best book reviews 2021

The 100 Must-Read Books of 2021

The fiction, nonfiction and poetry that shifted our perspectives, uncovered essential truths and encouraged us forward Annabel Gutterman, Cady Lang, Arianna Rebolini and Lucas Wittmann

1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows

Acts of desperation, afterparties, aftershocks, all that she carried, all the frequent troubles of our days, america on fire, beautiful world, where are you, the book of form and emptiness, call us what we carry, the chosen and the beautiful, chronicles from the land of the happiest people on earth, cloud cuckoo land, the code breaker, the committed, the copenhagen trilogy, covered with night, crying in h mart, dear senthuran, detransition, baby, empire of pain, everyone knows your mother is a witch, the family roe, the final girl support group, finding the mother tree, four thousand weeks, the free world, great circle, harlem shuffle, hell of a book, how the word is passed, invisible child, the kissing bug, klara and the sun, the life of the mind, the lincoln highway, a little devil in america, the loneliest americans, the love songs of w.e.b. du bois, malibu rising, the man who lived underground, mike nichols: a life, milk blood heat, my darling from the lions, my monticello, my year abroad, no one is talking about this, oh william, on juneteenth, one friday in april, one last stop, orwell's roses, the other black girl, our country friends, a passage north, pilgrim bell, poet warrior, the promise, the prophets, razorblade tears, real estate, the removed, remote control, the rib king, second place, seeing ghosts, somebody's daughter, something new under the sun, the sum of us, the sunflower cast a spell to save us from the void, the sweetness of water, a swim in a pond in the rain, tastes like war, there’s no such thing as an easy job, under a white sky, until proven safe, while we were dating, white magic, who is maud dixon, who they was, who will pay reparations on my soul, you got anything stronger, you're history, by ai weiwei, by megan nolan, by anthony veasna so, by nadia owusu, by tiya miles, by rebecca donner, by elizabeth hinton, by sally rooney, by ruth ozeki, by amanda gorman, by sunjeev sahota, by wole soyinka, by anthony doerr, by walter isaacson, by viet thanh nguyen, by tove ditlevsen, by nicole eustace, by jonathan franzen, by michelle zauner, by akwaeke emezi, by torrey peters, by patrick radden keefe, by rivka galchen, by joshua prager, by grady hendrix, by suzanne simard, by oliver burkeman, by louis menand, by melissa febos, by maggie shipstead, by colson whitehead, by mieko kawakami, by jason mott, by clint smith, by katie kitamura, by andrea elliott, by daisy hernández, by kazuo ishiguro, by kaitlyn greenidge, by christine smallwood, by amor towles, by hanif abdurraqib, by jay caspian kang, by honorée fanonne jeffers, by taylor jenkins reid, by richard wright, by lauren groff, by mark harris, by dantiel w. moniz, by melissa broder.

by Rachel Long

By jocelyn nicole johnson, by chang-rae lee, by patricia lockwood, by elizabeth strout, by annette gordon-reed, by donald antrim, by casey mcquiston, by caleb azumah nelson, by rebecca solnit, by zakiya dalila harris, by gary shteyngart, by anuk arudpragasam, by kaveh akbar, by joy harjo, by larissa pham, by damon galgut, by robert jones, jr., by s.a. cosby, by deborah levy, by brandon hobson, by nnedi okorafor, by ladee hubbard, by chibundu onuzo, by rachel cusk, by kat chow, by kristen radtke, by john le carré, by sarah ruhl, by ashley c. ford, by alexandra kleeman, by rivers solomon, by heather mcghee, by jackie wang, by nathan harris, by george saunders, by grace m. cho, by percival everett, by kikuko tsumura, by tarana burke, by elizabeth kolbert, by geoff manaugh and nicola twilley, by jasmine guillory, by elissa washuta, by alexandra andrews, by gabriel krauze, by jesse mccarthy, by gabrielle union, by lesley chow.

This project is led by Lucy Feldman and Annabel Gutterman, with writing, reporting and additional editing by Eliza Berman, Kelly Conniff, Mariah Espada, Lori Fradkin, Laurin-Whitney Gottbrath, Cady Lang, Nik Popli, Arianna Rebolini, Lucas Wittmann and Julia Zorthian; art and photography editing by Whitney Matewe and Jennifer Prandato; and production by Paulina Cachero and Nadia Suleman.

The 10 best books of 2021

There was at least one bright spot in our second pandemic year: an abundance of engaging books. These 10 standouts are an eclectic bunch, but all will make you see the world a little differently.

The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War

By Craig Whitlock, Simon & Schuster

NONFICTION | As Afghanistan fell to the Taliban mere days after the departure of American troops, stateside watchers wondered how we got here. Whitlock, a Washington Post investigative reporter, explains the inevitability of the outcome while also uncovering the deception that took place over several presidential administrations. By juxtaposing newly available classified documents with public statements, Whitlock shows how early in the conflict and how thoroughly U.S. leaders began misleading the world — and themselves — by putting a smiling face on failure and calling it success.

Review: Buried doubts and public deceptions in the Afghan war

All that she carried: the journey of ashley’s sack, a black family keepsake.

By Tiya Miles, Random House

NONFICTION | Miles, a Harvard professor, uses an artifact — a cloth sack passed from an enslaved mother to her 9-year-old daughter just as she was about to be sold — to trace the lives of generations of Black women through Reconstruction, Jim Crow segregation and beyond. The innovative storytelling in Miles’s National Book Award winner fills gaps in the historical record to create a bold reflection on American history, African American resilience and the human capacity for love in the face of soul-crushing madness.

Review: A humble cloth sack tells a story of enslavement and separation

By Jonathan Franzen, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

FICTION | With its dazzling style and tireless attention to the machinations of a single family, “Crossroads” is distinctly Franzenesque, but it represents a new level of discipline and even a deeper sense of mercy. The story revolves around an associate pastor at an active Protestant church in suburban Chicago who’s troubled by his own envy and adultery. Branching out to consider the moral crises of the pastor’s wife and children, the novel presents an electrifying examination of the irreducible complexities of an ethical life.

Review: Jonathan Franzen’s ‘Crossroads’ represents a marked evolution in a dazzling career

Empire of pain: the secret history of the sackler dynasty.

By Patrick Radden Keefe, Doubleday

NONFICTION | The gifted storyteller and investigative journalist behind “Say Nothing” turns his attention to the Sackler family and its association with the potentially addictive pain medication OxyContin. Keefe marshals a large pile of evidence — interviews with more than 200 people, access to internal company documents and a review of tens of thousands of pages of court documents — and deploys it with prosecutorial precision. The book also benefits from his talent for capturing personalities, which is no small thing given that the Sacklers didn’t provide access.

