. Rose’s lineage, which lived on through her only child, was in danger, and the love that she and her daughter shared would forever be damaged. Nonetheless, with what little she had in the way of possessions, Rose mustered the will to be creative, thoughtful, and resourceful. She gave her daughter, only 9 years old, a sack of items: a tattered dress, three handfuls of pecans, and a braid of her own hair. She told her daughter, “It be filled with my Love always,” and never saw her again. The act of filling a sack with meager possessions might seem inconsequential, but it spoke to the love, resilience, and hope that Black women summoned for survival through generations. Decades later, Ashley’s granddaughter learned of her great-grandmother’s act and embroidered the story on the sack, further preserving the story for her progeny. 

What makes this historical account so impressive is how Miles expands the story beyond this one family to show how it stands in the greater historical record of the lengths African American families went to preserve themselves and their memories through crafting and working with fabric. Miles pulls in her own family history to talk about the importance of textiles like quilts. Miles goes to great lengths to extract histories that the archives did not care to preserve, a brave endeavor that continues the very practice that Rose started almost two centuries ago.  —Fabiola Cineas, race and policy reporter

Wha t Noise Against the Cane by Desiree C. Bailey

The poetry of What Noise Against the Cane interlaces Black and political resistance, Afro-Caribbean customs, liberation, the body and nature, sense-making, and freedom, to name a few, across the Black Diaspora and Black America. The book begins with its long poem, “Chant for the Waters and Dirt and Blade.” Bailey charts the spiritual turmoil and complex wavering of an enslaved woman’s journey through the transatlantic slave trade to the brink of the Haitian Revolution — a turmoil beyond injury, beyond reconfiguration, and beyond placemaking.

As I navigated this poem, I found myself taking pause; digesting each stanza. Aside from Bailey’s play on words and diction, the magnitude of lines like “melody of home: a ruthless drift / a song that doesn’t return” and “praise our mothers’ fading homes / which we may only see in dreams” made me sit for a moment. The book’s spirit spoke directly to me —through its woman-led perspective, perhaps, but most certainly through the character’s negotiations with memory. “words I can’t speak cause I don’t want / my flesh to remember but the stink / collects there mapping / a route to my head / I want my memory to fail I want / to drive it out with the scent of pésil.” I was moved to ask myself: What are the ways our bodies remember? How were our ancestors’ bodies tethered to nature? How do our bodies store trauma across generations?

Here I found explorations of contemporary Black America and the Diaspora, negotiations of identity, and themes of home, nature and body, womanhood, and reckoning of self and lineage. I encourage readers to remember Haiti as the first Black republic and to think through the book’s and poems’ titles, the body’s relation to nature (which can seem quite the opposite at times), and what freedom looks and feels like in the quest for liberation. —Sierra Enea, video clearance producer

Floaters by Martín Espada — WINNER

Martin Espada invites the reader to understand the lives of different Latinx people using personal memories, lyrical fiction, and historical and current events. The title “Floaters” introduces the story of a Salvadoran father and daughter who drowned in an attempt to cross the Río Grande in search of a better life. From the unity of Puerto Ricans after Hurricane Maria to being called a “José” in a New York taxi, Martin Espada covers an unjust and bigoted United States that persists today.

Espada recalls his time working in Brooklyn as a tenant lawyer, only to be seen as a robber because he is Puerto Rican. He accurately depicts the ridiculous slurs, physical and mental abuse towards Latinos, that have been reignited and made even more visible than before through the Trump era. In opposition to the hate, he brings poems that carry a universal truth to all Latinos, to have pride in your identity, resilience in your work, and untiring care for your community. 

This diverse collection of poems uses Spanish words to create a personal and emotional attachment to the characters (some fictitious, others not). Some words simply do not have a great translation to English, and the author embraces it. One learns and identifies with the stanzas of what it was, and still is, to be a Latino, migrant, or Puerto Rican in the US. 

The last poem, dedicated to his passed father, brings up childhood memories and thoughts of seeing parents as gods, only to learn they are mortals that have made incredible sacrifices, like leaving a paradise of a home, for a better chance at life for the next generation. A Latinx person who reads this will feel this book hitting home, and those who are not Latinx are invited to learn and understand. —Natalie Ruiz-Pérez, video clearance producer

Sho by Douglas Kearney

Kearney’s poetry sings and crackles, loud and clear — no small feat for poetry that begs to be seen on a page. Kearney, who’s described  his visually experimental of previous works of poetry  as “performative typography,” sticks mostly to more traditional text and line structures in  Sho . The breaks and indents and whitespaces breathe and ebb and flow, giving the sense of life pulsing all around his poems.

That’s necessary for these poems, which are often rendered in vernacular and thus seem like voices leaping off the page. “Fire” marries the physicality and soul-blazing music of a church service (“That GOD — / Good Spirit flow pierced run swayed bowed / what we owed the body / I see / we sang / a sweet body of / the sweet body—We give”).

“Negroes are a Fatsuit, Hollywood, USA” is like a quick prose poem of frustration and grimace, all set in italics, that you might utter in your heart while scrolling through a TV ( “zooms inflate their wideness in whatever rerun I’ve them. I glut the frame with their  material : a too muchness .“) “Close” is dedicated to Kearney’s family (“Our Black asses /  been  hunkered in / this house, this now / ‘transitional’ hood, / we steal away where / some call ‘White Cliffs’— / Fool!“)  Sho  reads like testimony, a chorus of voices that tell a story of Black communities, a nation, and a very singular poet at the center of it all. —Alissa Wilkinson, film critic

A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure by Hoa Nguyen

Some mothers choose to shelve away their past lives. They keep their personal histories separate, untouched and indiscernible from the knowledge of their adult children. Not the mother of the poet Hoa Nguyen, Linda Diệp Anh Nguyễn, who is the centrifugal force of her fifth poetry collection.

Nguyen is a mystical myth-writer, and the book is a tender attempt at guiding readers through the non-chronological corridors of her mother’s life, first as a flying motorist in an all-women circus troupe, and later as an elderly homesick figure. Speckled throughout the collection are also her observant, insular intimacies of the Vietnamese diaspora: “who wants to hear / about your Asian North American experience anyway,” “look ma / no accent,” “people will ask about bar girls / and Saigon tea  will ask about about my language / with me being a bastard.”

Nguyen’s references to the Vietnam War are akin to surrealist word-paintings. She describes the absurd and senseless violence wrought by the United States with minimally abstract, almost-clinical language in “Napalm Notes” and “Notes on Operation Hades.” Yet, the book doesn’t linger on war-torn Vietnam. It is one of the poems’ many narrative backdrops, next to the “washed out washington dc stars,” an oxbow lake, and a fruit stand called Mexico in Vinh Long province.

Nguyen’s work spans across time, continent, trauma, and language, but the book’s opening and closing images are that of Hoa’s mother, frozen in her youth. They are an ode to Diệp’s adrenaline-packed memories and her past life, one stuffed with secrets, tangled love affairs, and rapturous adventures that the writer outlines in “words [that] hang in sinew and care.” —Terry Nguyen, reporter, The Goods

The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us from the Void by Jackie Wang

Other people’s dreams are boring. They’re a conversation killer. The only person they appeal to is the dream-haver, who finds them innately interesting, even though they know that if someone else were relaying these same dreams, their eyes would glaze over.

Jackie Wang’s collection The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us From the Void relays dream after dream, demonstrating poetry is perhaps the only medium suited to dream-telling. Wang elegantly weaves in and out of the realistic and the fantastical, often poking at longing and loneliness. As in dreams, there is an undercurrent of distress and confusion, though the tenor never tips into nightmare.

Wang’s work shines brightest when her dreams lead to the casually sharp profundity we all believe our own dreams achieve, as in “Panic at the Disco”: “I’m not “with” everyone around me. But where am I? / Maybe I’m trying to find you, then forget you, by jumping into the pool. / Yes, we are living by three tempos: party, catastrophe, and limerence.”

Dreams sound better when rendered in verse. —Julia Rubin, editorial director, features and culture

Translated Literature

Wint er in Sokcho by Elisa Shua Dusapin; translated from the French by Aneesa Abbas Higgins — WINNER

The threat of some dire happening ebbs and flows in Winter in Sokcho . It’s set in a sleepy seaside resort town near the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea. So when a more-or-less-clueless Frenchman asks a bored hotel clerk to take him there, you might hear narrative alarm bells in your head.

But this isn’t that kind of book. The discomfort is more about the cultural exchange and power dynamics between the clerk (the delightfully apathetic protagonist) and the Frenchman (an older comic book artist looking for a muse). The clerk is not as knowing as she thinks; the Frenchman is not as naive as he seems. Still, they awkwardly navigate something less than a romance and more than a distraction from their existential doubts.

In between are spare details that bring the town to life: The woman waiting behind bandages to reveal her newly redone face, a car ride past ocean waves spiking in the rain “like the spines of a sea urchin.” Always, the cold, a reason not to go out and instead dream about lives redrawn on the other side of a paper wall.

The ending may be a bit of an anticlimax, but such is the way of the novella. Just enjoy your stay in Sokcho while it lasts. —Tim Williams, deputy style and standards editor

P each Blossom Paradise by Ge Fei; translated from the Chinese by Canaan Morse

In  Peach Blossom Paradise , Ge Fei focuses much of the book on his main character Xiumi and the constellation of people who make up her life. Xiumi comes of age in a transformative time in Chinese history as the 20th century is just dawning in the waning years of the Qing dynasty. But in Fei’s telling, revolutionaries are not heroes, but deluded — deluded that they can change the world, deluded about the harm they can cause, and even deluded about their own motives. 

”You go on and on about revolution and unification, your worry for the world and the heat of your ambition, but all you really want is a piece of ass,” Xiumi says at one point, gesturing at one of the larger themes in Fei’s book: the subjugation of women. 

Throughout the book, women are forced to reckon with their lack of autonomy. Foot-binding, rape, and murder are companions to the women in Fei’s writing. The book opens with Xiumi, unaware of what a period is, finding that she is bleeding. Terrified, she believes she is dying and seeks to conceal the evidence. Throughout the book, she will fight for control of her body and she will lose.

Near the end of the book, Fei gives his main character a moment of clarity — as character after character attempts to understand and re-make the world, Xiumi finds a moment of peace in her memories: “These past events, which Xiumi had not consciously brought forth, or even thought she had experienced, now tumbled one after another in her mind. She saw how poignant and incontrovertible even the most mundane details could be as constituents of her memory. Each one summoned another in an endless and unpredictable sequence. And what was more, she could never tell which memory particle would sting the soft places in her heart, make her cheeks scald and her eyes brim with tears, just as the gray embers of the winter hearth do not announce which one of them can still burn your fingers.” —Jerusalem Demsas, policy writer

The Twilight Zone by Nona Fernández; translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer

The Twilight Zone delivers to its readers a sort of twisted familiarity, revealing a destination that will likely read as either too-possible or too-familiar depending on where or when in the world you’re living. As you read Nona Fernández’s tale of 1980’s Chile under the Pinochet dictatorship, which she deftly juxtaposes with the near-mundanity of life lived in between, around, and on top of the horrors of secret tortures and suddenly revealed betrayals, what resonates deeply is how tragically and incomprehensibly different life under authoritarian rule can be, even between the same houses on the same block. 

The book makes for a fast-paced, clever, and powerful read. You could absolutely read this book simply for the clever storytelling, for the story of a modern documentarian obsessed with a member of the Chilean secret service, or even for a quick political and cultural history lesson, but what you will inevitably walk away with is a reminder that what you see in front of you is rarely the whole story of a person, a time, or a place. The Twilight Zone is inevitably a reminder to look for the seams separating the reality we’re comfortable with from the surreal nightmare of authoritarianism whose victims deserve to be remembered. —Ashley Sather, production manager, Vox video

When We Cease to Understand the W orld by Benjamín Labatut; translated from the Spanish by Adrian Nathan West

When We Cease to Understand the World is extraordinary. It took over my mind when I read it. For days, I couldn’t think of anything else.

Benjamín Labatut, a Chilean author born in Rotterdam, has described his book as “a work of fiction based on real events,” adding, tantalizingly, that “the quantity of fiction grows throughout the book.” His subject is scientific discovery, which he renders in five meditative essayistic chapters as a sort of pure philosophical ecstasy. And that ecstasy can shiver over the boundary into existential horror in a whisper, an eyeblink. The more we discover about the inner workings of the universe, Labatut fears, the more we can see how little it corresponds to the reality in which we live our small human lives.

Take, Labatut suggests, Karl Schwarzschild. He was a German philosopher and astronomer fighting during World War I, and the first to solve the equations of Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Schwarzschild found hidden at the center of those equations something abhorrent to imagine: a point in space in which “the equations of general relativity went mad: time froze, space coiled around itself like a serpent.” The point is the center of a star that has gone nova, where mass collapses in on itself into “a single point of infinite density.” It came to be called the Schwarzschild singularity, and in Benjamín’s telling, simply contemplating the full monstrousness of the idea of the singularity breaks Schwarzschild’s mind and body. By the time Einstein receives a letter from Schwarzschild solving the equations of general relativity, Schwarzschild himself is already dead in a military hospital.

