100 Notable Books of 2021
100 Notable Books of 2021
For some years Bell, the author of “Scrapper” and “Cataclysm Baby,” has had climate and apocalypse on his mind. This excellent novel continues and deepens his investment. Timely, prescient and true, the book tracks the planet’s progression from lush Eden to barren hellscape.
In Rooney’s much-anticipated third novel, readers follow the lives of Alice, a writer of global acclaim, and her best friend, Eileen, who works at a literary magazine in Dublin. The two grapple with life’s biggest (and most inconsequential) issues in a lively correspondence.
Powers’s ability to translate arcane science into lush storytelling is on ingenious display in his latest novel, about a newly widowed astrobiologist and his troubled 9-year-old son, who embarks on an experimental neurofeedback therapy with profound implications for the human race.
Part homage, part psychological investigation, this novelized portrait of Huisman’s mother seeks to capture on paper the life of a beautiful, charismatic, unstable and exasperating woman — as well as the experience of growing up in her ambit.
This novel, about a half-Vietnamese American in Vietnam, is preoccupied with the body and its violations — both the sexual trauma experienced by the female characters and the ravages of colonial occupation and war upon the body of Vietnam.
This remarkable debut novel, about a young Indian woman saddled with the care of her ailing and abusive mother, inflicts a visceral punch. In spare and exacting prose, Doshi documents the petty cruelties and helpless dependency of a primal relationship in disarray.
Ferris tells the complex and often very funny story of hapless Charlie and his various attempts at success. Charlie’s novelist son eventually reveals himself to be the narrator, and sets up an impressive reversal.
The Nobel Prize winner’s first novel in 48 years, involving a sinister online business that sells human body parts for private use in rituals and superstitions, is many things at once: a caustic political satire, a murder mystery, a conspiracy story and a deeply felt lament for the spirit of Nigeria.
Weaving narratives from three eras across most of a millennium, from Constantinople in the 15th century to a space pilgrimage in the 22nd, Doerr’s first novel since “All the Light We Cannot See” offers a paean to the consolations of storytelling, and to the people who pass down ancient texts.
Franzen’s sixth novel follows the Hildebrandt family in suburban Chicago, with a shaky marriage, a crisis of faith and teenage anguish driving the compulsively readable plot. Set in the 1970s, the book examines an age-old moral dilemma: how to do good in a selfish world.
Following three central characters — a trans woman who wants a baby; her ex, a man who’s recently detransitioned; and the cisgender woman he’s impregnated — this debut novel suggests there are many different ways to be a parent, or a person.
Lewis’s haunting novel is built of vignettes whose links become gradually clear, involving a dealer in Indigenous artifacts, the Ivy-educated scion of a West African family, an East Village street kid with a pure singing voice and a photographer just back from a decade abroad.
After winning the Pulitzer Prize for each of his last two novels, Whitehead here delivers a rollicking crime caper set in the Harlem of the 1950s and ’60s, when social upheaval was just starting to roil the neighborhood. The highlight of the novel is a brilliantly executed robbery of the famed Hotel Theresa.
Mbue’s quietly devastating second novel — about a fictional African village with high mortality due to an American oil company’s pollution — charts the ways oppression, be it at the hands of a government or a corporation or a society, can turn the most basic needs into radical acts.
In the latest novel by the author of “A Separation,” a court translator in The Hague is tasked with intimately vanishing into the voices and stories of the “plethora of war criminals in our midst.”
Klara, the solar-powered humanoid who narrates the Nobelist Ishiguro’s powerful eighth novel, is an “Artificial Friend,” purchased as a companion to a sickly teenage girl. Through the robot’s eyes, and haunting mechanical voice, we encounter a near future in which technology, ominously, has begun to render humans themselves obsolete.
Based on the lives of Susan Smith McKinney Steward, the first Black female doctor in New York State, and her daughter, Greenidge’s second novel centers its post-Civil War New York story on an enduring quest for freedom. A feat of monumental thematic imagination.
In Davies’s wise, bracingly honest novel, a father chronicles his son’s birth through his teenage years. He juggles guilt, worry and marital strife alongside the joys, triumphs and laughter of family life — never sugarcoating, always leaning into the hard parts in a way that’s refreshing, timely and necessary.