Review: For the Sackler family, a dynasty built on medicine, marketing and pain

Gold diggers.

By Sanjena Sathian, Penguin Press

FICTION | Already chosen by Mindy Kaling for an upcoming TV series, this debut is an effervescent social satire that breaks the bonds of ordinary reality. The novel follows Neil Narayan, the American son of Indian immigrants who wilts under his parents’ impossible expectations. When he discovers the girl next door using alchemy to excel, he imagines it might be the key to his own success. But the real miracle here is the way Sathian melds ancient magic to the contours of her otherwise natural story of contemporary life.

Review: Sanjena Sathian’s ‘Gold Diggers’ is a witty social satire with a dash of magic

Klara and the sun.

By Kazuo Ishiguro, Knopf

FICTION | Ishiguro’s first novel since winning the Nobel Prize is a delicate, haunting story. Klara, the narrator of this genre-straddling novel, is an Artificial Friend designed to provide companionship to teenagers. Why young people need robot companions is one of the questions that Ishiguro raises but postpones so naturally that the horror feels almost incidental. Although some of the themes overlap with Ishiguro’s chilling “Never Let Me Go,” this is a gentler exploration of the price children pay for modern advancements.

Review: In Kazuo Ishiguro’s ‘Klara and the Sun,’ a robot tries to make sense of humanity

The love songs of w.e.b. du bois.

By Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, Harper

FICTION | Rarely is a debut novel as ambitious as Jeffers’s National Book Award-longlisted epic that ingeniously interweaves the past and present. This is a coming-of-age tale about a city girl named Ailey Garfield and her burgeoning passion for historical excavation. It’s punctuated by interludes involving Ailey’s enslaved ancestors on a brutal Georgia plantation. At roughly 800 pages, it is, indeed, a mountain to climb, but the journey is engrossing, and the view from the summit will transform your understanding of America.

Review: ‘The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois’ is the kind of brilliant epic that comes around only once in a decade

By Lauren Groff, Riverhead

FICTION | Now that we’ve endured almost two years of isolation and social distancing, Groff’s new novel about a 12th-century nunnery feels downright timely. But that’s just part of its allure. This National Book Award finalist is about 17-year-old Marie de France — a real but little-known historical figure — and her struggles to revive a dilapidated abbey. Although “Matrix” is radically different from Groff’s masterpiece, “ Fates and Furies ,” it too is a captivating story of a woman redefining both the possibilities of her life and the bounds of her realm.

Review: In Lauren Groff’s hands, the tale of a medieval nunnery is must-read fiction

Somebody’s daughter: a memoir.

By Ashley C. Ford, Flatiron

NONFICTION | Ford’s heart-wrenching memoir tells the story of a family haunted by a conspicuous absence — that of her incarcerated father. As the book opens, Ford learns that her dad will be released from prison. But after decades of wishing he were there, and enduring a heinous attack that echoes her father’s own crimes, Ford must find a way forward. In recounting that journey, in its most raw and unabridged form, she creates an unforgettable account of a life marked by sorrow but also joy.

Review: What happens to a family when a father goes to prison

Under a white sky: the nature of the future.

By Elizabeth Kolbert, Crown

NONFICTION | While Kolbert’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “ The Sixth Extinction ” detailed the human penchant for environmental destruction, “Under a White Sky” examines the arduous efforts to stave off that damage, even as those technological “solutions” risk making matters worse. Kolbert expertly mixes travelogue, science reporting and explanatory journalism, all with the authority of a writer confident enough to acknowledge ambiguity. Revealing the Anthropocene at its most absurd, the book is sometimes inspiring, occasionally bleak and entirely worthy of our attention.

Review: Why humanity can’t be trusted to repair its own environmental damage

Best romance novels of 2021

Best audiobooks of 2021

Best graphic novels of 2021

50 notable works of nonfiction

50 notable works of fiction

Best thriller and mystery books of 2021

Best book covers of 2021

Best science fiction, fantasy and horror of 2021

Best feel-good books of 2021

Best children’s books of 2021

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The Best Books We Read in 2021

By The New Yorker

“ De Gaulle ,” by Julian Jackson

New Yorker writers reflect on the year’s highs and lows.

This superb biography of the former French leader brilliantly explores how he managed to dominate his country’s political life for decades. Jackson’s account of De Gaulle’s youth and conservative milieu only enhances one’s respect for De Gaulle’s stand, in 1940, against the Vichy government, and his account of De Gaulle’s war years in London makes clear why Churchill and Roosevelt found him almost impossible to deal with. The second half of the book—which deals with De Gaulle’s return to power during the conflict in Algeria, and his somewhat autocratic presidency—is even more compelling; together the two halves form as good an argument as one can make for believing that a single individual can alter the course of history. But Jackson, with sublime prose and a sure grasp of the politics and personalities of the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Republics, never allows that argument to overshadow De Gaulle’s extremely difficult and domineering personality, and why it never entirely fit the democracy he helped rescue and then presided over. —Isaac Chotiner

“ Segu: A Novel ,” by Maryse Condé

In a year that began with an attempted coup, it was good to remember that zealotry and factionalism have menaced every society—and often make for excellent storytelling, too. Maryse Condé’s 1984 novel “Segu” opens in the ruthlessly competitive capital of the eighteenth-century Bambara Empire, in present-day Mali, where the ruling mansa uneasily monitors the rise of Islam and the mysterious arrival of white explorers. Griots sing the exploits of a noble family, the Traores, whose sons are destined to suffer every consequence of modernity’s upheavals. Condé, who was born in Guadeloupe but spent years in West Africa, is the great novelist of the Afro-Atlantic world, and “Segu,” her masterpiece, is the mother of diaspora epics. The novel follows the Traores as they are scattered across the globe, from Moroccan universities to Brazilian sugarcane fields, pulled every which way by their ambitions, lusts, and religious yearnings. Condé excels at evoking the tensions of a world in flux, whether it’s the ambivalence of a man torn between his family gods and Islam’s cosmopolitanism or the cynicism of a wealthy mixed woman who sells slaves on the coast of Senegal. Despite its magisterial scope, “Segu” is also warm and gossipy, and completely devoid of the sentimental attachment to heritage that turns too many family sagas into ancestral stations of the cross. Condé has a wicked sense of humor that doesn’t play favorites, especially with her mostly male protagonists, whose naïve adventurism and absent-minded cruelty (especially toward women) profoundly shape the history that eludes their grasp. —Julian Lucas