This book is haunting, uncompromising, filled with sentences of clear and limpid beauty. Read it and feel your mind expand as it tries to take in all that Labatut has to offer. — Constance Grady, book critic

Pl anet of Clay b y Samar Yazbek; translated from the Arabic by Leri Price

Planet of Clay documents the Syrian war from the perspective of one girl caught up in its devastation. Rima, the narrator, is mute, and, though it’s never fully explained why, is constantly driven to walk. “My head is my feet,” she writes. For this reason, her mother and brother keep her tied closely to them, and attach her wrist with rope so she can move about a room, but never leave on her own. This makes Rima a witness, but also leaves her without control of her own fate — not unlike civilians caught in the middle of conflict.

The book’s narrative mirrors the trajectory of conflict. Early on in the book, Rima’s mother is killed at a checkpoint, and Rima herself is shot and wounded. From there, the horrors only escalate. Rima is brought by her brother to a hideout that is eventually bombed. She experiences a chemical attack, and sees women and children “disappear,” as she calls it. 

The account Rima tells is deeply personal, but also refracted: She does not fully grasp the politics of the conflict or why this is happening, but she feels and experiences the tragedy. The writing takes on this quality, too. It is poetic and spare, but sometimes lacking in specific detail to ground the narrative. But that is also what gives the book a lot of its power. When the politics fall away, you more sharply feel the cruelty and almost sick routine of war: the indignities, the death, the torture, and the planes dropping bombs overhead night after night after night.  —Jen Kirby, foreign writer

Young People’s Literature

T he Legend of Auntie Po by Shing Yin Khor

“Every night, my father and I feed a hundred lumberjacks,” Shing Yin Khor writes in the opening to her endearing, vibrant graphic novel The Legend of Auntie Po . “We also feed forty Chinese workers who do not receive board.” With this, we’re ushered into the bustling life of a Sierra Nevada logging camp in 1885, as seen through the eyes of Mei, a teenager who lives and works on the camp with her father. Around the campfire, Mei tells stories, transforming Paul Bunyan into a super-strength Chinese auntie, Po Pan Yin. 

Although the logging camp is a loving place, the shadow of sinophobia cast by the recently passed Chinese Exclusion Act falls across Mei and her future. As she struggles with the prospect of a life lived on the margins of society despite all her intellect and talent, hate crimes and racism remain a looming background threat. As tensions worsen, Mei begins to wield Auntie Po and her big blue ox Pei Pei as protective totems for her and her community — a giant strongwoman to deal with the oversized dangers of her world.

The Legend of Auntie Po stays profoundly hopeful, despite grappling with complex issues — everything from Mei’s disconnection from her own culture (“I’m angry that I have to make my own gods,” she reflects at one point), her queer identity, and religious faith, to the disenfranchisement of laborers and the way the lens of privilege can trouble even the most intimate found families. Yin Khor has a gift for capturing all these tensions through vivid imagery rather than words. Her characters’ body language and silences often speak for them. An entire commentary on labor rights, the environment, and capitalism gets condensed into an image of a double-handed logging saw aptly called “the misery whip.” It’s all rendered in vivid, warm colors alongside the postcard-ready scenery of the mountains — a poignant story, one that chooses optimism over fatalism, much like the fables Mei creates around Auntie Po. — Aja Romano, web culture reporter

L ast Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo — WINNER

Malinda Lo’s  Last Night at the Telegraph Club  is a story of sapphic self-discovery. Over the course of one year in San Francisco’s Chinatown in the 1950s, 17-year-old Lily Hu grows into herself. She says no to friends she’d only ever said yes to, nourishes her interest in rockets and space, ventures to the titular Telegraph Club to see “male impersonator” Tommy Andrews, and all along the way realizes, yes, she loves other women, and one in particular: her new white friend Kath. 

In brief chapters interspersed throughout the novel that contribute little to the narrative but significantly to the world-building, Lo flits into other characters’ viewpoints, layering the experiences of the mother, aunt, and father into her exploration of this place and moment. In the midst of it all, Lily must navigate thorny adult issues: duty to one’s family, Red Scare-fueled racism, homophobia. It’s a beautifully done intersectional story, but the novel is still at its best in the small moments of discovery that embody any love, but particularly a first queer one.

The moment Lily notices a group of young women walking in the park who share “shockingly bold” flirtatious grins, and wonders if there’s “something significant” in Kath’s silence as she watches too. There’s another moment when Lily recognizes Kath across the crowded Telegraph Club by her body movement alone. And the moment she discovers something she’d never known, never imagined, “how a first kiss could turn so swiftly into a second, and a third, and then a continual opening and pressing and touching, the tip of her tongue against Kath’s, the warmth of her mouth.” — Caroline Houck, senior deputy editor, policy and politics

Too Bright to See by Kyle Lukoff

The worst part of growing up is being 11. It’s that terrible pocket of time when you realize that you won’t ever instantly turn into the person you daydreamed about becoming, and how what you’re feeling rarely matches up with what you see in the mirror. Everyone tells you what to be, but there’s no guidebook on how to get there. Kyle Lukoff hammers home this uneasy time in Too Bright to See , a kind and caring coming-of-age novel.

It’s the summer before middle school and Bug, an 11-year-old living with her mom in Vermont, is going through that aforementioned awful time where nothing quite fits. She’s also dealing with the loss of her uncle Roderick, who was an effervescent presence in her family’s life. His death and absence haunt her family’s home.

The grief and new start coincide with Bug’s journey of self-discovery; what she wants to look like, what she fantasizes about the person she wants to be, and the realization of her own gender identity. The book never strays into saccharine nor does it ever wander off into pointless cruelty. Bug’s story, as uncertain as she can be, is honest and clear. Too Bright to See is a journey that’s somehow both gentle and brave, and in Lukoff’s caring hands is a spirited success.  —Alexander Abad-Santos, senior correspondent 

Revolution in Our Time: The Black Panther Party’s Promise to the People by Kekla Magoon

“The Panthers fought a revolution in their time, just as we are fighting one in ours,” Kekla Magoon writes in her refreshingly blunt new history of the Black Panthers. Tackling the Panthers’ notoriety head-on, she outlines their goals, controversies, and continued relevance.

Revolution frames the Panthers’ movement and the unprecedented suppression effort against them within the ongoing fallout of slavery, the disenfranchisement of Jim Crow, the long history of police brutality and racist violence, and the turbulent civil rights struggle out of which the Panthers emerged. Magoon traces the Panthers’ path to prominence alongside dozens of individual narratives of Black civilians whose lives intersected with the fight for civil rights.

Magoon is especially blunt about the connection between state-sanctioned violence against Black communities and the Panthers’ decision to be armed in public — a decision that exacerbated the chaos and fear, fueled both by racism and irresponsible media, that seemed to greet the Panthers’ every move. “In a vacuum, it is easy to default to saying, ‘Violence is never the answer,’” Magoon writes. “But when it comes to Black history, we mustn’t forget that violence is also the question.”

Magoon highlights the many men and women who died in the struggle for civil rights at the hands of police brutality, hate crimes, and other suppression efforts. She connects the Panthers’ socialist practices to the broader struggles of the poor and working class.

And she depicts vividly the incremental fights for equality, won and lost, in which the Black Panthers had a hand — from voting rights to education, to holding police accountable for brutality, and many more ripples in a sea of change. And although Magoon covers decades, even centuries, of history, she does so with a straightforwardness and detail that makes this book a helpful resource for readers of every age. — Aja Romano, web culture reporter

Me (Moth) by Amber McBride

How you feel about  Me (Moth) , a debut novel written in verse, will largely depend on how you feel about its ending, which takes an enormous swing. For me, author Amber McBride mostly pulled it off, but the ending is still the sort of thing that tends to crowd out the rest of the book in the memory.

Relegating the rest of the novel to an afterthought, however, would be too bad. McBride has a clear voice and a lyrical notion of how to tell a story across several poems. The plot is simple: A girl named Moth has lost her family in a car accident and now lives with her aunt out in suburban Virginia, where she is one of just a handful of Black students. One day, a new boy enters her classroom, and they form an instant connection. His name is Sani, and he’s of Navajo descent. After a series of events leaves Moth feeling more abandoned than ever, she and Sani embark on a voyage west to visit Sani’s dad in New Mexico. 

McBride structures most of the book as one long conversation between Moth and Sani. They tell stories to each other, and they joke back and forth, and they work together on a song about their road trip. (Sani is a wannabe musician; Moth gave up a promising dance career after the accident.) Of particular note are several chapters in which McBride captures the way text communication can feel a little like poetry.

But, again, that ending — it’s good, but it leaves you wondering just how much of the book was meant as a setup for a twist. Less of it than you’d expect but more of it than you’d think, I guess, and some part of me wishes McBride hadn’t felt the need to drop a major reveal. There’s more than enough story in the unlikely connection between Moth and Sani. — Emily VanDerWerff, critic at large

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Best fiction of 2021

Dazzling debuts, a word-of-mouth hit, plus this year’s bestsellers from Sally Rooney, Jonathan Franzen, Kazuo Ishiguro and more

T he most anticipated, discussed and accessorised novel of the year was Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You (Faber), launched on a tide of tote bags and bucket hats. It’s a book about the accommodations of adulthood, which plays with interiority and narrative distance as Rooney’s characters consider the purpose of friendship, sex and politics – plus the difficulties of fame and novel-writing – in a world on fire.

Rooney’s wasn’t the only eagerly awaited new chapter. Polish Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk ’s magnum opus The Books of Jacob (Fitzcarraldo) reached English-language readers at last, in a mighty feat of translation by Jennifer Croft: a dazzling historical panorama about enlightenment both spiritual and scientific. In 2021 we also saw the returns of Jonathan Franzen , beginning a fine and involving 70s family trilogy with Crossroads (4th Estate); Kazuo Ishiguro, whose Klara and the Sun (Faber) probes the limits of emotion in the story of a sickly girl and her “artificial friend”; and acclaimed US author Gayl Jones, whose epic of liberated slaves in 17th-century Brazil, Palmares (Virago), has been decades in the making.

Pat Barker’s The Women of Troy (Hamish Hamilton) continued her series reclaiming women’s voices in ancient conflict, while Elizabeth Strout revisited her heroine Lucy Barton in the gently comedic, emotionally acute Oh William! (Viking). Ruth Ozeki’s The Book of Form and Emptiness (Canongate), her first novel since the 2013 Booker-shortlisted A Tale for the Time Being , is a wry, metafictional take on grief, attachment and growing up. Having journeyed into the mind of Henry James in 2004’s The Master, Colm Tóibín created a sweeping overview of Thomas Mann’s life and times in The Magician (Viking). There was a change of tone for Colson Whitehead, with a fizzy heist novel set amid the civil rights movement, Harlem Shuffle (Fleet), while French author Maylis de Kerangal considered art and trompe l’oeil with characteristic style in Painting Time (MacLehose, translated by Jessica Moore).

Treacle Walker (4th Estate), a flinty late-career fable from national treasure Alan Garner, is a marvellous distillation of his visionary work. At the other end of the literary spectrum, Anthony Doerr, best known for his Pulitzer-winning bestseller All the Light We Cannot See , returned with a sweeping page-turner about individual lives caught up in war and conflict, from 15th-century Constantinople to a future spaceship in flight from the dying earth. Cloud Cuckoo Land (4th Estate) is a love letter to books and reading, as well as a chronicle of what has been lost down the centuries, and what is at stake in the climate crisis today: sorrowful, hopeful and utterly transporting. And it was a pleasure to see the return to fiction of Irish author Keith Ridgway, nearly a decade after Hawthorn & Child, with A Shock (Picador), his subtly odd stories of interconnected London lives.

Damon Galgut’s first novel in seven years won him the Booker. A fertile mix of family saga and satire, The Promise (Chatto) explores broken vows and poisonous inheritances in a changing South Africa. Some excellent British novels were also listed: Nadifa Mohamed’s expert illumination of real-life racial injustice in the cultural melting pot of 1950s Cardiff, The Fortune Men (Viking); Francis Spufford’s profound tracing of lives in flux in postwar London, Light Perpetual (Faber); Sunjeev Sahota’s delicate story of family consequences, China Room (Harvill Secker); and Rachel Cusk’s fearlessly discomfiting investigation into gender politics and creativity, Second Place (Faber).

Also on the Booker shortlist was a blazing tragicomic debut from US author Patricia Lockwood, whose No One Is Talking About This (Bloomsbury) brings her quizzical sensibility and unique style to bear on wildly disparate subjects: the black hole of social media, and the painful wonder of a beloved disabled child. Raven Leilani ’s Luster (Picador) introduced a similarly gifted stylist: her story of precarious New York living is full of sentences to savour. Other standout debuts included Natasha Brown’s Assembly (Hamish Hamilton), a brilliantly compressed, existentially daring study of a high-flying Black woman negotiating the British establishment; AK Blakemore’s earthy and exuberant account of 17th-century puritanism, The Manningtree Witches (Granta); and Tice Cin’s fresh, buzzy saga of drug smuggling and female resilience in London’s Turkish Cypriot community, Keeping the House (And Other Stories).

Caleb Azumah Nelson’s Open Water (Viking) is a lyrical love story celebrating Black artistry, while the first novel from poet Salena Godden, Mrs Death Misses Death (Canongate), is a very contemporary allegory about creativity, injustice, and keeping afloat in modern Britain. Further afield, two state-of-the-nation Indian debuts anatomised class, corruption and power: Megha Majumdar’s A Burning (Scribner) in a propulsive thriller, and Rahul Raina’s How to Kidnap the Rich (Little, Brown) in a blackly comic caper. Meanwhile, Robin McLean’s Pity the Beast (And Other Stories), a revenge western with a freewheeling spirit, is a gothic treat.