Do we live and die by accident, or according to some preordained plan? Spufford explores the question in this vividly imagined and richly drawn novel, which is based on an actual World War II bombing in London.
Set in the 1950s, Towles’s exhilarating novel follows four boys on a trip across America, from rural Nebraska to the skyscrapers of New York. All of them seek a better future but have very different ideas about how to get there; over the course of 10 days this multiperspective story offers an abundance of surprising detours and run-ins.
This triumphant debut novel follows a young Black woman figuring out how to live with joy in the modern American South. The novel switches between the past and the present, alternating the heroine’s story with those of her ancestors.
In this novel of huge imaginative sympathy, Toibin delves into the rich interiority of the German novelist Thomas Mann. From childhood to early success to exile abroad, we follow Mann through personal challenges and political turmoil as he turns the complexities of life into art.
In his haunting new novel, Knausgaard alternates between the first-person accounts of nine characters, all of whom spot a huge, bright star that has inexplicably appeared in the sky. Realist drama gradually gives way to touches of horror and an enigmatic spiritual treatise.
Part study of suburbia, part globe-trotting adventure, Lee’s latest novel follows a young man from a transformative trip in Asia to a low-key life in a New Jersey town. Reflective, precise writing and a steady churn of pleasures and perils make for a winning combination.
Cohen imagines a college job interview in the 1950s for Benzion Netanyahu, academic and father of the recently ousted Israeli prime minister. The novel explores themes of Jewishness and diaspora as Netanyahu’s fatalistic view of Jewish history bumps up against that of the narrator, an assimilated American Jewish professor.
This singular novel by Lockwood, a lauded memoirist and poet who first gained a following on Twitter, distills the experience of life online while transfiguring it into art. The result is a book that reads like a prose poem, at once sublime, profane, intimate, philosophical, witty and, eventually, deeply moving.
In her quietly radiant new novel, Strout returns to a subject she writes about brilliantly (marriage) and a character readers have met before (Lucy Barton). A long-divorced couple team up for a (platonic) trip to Maine, where they learn about family history and also about themselves.
Part romance, part fantasy, this gorgeous novel is about meeting someone on your daily commute — a girl, it turns out, who has been riding the train since the 1970s, thanks to a magical timeslip. But it’s also about loneliness, and being unmoored from normal time, and missing people you’ve lost, and dealing with generational trauma and fearing an unknowable future.
Shteyngart’s fifth novel begins at the onset of the pandemic, with seven friends and one nemesis gathered at an estate in the Hudson Valley to wait out what they’re sure will be a quick blip in their convenient and prosperous lives.
Plenty of poems here address disability, history and quotidian human behavior, but racism and economic oppression are the former poet laureate’s primary concerns in this book, her first in 12 years. With Dove’s characteristically affable voice, the book tries to understand saving graces and the things they save us from.
A struggling writer steals a plot from his student and his life changes overnight. Suddenly, he’s a household name and the toast of the literary community. But somebody knows what he did — and wants revenge. Korelitz’s latest novel is a literary thriller with two questions at its core: Who knows the truth? And who really owns a story, anyway?
This novel follows a white South African family from the final years of apartheid to the present. A long-deferred vow to their Black housekeeper becomes a stand-in for the nation’s moral bankruptcy.
A lyrical and rebellious love story about two enslaved boys in Mississippi, whose relationship is accepted and even cherished until a Christian evangelist, also enslaved, turns the plantation against them. The novel is about their choice to love in the face of the forces that would crush them, and the repercussions of that love.
This sprawling, go-for-baroque pulp thriller is about two dads — one Black, one white, both ex-cons — who decide to avenge the murders of their sons. Cosby writes in a spirit of generous abundance and gleeful abandon and, unlike a lot of noir writers, he doesn’t shy from operatic emotion.
Inspired by a trove of letters written by her great-grandmother in 1930s Germany and incorporated into the text, Fox’s latest novel spans four generations and two continents, offering a nuanced exploration of the burden of inherited trauma on a single family riven by the Holocaust.
Erdrich's playful wit and casual style belie a seriousness of purpose, which in the case of this winning novel, entails tackling the pandemic, the death of George Floyd, the trials of doing time in prison and, not least, the power of books to change lives.