“ Upper Bohemia: A Memoir ,” by Hayden Herrera

I came upon this recent memoir while browsing the shelves at the Brooklyn Public Library, and was immediately drawn in by its cover: a black-and-white photograph of two young girls, perched out the back window of a sports car, whose ruffled blouses and blond hair suggested a kind of patrician free-spiritedness. Herrera is known for her biographies of artists such as Frida Kahlo and Arshile Gorky, but in “Upper Bohemia” she turns to the story of her own family, a high-Wasp clan as privileged as it was screwed up. During the nineteen-forties and fifties, Herrera and her older sister Blair were shunted, willy-nilly, between their divorced parents, both of whom were possessed of great looks, flighty temperaments, and intense narcissism. Her mother and father—each married five times—often disregarded the girls, treating them as considerably less significant than their own artistic or sexual fulfillment, whose pursuit took them through urbane, artsy circles in Cape Cod and New York, Mexico City and Cambridge. Herrera tells a fascinating cultural history of a particular milieu, but what is most affecting is her ability to channel, in sensate detail, the life of a lonely child trying to make sense of the world around her. Her tone carries a measure of detachment, but I often found it immensely moving. “Blair and I had not spent much time with our mother since the fall of 1948 when, after putting us on a train to go to boarding school in Vermont, she drove to Mexico to get a divorce,” she writes. “Whenever our mother did turn up, she brought presents from Mexico, animals made of clay or embroidered blouses for Blair and me. She always made everything sound wonderful. She was like sunshine. Blair and I moved toward her like two Icaruses, but we never touched her golden rays.” This is a beautiful book. —Naomi Fry

“ Long Live the Post Horn! ,” by Vigdis Hjorth, translated by Charlotte Barslund

Vigdis Hjorth’s “Long Live the Post Horn!”—a swift, darkly funny novel about existential despair, collective commitment, and the Norwegian postal service—buoyed me during this strange, roiling year. Ellinor, the novel’s narrator, is a thirty-five-year-old public-relations consultant whose projects and relationships are characterized by a bleak, steady detachment. When her colleague Dag leaves town, Ellinor grudgingly inherits one of his clients: Postkom, the Norwegian Post and Communications Union, which wants to fight an E.U. directive that would usher in competition from the private sector. For Ellinor, the project begins creakily; gradually, she gets swept up. What results is a personal awakening of sorts—a newfound desire to live, connect, and communicate—and a genuinely gripping treatment of bureaucratic tedium. “Long Live the Post Horn!” is rich with political and philosophical inquiries, and gentle with their delivery. They arrive in the form of dissociative diary entries, awkward Christmas gift exchanges, and the world’s loneliest description of a sex toy (“he had bought the most popular model online, the one with the highest ratings”). There’s also a long yarn told by a postal worker, which makes for a wonderful, near-mythic embedded narrative. “What exactly did ‘real’ mean?” Ellinor wonders, experiencing a crisis of authenticity while desperately trying to produce P.R. copy for the Real Thing, an American restaurant chain. “Was the man behind the Real Thing himself the real thing, I wondered? I googled him; he looked like every other capitalist.” Expansive and mundane—this novel was, for me, sheer joy. —Anna Wiener

“ Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History ,” by Lea Ypi

Some people feel free to imagine their lives unbounded by history. Lea Ypi did not have that luxury. Born in 1979 in Albania, then one of the most sealed-off countries in the Communist bloc, she had little reason to question her love for Stalin until the day, in 1990, that she went to hug his statue and found that protesters had decapitated it. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, the edifice of Albanian socialism collapsed, too. Even more disorienting was the fact that Ypi’s parents turned out never to have believed in it—they’d just talked a good line to prevent their dissident, bourgeois backgrounds from tainting her prospects. Ypi’s new book, “Free,” out in the U.K. and to be published stateside in January, is a tart and tender childhood memoir. But it’s also a work of social criticism, and a meditation on how to live with purpose in a world where history, far from having ended, seems energized by disinformation. Ypi, a political theorist at the London School of Economics, is interested in how categories of thought—“proletariat,” for instance—were replaced by reductive rallying cries like “freedom.” “When freedom finally arrived, it was like a dish served frozen,” she writes. “We chewed little, swallowed fast and remained hungry.” Her parents became leaders in the new democratic opposition but lost their savings to a shady investment scheme, and when the country devolved into civil war, in 1997, her formidable mother had to leave for Italy, where she worked cleaning houses. When Ypi studied abroad, her leftist friends didn’t want to hear about her experience: their socialism would be done right, and Albania’s was best forgotten. But Ypi is not in the business of forgetting—neither the repression of the system she grew up in nor the harshness of capitalism. Her book is a quick read, but, like Marx’s spectre haunting Europe, it stays with you. —Margaret Talbot

“ Harrow: A Novel ,” by Joy Williams

I have already written at length about the wonder of Joy Williams’s most recent novel , “Harrow.” But I feel compelled to re-state my case. The book is set in a world that climate change has transformed into a grave, and it’s dense with wild oddity, mystical intelligence, and with a keenness and beauty that start at the sentence level but sink down to the book’s core. “Harrow” tracks a teen-ager named Khristen across the desert, where she eventually meets up with a sort of “terrorist hospice” of retirees determined to avenge the earth. Her companion, Jeffrey, is either a ten-year-old with an alcoholic mother or the Judge of the Underworld. Williams, the real Judge of the Underworld, moonlights here as a theologist, animal-rights activist, mad oracle, social historian, and philosopher of language. Her comic set pieces—e.g., a birthday party in which the hastily provisioned cake depicts a replica, in icing, of Goya’s “Saturn Devouring His Son”—unlock tears, and her elegies wrest out laughter, if only because it’s absurd to find such pleasure in a study of devastation. When the book was over, I missed the awful, cleansing darkness of its eyes upon me. —Katy Waldman

“ A Mad Love: An Introduction to Opera ,” by Vivien Schweitzer

My late grandfather spent most of his weekends holed up in his study—a sunken room, adorned with a ratty Chesterfield sofa and posters from various international chess championships—listening to opera. As a child, I found this practice impenetrable. I didn’t understand the languages blaring out of his record player, and I wasn’t old enough to grasp the rhapsodic emotion inherent in the form. Opera is about Big Feelings; it radiates youth, yet it remains a passion that most people age into. (Perhaps that has something to do with the cost of a Met ticket.) Then the pandemic hit, and suddenly all I wanted to do was listen to Maria Callas, whose unhinged arias clicked into place as the soundtrack for my anxious, pacing mind. My grandfather was no longer around to discuss my fixation, but, fortunately, I found Vivien Schweitzer’s 2018 book, “A Mad Love,” which is a sparkling cultural history of opera’s greatest composers and their obsessive brains. Beginning with Monteverdi and barrelling through to Philip Glass, the book is about the blood and sweat that goes into writing an opera (an often lunatic effort, it seems), and about the feverish attachment fans have to the resulting work. I found myself tearing through it in the bathtub, delighted not just to inhale the gossipy backstories of the “Ring” cycle and “La Traviata” but to join the society of opera nuts of which my grandfather was a card-carrying member. I finally understood what he was listening for on those Sunday afternoons: anguish, joy, love, betrayal. —Rachel Syme