When is love not enough? The summer’s word-of-mouth hit was Meg Mason’s Sorrow and Bliss (W&N), a wisecracking black comedy of mental anguish and eccentric family life focused on a woman who should have everything to live for. Another deeply pleasurable read, The Hummingbird by Sandro Veronesi (W&N, translated by Elena Pala), charts one man’s life through his family relationships. An expansive novel that finds the entire world in an individual, its playful structure makes the telling a constantly unfolding surprise.

There was a colder take on family life in Gwendoline Riley’s My Phantoms (Granta): this honed, painfully witty account of a toxic mother-daughter relationship is her best novel yet.

Two debut story collections pushed formal and linguistic boundaries. Dark Neighbourhood by Vanessa Onwuemezi (Fitzcarraldo) announced a surreal and inventive new voice, while in English Magic (Galley Beggar) Uschi Gatward proved a master of leaving things unsaid. Also breaking boundaries was Isabel Waidner, whose Sterling Karat Gold (Peninsula), a carnivalesque shout against repression, won the Goldsmiths prize for innovative fiction.

It will take time for Covid-19 to bleed through into fiction, but the first responses are already beginning to appear. Sarah Hall’s Burntcoat (Faber) is a bravura exploration of art, love, sex and ego pressed up against the threat of contagion. In Hall’s version of the pandemic, a loner sculptor who usually expresses herself through monumental works is forced into high-stakes intimacy with a new lover, while pitting her sense of her own creativity against the power of the virus.

A fascinating historical rediscovery shed light on the closing borders and rising prejudices of current times. In The Passenger by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz (Pushkin, translated by Philip Boehm), written in 1938, a Jewish businessman tries to flee the Nazi regime. The J stamped on his passport ensures that he is met with impassive bureaucratic refusal and chilly indifference from fellow passengers in a tense, rising nightmare that’s timelessly relevant.

Finally, a novel to transport the reader out of the present. Inspired by the life of Marie de France, Matrix by Lauren Groff (Hutchinson Heinemann) is set in a 12th-century English abbey and tells the story of an awkward, passionate teenager, the gifted leader she grows into, and the community of women she builds around herself. Full of sharp sensory detail, with an emotional reach that leaps across the centuries, it’s balm and nourishment for brain, heart and soul.

• Best books of the year
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• Kazuo Ishiguro
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16 authors pick the best crime novels of 2021

December 3, 2021

2021 has been a bumper year for crime fiction, filling our bookshelves with fantastic pulse-racing reads across the genre, from psychological thrillers to cosy mysteries, police procedurals to domestic noir.

It’s time to celebrate some of the crime fiction highlights of the year and what better way than with to invite some of our favourite authors to give their recommendations? With choices from Shari Lapena, Ajay Chowdhury and Stuart MacBride , amongst others, expect big hitters, surprise debuts and fantastic follow-ups.

Tick off the ones you’ve read so far and pick your favourites from the rest to see out the year with in literary style. Here are the best crime novels of 2021.

The best crime novels of 2021:

In a year packed with brilliant thrilling and chilling reads (particularly in wintry settings – my favourite!), my top crime-thriller of 2021 had to be The Sanatorium by Sarah Pearse . Dark, claustrophobic and intense, The Sanatorium took me straight to the heart of the Swiss Alps, enveloping me in the atmosphere of the sanatorium-turned-fancy-new-hotel Le Sommet. What really made this book for me was the complex and compelling character of DS Elin Warner, and I can’t wait to see her adventure continue in The Retreat in 2022. I would also like to shout-out my favourite domestic thriller of the year, When They Find Her by Lia Middleton. Totally unputdownable, it’s the sign of a brilliant author when they can build such empathy with a character making a terrible decision within the first few pages and yet keep the reader glued right until the very end as the rest of the twisting plot unfolds.

One of the most bittersweet reads of the year for me was John le Carré’s final book – Silverview . Sweet because it is a wonderful book, full of his usual tropes of father figures, agent handling in the field, old spies who have seen it all and the morality of espionage. And of course, sad because there may not be any more. The story starts off simply enough – a City high flyer has cashed in and is running a failing bookshop in a small seaside town when a mysterious visitor upends his world. What follows is a classic le Carré cat and mouse game, with plenty of wheels inside wheels within wheels; non sequiturs that resolve themselves satisfactorily a hundred pages later; wonderful language (all those ‘joes’ and ‘treffs’ that Mick Herron has now gleefully made his own); and dialogue that sparkles in your mind. Read it, smile and weep.

The Sanatorium by Sarah Pearse

When They Find Her by Lia Middleton

Silverview by John le Carré

A book that I thoroughly enjoyed recently is Richard Osman’s The Man Who Died Twice . The main characters live in a posh retirement village in England, and they have started what they call the Thursday Murder Club. One of them, Elizabeth, is a former MI5 agent. The plot is an intricate mystery, with a dash of the spy story. It kicks off with a letter to Elizabeth from an old spy – who also happens to be her ex-husband. He’s in hiding and decided to take a unit in the retirement village as a safe house and have Elizabeth and her friends protect him. Apparently, he’s stolen some diamonds… Of course, the Thursday Murder Club crew want to find the missing diamonds themselves. I absolutely loved this book. It’s clever, funny and wildly entertaining.

I loved Richard Osman’s first novel, The Thursday Murder Club , so I couldn’t wait to read his latest. Wow! What a great plot with intelligent twists and turns. It was also a joy to return to the warm, often unpredictable characters from book one. Mix this with Richard’s humour and you have a book that appeals to all generations. It’s certainly doing the rounds in my family!

The third instalment in Anthony Horowitz’s Hawthorne series was, without doubt, one of my most anticipated reads of 2021. With ‘Tony’ and Hawthorne trapped on a remote island, following a chilling murder at a new literary festival, A Line to Kill has everything I’ve come to want from a Horowitz mystery: a fiendish puzzle, a colourful cast of scheming suspects and a final reveal as surprising at it is satisfying. Hawthorne’s next case can’t come soon enough. I also can’t remember the last time I devoured a book as eagerly as I did The Appeal by Janice Hallett. The premise gripped me from the off, a bickering amateur dramatics group and a shifty charity appeal for a sick child providing the setup for a brutal murder. But it was the execution that I fell in love with. Telling her story almost entirely through emails and text messages, the window that Janice Hallett provides into her characters’ lives is just irresistible. I’ve been recommending this book to virtually everyone I meet, and Janice’s next mystery, The Twyford Code , is already my most anticipated read of 2022.

The Man Who Died Twice by Richard Osman

A Line to Kill by Anthony Horowitz

The Appeal by Janice Hallett

I’ve read so many excellent thrillers this year so it makes it very hard to choose just one, but I’m going to go for The Night She Disappeared by Lisa Jewell. It tells the story of teenage mum Tallulah who, along with her boyfriend Zach, goes missing after a night out. What I love about all of Lisa’s books is how expertly she breathes life into her characters so that you feel like you know them. I truly cared about Tallulah, and the desperate, quiet grief of her mother Kim as she tries to find out what happened to her. It’s a rich, layered and gripping thriller with heart. Outstanding from beginning to its twisty end.

The Nothing Man by Catherine Ryan Howard was, by some distance, the best book I read this year. Interweaving two stories – one, a true crime novel by author Eve Black whose family were killed by the eponymous serial killer 20 years ago; the other told from the point-of-view of the killer himself, long dormant, who starts to read the memoir and realise how close Eve is to unmasking him. It’s like a mash-up of Red Dragon and I’ll Be Gone in the Dark , and is brilliantly told and fantastically gripping. I loved it.

I’ve been a big fan of Andrew Taylor’s writing for years, and his latest, The Royal Secret , is another magnificent instalment in his James Marwood series. Wonderfully evocative, mixing deadly plots, witchcraft, secrets, and genuine menace, this is historical crime fiction at its very, very best.

The Night She Disappeared by Lisa Jewell

The Nothing Man by Catherine Ryan Howard

The Royal Secret by Andrew Taylor

I read so many thrillers this year and it’s very difficult to choose a favourite, but I’m going for The Push by Ashley Audrain. It’s about Blythe, who suspects there’s something not quite right with her young daughter Violet. Is Violet a monster? Or is it Blythe who’s the monster? The story is expertly told, leading the reader from one side to the other – is Blythe trustworthy? Is she right that Violet is bad? Or are all children good – is the problem with Blythe? We hear about her grandmother and her mother, gaining an understanding of why she is the way she is. And still we’re not sure – do we trust Blythe or not? Can nature outwit nurture or is nurture the problem here? I flew through The Push , desperate to see what would happen but savouring it too; enjoying the sublime writing and the dark paths on which narrator Blythe takes us. The characters stayed with me for a long time after I’d finished the book, and I can’t wait to see what Ashley Audrain writes next.

Samantha Downing introduced herself to the world in 2019 with My Lovely Wife , a deliciously sick and twisted thriller about a successful couple with a shocking secret. In this year’s For Your Own Good , she brings us Teddy Crutcher, a teacher who has nothing but scorn for his colleagues and ultra-privileged pupils. Soon, the school is hitting the headlines for all the wrong reasons. As before, Downing hooked me from the first few lines: Entitlement has a particular stench. Pungent, bitter. Almost brutal. Teddy smells it coming. Great stuff.

If we knew how Stephen King does it, we’d all be doing it. Idea after idea, book after book, the man is surely in league with the story gods, though there’s nothing supernatural here, no horror, nor anything mind-meltingly original. But King’s characterisation and evocation of small-town America in Billy Summers are masterful, as always. He is so good at nostalgia, at the small details that make us feel as though we know his characters from our own lives. A ‘one last job’ sniper (who only kills bad people), Billy Summers is a self-reliant loner living off his wits, waiting patiently to take the shot. But in helping a young woman in trouble he begins to exorcise his own demons and perhaps even catches a glimpse of redemption through his rifle scope. I loved how Billy Summers’ cover identity is an aspiring author, meaning King can talk about writing, something anyone who’s read his masterclass On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft will surely appreciate. And there’s something wonderful about the eponymous hero daring to hope he might become a writer for real. Funny because I like to imagine myself as a sniper taking out bad guys. I guess the grass is always greener.

The Push by Ashley Audrain

For Your Own Good by Samantha Downing

Billy Summers by Stephen King

My favourite crime novel of 2021 was Lie Beside Me by Gytha Lodge. What do you do if you wake up next to a man who isn’t your husband – and who is dead? It’s a heartfelt and layered exploration of unreliability, peppered with a cast of fantastically authentic police characters. I loved it!

Earlier this year, I was gripped by S K Barnett’s Safe . It opens with a teenager wandering through a town in Long Island, dishevelled and alone. When approached by a concerned stranger, she identifies herself as Jenny Kristal – a child who went missing from the town seven years previously. Jenny’s family are delighted to have her home, but are surprised that she remembers so little about her life before the abduction. At the same time, Jenny notices that the stories she is told about her disappearance are vague and inconsistent. I found this book tight, smart and brilliantly twisted. Most of all, I loved Jenny’s voice: she tells her story with a perfect blend of humour and sincerity. It was pure fun to read.

The stand-out thriller for me this year was Cara Hunter’s latest DI Fawley novel, The Whole Truth . An Oxford student accuses a professor of sexual assault – but if it sounds like a story you’ve heard before, think again. Not only are Cara’s novel brilliantly paced and expertly structured, they are also beautifully written. And not once have I ever come close to guessing the ending. An exceptional crime writer, who just gets better and better with each book.

Lie Beside Me by Gytha Lodge

Safe by S K Barnett

The Whole Truth by Cara Hunter

I love a thriller that does something different. Stu Turton’s ace The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle did that in 2018 and The Devil and the Dark Water , which came out in paperback this year, is another mind-bender. If Evelyn was Agatha Christie with a twist, The Devil is Turton’s tribute to Conan Doyle: 1634 – an impossible murder on a ship sailing from the East Indies to Amsterdam and the world’s greatest detective locked in the hold. It doesn’t have the unique hook of its predecessor. But it’s still a feat of storytelling with Stu’s trademark crazy twists and turns. I can’t wait to see what he does next!

2021 was an absolutely storming year for crime books, and it was incredibly hard to choose just one. In the end, I went for the novel that I found the hardest to stop reading, and the one that most easily transported me to another place, and that was Gillian McAllister’s addictive That Night . Based largely in the sultry Italian countryside and in part in chilly London, it follows a single decision – to hide the death of a man at the hands of a sibling – and the spiralling consequences of that single action. A brilliant, smart novel that was as full of character and heart-breaking suspense as Gillian’s other fabulous stories. A perfect, escapist read.

The Devil and the Dark Water by Stuart Turton

That Night by Gillian McAllister

There you have it – the best crime novels of 2021, as chosen by crime authors! What books would make your list? Let us know in the comments below…

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Superb page – I have got many ideas!

Why did I look at this ????? So many books and not enough time to fit them in . A New Year a new reading list.

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The New York Times Fiction Bestseller List 2021

Go beyond just the current list of New York Times Fiction Best Sellers of 2021 to discover every bestselling book listed on the NYT Bestseller List in 2021.