Kleeman’s novel is an unlikely amalgam of climate horror story, movie-industry satire and made-for-TV mystery, following a flailing writer who has come to Los Angeles for a film adaptation of his novel starring a tabloid-tragic teen star.
Elusive creatures flit through a Chinese city in this enchanting novel, alternately avoiding and consorting with its human inhabitants, all the while pursued by a cryptozoologist with a fondness for smokes and booze — a female, science-minded Sam Spade.
In Baxter’s new novel, an aging couple‘s search for their missing son leads them to a quasi-anarchist group. With generous, keen humor, the author suggests that their real problem might be mortality: not our tumultuous times, but time itself.
In rural Money, Miss., two white men are found murdered next to the corpse of a Black man whose mutilated face bears an eerie resemblance to Emmett Till’s. As more bodies pile up, Everett’s acid satire expands to encompass America’s racist past and present with equal parts horror and humor.
Immensely satisfying, refreshingly new and gloriously written, this vibrant noir, set in 1970s Mexico City, traces how a dowdy secretary on the cusp of 30 sparks to life thanks to the disappearance of her beautiful and glamorous neighbor.
Lish’s substantial gifts are on abundant display throughout this gorgeously written novel, which offers a rich tapestry of troubled lives in and around working-class Boston. Corey, the young protagonist, grows up with a terminally ill mother and a perplexing father whose presence gradually turns sinister.
A middle-aged woman spontaneously buys a new house and moves into it alone, without her husband or teenage daughter. Spiotta’s precisely observed, fiercely intelligent novel excavates the long and winding path that led our protagonist to this place.
El Akkad’s second novel examines opposing sides of a migrant crisis from the point of view of two children: a boy who washes up on an island after a doomed ship passage, and the girl who takes him in and tries to get him to safety. In a compassionate but nuanced telling, the novel effectively effaces assumptions of superiority and inferiority, good and bad.
Labatut’s singular imagination dazzles in this hybrid of fiction and biography, exploring the lives of major 20th-century scientists. His true subject is the ecstasy of discovery and the agonizing price it can exact.
The 2020 Nobel laureate’s stark new collection consists of just 15 poems, but each is as breathtaking as a cold night; the book affirms her icy precision and extends her interest in silence and the void through verses that seem, at times, to offer a poetics of resistance to poetry.
This romance novel has considered realism and punted it outside the highest available window. Letter openers have a hidden rapier blade; a respectable lady’s house in Mayfair is equipped with a flying spell and can sail to Bath. Yet amid the often wacky melodrama, there are moments of emotion that cut to the quick.
Equal parts biography, history and thriller, this book tells the story of the author’s idealistic but doomed great-great-aunt, Mildred Harnack, who, between 1932 and 1942, helped build a network of objectors in Berlin who hoped to stop the Nazis.
This book presents the long, troubled relationship between the United States and Iran in a breezy and supple narrative, replete with poignant anecdotes, to posit convincingly that “antagonism between Iran and America is wholly unnecessary.”
Hinton documents hundreds of often violent urban protests by Black Americans beginning in the mid-1960s, as policing grew increasingly aggressive. Such protests must be understood, she posits, not as riots but as “rebellions” against racial injustice.
Focusing on a single intimate tale that contains the seeds of today’s adoption practices and parenting norms, Glaser’s account is the most comprehensive and damning yet of the scandals at the postwar adoption agency Louise Wise Services.
A former civilian adviser in Afghanistan and aide to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Malkasian has written a broad-reaching, authoritative history of America’s longest war from 9/11 to the near-present, including knowledgeable details on the Afghan part of the story.
In 1994, Wang moved from China to Brooklyn with her family. This is her memoir of their tumultuous early years building a life in an unfamiliar and mostly inhospitable place.
This haunting memoir, by a man who grew up in an intentional community in India and returned to live there with his wife and children, is a sensitive excavation of fraught family history as well as a philosophical meditation on the utopian impulse.
This memoir from a young survivor of acute myeloid leukemia provides an unlikely roadmap to the new not-normal of the pandemic era. Through her treatment and subsequent cross-country roadtrip, Jaouad demonstrates the courage it takes to live with unanswered questions.
Gabler relates how the youngest Kennedy brother overcame ridicule and scandal to become one of the most effective senators in U.S. history. In five decades, Ted Kennedy sponsored nearly 700 bills that became law, and left his imprint on scores of others.