“ Not One Day ,” by Anne Garréta, translated by Emma Ramadan

It is a peculiar feeling, reading a book that seems to have been written for you but wasn’t. The friend who recommended the Oulipian writer Anne Garréta’s “Not One Day” must have known that I would find this merger of intimacy and anonymity irresistible. While recovering from an accident that has left her body immobile, the book’s narrator, a nomadic literature professor, decides that she will write about the women she has desired. Each woman will be identified by a letter of the alphabet; to each letter, she will devote five hours a day for precisely one month. She knows that narrating desire requires discipline—and she finds that desire always, always exceeds it. Letters are skipped and jumbled, so that the table of contents reads, “B, X, E, K, L, D, H, N, Y, C, I, Z.” The narrator takes a long break from the project and, when she comes back to it, one of the stories she writes is fiction. Slowly, the categories that keep desire and its creation of “our little selves” in check—self and other, past and present, man and woman, heterosexual and homosexual, solipsistic alienation and shared passion—get wonderfully and terrifyingly muddled. Instead of a confession written in the familiar “alphabet of desire,” we glimpse the making of a whole new language. I could smother the book with adoration—it is aching and maddening, intelligent and wildly sexy. But it would be simpler to say that reading it is like meeting someone new and feeling the world come undone. Here is a book that insists that the desire for fiction, for its mimicry and its mirage, is indistinguishable from the desire for another person. —Merve Emre

“ Tom Stoppard: A Life ,” by Hermione Lee

For a time this year, Lee’s newest biography just seemed to be around , and during a couple weeks when I was ostensibly reading other things, I found myself opening it in odd moments—over breakfast, waiting for the pasta pot to boil—until I realized that I’d worked my way through the whole thing. The biography is nearly nine hundred pages, so my experience of it as a side pleasure, a lark, is a testament to Lee’s craft. Much of Stoppard’s history is widely known: his passage from peripatetic refugee youth to Bristol newspaperman and radio-drama hack, and then, with “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” to fame and fortune as a witty playwright. What Lee adds is detail, particularly around interesting career turns, plus a big serving of her own admiration. (Not entirely to its credit, I think, this is the sort of biography that everyone dreams of having written about them; our protagonist is always brilliant, invariably a delight. Stoppard, on reading it, was apparently moved to clarify that he was “not as nice as people think.”) What Stoppard contributes is an air of whimsy on the ride up his great tower of success. There is pleasant cohesion to his body of work, with its blend of bookish intellection and breezy verbal humor. Off the page, it becomes clear, he pairs casual social climbing with the cheery pursuit of material ease, often courtesy of Hollywood. He has maintained a stream of scriptwriting work, on projects such as the Indiana Jones franchise, and his constant efforts to boondoggle more luxury out of what’s offered him—his budget must be increased to accommodate a high-end hotel suite, he tells a studio, “because I prefer not to sleep and work in the same room”—are among the smaller charms of this book. Lee’s biography is ultimately such a pleasure, though, because it is a writer’s book: full of respect for the thrill of the craft, able to keep the progress of the life and the work aloft in the right balance. To read it is to be excited about the act of literature all over again. —Nathan Heller

“ Novel 11, Book 18 ,” by Dag Solstad, translated by Sverre Lyngstad

I first encountered “Novel 11, Book 18,” by the great Norwegian novelist Dag Solstad, on a bright, warm day, on a walk with some friends who were visiting from out of town. Buzzed on the weather and the handsome paperback cover—deep green on cream—and, above all, on the nearness of my friends, I bought it. It was almost funny, then, to discover how relentlessly bleak the book is. Published in 1992, but released in the United States this year, by New Directions, with an English translation by Sverre Lyngstad, it tells the story of Bjørn Hansen, a mild-mannered civil servant who has left his wife and son in pursuit of his lover, Turid Lammers. The change of life means a change of locale: Hansen leaves Oslo and settles in Kongsberg, a small, airless town where he soon joins an amateur theatre troupe, of which Turid is widely considered the most talented performer and a kind of spiritual leader. In probably the best and darkest bit of situational comedy that I read all year, Hansen tries to persuade the troupe—usually a vehicle for light musicals—to put on a production of Henrik Ibsen’s play “The Wild Duck.” He wins out, but the show is a terrible flop—and, worse in Hansen’s eyes, Turid gives a cynical, crowd-pleasing performance that inoculates her, and only her, from the more general disapproval of the audience. The relationship is soon over. Solstad tells the story in deceptively simple sentences that repeat themselves in a fugal fashion, gathering new and ever sadder aspects of meaning as they recur. Hansen, wading through the disappointing wash of his life—he’s having the worst midlife crisis imaginable—eventually cooks up a scheme of revenge that’s so sad and absurd it’s almost slapstick. The book’s generic title implies that tiny tragedies like Hansen’s are happening everywhere, all the time, as a simple cost of being alive. For Solstad, what feels like a reprieve—sun and intimacy, the company of friends—is just another step on a tightrope that stretches across the void. Maybe save this one for summer. —Vinson Cunningham

“ Patch Work: A Life Amongst Clothes ,” by Claire Wilcox

Among the books that most surprised and most moved me this year was “Patch Work: A Life Amongst Clothes,” a memoir by Claire Wilcox. Wilcox is senior curator of fashion at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, and she writes about clothing with an intoxicating specificity: century-old gowns are made from “narrow lengths of the finest Japanese silk, hand-stitched together and then pleated into rills like the delicate underside of a field mushroom.” But this fragmentary, dreamlike book is not about fashion as it is often understood. There is no industry gossip, no analysis of trends. Rather, Wilcox uses her encounters with objects—the bags of lace in the museum’s collection, the pair of purple velvet trousers she borrowed from a charismatic friend—to explore themes of love and loss, birth and bereavement, family and tribe. The book, which is as skillful and oblique in its structure as the precious gowns she describes, is stitched together with loving care from narrative scraps and images, ultimately revealing how materiality and memory operate on one another, so that the sensation of holding a button in her fingers brings Wilcox back to her earliest memory of fastening her mother’s cardigan: “buttoning and unbuttoning her all the way up, and then all the way down again.” —Rebecca Mead