Since 1931, The New York Times has been publishing a weekly list of bestselling books. Since then, becoming a New York Times bestseller has become a dream for virtually every writer.

When I first started reading adult fiction, one of the first places I went for book recommendations was the New York Times Fiction Best Sellers. I wanted to know what books were the most widely read, and start with those.

However, scrolling through the list week by week on The New York Times website is rather annoying. I just wanted all the bestselling fiction books gathered together in one place.

When I couldn’t find it, I decided to create it.

Here are all the New York Times fiction bestsellers from 2021. Instead of just the current best seller list , which you can find all over the place, I’ve compiled a list of every book that has appeared on the New York Times Fiction Best Sellers list in 2021 for Hardcover Fiction. 

Note: The week count in this list stops on the last week of 2021. Visit the 2022 Bestseller List if you want to find out which books kept ranking into the next year.

Since this is a bit of a sprawling post, feel free to jump to the section that most interests you or take your time scrolling through the complete list of New York Times fiction best sellers.

Quick Links

• #1 Fiction Best Sellers of 2021
• Heavyweights (10+ Weeks)
• Fan Favorites (5+ Weeks)
• Honorable Mention (2+ Weeks)
• One Hit Wonders

Don’t Miss a Thing

#1 New York Times Fiction Best Sellers of 2021

Where the Crawdads Sing

Delia owens.

(133 Weeks) For years, Kya Clark has survived alone in the marshes of the North Carolina coast. Dubbed “The Marsh Girl” by the locals, she was abandoned by her family and has been raised by nature itself. Now, as she comes of age, she begins to yearn for something more than her loneliness – maybe even a connection with the locals.

Publication Date: 14 August 2018 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

The Vanishing Half

Brit bennett.

(50 Weeks) Growing up in a small black community in the Deep South, the Vignes sisters run away at age sixteen. Though identical twins, their lives end in completely different paths. One returns to live in their hometown while the other secretly passes as white. Bennett explores more than race, as she contemplates how the past affects future generations when their daughters’ lives intersect.

Publication Date: 2 June 2020 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

American Dirt

Jeanine cummins.

(35 Weeks) In Mexico, bookstore owner Lydia is charmed to meet Javier, a man who shares her taste in books, only to find he is the local drug lord. When her husband exposes Javier’s secrets, the wrath of the cartel falls upon her family. Lydia and her son Luca must flee from his wrath – all the way to American soil.

Publication Date: 21 January 2020 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

The Last Thing He Told Me

(30 Weeks) Before Owen Michaels disappeared, he smuggled a note to his new wife Hannah: Protect her . Hannah knows he’s referring to his sixteen-year-old daughter Bailey, but Bailey doesn’t want anything to do with Hannah. As Owen’s boss gets arrested and the FBI come knocking, Hannah and Bailey must come together to discover Owen’s secrets.

Publication Date: 4 May 2021 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

The Four Winds

Kristin hannah.

(27 Weeks) In the Texas panhandle in 1934, severe drought plagues the land. With crops failing, dust storms whip up, leaving the farmers fighting for survival. In the perilous times of the Great Depression, Elsa Martinelli must decide whether to stay and fight for her land or head west to California which offers her family a better life.

Publication Date: 2 February 2021 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

The Guest list

(25 Weeks) On a remote Irish island, the perfect wedding turns deadly in this thrilling mystery. The high profile wedding between a television star and a magazine publisher is supposed to be the perfect event. Yet once the guests arrive, past conflicts come into play and someone turns up dead. Was it the bride? The best man? The wedding planner?

Anxious People

Fredrik backman.

(24 Weeks) After a failed bank robbery, a banker robber on the run accidentally ends up with a room full of hostages at an open house. After letting all of the hostages go, the police storm the apartment, only to find it empty. Now the police must interview the dysfunctional group to figure out what exactly happened. Backman purposely plays on your assumptions and uses an unusual narration style that gives the story an allegorical feel.

Publication Date: 8 September 2020 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

Nicholas Sparks

(22 Weeks) After being injured in a bombing in Afghanistan, a Navy doctor settles at his late grandfather’s cabin in North Carolina. While recuperating from his wounds, Trevor Benson never expects to find love, but he can’t fight the attraction he feels to deputy sheriff Natalie Masterson. However, Natalie remains distant, and a sullen teenage girl might be more connected to Trevor’s grandfather’s death than any suspected.

Publication Date: 29 September 2020 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

If It Bleeds

Stephen king.

(20 Weeks ) A collection of four novellas. In “If It Bleeds,” a standalone sequel to The Outsider , a bomb at a middle school prompts an investigation into the lead reporter by Holly Gibney. Other stories include “Mr. Harriagan’s Phone,” “The Life of Chuck,” and “Rat.”

Publication Date: 21 April 2020 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

A Time for Mercy

John grisham.

(19 Weeks) John Grisham returns you to Clanton, Mississipi, the setting of his debut novel A Time to Kill . After appearing in the novel Sycamore Row , lawyer Jake Brigance is back, this time defending a teenager accused of killing a local deputy. With demand rising for a swift guilty verdict and the death penalty, Brigance realizes the town is against him as he pleads for mercy along with justice.

Publication Date: 13 October 2020 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

Billy Summers

(18 Weeks) From the master of fiction comes a new novel about a good guy in a bad job. Sniper for hire Billy Summers is picky about his jobs. The decorated Iraq war veteran only accepts hits on men who are truly evil. Before getting out of the game, Billy decides to accept one last job when everything goes wrong.

Publication Date: 3 August 2021 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

The President’s Daughter

Bill clinton and james patterson.

(13 Weeks) Former President Bill Clinton and master storyteller James Patterson collaborate for a second time on a summer political thriller. When Former US President Matthew Keating’s daughter is abducted by a madman, he uses the skills he learned as a Navy SEAL to set out on a one-man mission to get her back, while the entire world watches in real time.

Publication Date: 7 June 2021 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

The Evening and the Morning

Ken follett.

(12 Weeks) Thirty years after publishing The Pillars of the Earth , Ken Follett has written a prequel revealing the events that led up to his epic work. At the end of the Dark Ages in England, one man’s determination to make his abbey the center of learning changes the lives of a boatbuilder, a noblewoman, and the monk in unexpected ways.

Publication Date: 15 September 2020 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

Ready Player Two

Ernest cline.

(12 Weeks) Ernest Cline returns with a sequel to his science fiction bestseller, Ready Player One . After winning James Halliday’s contest, Wade Watts finds another easter egg hidden in Halliday’s vaults – a technological advance leagues ahead of the OASIS. Wade and his friends must solve this new riddle in a plot eerily reminiscent of the first book. And, yes, Wil Wheaton is narrating the audiobook.

Publication Date: 24 November 2020 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

The Hill We Climb

Amanda gorman.

(12 Weeks) In 2021, Amanda Gorman became the youngest presidential inaugural poet in US history when she read her poem, “The Hill We Climb,” at President Biden’s inauguration. A special edition hardcover copy of her inaugural poem with a foreword by Oprah Winfrey.

Publication Date: 30 March 2021 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

(12 Weeks) At 17, Samuel Sooleyman gets the chance of a lifetime: a trip to America with his South Sudanese teammates to play basketball in front of college scouts. While there, war breaks out across South Sudan, ransacking his village and killing his father. When he is offered a scholarship to play at North Carolina Central, Samuel uses his raw talent and determination to succeed, desperately hoping to bring his family to America.

Publication Date: 27 April 2021 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

The Paper Palace

Miranda cowley heller.

(12 Weeks) On a July morning, Elle wakes up at The Paper Palace, her family’s summer home, with an enormous choice facing her. The previous night, she had sex with her childhood best friend Jonas while their spouses chatted in the kitchen. Now Elle must decide between the perfectly happy married life she has made with Peter or the life that could have been with Jonas if tragedy hadn’t struck.

Publication Date: 6 July 2021 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

(11 Weeks) As a troubled teenager, Maggie Dawes was sent to live with her aunt in a remote North Carolina beach town. Her life is changed forever when she met Bryce Trickett, a handsome local teen who taught her to love the island and introduced her to photography before he heads off to West Point. Now a renowned travel photographer, Maggie recounts the story of her first love to her young assistant after Maggie is diagnosed with a crippling illness.

Publication Date: 28 September 2021 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

The Sentinel

Lee child and andrew child.

(10 Weeks) In the 25th Jack Reacher novel, Lee Child teams up with his younger brother Andrew. When Jack Reacher intervenes in an ambush in Tennessee, he meets an unassuming IT manager. Recently fired from his job after a cyberattack, Rusty Rutherford just wants to clear his name. Instead, they stumble upon a much larger conspiracy.

Publication Date: 27 October 2020 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

Golden Girl

Elin hilderbrand.

(10 Weeks) On a brilliant June day, author Vivian Howe is killed in a hit-and-run car accident. She finds herself in the Beyond, where she is allowed to view one last summer and is granted three “nudges” to those she left behind. The mother of three must choose how she will help her three children, as they struggle with adulthood and discover secrets she had kept buried. Elin Hilderbrand is known for writing some of the best beach reads, so you won’t want to miss her latest book.

Publication Date: 1 June 2021 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

The Lincoln Highway

Amor towles.

(10 Weeks) After spending a year at a prison work farm for involuntary manslaughter, eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson returns to his Nebraska hometown. With his mother gone and his father recently deceased, Emmett plans to pick up his eight-year-old brother and head West. But his plans are derailed when two friends from the work farm suddenly appear with a scheme of their own.

Publication Date: 5 October 2021 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

Apples Never Fall

Liane moriarty.

(9 Weeks) It should be the golden years for Stan and Joy Delaney now that they’ve sold their tennis academy and settled into retirement, so why aren’t they happy? When they welcome a bleeding stranger into their home, her arrival begins a cascade of events. Now Joy is missing, and the four grown Delaney children wonder if their father might have done it. Liane Moriarty’s books always make for exciting reads, so you’ll want to keep your eye out for her latest novel this fall.

Publication Date: 14 September 2021 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

The Judge’s List

(8 Weeks) After taking on a criminal syndicate that was paying off a federal judge in The Whistler , Florida Board of Judicial Conduct investigator Lacy Stoltz returns in Grisham’s latest thriller. In her latest case, the crimes are even worse than before. Instead of taking bribes, a corrupt judge is taking lives with his own hit list.

Publication Date: 19 October 2021 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

Fortune and Glory

Janet evanovich.

(8 Weeks) The 27th Stephanie Plum novel. After Grandma Mazur’s new husband dies, he leaves her the key to his massive fortune. As Stephanie and her grandma search for the treasure, they realize they aren’t the only ones looking. Stephanie’s old nemesis from Little Havana is hot on the trail. Can Stephanie outwit her? And will she finally decide between Joe Morelli and Ranger?

Publication Date: 10 November 2020 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

State of Terror

Hillary rodham clinton and louise penny.

(7 Weeks) Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton teams up with acclaimed mystery novelist Louise Penny in one of the most-anticipated best new thriller books of Fall 2021. Years of American withdrawal from the world stage have left a power vacuum that its enemies have been more than happy to fill. After a series of terrorist attacks, novice Secretary of State Ellen Adams, under the administration of her rival, must unravel a deadly global conspiracy.

Publication Date: 12 October 2021 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

A Gambling Man

David baldacci.

(7 Weeks) Fresh out of prison, WWII veteran Aloysius Archer heads to California for a head start in the 1950s. On the way, he stops in Reno and picks up a fire-red convertible and an aspiring actress. When they arrive in Bay Town, Archer joins a well-known PI to investigate a blackmail case of an up-and-coming politician.

Publication Date: 20 April 2021 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

The Law of Innocence

Michael connelly.

(7 Weeks) After a big courtroom win, Lincoln Lawyer Mickey Haller is pulled over by the police who find the body of a former client in his trunk. Unable to post bail, Haller must defend himself against murder charges from his jail cell while fending off enemies from the inside and out. Haller knows that it’s not enough to get a not guilty verdict. To be free of the charges, he must find out who really did it.

Beautiful World, Where Are You

Sally rooney.

(6 Weeks) Hitting the upper end of the new adult genre, Sally Rooney’s latest novel follows the lives of four single 30ish Irish protagonists as they try to find their way in life. On a whim, Alice, a novelist, invites Felix, a warehouse worker she just met, to travel to Rome with her. Meanwhile, while recovering from a breakup, Alice’s best friend Eileen begins flirting with Simon, a childhood friend.

Publication Date: 7 September 2021 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

Life After Death

Sister souljah.

(6 Weeks) In the sequel to The Coldest Winter Ever , Winter Santiago is out of prison and ready to take her to get her revenge, reclaim her father’s status, and reunite with Midnight. But Winter’s business partner Simone is also out for revenge, and Winter is her main target.

Publication Date: 2 March 2021 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

A Court of Silver Flames

Sarah j. maas.

(6 Weeks) The fifth book in Maas’s bestselling fantasy series, A Court of Thorns and Roses . Haunted by the horrors of the previous war, Nesta’s temper is constantly on edge, and no one seems to bother her more than Cassian. When the human queens threaten the fragile peace, she must work with Cassian to save the kingdom.

Publication Date: 16 February 2021 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

Harlan Coben

(6 Weeks) Twenty years ago, a rich heiress was abducted. Although she escaped, her captors were never found or the family’s items recovered. When his suitcase is found at a murder scene, Windsor Horne Lockwood III, “Win” to his friends, becomes entangled in an investigation into two cold cases where the suspect may have also been involved in domestic terrorism.