As Marton demonstrates in this biography, Merkel’s was a life full of drama, as she rose from the hinterlands of East Germany to the center of power in Berlin and overcame all of the obstacles, from Communist repression to German misogyny, on her rise to the top.
Wheatcroft’s Churchill led Britain heroically during World War II, but at other times in his life, as recounted in this revisionist biography, he was an imperialist, a racist, a drunk, a neglectful father and, perhaps most of all, a masterful mythmaker.
In this energetically reported book, Chafkin paints a deeply disturbing portrait of the billionaire entrepreneur turned Donald Trump backer Peter Thiel, tracing his ascent through the ranks of Silicon Valley moguls along with his embrace of far-right causes and beliefs.
First published in Denmark in the 1960s and ’70s, Ditlevsen’s unstinting memoirs detail in luminous prose her hardscrabble upbringing, career path and merciless addictions: a powerful account of the struggle to reconcile art and life.
In the musician’s gutting account of coming to terms with her mother’s death and coming into her own as a Korean American, food is her lifeline.
In this powerful, discomfiting book, Press investigates a series of morally fraught jobs — among them drone warfare operators and prison psychologists — and shows how such work is tacitly condoned by society while also rendered invisible so as not to disturb our collective conscience.
This account of a love triangle that roiled the country’s burgeoning evangelical movement in the late 1820s is scholarship at its most entertaining and insightful, as Heyrman, mining smoldering letters by aspiring missionaries, chronicles the ambition, hypocrisy and sexism at the heart of a crusade.
Tenacious reporting and deft storytelling by Keefe, the prizewinning author of “Say Nothing,” about Ireland’s Troubles, give this exposé of the family widely blamed for igniting the opioid crisis the moral heft of Greek tragedy, yielding a mesmerizing portrait of appalling greed and indifference.
This lively, thorough and fascinating history reconstructs the fight for gay marriage, tracing how an issue that barely registered among queer activists became, in the wake of outspoken opposition from the religious right, a priority.
“It is a confusing time to be a woman who loves a troubled man,” Henderson writes in this unflinching memoir of her husband’s long and confounding illness. She tells their story with a novelist’s eye for detail and the honesty of a trusted friend.
Paul exhorts readers to “think outside the brain.” We are not solo actors, she insists, forced to rely only on what’s in our heads to solve problems; rather, we’re networked organisms with the power to transform our thinking.
In this nuanced portrait, more than a decade in the making, Norma McCorvey — best known as “Jane Roe,” the woman at the center of Roe v. Wade — emerges as a contradictory figure, both heroine and villain of her story and one whose views on abortion are as complex as those of her fellow citizens.
Featuring characters mostly drawn from life confronting illness, loss, violence and death, this exquisite collection of pieces defies classification, blending intuition and observation into something unaccountably yet undeniably real.
In a sweeping, original history, Menand employs finely tuned capsule biographies of writers, filmmakers, artists and more to cover the interchange of arts and ideas between the United States and Europe in the decades following World War II.
This powerful blend of memoir and literary investigation begins with the author’s obsession with an 18th-century Irish poem. But it’s far from dusty scholarship; Ni Ghriofa weaves past and present, dreams and harsh reality, in an account of motherhood and transformation.
Smith, a poet and journalist, spoke with scholars, guides, heritage fanatics and tourists as he visited sites key to America’s slavery past. The result is timely and profound, an eloquent view of a history we have yet fully to confront.
A contentious publishing experience left Laymon unsatisfied with his 2013 essay collection. Now, seven years later, after buying the book back from his initial publisher and revising the collection, he returns with Take 2.
Standing 6-foot-10 with a booming voice and an urban dictionary’s worth of curse words, the onetime Georgetown basketball coach inspired a potent mixture of fear and respect. In this lively and entertaining book, Thompson, who died in August, finally gets to cast his legend on his own terms.
Expanding on a 2013 series for The Times about a homeless New York schoolgirl and her family, Elliott delivers a searing account of the family’s struggles with poverty and addiction in a city and country that have repeatedly failed to address these issues with efficacy or compassion.
In this first of two projected volumes, Logevall demonstrates how, even at an early age and despite his playboy reputation, John Kennedy took a serious interest in politics, forming a cleareyed sense of the world and his nation’s place in it.