“ Sabbath’s Theater ,” by Philip Roth

Over the course of the pandemic, the actor John Turturro and I have been adapting Roth’s novel for the stage, so I’ve read the book probably twenty times now. I have been astonished again and again. It’s never the adulterous urinating or alte kaker underwear-sniffing that shock me. It’s Roth’s singular capacity for conjuring death—its promises, its terrors, its reliability, and the relentless ache that it leaves behind. There are times when Roth approaches the subject with a cosmic lightheartedness: “Exactly how present are you, Ma? Are you only here or are you everywhere?” Mickey Sabbath, the aging, insatiable puppeteer, asks his dead mother’s ghost. “Do you know only what you knew when you were living, or do you now know everything, or is ‘knowing’ no longer an issue?” When it pertains to Drenka, Sabbath’s Croatian mistress—his “sidekicker,” as she puts it—death is tinged with so much yearning that it’s almost too much to bear, for both Sabbath and the reader (this one, anyway). “Got used to the oxygen prong in her nose. Got used to the drainage bag pinned to the bed,” Sabbath thinks, recalling the last of many nights he spent at her hospital bedside. “Cancer too widespread for surgery. I’d got used to that, too.” For all of Sabbath’s lubricious opportunism, Drenka is his one love. “We can live with widespread and we can live with tears; night after night, we can live with all of it, as long as it doesn’t stop.” But it does, of course. It always stops. Though not, in this book, for Sabbath, Roth’s most unrepentantly diabolical hero, despite his relentless flirtation with suicide: “He could not fucking die. How could he leave? How could he go? Everything he hated was here.” —Ariel Levy

“ Warmth ,” by Daniel Sherrell

In “Warmth,” the writer and organizer Daniel Sherrell’s bracing début memoir , he refers to climate change as “the Problem”—the horrifying, galvanizing fact that should cause all sentient people to lose sleep, to shout themselves hoarse, to reorient their lives in fundamental ways. And yet, apart from a small minority, most people seem content to listen to the string ensemble on the deck of the Titanic, shushing anyone who tries to interrupt the music. To be clear, this is my harsh indictment, not Sherrell’s. For an unabashed climate alarmist, he is mostly compassionate to the quietists, in part because, like all Americans, he used to be one. Sherrell was born in 1990. His father, an oceanographer, took long research trips to the polar ice caps. Of all people, the Sherrells understood what an emergency climate change was—and yet their household was a normal one, in the sense that the Problem didn’t come up much. “Even when all the evidence was there before us,” Sherrell writes, “it was difficult to name.” The book is marketed as a climate-grief memoir, and it certainly is that, but what came through for me, even more clearly than the grief, was a kind of existential irony: not only are we apparently unable to solve the Problem, we can’t even seem to find an honest way to talk about it. Most Americans claim to believe the science; the science says that, unless we make drastic changes, the future will be cataclysmic; and yet, Sherrell observes, “it still sounded uncouth, even a little ridiculous, to spell this all out in conversation.” This is the way the world ends: not with a bang, and not even with much of a whimper. “Warmth,” written in the form of a letter to a child that Sherrell may or may not conceive, is not a thesis-y sort of book. But, if it has a central claim, it’s that the activist chestnut “Don’t mourn, organize!” is a facile mantra, a false choice. Why not both? —Andrew Marantz

“ Brothers and Keepers ,” by John Edgar Wideman

John Edgar Wideman was teaching at the University of Wyoming in the mid-seventies when, one day, his brother, Robert, showed up in town unannounced. Wideman had a young family and a steady job as a writer and an academic. Robert was on a more tumultuous path; he was on the run after a botched robbery back home, in Pittsburgh, had ended with one of his accomplices shooting a man, who later died from his injuries. Published in 1984, “Brothers and Keepers” is Wideman’s attempt to reckon with their diverging lives, and with the bond that they will never relinquish. He sifts through episodes from their childhood, searching for overlooked turning points. No single genre can tell such a complex story. Sometimes, the book is about the deprivations of the criminal-justice system, as Wideman describes in granular detail his visits to the prison where Robert serves a life term. (Robert would pursue education himself in prison, and, in 2019, his sentence was commuted.) At other times, the book feels surreal and fantastical, as Wideman entertains the possibility that their lives might have taken them elsewhere. And there are moments of austerity and dread, as he contemplates the ethics of turning his brother into a character. I often find that memoirs flatten the degree to which “the personal is political” is an idea rife with contradictions. What makes “Brothers and Keepers” so absorbing is that Wideman feels love but not sympathy—not for his brother, and certainly not for himself. —Hua Hsu

2021 in Review

• Richard Brody on the best movies .
• Doreen St. Félix on essential TV shows .
• Ian Crouch on the funniest jokes .
• Amanda Petrusich on the best music .
• Alex Ross on notable performances and recordings .
• Michael Schulman on the greatest onscreen and onstage performances .
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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.

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The Best Reviewed Books of 2021: Fiction

Featuring sally rooney, kazuo ishiguro, colson whitehead, viet thanh nguyen, jonathan franzen, and more.

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Well, friends, another grim and grueling plague year is drawing to a close, and that can mean only one thing: it’s time to put on our Book Marks stats hats and tabulate the best reviewed books of the past twelve months.

Yes, using reviews drawn from more than 150 publications, over the next two weeks we’ll be revealing the most critically-acclaimed books of 2021, in the categories of (deep breath): Memoir and Biography ; Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Horror ; Short Story Collections ; Essay Collections ; Poetry ; Mystery and Crime ; Graphic Literature; Literature in Translation; General Fiction; and General Nonfiction.

Today’s installment: Fiction .

1. Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney (FSG)

27 Rave • 26 Positive • 25 Mixed • 2 Pan

Listen to an excerpt from Beautiful World, Where Are You here

“… wise, romantic, and ultimately consoling … Once again, Rooney has drawn a circumscribed world—four people, tightly wound in the small universe of one another’s lives—and once again, this is a love story, although the book’s most compelling romance is the platonic one between its two main female protagonists … it is the epic minutiae of human relations , not the grand structures of economic inequality, that send the blood pumping through the writing. Nonetheless, we know the two can’t be extricated; the latter impinges on the former … In [some] moments, Rooney deprives herself of access to her character’s interiority—the very medium of most fiction concerned with personal relations. Here’s an alternate way of seeing, one derived from a camera lens rather than the traditionally omniscient novelist’s gaze. The effect—implying the novelist herself might not fully know her characters, or at least withhold some of her knowledge—is one of delightful modesty … Maybe Rooney knows that it’s the small dimensions of her fiction—the close, funneled, loving attention she pays her characters—that allow her books to trap within their confines anxieties of huge historical breadth.”