Publication Date: 16 March 2021 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

The Cellist

Daniel silva.

(6 Weeks) In his twenty-third novel, Gabriel Allon investigates the death of Viktor Orlov, his friend who was once the richest man in Russia. A crusader against the Russian regime, Orlov was killed by a nerve agent in his heavily-guarded London apartment. MI6 believes an investigative reporter is a Russian assassin, but Allon finds the truth is much darker than anyone knows.

Publication Date: 13 July 2021 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

The Stranger in the Lifeboat

Mitch albom.

(6 Weeks) How would you react if you called for help from God and He answered? In Albom’s new Christian novel, a group of shipwrecked strangers pulls a man from the sea. He claims to be “The Lord” and can save them, but only if they all believe in him.

Publication Date: 2 November 2021 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

A Slow Fire Burning

Paula hawkins.

(5 Weeks) When a young man is murdered on a London houseboat, police investigate three women: his one-night stand Laura, his grieving aunt Carla, and his nosy neighbor Miriam. Even though Miriam spotted Laura leaving the houseboat that night covered in blood, she is loath to say anything. For Miriam knows exactly what it’s like to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Publication Date: 31 August 2021 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

The Madness of Crowds

Louise penny.

(5 Weeks) As New Year’s Eve approaches, Chief Inspector Armand Gamache is surprised when he is requested to serve as security for a lecture by a visiting statistics professor. When he looks into Professor Abigail Robinson, Gamache is shocked by her views and begs for the lecture to be canceled. Accusing him of academic censorship, the university refuses, and as the professor’s ideas start to seep across Three Pines, Gamache must deal with a murder and the spreading madness.

Publication Date: 24 August 2021 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

While Justice Sleeps

Stacey abrams.

(5 Weeks) Young law clerk Avery Keene is trying to balance her work with legendary Justice Howard Wynn with her troubled family life. When Justice Wynn falls into a coma, Avery is surprised to learn she is named his legal guardian and power of attorney. As politicians vie to replace the ailing judge, Avery learns that Justice Wynn was researching a dangerous merger that involves a conspiracy at the highest levels of government.

Publication Date: 11 May 2021 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

The Russian

James patterson and james o. born.

(5 Weeks) In the thirteenth book in the series, Detective Michael Bennett connects a series of murders of young women in New York City to similar cases in San Francisco and Atlanta. Detective Bennett must do his best to solve the case without falling into the killer’s trap – all while preparing for his wedding to Mary Catherine.

Publication Date: 25 January 2021 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

Star Wars: Light of the Jedi

Charles soule.

(4 Weeks) Two hundred years before the events of The Phantom Menace, the High Republic is at its peak. Peace flourishes under the rule of the Senate and the watchful eye of the Jedi. When a hyperspace catastrophe with sinister roots tears a ship apart, the shrapnel threatens an entire system and the Jedi are pushed to their limits.

Publication Date: 5 January 2021 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

John Sandford

(4 Weeks) In the 31st book of his popular Prey series, Lucas Davenport and Virgil Flowers join forces to solve a maritime mystery. While off-duty, a Coast Guardsman notices a suspicious boat pick up a diver in the middle of the ocean, he knows something fishy is happening. When the Coast Guard responds, three men are killed and the FBI is called in to investigate their murders.

Publication Date: 13 April 2021 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

Nora Roberts

(4 Weeks) Following in the footsteps of her mother’s celebrity fitness brand, Adrian has established her own line of successful yoga and workout videos. When threatening notes in rhyme start to appear, Adrian can dismiss it as easily as her mother. Moving back to Maryland, Adrian reconnects with her childhood crush at the same time a series of murders rocks her world.

Publication Date: 25 May 2021 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

(4 Weeks) Scott Horvath, America’s top spy, has a decision before him. Retire with his beautiful girlfriend in Norway or return. When he sees a man step out of a taxi in Oslo, a man he killed years ago, Horvath’s past comes back to haunt him and sends him on a path all the way to the Artic Circle.

Publication Date: 20 July 2021 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone

Diana gabaldon.

(3 Weeks) In the 9th Outlander book, a reunited Claire and Jamie face being torn asunder again as the American Revolution approaches their North Carolina home. After finally being reunited with their daughter Brianna and her family, the family is worried as the tensions of the colonists grow and the perils of the 1700s seem less safe than they thought.

Publication Date: 23 November 2021 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

Call Us What We Carry

In 2021, Amanda Gorman became the youngest presidential inaugural poet in US history when she read her poem, “The Hill We Climb,” at President Biden’s inauguration. In her expanded collection, Amanda Gorman becomes a new voice in American poetry.

Publication Date: 7 December 2021 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

Save for Later

Heavyweights (10+ Weeks on the NYT Bestseller List)

The Midnight Library

(53 Weeks) In the Midnight Library, there are two books – one book for the life you’ve lived and one for the one you could have lived. Nora Seed must decide which book to choose from. What if she had made different choices? Would her life truly have been better?

Publication Date: 29 September 2020 Amazon | Goodreads |  More Info

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

V. e. schwab.

(43 Weeks) To escape a forced marriage, Addie LaRue makes a bargain with the devil in 1714. She gets to live forever, but the catch is she will be forgotten by everyone she meets. After 300 years, Addie has become resigned to her fate until she meets a young man who remembers her name.

Publication Date: 6 October 2020 Amazon | Goodreads |  More Info

Project Hail Mary

(16 Weeks) In a last-ditch effort to save Earth from an extinction-level event, a group of astronauts is sent on a desperate mission in a cobbled-together spacecraft. But when Ryland Grace wakes up, he has no memory of his mission or why the rest of the crew is dead. The sole survivor, he must take on an impossible task with no margin for failure.

Malibu Rising

Taylor jenkins reid.

(16 Weeks) In 1983, four famous siblings throw an epic summer party at their Malibu mansion. Secrets come out, the party gets out of control, and a fire will burn it all down by dawn. Malibu Rising is a gorgeous family drama that surpasses a simple beach read. The story of the Riva children abandoned by their famous rockstar father is heartbreakingly sad and yet still hopeful. The characters come alive as each sibling ponders if they can escape their parents’ fates.

Publication Date: 01 June 2021 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

Cloud Cuckoo Land

Anthony doerr.

(11 Weeks) From the author of All the Light We Cannot See comes an ambitious work of literary fiction. Doerr’s novel toggles between three timelines – the Fall of Constantinople in 1453, present-day Idaho, and interstellar ship far in the future. Each piece explores the power of stories as a fictional ancient Greek comedy weaves throughout the entire book. The awe-inspiring power of the written word that Doerr evokes in every sentence will be appreciated by literary fiction lovers.

Fan Favorites (5+ Weeks on the New York Times Bestseller List)

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

(9 Weeks) An “Artificial Friend” named Klara is purchased to serve as a companion to an ailing 14-year-old girl.

Deadly Cross by James Patterson

Amazon | Goodreads

(8 Weeks) The 28th book in the Alex Cross series. An investigation of a double homicide of the ex-wife of the Vice President and sends Alex Cross to Alabama to investigate.

The Lost Apothecary by Sarah Penner

(7 Weeks) An aspiring historian in London finds a clue that might put to rest unsolved apothecary murders from 200 years ago.

Daylight by David Baldacci

(7 Weeks) The F.B.I. agent Atlee Pine’s search for her kidnapped twin sister overlaps with a military investigator’s hunt for someone involved in a global conspiracy.  

Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead

(7 Weeks) Ray Carney, a family man who sells furniture on 125th Street, gets a new clientele made up of vicious and unsavory characters.

That Summer by Jennifer Weiner

(6 Weeks) Daisy Shoemaker receives emails intended for a woman leading a more glamorous life and finds there was more to this accident.

The Awakening by Nora Roberts

(6 Weeks) The first book in the Dragon Heart Legacy series. Breen Kelly travels through a portal in Ireland to a land of faeries and mermaids.

The Sanatorium by Sarah Pearse

(6 Weeks) Elin Warner must find her estranged brother’s fiancée, who goes missing as a storm approaches a hotel that was once a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps.

Neighbors by Danielle Steel

(5 Weeks) A Hollywood recluse’s perspective changes when she invites her neighbors into her mansion after an earthquake.

We Begin at the End by Chris Whitaker

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The Best Fiction Books » Science Fiction

The best science fiction of 2021: the arthur c clarke award shortlist, recommended by tom hunter.

Every year, the director of the Arthur C Clarke Award talks us through their six book shortlist. The 2021 crop of the best science fiction books features a "deliciously pulpy" space opera, a time travel story for young adults, and a cacophonous tale of talking animals. What they all have in common is that they are by debut authors, says Tom Hunter : they represent a new generation of sci fi writing.

Interview by Cal Flyn , Deputy Editor

The Infinite by Patience Agbabi

Edge of Heaven by R B Kelly

Chilling Effect by Valerie Valdes

The Animals in That Country by Laura Jean McKay

The Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez

Vagabonds by Hao Jingfang, translated by Ken Liu

1 The Infinite by Patience Agbabi

2 edge of heaven by r b kelly, 3 chilling effect by valerie valdes, 4 the animals in that country by laura jean mckay, 5 the vanished birds by simon jimenez, 6 vagabonds by hao jingfang, translated by ken liu.

W e’re here to discuss the 2021 Arthur C Clarke Award, which seeks to highlight the best new science fiction books. This is the third year in a row we’ve discussed your shortlists, but perhaps you could start by telling us a bit about the prize for late joiners.

This anniversary is a big one for us. Ten years ago, at our 25th anniversary, we might have shut the award down. Sir Arthur passed away, and the money coming from him towards our prize money stopped. So our bank account was empty, and we considered getting smaller and carrying on with no prize money or stopping altogether, but instead we completely changed the business model and have continued to get stronger every year. So this is a huge celebration for us internally: ten years of growth and success.

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You can see that in the number of books being submitted to us now, which is over 100 each year since 2013. This reflects the recognition of the award both publicly and within the publishing space. More publishers and imprints want to put their books forward, and there is wider consideration and willingness to push the barriers of what we might consider a science fiction title. One of the thing that defines our award very clearly, going right back to the establishment of the award, is that we don’t have a single definition of ‘science fiction’; we don’t have a single definition of ‘best’; and we don’t even have a definition of ‘novel’—there’s no particular word count.

We think about length, but think of novels like The Time Machine by H. G. Wells . It’s only about 30,000 words, I think. So we look at the whole of the book, rather than judging the word count, imprint, anything like that. And we wouldn’t have the numbers of entries we do if the divide between science fiction and literary fiction wasn’t breaking down. A classic example is The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead. That won a National Book Award in America, and was praised by Barack Obama as well as winning the Clarke Award.

Talk me through this year’s shortlist.

I say this every year, but this is definitely my favourite shortlist. It’s a shortlist that I’m extra delighted to have on this 35th anniversary. And it’s particularly cheering to see such a diverse shortlist full of fantastic new authors.

That’s right—it’s impossible not to mention that these are all debut novels.

Yes. The award is well-known for recognising debut authors. But this is the first time all six nominated books are by first-time authors. The stars have aligned.

It’s worth mentioning that this isn’t something the judges intended when they made their decision. They weren’t looking to hit particular quotas around equity, diversity or identity, although it is something we consider. And we were not setting out to say that we should be supporting first-time authors over and above established authors.

“This is the first time all six nominated books are by first-time authors”

We cut the books down from 104 to around 20 or 25 books that were under serious consideration, then to a shorter list again of 13. The discussion was still raging at that point. Then you hone in and hone in, and start to see, you know, are we talking about fresh voices? Is that what’s exciting to the judges? Do they speak to a contemporary issue, or are they timeless? All these things are weighed and balanced.

Our first book shortlisted for the 2021 award for the best new science fiction novel is The Infinite by Patience Agbabi.

Okay. Patience Agbabi is a debut author, and she’s very well regarded in spoken word and poetry circles. This is also one of only a few times we’ve shortlisted a novel for younger readers ; I think Stephen Baxter’s H-Bomb Girl was the first example of a YA novel to be shortlisted, in 2008. Patrick Ness , who is very well known, was also shortlisted for Monsters of Men in 2011. But both of those authors are known within the science fiction space. Patience has just leapt right to the front with her first book.

And this is a great book for us to start with if we’re talking about what the award is trying to show in terms of the breadth of science fiction . We’ve got here a young heroine. She’s British-Nigerian, she’s autistic. She’s at high school, but this high school is very special in that she’s on a school trip to the future, because she is a time traveler, born on February 29, during which a certain percentage of people are gifted with time traveling powers. But things are going wrong in the future. That’s the crux of the plot. I don’t want to get into spoiler territory, but it’s worth saying that the book opens with a quote from Greta Thunberg , which will perhaps give you a nod towards the direction of travel.

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Of course, there are some very recognisable tropes here: you’ve got the school. This is a great way to engage with younger readers, by setting things in environments that they’re familiar with. But while it is aimed at younger readers, that doesn’t mean the writing is any less mature. It’s an absolute page turner.

And as you might imagine, it’s a very particular first person voice. You could talk about some comparable titles like Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time , with the autistic protagonist. But Agbabi’s spoken word background brings a freshness.