Sykes explores the world of our ancient cousins, offering a full picture of what their lives may have looked like. It’s a remarkably crisp portrait because recent science has been able to infer a lot about Neanderthals from the little they left behind.
This slim but forceful treatise begins with patriotic despair: With inequality persisting in the United States across generations, Packer paints a picture of a deeply fractured America that he divides into four irreconcilable categories. The result, he believes, is that we are losing the art of self-government.
The 12 previously published essays collected here (mostly) for the first time were written between the late 1960s and the year 2000. Revisiting Didion’s work now provides a familiar joy, as well as a reminder of her prescience.
Based on the author’s own involvement in the movement as well as on 17 years of interviews conducted with 188 members of the group, this book is a weighty masterpiece: part sociology, part oral history, part memoir, part call to arms.
Zimmer’s book tackles some of biology’s hardest questions: What is life? How did it begin? And what criteria should we even use to call something “living”? From metabolism to sentience to evolution to our current focus on DNA, Zimmer takes the reader on an elegant, deeply researched tour.
Abdurraqib, a poet, cultural critic and essayist, uses the tales of Black performers to make powerful observations about race in America, gliding through music, television, film, minstrel shows and vaudeville. The book is also a candid self-portrait, written with sincerity and emotion.
This capacious account of New York’s recent rise describes the men and women in every facet of life who helped revitalize the city. Yet for Dyja, who sees the need for another reinvention of New York, the city has in many ways fallen prey to its own success.
This stunning memoir is less an account of the writer’s own life than a post-mortem of his parents’ marriage, and an honest and heartfelt portrayal of his mother. Sorrentino aches to gain her acceptance, a lifelong effort that often results in disappointment.
Nelson’s brainy, affecting, genre-crossing books have earned her a deserved reputation as a sui generis amalgam of poet, memoirist, theorist and critic. This provocative meditation on the ethics of freedom as a source of constraint, as well as liberation, shows her at her most original and brilliant.
In a book that is part memoir, part history, Gordon-Reed (who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2009 for “The Hemingses of Monticello”) recounts her continuing affection for her home state of Texas, despite its reputation for violence and racism, writing that “the things that happened there couldn’t have happened in other places.”
In a series of striking essays, Horn explores how the ways we commemorate antisemitism and Jewish tragedy distract from the very concrete, specific death of Jews. She wants a more direct reckoning with Jew hatred and its consequences.
Broome’s coming-of-age memoir explores Black manhood and queerness in the Rust Belt, and the pressures that Black queer boys face to change. Broome pairs his own story with a scene he witnessed, of a father screaming at his young son.
A fascinating and rigorous, no-punches-pulled account of Lapine’s first collaboration with Sondheim, on a Pulitzer Prize-winning musical. Despite the hilarious anecdotes, this is not a collection of gossip. It is actually a story of artistic steadfastness.
The bar is high for a new Plath biography, but Clark’s meticulously researched account manages to be both riveting and revelatory, restoring complexity and nuance to a poet whose career has been overshadowed by the circumstances of her tragic early death.
This collection of essays offers a full portrait of Kennedy’s thinking as a law professor and public intellectual, demonstrating his commitment to reflection over partisanship, thinking over feeling.
The acclaimed cartoonist uses her lifelong obsession with exercise to ponder some big questions: What is going on with our ridiculous bodies and our even more ridiculous relationship between our bodies and minds?
Nearly two decades after her mother’s death, when Chow was just 13, her family is still in deep mourning, an experience she documents with wit, poignancy and fresh insight and imagery.
This memoir begins with a phone call in which the author learns that her father is coming home after almost 30 years in prison, and it ends with his release. But at its heart, this is the story of Ford as her mother’s daughter, for better and often for worse.
A former columnist for The Chicago Tribune offers a textured portrait of her 1970s childhood on the South Side, where three Black girls with similar aspirations ended up with wildly divergent fates.
The poet’s letters cast light on a generous soul with an active social life and a quicksilver wit. Artifice was Merrill’s way of being natural. He lavished his correspondents with parody and aphorism, as well as assessments of his poetic peers.
McWhorter, a Black liberal who dissents from much of the left's views on race, argues against the position that racism and white supremacy are “baked into” the structure of American society.