–Hermione Hoby ( 4Columns )

2. Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro (Knopf)

28 Rave • 24 Positive • 6 Mixed

“ Klara and the Sun confirms one’s suspicion that the contemporary novel’s truest inheritor of Nabokovian estrangement—not to mention its best and deepest Martian—is Ishiguro … Never Let Me Go wrung a profound parable out of such questions: the embodied suggestion of that novel is that a free, long, human life is, in the end, just an unfree, short, cloned life. Klara and the Sun continues this meditation, powerfully and affectingly. Ishiguro uses his inhuman, all too human narrators to gaze upon the theological heft of our lives, and to call its bluff … Ishiguro keeps his eye on the human connection. Only Ishiguro, I think, would insist on grounding this speculative narrative so deeply in the ordinary … Whether our postcards are read by anyone has become the searching doubt of Ishiguro’s recent novels, in which this master, so utterly unlike his peers, goes about creating his ordinary, strange, godless allegories.”

–James Wood ( The New Yorker )

3. No One is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood (Riverhead)

31 Rave • 13 Positive • 7 Mixed

Read an interview with Patricia Lockwood here

“Now Lockwood has put that strength into her first novel, No One is Talking About This , which leaves no doubt that she still takes her literary vocation seriously. It’s another attention-grabbing mind-blower which toggles between irony and sincerity, sweetness and blight … Lockwood deftly captures a life lived predominantly online … This portrait of a disturbing world where the center will not hold is a tour de force that recalls Joan Didion’s portrait of the dissolute 1960s drug culture of Haight-Ashbury in her seminal essay, ‘Slouching Towards Bethlehem’ … Lockwood is a master of sweeping, eminently quotable proclamations that fearlessly aim to encapsulate whole movements and eras … It’s a testament to her skills as a rare writer who can navigate both sleaze and cheese, jokey tweets and surprising earnestness, that we not only buy her character’s emotional epiphany but are moved by it … Of course, people will be talking about this meaty book, and about the questions Lockwood raises about what a human being is, what a brain is, and most important, what really matters.”

–Heller McAlpin ( NPR )

4. Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen (FSG)

32 Rave • 12 Positive • 7 Mixed • 1 Pan

“… a novel that takes the religious beliefs of its characters seriously, without ever forgetting how easily faith can twist itself into absurdity … is light on curmudgeonly social commentary. (Readers who prefer his breakout 2001 novel, The Corrections , will surely welcome this … As with the best of Franzen’s fiction, the characters in Crossroads are held up to the light like complexly cut gems and turned to reveal facet after facet … feels purged of showy writing and stylistic set pieces, but the long flashback recounting this interlude feels bleached with the merciless glare and punishing downpours of winter afternoons on treeless Southern California boulevards. The way Franzen conveys this atmosphere without calling attention to how well he’s conveying it is in tune with the deferential spirit of the novel … The power of this enveloping novel, facilitated by neatly turned plot elements finally resides in how uncannily real, how fully imagined these people feel … Real people are tricky puzzles, volatile blends of self-knowledge and blindness, full of inexhaustible surprises and contradictions. Literary characters seldom achieve a comparably unpredictable intricacy because they are, after all, artifacts made by equally blinkered human beings, and furthermore they are the means to an artistic end. Franzen hasn’t always given his readers characters as persuasively flawed as the Hildebrandts. He hasn’t always tried to. But in Crossroads , his satirical and didactic impulses largely in check, his touch gentled, Franzen has created characters of almost uncanny authenticity. Is there anything more a great novelist ought to do? I didn’t think so.”

–Laura Miller ( Slate )

5. Matrix by Lauren Groff (Riverhead)

30 Rave • 9 Positive • 4 Mixed

Read an interview with Lauren Groff here

“Now that we’ve endured almost two years of quarantine and social distancing, [Groff’s] new novel about a 12th-century nunnery feels downright timely … We need a trusted guide, someone who can dramatize this remote period while making it somehow relevant to our own lives. Groff is that guide largely because she knows what to leave out. Indeed, it’s breathtaking how little ink she spills on filling in historical context … Though Matrix is radically different from Groff’s masterpiece, Fates and Furies, it is, once again, the story of a woman redefining both the possibilities of her life and the bounds of her realm … Although there are no clunky contemporary allusions in Matrix, it seems clear that Groff is using this ancient story as a way of reflecting on how women might survive and thrive in a culture increasingly violent and irrational.”

–Ron Charles ( The Washington Post )

6. Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead (Doubleday)

30 Rave • 10 Positive • 1 Mixed • 1 Pan

Read an interview with Colson Whitehead here

“Whitehead’s own mind has famously gone thataway through nine other books that don’t much resemble one another, but this time he’s hit upon a setup that will stick. He has said he may keep Ray going into another book, and it won’t take you long to figure out why … brings Whitehead’s unwavering eloquence to a mix of city history, niche hangouts, racial stratification, high hopes and low individuals. All of these are somehow worked into a rich, wild book that could pass for genre fiction. It’s much more, but the entertainment value alone should ensure it the same kind of popular success that greeted his last two novels. It reads like a book whose author thoroughly enjoyed what he was doing … The author creates a steady, suspenseful churn of events that almost forces his characters to do what they do. The final choice is theirs, of course … Quaint details aside, this is no period piece … Though it’s a slightly slow starter, Harlem Shuffle has dialogue that crackles, a final third that nearly explodes, hangouts that invite even if they’re Chock Full o’ Nuts and characters you won’t forget even if they don’t stick around for more than a few pages.”

–Janet Maslin ( The New York Times )

7. Oh, William! by Elizabeth Strout (Random House)

25 Rave • 7 Positive

Read an interview with Elizabeth Strout here

“… yet another stunning achievement … In spare, no-nonsense, conversational language, Lucy addresses the reader as an intimate confidante … all her characters are complicated, neither good nor bad but beautifully explored and so real in their humanness … Strout’s simple declarative sentences contain continents. Who is better at conveying loneliness, the inability to communicate, to say the deep important things? Who better to illustrate the legacies of imperfect upbringings, of inadequate parents? When William explains that what attracted him to Lucy was her sense of joy, the reader can only agree. This brilliant, compelling, tender novel is—quite simply—a joy.”