Yes. And YA can play such an important role in getting people into reading as young people, or getting them into science fiction in particular. I remember reading Interstellar Pig by William Sleater as a teenager, having picked it at random in the library, and it blew my mind. I think it introduced me to the concept of mathematics in base twelve. So YA sci fi can also be a good introduction to complex concepts you later meet in school. Time travel novels , like The Infinite, are full of interesting paradoxes to make you think.

Definitely. Most science fiction readers become fans young, then seek out the stuff that interests them. You know: I liked spaceships the way some kids like football, so now I Iike real spaceships, lego spaceships… it also led to other interests in robotics, cybernetics, digital culture and the environment as well. And it’s exciting to have this book on the shortlist because I know a lot of our fans have kids of their own and are looking for good books to give them.

Well, speaking of futurism and artificial intelligence , does that bring us to the second book on your 2021 shortlist of the best new science fiction books? Please tell us about Edge of Heaven by R.B. Kelly.

Absolutely. So this is set in 2119, around 100 years ahead. And as you can imagine, things are not going well on the near future Earth. I don’t usually like to make these sorts of comparisons, but if you liked Blade Runner , that noir flavour of science fiction, then this is probably the one our shortlist for you. Think crumbling societies, dispossessed populations, outlawed technologies and a (very on trend) deadly plague to name just a few of the challenges our protagonists will be facing here.

If The Infinite exemplified what the Clarke Award can do in terms of recognising the wealth of science fiction for younger readers, another area that’s always welcome to us is the opportunity to help promote small presses. And this book comes to us via a long and winding road. So, R. B. Kelly won the Irish Writers’ Centre Novel Fair Competition, which is a small award specifically for first time writers. The winner has their book published by a small press, and Edge of Heaven was first published in the Republic of Ireland in 2016—so, not eligible for our award. But it was then subsequently picked up by another small press in the UK—NewCon Press, which has a very strong track record in UK science fiction having made its name publishing anthologies before moving into novels and novellas.

Next on your 2021 shortlist of the best new science fiction is Chilling Effect by  Valerie Valdes.

Yes. Valdes is a Cuban-American author. A debut author, too, of course. This is an exciting, fun book. We love serious, literary books— The Handmaid’s Tale was our first ever winner—but not all books that we like must be set in patriarchal, oppressive, near-future dystopias . We like fun books! And, actually, one of the biggest conversations between our judges this year was around a number of different titles that were just great fun and whether this was important to reflect in an award like the Clarke.

Locus magazine called this “delightfully pulpy”, which I love. Sometimes you do want pulp—but very good comfort reading is hard to find.

It’s not like we don’t have form here. It reminds me of our 1991 winner, Take Back Plenty by Colin Greenland which was also a hugely fun spare opera romp, and Neil Gaiman was one of our judges that year, so you can’t get a higher endorsement for the value of fun in science fiction than that.

So yes, Chilling Effect is delightfully pulpy. You know, it’s got psychic cats. It’s got a mismatched crew on a spaceship. People will say ‘we’ve seen that before,’ but as with all our shortlisted books there’s something that makes this distinct and original. We’ve got near-future noir, time travel, solar system colonisation, dystopic pandemic-based stuff… these tropes do have a lot of life in them when they are found by new writers. And seeing something familiar in a new way is going to be exciting for the judges.

“There’s a big movement in science fiction towards books that are fun”

This is really good, fun, brilliantly well written, and the characters stay with you. One of our judges said that they went back and immediately started reading this one again—this, out of hundreds of books. So that’s praise.

If we’re looking at trends, I think there’s a big movement in science fiction towards books that are fun. We ran a survey on people’s reading habits in 2020 and asked ‘has Covid affected your reading?’56 percent of respondents said ‘yes, absolutely.’ Many are looking for comfort reads, lots of people are reading more. Although of course, everyone’s experience of Covid has been very different. So I do want to thank all our judges who have been reading all the submissions under those same conditions.

But I also think this is part of a bigger trend, which we have seen for several years now. We’ve seen writers like Becky Chambers winning the Hugo Award—

For her much loved Wayfarers series .

—so I think there is a strong upswelling of fun books.

Another key issue that people are looking at is how science fiction is engaging with issues of, for example, diversity. And here we have a very diverse ship crew. In science fiction, there might be alien ethnicities… all these kinds of things that can be a mechanism for exploration against an interstellar backdrop. Back on Earth we are arguing about LGBTQI+ issues, and then suddenly in sci fi we have a protagonist that changes sex.

Right. I was talking about exactly this with Sherryl Vint recently, in the context of Ursula Le Guin’s best books .

There are a lot of precedents. So what writers like Valerie are doing is taking these great big issues and having fun with it, not feeling the pressure of science fiction as a predictive literature. Which it isn’t anyway—as so many scifi writers will tell you, we’re not trying to literally guess the future, we’re talking about now . Books like Chilling Effect are very much about the now.

Shall we talk about The Animals in that Country ? I’ve just finished it, and loved it. It’s clever and a little bit experimental, without taking itself too seriously. It’s also one of two books on the shortlist that deal with pandemics . Is that just a coincidence?

We get pandemic books every year. Station Eleven , our 2015 winner, was a pandemic book.

And one of my favourite books of all time.

If you add zombie pandemics… we get more than enough of those.

So, the premise of The Animals in that Country is that there is a pandemic, but it’s a virus that enables humans to start to understand the speech of animals. But not in a Doctor Dolittle way, when we can just chat to them. It’s more like the Wittgenstein idea that ‘If a lion could speak, we could not understand him.’

Right, that’s the epigraph, so it’s very explicitly an exploration of that idea.

So the characters can hear them, but they don’t always know what they are saying. And of course you don’t want to hear everything. It will drive you mad.

People look at the Clarke Award shortlist every year and try to guess what the judges were thinking. They automatically think: that’s the space one, that’s the fun one, that’s the literary one. And I don’t think it’s unfair to say that this is the literary one, at least in terms of its origins, not as a statement of relative quality versus our other contenders.

It’s coming from a publisher, Scribe (part of the Penguin Random House family), which doesn’t traditionally do a lot in the speculative fiction market. This is the first time they were submitting to us, and obviously they are thrilled this book was shortlisted.

“If you’re going to travel via an Einstein-Rosen bridge, it can take a chapter of explanatory text or you can just say ‘the wormhole opened…’”

The book has elements of pandemic, elements of the road trip—the need to get across country to find family members, other survivors who are accommodating the breakdown of society. We kind of know how societies are supposed to breakdown in zombie apocalypses or in environmental crises. We’ve seen it a million times before. But this one stood out because it’s nothing like those at all, and all the familiar tropes are up in the air.

Okay. Next on our shortlist of the best science fiction of 2021 is another book by first time author: The Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez.

This book’s publisher, Titan, will be very well known to a lot of readers for the excellent nonfiction work they do with big coffee table film books and similar, but over recent years have been very active in publishing their own lists of science fiction, fantasy and horror. They’ve picked up a lot of great authors, and Simon Jimenez is no exception. If the following book, Vagabonds , is near-space, our own solar system, then The Vanished Birds is very definitively space opera.

Sorry to interrupt, but do you mind explaining what you mean by that?

Of course. Space opera is always so difficult to define, but I’ll give it a go. I would suggest that if a story allows for the possibility of intergalactic travel without the several thousand years wait it should take to get to the nearest star, you’re probably in space opera territory. It doesn’t have to be a Star Wars style evil galactic empire but we’re definitely talking about spacefaring civilisation or civilisations, where the actual collapse of the journey required has been solved by means that might be called hand waving…. Or it might be very well worked out!

One of my favourite examples of solving the faster than light trick is a book called Light by M. John Harrison —which was nominated for the Clarke Award; he won it in 2007 with the sequel, Nova Swing —where basically every civilisation in the universe will evolve very different mathematics and philosophical concepts of how the universe works, and because that’s how they model the universe all the methods work even if they work on contradictory physics… It plays very cleverly with quantum uncertainty principles so civilisations ends up with something like a sort of Schrodinger’s drive; if you don’t believe it, you can’t get the engine to start.

Hopefully that’s not too off the cuff a sense of what space opera is, and to get more specific this next book, The Vanished Birds , opens with an absolute classic of that intergalactic perspective—picture a very distant planet, a very low tech planet that was colonised in some distant past and is now home to generations of farmers. Every 15 years, the skies open and a fleet of ships descend upon the fields. The ships are described as being made of metal and cloth—and we don’t know whether we’re seeing this through the eyes of somebody who just doesn’t know what they’re seeing or if it’s a literal description—but it’s a very beautiful image that remind me of Sir Arthur’s famous line that ‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’.

These spaceships sail in to collect the harvests and the people on the ships are travelling at post-relativity speeds, so they are ageing at a very different speed. A character on the planet would see the same spaceship crew member as having aged perhaps a year in the time they have aged 15 themselves. The planet’s farmers might not see it, but as readers suddenly we’re exposed to this vast gulf of relative time and the number of generations that might have lived and died, cut off on their planet while working to supply an intergalactic marketplace they never see for themselves.

And it’s a beautifully written book. It doesn’t spend too much time explaining these technologies. This ‘ship of cloth’ and so on. One of the joys of space opera, of course, is that because we’re far future (or perhaps a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away) the need to explain these magical technologies is lessened and you can just give yourself to the dream.

Great. I think that brings us to our final book: Vagabonds by Hao Jingfang.

I think this is the first time a book in translation has been nominated for the prize, so it’s very exciting. It’s published by Head of Zeus, a publisher that is leading the field right now in terms of bringing works in translation into the mainstream.

But let’s talk about the book. It’s near space—that is, our solar system—set in the future on a colonised Mars. So it couldn’t be more topical. Settlement has been achieved, and indeed Mars would like to separate from the Earth. I say that science fiction isn’t predictive, but a quick glance over our own contemporary politics and you can see that this is definitely well within the limits of plausibility.

Hao Jingfang is a Chinese author, and science fiction is often discussed as a way artists and writers can use fictions as a way to write if there are issues around state censorship; the Strugatsky brothers in Russia would be another great example here.  You can imagine that science fiction is a form that might even be encouraged by the state, especially if your own country seems to be doing very well in a particular imagined future, and the more subtle critiques might slide past the censor as long as they see the right flag on the right planet.

“Science fiction is a way writers can write if there are issues around state censorship”

All that makes the story sound very political, but the book itself is very lyrical and reflective right from its beautifully evocative opening line: Once, a group of children was born on one world and grew up on another. It’s almost a fairy tale opening… once upon a future time.

It’s a thoughtful book, in the very best way. Some science fiction books spend their time talking about technology and what that means; this is more about the philosophies of that cultural change—what it means to have two planets now separated, rather than one ruled over by the other, and the tensions between two very different cultural backgrounds. The book follows characters born on Mars, sent to Earth, and then come back again. So it’s very much an ambassador-type story, or one where the cultures are literally worlds apart.

We talked about the ‘literary’ book on the shortlist earlier and perhaps this is actually the literary one, in the way people often think of ‘literary’ as meaning a book that’s very focused on a character’s interiority. If your perceptions of what science fiction is comes more from popular culture, by which I guess we’re really talking about cinema and videogames, you might think that the key to a good sf story is a good mix of action and imaginary technologies I hope many readers here who are less familiar with the written part of the genre might be tempted to start with this book in which case they’ll find something fresher and more intellectually invigorating than your regular franchise fare (fun as that can be).

So that brings us to the end of our shortlist of six. All of these books are imaginative and very different, but still very much within the heart of what we call science fiction, even if they are all pushing in different directions—taking tropes and reimagining them afresh. And we have entirely new voices, coming from translation.

We can review our submissions data to see trends in science fiction publishing; we know that this year, our gender breakdown was 39% female, down from last year’s 40% but ten points on the median from where its been just five years prior, and feels like a small but positive change worth noting.

Obviously it takes a long time to produce books—for publishers to find new voices, for writers to be commissioned. We know that among publishers there is active outreach to make their lists more diverse, partly due to demand from readers. And we’re starting to see the results of that demand being met now in our more recent submissions.

We’re also seeing larger numbers of female writers coming to the fore consistently in our shortlists, and more writers of colour. We’re glad to see the raw data pointing towards larger diversity of authors and readers. But the point I want to make is that these are fantastic books that deserve to be read precisely because they are fantastic books.

Just as a final question: why is it important for readers to find new writers, or new books at all, rather than simply working through the extensive back catalogue of sci fi classics ?

Firstly, I should say that it’s great when the Arthur C Clarke Award showcases new writers, but that’s not one of our mission statements. Our judges form their own opinion of what they are looking for every year. But I do think it’s brilliant when we are able to spotlight something new.

We’ve done some surveys around reading habits within our fan base: active sci fi fans, rather than the general populace. So we know that they will read about 50 books a year—a book a week, basically. Not as many as our judges have to read, but much wider in terms of the range of books. For example, when we dug into the data, we found that of those 50 books, maybe only five or six of those books being read will be books published in that same year. The vast majority of books people are reading are already from past years, whether they’re considered classics or not.

Think of it this way: just as the light we see in the night sky is from distant stars and thousands or millions of years old by the time it arrives on our planet, what we are looking at now with today’s shortlist and submissions is really the science fiction of several years ago. All these books have taken time to write, maybe sometimes years before they’re ready to be submitted to agents, been rejected, kept going, submitted again, found a publisher and so on…

That’s a great way to think about it.