–Mameve Medwed ( The Boston Globe )

8. The Prophets by Robert Jones, Jr.  (G.P. Putnam’s Sons)

24 Rave • 3 Positive

Read an excerpt from The Prophets here

“Meeting yourself in media is no guarantee that the mirror will be kind or wanted. Instead, it’s often a jagged glass you catch yourself in before it catches you. And even when you know it’s coming, the blood’s still warm and sharp. What of me, of us, was I to witness in The Prophets , the debut novel of Robert Jones Jr., set on an antebellum plantation in Mississippi? … What I found was an often lyrical and rebellious love story embedded within a tender call-out to Black readers, reaching across time and form to shake something old, mighty in the blood … One of the blessings of The Prophets is its long memory. Jones uses the voices from the prologue to speak across time, to character and reader alike. These short, lyric-driven chapters struck me as instructive and redemptive attempts at healing historical wounds, tracing a map back to the possibility of our native, queer, warrior Black selves. These voices are Black collective knowledge given shape, the oral tradition speaking in your face and setting you right … What a fiery kindness […] this book. A book I entered hesitantly, cautiously, I exited anew—something in me unloosed, running. May this book cast its spell on all of us, restore to us some memory of our most warrior and softest selves.”

–Danez Smith ( The New York Times Book Review )

9. The Committed by Viet Thanh Nguyen (Grove)

19 Rave • 12 Positive • 4 Mixed • 1 Pan

Listen to an interview with Viet Thang Nguyen here

“The novel is […] a homecoming of a particularly volatile sort, a tale of chickens returning to roost, and of a narrator not yet done with the world … Nguyen […] is driven to raptures of expression by the obliviousness of the self-satisfied; he relentlessly punctures the self-image of French and American colonizers, of white people generally, of true believers and fanatics of every stripe. This mission drives the rhetorical intensity that makes his novels so electric. It has nothing to do with plot or theme or character … That voice has made Nguyen a standard-bearer in what seems to be a transformational moment in the history of American literature, a perspectival shift … It’s a voice that shakes the walls of the old literary comfort zone wherein the narratives of nonwhite ‘immigrants’ were tasked with proving their shared humanity to a white audience … May that voice keep running like a purifying venom through the mainstream of our self-regard—through the American dream of distancing ourselves from what we continue to show ourselves to be.”

–Jonathan Dee ( The New Yorker )

10. Afterparties by Anthony Veasna So (Ecco)

22 Rave • 5 Positive • 1 Mixed

“The presence of the author is so vivid in Afterparties , Anthony Veasna So’s collection of stories, he seems to be at your elbow as you read … The personality that animates Afterparties is unmistakably youthful, and the stories themselves are mainly built around conditions of youth—vexed and tender relationships with parents, awkward romances, nebulous worries about the future. But from his vantage on the evanescent bridge to maturity, So is puzzling out some big questions, ones that might be exigent from different vantages at any age. The stories are great fun to read—brimming over with life and energy and comic insight and deep feeling.”

–Deborah Eisenberg ( New York Review of Books )

Our System:

RAVE = 5 points • POSITIVE = 3 points • MIXED = 1 point • PAN = -5 points

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The 10 Best Book Reviews of 2021

Merve emre on simone de beauvoir, justin taylor on joy williams, and more.

The older I get, the more I’m interested in critics who play around with form and style. Mixing genres, experimenting with voice and structure, and tapping into personal experience are some of my favorite devices, though I still have a soft spot for the formal limitations of an 800-word newspaper writeup. From longform online essays to crisp perspectives in print, here are my 10 favorite book reviews of 2021.

Brought to you by Book Marks , Lit Hub’s “Rotten Tomatoes for books.”

Parul Sehgal on Soyica Diggs Colbert’s Radical Vision: A Biography of Lorraine Hansberry ( New York Times )

Sehgal deftly takes on the style of the theatre in her review of a book about Chicago’s greatest playwright, by opening her first paragraph like the first scene in a play.

“The curtain rises on a dim, drab room. An alarm sounds, and a woman wakes. She tries to rouse her sleeping child and husband, calling out: ‘Get up!’ It is the opening scene—and the injunction—of Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun , the story of a Black family living on the South Side of Chicago.”

Merve Emre on Simone de Beauvoir’s The Inseparables (tr. Lauren Elkin) ( The New Yorker )

Emre always helps readers see things in a new way, in this case not just Simone de Beauvoir’s lost novel, but also Simone de Beauvoir herself.

“To read The Inseparables is to learn what could have been, and to judge what was a little more harshly. It is to see in the memoirs a lingering refusal to give Zaza the autonomy that everyone in life seems to have denied her at the greatest possible cost. And it is to see in The Second Sex an inability, or perhaps an unwillingness, to make as affirmative a case as possible for lesbian identity.”

Victoria Chang and Dean Rader on Douglas Kearney’s Sho ( Los Angeles Review of Books )

Reviews-in-dialogue are my new favorite thing. I love how naturalistic and conversational they are, as the form really allows critics to be themselves. Chang and Rader are a joy to read.

“Kearney’s body of work is very much about play with language, yet, that somehow feels like it diminishes the political aspects of his poems and his body of work. Perhaps play itself in Kearney’s work is a political act. I find this tension fascinating because on the one hand, I often get carried away in Kearney’s language (and the conceptual aspects of his work), but I’m also acutely aware of the humanity in his work (or the exploration of anti-humanity). In this way, maybe play and the political are not mutually exclusive. Maybe for Kearney, play = confrontation.”

J. Howard Rosier on Frederick Seidel’s Selected Poems ( Poetry Foundation )

Rosier does a great job bringing paratext to bear on the text itself, in this case interviews and Seidel’s other work.

“For a poet as revered as Seidel, there are scant mentions of turns of phrase being Seidelian, few poetic narratives or structures construed as Seidelesque. Chalk it up to the oddity of a formalist disassociating form from content; Seidel uses form like a hypnotist to mesmerize readers so that they are sedated, or at the very least put at ease, in spite of his content.”

Sheila Liming on Edith Wharton’s Ghosts ( Cleveland Review of Books )

Every editor’s dream assignment is a critic with deep subject matter expertise, and you can’t beat Liming—author of What A Library Means to A Woman: Edith Wharton and the Will to Collect Books —writing about Wharton’s ghost stories.

“Here are ‘fetches’ (ominous doppelgangers) of Celtic superstition, zombie mistresses rising from the grave, and ghost dogs, even. But for each of these paranormal threats there is an equally normal, equally mundane, and equally human villain attached to the story. In this way, Wharton’s Ghosts can be read and interpreted in concert with many of her better-known works, including novels like The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence , which tell stories of everyday human malice.”

Meg Ringer on Jon McGregor’s Lean Fall Stand ( Chicago Review of Books )

Some of the best reviews are the product of a critic who brings personal experience into their analysis of the book at hand. Ringer’s perspective on Lean Fall Stand is full of unique insights and emotional power. (Disclosure: I founded the Chicago Review of Books in 2016, but stepped back from an editorial role in 2019.)