Science fiction might be the literature of the future, but it’s a genre that continues to reinvent itself by standing on the shoulders of its own heritage. Personally I’ve often found the best way to engage with the legacy of our genre is precisely by following personal line of interest back from books that inspired me back to books that inspired their authors and so on and on. For me this feels like a more natural way to trace back through the history of science fiction rather than jumping to some pre-set list of classics. Science fiction isn’t a curriculum to be completed, there’s no test at the end and reading an award shortlist should be for pleasure, not homework.

Award shortlists are perhaps at their best when they serve as an encouragement to break out of a pattern of familiar reading and try something new, and perhaps at their worst when taken as a dictate that in some way replaces our own sense of what ‘best’ might mean.

I’ve always said if you find one book in our shortlist of six that’s love at first sight, the chances are you’ll find one that doesn’t work for you as well because a good shortlist should be six different interpretations of ‘best,’ not the same formula repeated six times over.

So, if you find one book on the shortlist that jumps out at you, I say pick it up—it might just be tomorrow’s classic in your hands today!—but pick it up because it was recommended to you in the way you might pay attention to a friend enthusing about their new favourite author or novel.

With science fiction publishing in the UK thriving and over 100 increasingly diverse titles currently being published every year, a single definition of science fiction in the 2020s will always be a challenge. We’ve put forward our best answer, but it’s ultimately the readers who will decide how close we came to getting it right.

July 19, 2021

Five Books aims to keep its book recommendations and interviews up to date. If you are the interviewee and would like to update your choice of books (or even just what you say about them) please email us at [email protected]

Tom Hunter is the current Director of the Arthur C Clarke Award, an annual award given for the best science fiction novel first published in the United Kingdom during the previous year. The award was established with a generous grant given by Sir Arthur C Clarke and the first prize was awarded in 1987 to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale .

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35 Must-Read 2021 Book Releases by Black Authors

From Cicely Tyson's 'Just as I Am' to Amanda Gorman's debut poetry collection.

Books helped us through the chaos of 2020, and in 2021 there are even more releases to offer us solace and comfort. However, despite our love for reading, many book lovers do not see ourselves represented in the books that we pick up. A  recent study by  The New York Times  revealed that just 11 percent of books published in 2018 were written by people of color and an even smaller percentage by Black authors. To fully grasp—and empathize with—the lived experiences of the Black community, our voices and stories must be amplified and celebrated not just on Black History Month, but every month.

Whether you gravitate towards thrillers (see: Zakiya Dalila Harris's  The Other Black Girl ), or prefer a historical fiction novel (you can't go wrong with Robert Jones, Jr.'s  The Prophets ), we rounded up the must-read 2021 book releases by Black authors. Go forth and support this mix of new and notable authors, ahead.

'Black Buck' by Mateo Askaripour

This quick-witted satirical debut follows a young man who transforms almost overnight from an unambitious Starbucks employee to a ruthless salesman after a chance encounter with the CEO of NYC’s hottest tech startup. When tragedy strikes, he resets with a new goal: helping young people of color infiltrate America’s sales force.

Available January 5, 2021

'The Prophets' by Robert Jones, Jr.

A devastating and beautifully written novel set at a Mississippi cotton plantation,  The Prophets  follows two enslaved Black boys, Isaiah and Samuel, as they fall in love and find refuge in each other amidst the horror of their reality. But when a fellow slave seeks to gain favor by preaching the master’s gospel, their relationship is exposed, which sets off a brutal chain of events. 

'Angel of Greenwood' by Randi Pink

Isaiah Wilson and Angel Hill attend the same school in the Greenwood area of Tulsa, Oklahoma—known as Black Wall Street—and hold different views on how to defeat racism. But when a vicious white mob storms the community of Greenwood on May 31, 1921, leaving the town destroyed and thousands of residents displaced, Isaiah, Angel, and their peers discover who their real enemies are.

Available January 12, 2021

'We Are All Birds of Uganda' by Hafsa Zayyan

This ambitious debut follows Sameer, a high-flying lawyer in present-day London who travels to Uganda to discover his origins, and Hasan, a successful family man in 1960s Uganda facing deportation due to his Asian background. Spanning across two continents and several generations, Hafsa Zayyan’s novel is a multi-layered, moving tale about identity, family, prejudice, and how history repeats itself.

Available January 21, 2021

'Just as I Am' by Cicely Tyson

The late Academy-, Tony-, and three-time Emmy Award-winning actor and trailblazer Cicely Tyson, known for her work in  The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman ,  A Woman Called Moses , and  Roots , reflects on her life and career spanning more than seven decades, transforming from the church girl who once rarely spoke a word to one of the most prolific actresses of the century. 

Available January 26, 2021

'A Glimmer of Death' by Valerie Wilson Wesley

Fans of cozy mysteries will love this novel about caterer and psychic Dessa Jones who takes a job at a real estate firm when her bakery company goes bust. Her new boss, Charlie, is an abusive jerk, so when he’s found brutally murdered, his many victims become the suspects. As Dessa follows the case, she realizes that she needs to do something fast before she’s either the next victim or the primary suspect.

'This Close to Okay' by Leesa Cross-Smith

Recently-divorced therapist Tallie Clark is heading home when she saves a man from jumping off of a bridge. Told through both Tallie and the man's perspective, this is a touching story about two strangers who meet under the worst of circumstances, but end up finding love and healing within each other.

Available February 2, 2021

'Four Hundred Souls' by Ibram X. Kendi & Keisha N. Blain

Edited by Ibram X. Kendi, author of  How to Be an Antiracist , and fellow historian Keisha N. Blain,  Four Hundred Souls  is a 400-year history lesson on African Americans from the arrival of 20 enslaved Ndongo people on the shores of the British colony in mainland America to present day. Ninety writers take on five years each to create this essential work of Black history.

'Muted' by Tami Charles

Seventeen-year-old Denver is ready to leave her small, white town and become a star with her two best friends, Shak and Dalisay. When they meet R&B star Sean "Mercury" Ellis, it seems like their dreams may come true. But Denver begins to realize that she's trapped in Merc's world, and she must get out or be broken. Written entirely in verse,  Muted  is a fearless exploration of the way Black and brown girls are exploited in the music industry. 

'The Gilded Ones' by Namina Forna

One of *the* most talked about books of the year is this West African-inspired feminist fantasy set in a patriarchal society, where a woman’s worth is tied to her purity. When Deka bleeds gold—the color of impurity—at the blood ceremony, she’s presented with two choices: stay and be subjected to torture at the hands of her former community, or leave and join an army of girls just like her to fight for the empire. The novel has already been  auctioned for a TV adaptation .

Available February 9, 2021

'Honey Girl' by Morgan Rogers

Grace Porter, an overachiever and recent PhD graduate, goes on a girls trip to Vegas to celebrate her degree, but gets drunkenly married to a woman whose name she can't even remember. Staggering under her father’s expectations, she escapes to New York to spend the summer with her wife. Morgan Rogers’s debut novel is a coming-of-age story that explores what it means to follow your heart and make space in places never meant for you.

Available February 23, 2021

'Black Boy Out of Time' by Hari Ziyad

One of 19 children in a blended family, Hari Ziyad was raised by a Hindu Hare Krsna mother and a Muslim father. Taking the reader on a journey of their formative years and later throughout their life, as they navigate towards finding their true self in New York City, they explore childhood, gender, race, and what it means to grow up Black and queer in America.

Available March 1, 2021

'What's Mine and Yours' by Naima Coster

From the author of  Halsey Street  comes an explosive family saga spanning three decades about two families in Piedmont, North Carolina, whose lives intersect during the aftermath of a high school integration initiative.

Available March 2, 2021

'The Conductors' by Nicole Glover

In a post-Civil War Philadelphia, Hetty Rhodes, a magic user and former conductor on the Underground Railroad, solves murders and mysteries with her husband, Benjy, that the white police ignore. When one of their friends is found murdered in an alley, they set out to find answers, but their search leads them to unexpected revelations that will change everything.

'Lightseekers' by Femi Kayode

Dr. Philip Taiwo is a respected Nigerian investigative psychologist who is called on by a powerful Nigerian politician to look into the public torture and murder of three university students in Port Harcourt. When he arrives there, he discovers that there’s far more to the story, and he must quickly navigate the tumultuous sociopolitical landscape to find out the truth before it’s too late.

'Act Your Age, Eve Brown' by Talia Hibbert

The final installment in  The Brown Sisters  trilogy centers on the flightiest Brown sister, Eve, who sets out to prove herself to her parents by getting a job at a B&B. However, the rigid, perfectionist owner, Jacob, is instantly put off by Eve. When she accidentally hits him with her car, he’s forced to accept her help. Before long, she’s infiltrated his work, his kitchen, and his heart.

Available March 9, 2021

'Black Girl, Call Home' by Jasmine Mans

In a deft and breathtaking portrayal of identity, race, sexuality, family, and feminism, spoken-word poet Jasmine Mans explores the painful, joyous path to adulthood as a young, queer Black woman in America.

'Wild Women and the Blues' by Denny S. Bryce

In 1925 Chicago, the jazz capital of the world, Honoree is trying to dance her way to the top at Dreamland Café, where she socializes with celebrities. In 2015, grieving film student Sawyer Hayes seeks out the 110-year-old Honoree to get answers for his thesis on the legendary filmmaker, Oscar Micheaux. As the past meets the present, it’s a final chance for Honoree to truly be heard and seen before it’s too late.

Available March 30, 2021

'Libertie' by Kaitlyn Greenidge

In Reconstruction-era Brooklyn, Libertie Sampson, the daughter of a Black female physician, is urged by her mother to become a doctor, but Libertie would rather pursue music. So, when a suitor from Haiti proposes to Libertie promising true equality on the island, she accepts, only to discover that she is far from living the life of freedom she craves.

'The Final Revival of Opal & Nev' by Dawnie Walton

Opal is an Afro-Punk performer in the '70s who teams up with aspiring British singer/songwriter Nev for a rock music collaboration. However, when a rival group uses a Confederate flag for their promotion and Opal fights back, their collaboration ends before it has even begun. Decades later, a music journalist sets out to document the rock-and-roll duo's rise and fall. But as she digs deeper, disturbing allegations come to light that threaten to destroy everything.

'Caul Baby' by Morgan Jerkins

Morgan Jerkins makes her fiction debut with this otherworldly tale about a woman, Laila, desperate to become a mother, who turns to the Melancons, an old and powerful Harlem family known for their caul—a precious layer of skin that is the secret source of their healing power. Although the deal falls through, another baby, Hallow, is born with caul to Laila’s niece, Amara. Years later, when Amara and Hallow cross paths, Hallow will be forced to decide where she truly belongs.

Available April 6, 2021

'Love in Color' by Bolu Babalola

Following its earlier U.K release last summer, Bolu Babalola's debut collection,  Love in Color , is finally getting published in the U.S. In the anthology, Babalola retells the most beautiful love stories from around the world focusing on the myths, folklore, and history of West Africa, Greece, and the Middle East.

Available April 13, 2021

'Open Water' by Caleb Azumah Nelson

He’s a photographer and she’s a dancer who connect over their shared experiences and fall in love. But two people who seem destined to be together can still be torn apart by fear and violence. Beautifully crafted with stunning prose,  Open Water  explores Blackness and trauma in a world that defines you by the color of your skin and the love that struggles amidst the pain.

'Sorrowland' by Rivers Solomon

Sorrowland  follows Vern, a young girl who flees the cult-like commune where she was raised to provide a better life for herself and her children. But even in the forest where she has gone, she is a hunted woman. To protect her family, Vern transforms into something terrifying and powerful that may just help her break free from her past.  Sorrowland  is a powerful story about motherhood, survival, and the cruel treatment of Black bodies.

Available May 4, 2021

'Meet Cute Diary' by Emery Lee

Noah Ramirez runs the "Meet Cute Diary," a blog that documents trans people's happily-ever-afters. But when a troll exposes the blog as fiction, the only way to save it is to convince everyone the stories are true. Enter: Drew. Drew is willing to fake-date Noah, but as Noah's feelings grow stronger, he realizes that dating in real life isn’t quite the same as finding love on the page. This heartfelt rom-com aims to make trans teens feel seen and worthy of love.

'While Justice Sleeps' by Stacey Abrams

Stacey Abrams, voting rights activist and former Georgia gubernatorial candidate, is also the author of eight romance novels under the pseudonym, Selena Montgomery.  While Justice Sleeps  is Abrams's first novel under her own name. The story follows Avery Keene, who's a law clerk for the legendary Justice Howard Wynn. When she unexpectedly becomes Justice Wynn’s legal guardian, Avery finds herself in a dangerous and controversial new role.

Available May 11, 2021

'The Other Black Girl' by Zakiya Dalila Harris

With an  adaptation already in the works at Hulu , Zakiya Dalila Harris's debut novel is one of the most highly-anticipated books of the year. When Nella Rogers, an editorial assistant at the predominantly white publishing firm, Wagner Books, meets Hazel, she is initially thrilled to no longer be the only Black girl at work. Then, the threatening notes start appearing, and Nella can’t help but wonder if Hazel is behind them.

Available June 1, 2021

'Dead Dead Girls' by Nekesa Afia

Nekesa Afia’s debut mystery novel follows Louise Lloyd, a young Black woman working at a cafe and a speakeasy in 1920s Harlem. After an altercation with a local police officer, she is forced to assist in the investigation of a serial killer targeting Black girls in her neighborhood.  According to the author , this book is for you if you want "a jazz age murder mystery starring a tiny, tired lesbian."

'Ace of Spades' by Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé

Ace of Spades  is a compelling, incendiary debut thriller about Devon and Chiamaka, the only Black students in Niveus Private Academy, whose lives are turned upside down when an anonymous texter, known as Aces, brings their dark secrets to light. With heart-pounding suspense, Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé’s novel delves deep into the heart of institutionalized racism.

'Instructions for Dancing' by Nicola Yoon

The bestselling author of  Everything, Everything  and  The Sun Is Also a Star  returns with a beautiful and compelling story about Evie, a teenager whose recently-divorced parents have left her disillusioned about love. When she gains a newfound ability to see visions of others’ relationships, she feels even less confident about the power of love. However, a meeting with a mysterious boy, X, at a dance studio forces her to question her views on life and love.

'Seven Days in June' by Tia Williams

This beautiful love story follows an erotica writer, Eva, who’s juggling her career and single motherhood when she reconnects with the love of her life, Shane, who's now a famous literary author. However, Eva's not sure she can trust the man who broke her heart, and she wants him out of her life—after she gets some answers, of course.

'Dear Senthuran' by Akwaeke Emezi

The critically-acclaimed author of  The Death of Vivek Oji  returns with a stunning memoir about navigating success, gender, and identity through candid letters with friends, lovers, and family. 

Available June 8, 2021

'Island Queen' by Vanessa Riley

Set on the tiny Caribbean island of Montserrat, this novel is a fictionalized tale about Dorothy Kirwan Thomas, born enslaved but bought her freedom, who becomes one of the wealthiest, most powerful landowners in the colonial West Indies. 

Available July 6, 2021

'No Gods, No Monsters' by Cadwell Turnbull

One October morning, Laina gets the news that her brother was shot and killed by Boston cops. But what looks like a case of police brutality turns out to be something stranger; monsters are real, and they're done hiding. Now, she must figure out why this is happening and, more importantly, why now. 

Available September 7, 2021

'The Hill We Climb and Other Poems' by Amanda Gorman

The debut poetry collection from National Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman features "The Hill We Climb"—the breathtaking poem the 22-year-old read at President Biden's inauguration—and more eagerly-awaited works. 

Available September 21, 2021

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Taiwo Balogun is a freelance writer covering beauty, books, movies, and culture. As a writer, she is passionate about creating content to help others discover ways towards a happier lifestyle. When she’s not busy on her computer, Taiwo spends her time reading the latest book release or binge-watching a new series. 

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12 Top Authors Pick the Best Books of the Year

David baldacci, louise penny and others offer their favorite reads from 2021 and of all time.

Christina Ianzito,

As we’ve noted in our  seasonal roundups , 2021 has been a fantastic year for books — so much so it can be hard to choose which one to read next. We asked top authors for one novel or work of nonfiction that stood out for them this year, as well as a less recent book that they particularly loved. Here’s what they said.

Dean Koontz

Best-selling author of suspense novels, most recently  Quicksilver

When Christmas Come s by Andrew Klavan (2021) : This is an exciting but tender, heartfelt crime novel about an English professor’s attempt to clear a former Army Ranger of murder. It’s fast-paced, haunting, with a central character you’ll love.

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Breakfast at Tiffany’ s by Truman Capote (1958): An enchanting country kid becomes a Manhattan party girl, Holly Golightly, who retains a heartbreaking innocence that makes her unforgettable. Exquisite prose and a sweetly semi-tragic ending make this novella a minor classic.

Jodi Picoult

Author of more than 25 novels, including the new  Wish You Were Here

The Soulmate Equation  by Christina Lauren (2021): A charming novel about the intersection of science and romance, and what happens when DNA can predict your perfect match. Is that a blessing or a curse? And does destiny matter more than individual choice? 

The Book Thief  by Markus Zusak (2005):  A story about the resilience of humans, and how one little life can make a difference in thousands of others. And it’s narrated by Death, which is a mic drop in and of itself.

David Baldacci

Blockbuster thriller author, most recently of  Mercy

The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race  by Walter Isaacson (2021): The story of biochemist Jennifer Doudna, who helped to develop a gene editing technology, ushering in wondrous possibilities and unsolvable ethical dilemmas. It’s written in the unputdownable style of a novel as Isaacson does so well. 

The Drowning Pool by Ross Macdonald (1950): A body of a woman in a pool leads to everything that Macdonald (real name Kenneth Millar) did so well: exploring the darkest of family secrets, the chasm between rich and poor, the dirt that clings to every pore of humanity, and most brilliantly of all, Macdonald’s detective, Lew Archer, who tries to make sense of the insensible. Macdonald is the best of the crime noir writers, taking up the mantle from Hammett and Chandler and lifting it to a rarefied level. 

​Louise Penny

​Canadian author of the Chief Inspector Gamache series, including her latest,  The Madness of Crowds . Penny also cowrote the recent thriller  State of Terror  with Hillary Rodham Clinton

​When Harry Met Minnie: A True Story of Love and Friendship  by Martha Teichner (2021): About the bond between two rescue dogs and their owners, this is a warm, intelligent, funny and most of all a luminous celebration of love and friendship and how life-changing events can spring from the mundane.

A Fish Caught in Time: The Search for the Coelacanth  by Samantha Weinberg (2000): In 1938, fishermen off the coast of South Africa brought up something extraordinary in their nets: a coelacanth, a huge fish with limb-like fins thought to be extinct for some 65 million years. This is the riveting story of what was described as the “greatest scientific find of the century.”

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Erik Larson

Bestselling nonfiction writer whose books include 2021’s  The Splendid and the Vile

Klara and the Sun  by Kazuo Ishiguro (2021): A moving exploration of loneliness and artificial intelligence, as told through the observations and experiences of an “Artificial Friend” named Klara, acquired to be the companion of a dying girl. It kept me thinking for weeks afterward.

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The World That We Knew  by Alice Hoffman (2019) : Set in Nazi Germany, this novel traces the wrenching journey of a Jewish girl named Lea and her mystical guardian, Ava, a golem Lea’s mother hopes will protect her — a thrilling story of the lasting power of love.

Author of 2013’s award-winning  A Tale for the Time Being  and 2021’s  The Book of Form and Emptiness , among other novels. She’s also a Zen Buddhist priest.

The End of Bias: A Beginning  by Jessica Nordell (2021): Implicit and unconscious bias exists in us all and underlies our most destructive human behavior. Nordell’s examination, based on 15 years of research and filled with fascinating case studies, is lively, informative, optimistic, compassionate and necessary. The takeaway is: We can change our biased behavior, so let’s start now.

One Hundred Years of Solitude  by Gabriel García Mǻrquez (1967): This sprawling masterpiece of a novel about a multigenerational Colombian family named Buendía was the first encounter I had with magical realism. It was the book that made me want to be a fiction writer. “Wait, I want to do that!” I remember thinking.

Lisa Jewell

British author of popular thrillers, most recently  The Night She Disappeared

The Plot  by Jean Hanff Korelitz (2021): This tale of a frustrated writer stumbling upon the perfect plot for a novel but having to negotiate a moral minefield to use it in his own work is so clever, so taut, so dazzling, I read it in about five hours flat. There is not one bum note or wasted word. 

The Push  by Ashley Audrain (2020): A mesmerizing exploration of the dark side of motherhood; what happens if your perfect baby girl turns out not to be made of sugar and spice and all things nice? Are you a bad mother? Or is your daughter a bad child? Spellbinding.

Chris Bohjalian

Author of best-selling novels, including 2021's  The Hour of the Witch

Woodrow on the Bench: Life Lessons from a Wise Old Dog  by Jenna Blum (2021): I feel I got to know Woodrow, novelist Jenna Blum’s black lab, in Blum’s wise, wrenching and devastatingly beautiful memoir of his last half-year. After reading it, you will never again look into your dog’s — or any dog’s — eyes and not feel the bond that can exist between a person and their pet.

The Friend  by Sigrid Nunez (2018): Wistful and elegiac, but also rich with gentle humor, this is the story of a woman, her literary mentor who kills himself, a tiny apartment and an aging Great Dane. I loved it, with its explorations of the bonds between humans and our closest animal companions.

Janet Evanovich

A fixture on best-seller lists since 1994; her most recent book is this year’s  Game On

Black Ice  by Brad Thor (2021): Scot Harvath is back and better than ever in this fun, fast-paced thriller set in the beautiful country of Norway and the Arctic. You don’t need to have read the others in the series, your pulse will be pounding either way.

Heroes’ Feast: The Official D&D Cookbook  by Kyle Newman, Jon Peterson and Michael Witwer (2020): This beautifully illustrated and charmingly written cookbook is not just for Dungeons & Dragons fans, but for anyone with an adventurous heart and a love for other-worldly travel.

Wanda M. Morris

Debut author of the buzzed-about new legal thriller  All Her Little Secrets ​

Revival Season by Monica West (2021): A 15-year-old girl must come to grips with who her father, a famous Baptist preacher in the South, really is and the newfound power she possesses in a community where women are thought to be invisible and powerless. I love this coming-of-age story that is both compassionate and suspenseful, as well as a complicated and moving story about family and faith.

​Defending Jacob by William Landay (2012): A quiet suburb is rocked when the local assistant district attorney's teenage son is charged with the murder of a classmate. This book enthralled me, not only because of the outstanding storytelling, but because it posed the scenario every parent, including me, grapples with — how far would you go to save your child?

Anthony Horowitz

British TV writer behind PBS's Foyle's War and author of best-selling mysteries, such as the recent  A Line to Kill

Checkmate in Berlin by Giles Milton (2021): This is a fantastic story of Berlin at the end of World War II. It starts with the disease and destitution that Berliners faced when the fighting stopped, moves through the increasing tension and menace of the Cold War and climaxes with the logistically impossible Berlin Airlift that managed to save thousands of lives. In Giles Milton’s expert hands, focusing on the larger-than-life characters who made this all happen, history is as enthralling as any fiction you’ll ever read. 

The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters (2009): I love the work of Sarah Waters, who brings the 19th and early 20th century to vivid life like no other writer. The Little Stranger is a superlative ghost story … if it is a ghost story. It’s hard to say. Certainly, Hundreds Hall, the grim, decaying mansion where it is set, contains a malign presence of some sort. But can we believe Dr. Faraday, the country GP called to the house, or is he the ultimate unreliable narrator? This book will linger in your mind long after you read it. It will haunt you.

Best-selling author of international thrillers, including  Black Ice .

Steel Fear  by Brandon Webb and John David Mann (2021): A serial killer is loose on an aircraft carrier. It’s an absolutely chilling thriller.

One Second After  by William Forstchen (2009): In the aftermath of a mysterious event that cripples all modern electronics, the residents of a small college town must band together to survive. One of the best books I have read in the last 10 years.

Christina Ianzito is the travel and books editor for aarp.org and  AARP The Magazine , and also edits and writes health, entertainment and other stories for aarp.org. She received a 2020 Lowell Thomas Award for travel writing.

Editor's note: This article was originally published on December 8, 2021. It's been updated to reflect new information. 

Christina Ianzito is the travel and books editor for aarp.org and AARP The Magazine , and also edits and writes health, entertainment and other stories for aarp.org. She received a 2020 Lowell Thomas Award for travel writing.

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Books Fall Preview: Fiction

20 New Works of Fiction to Read This Season

New novels from Jonathan Franzen and Anthony Doerr, a political thriller by Hillary Clinton and Louise Penny, a Korean murder mystery — and more.

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By Joumana Khatib

‘ Beautiful World, Where Are You ,’ by Sally Rooney

Here’s a third smart, sexy novel from Rooney, who received widespread acclaim for her first two, “Conversations With Friends” and “Normal People.” This book has a clear autobiographical bent: Alice is a young novelist who has rocketed to worldwide fame. Her close friendship with Eileen anchors the book, with their email exchanges alighting on everything from political and social upheaval to their romantic lives.

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Sept. 7 | Read our review | Read our profile of Rooney

‘ Inseparable ,’ by Simone de Beauvoir. Translated by Sandra Smith.

De Beauvoir may be most closely associated with Jean-Paul Sartre, but this loosely autobiographical novel, written in 1954 and put aside for decades, suggests that her more significant relationship was with her childhood friend Zaza.

Ecco, Sept. 7 | Read our review

‘ Apples Never Fall ,’ by Liane Moriarty

Family tensions bubbling over in Australia, jump cuts between past and present — it’s another novel from Moriarty, known for books like “Big Little Lies” and “Nine Perfect Strangers.” This time, she focuses on the Delaney family, headed by two retired tennis stars, and the fallout after their mother goes missing.

Holt, Sept. 14 | Read our review

‘ Harlem Shuffle ,’ by Colson Whitehead

In 1960s Harlem, Ray Carney, a furniture salesman, is trying to lead a mostly upright life — until he’s drawn into a heist that goes awry. Our reviewer called this, Whitehead’s first novel since he won Pulitzer Prizes for “The Underground Railroad” and “The Nickel Boys,” “a rich, wild book.”

Doubleday, Sept. 14 | Read our review | Read our profile of Whitehead

Tell us: What novels and story collections are you most looking forward to reading?

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