“Though there was a time—before we met, before his diagnosis—when my husband traveled to Antarctica, Robert and Anna’s story is not ours. It is barely even close. But Lean Fall Stand reads like a meditation on the questions we all must someday face: Who am I? What can I stand? Who will be there when I fall?”

Ryan Ruby on Peter Weiss ( The Point )

Speaking of hybrids between personal essays and reviews, Ruby’s experience discovering the work of Weiss during the 2016 election is riveting stuff.

“By creating physical objects that survive their creators and the world in which they were made, the artist helps to manufacture the continuity of our collective experience of historical time, and to the extent that it distinguishes itself, the work of art can become a symbol of that continuity. ‘Imagination lived so long as human beings who resisted lived,’ the narrator writes, but in the end what Weiss demonstrates in The Aesthetic of Resistance is that the converse is also true, and just as important, then as now, for what the imagination always has and always will resist is death.”

Justin Taylor on Joy Williams’ Harrow ( Bookforum )

I love a good delayed lede. In this marvelous example, the title of the book Taylor’s reviewing doesn’t even appear until more than 800 words have passed.

“I drove across the Everglades in May. I had originally planned to take Alligator Alley, but someone tipped me off that, in the twenty years since I left South Florida, the historically wild and lonesome stretch of road had been fully incorporated into I-75, turned into a standard highway corridor with tall concrete walls on both sides, designed to keep the traffic noise in and the alligators out.”

Lauren LeBlanc on Maurice Carlos Ruffin’s The Ones Who Don’t Say They Love You ( Los Angeles Times )

Ruffin’s fiction does a lot of interesting things with place, and LeBlanc smartly centers her review on New Orleans, as well as the way Ruffin subverts geographical expectations.

“Several recent story collections (Bryan Washington’s Lot and Dantiel W. Moniz’s Blood Milk Heat spring to mind) present geographies as characters. While Ruffin’s stories can’t help but transport the reader to humid, sunken, decaying New Orleans, it’s too easy to say this book is merely a set of love songs to the city. What makes such collections ring true is the way they subvert conventional knowledge.”

Victor LaValle on James Han Mattson’s Reprieve ( New York Times )

Opening a review with a question can be a powerful way to focus a reader’s attention, as LaValle does here with a compelling lede drawn from his own insights as a horror fiction writer.

“Why do people enjoy being scared? This is a pretty common question for those of us who write horror, or stories tinged with horror, and maybe for those who design roller coasters too. Why do some people take pleasure in terror?”

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The best books of 2021, chosen by our guest authors

From piercing studies of colonialism to powerful domestic sagas, our panel of writers, all of whom had books published this year, share their favourite titles of 2021

Kazuo Ishiguro

Author of Klara and the Sun (Faber)

The beautiful, horrible world of Mariana Enriquez, as glimpsed in The Dangers of Smoking in Bed (Granta), with its disturbed adolescents, ghosts, decaying ghouls, the sad and angry homeless of modern Argentina, is the most exciting discovery I’ve made in fiction for some time. Horrifying in another way, Jonathan Calvert and George Arbuthnott’s Failures of State (Mudlark) is a brilliantly presented indictment of the UK’s fumbling attempt to meet the Covid challenge. Read alongside Jeremy Farrar’s more personal Spike: The Virus v The People (Profile) and Michael Lewis’s compelling The Premonition (Allen Lane), we see a disturbing common trait emerging in our country and others: the unwillingness to prioritise people’s lives over ideas and ingrained structures.

Bernardine Evaristo

Author of Manifesto: On Never Giving Up (Hamish Hamilton)

I have been deeply impressed by recent books that invite us to reconsider aspects of British and global history, culture and identity beyond the often distorted, dishonest and pumped-up myth-making that has long prevailed. History is an interpretation of the past and these three books, each one powerfully persuasive and offering new ways of seeing, are in conversation with each other. Empireland : How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain (Penguin) by Sathnam Sanghera, The New Age of Empire : How Racism and Colonialism Still Rule the World (Allen Lane) by Kehinde Andrews and Green Unpleasant Land : Creative Responses to Rural England’s Colonial Connection s (Peepal Tree Press) by Corinne Fowler.

Damon Galgut

Author of The Promise (Chatto & Windus)

I seldom read books when they first appear, but there were two slim volumes that especially impressed me this year. Burntcoat (Faber) by Sarah Hall is in the vanguard of a new genre of pandemic/lockdown fiction: the connections between isolation and creation are laid bare in a disquieting dystopia of the not-quite-now. Small Things Like These (Faber) by Claire Keegan, on the other hand, casts its gaze backward, to Ireland in 1985; its balance of crystalline language and moral seriousness makes it profoundly moving.

Wole Soyinka

Author of Chronicles From the Land of the Happiest People on Earth (Bloomsbury)

I sometimes suspect that I was actually found abandoned in a tree, adopted and raised as a family secret. Amos Tutuola, Gabriel García Márquez, DO Fagunwa, Shahrnush Parsipur and other exponents of tree anthropomorphism are perhaps the outsiders in the know. Now they are joined by Elif Shafak in The Island of Missing Trees (Viking) with her integrative literary sensibility, and the genre sprang back on its feet, tender and savage by turns in a Greco-Turkish-Cypriot historic setting. The rigorous questioning of nation and identity, given my incessant preoccupations, made it a truly therapeutic literary meal.

Colm Tóibín

Author of The Magician (Viking)

I enjoyed Hugo Hamilton’s The Pages (Fourth Estate), narrated with verve and ingenuity by an actual book, a novel by Joseph Roth, which got saved from the Nazi bonfire and then taken on a picaresque journey across the Atlantic and back to Germany. I also enjoyed the social historian Patrick Joyce’s Going to My Father’s House (Verso), a haunting meditation on Ireland and England, war and migration, Derry and Manchester. I admired the originality of his observations and his tone of melancholy, calm wisdom. I love John McAuliffe’s Selected Poems (Gallery) for the way that ordinary things are rendered and rhythm handled so deftly and artfully.

Rachel Kushner

Author of The Hard Crowd: Essays 2000–2020 (Jonathan Cape)

My generation is very much marked by Dennis Cooper’s George Miles cycle: in the 1990s, everyone read these books; I was awed by them. For many years, Dennis took a break from novels to focus on theatre and film. He’s back with I Wished (Soho Press), which is classic Dennis Cooper: intricate, funny, destabilising and totally unforeseen. Wolfgang Hilbig is apparently one of the most acclaimed German writers, but was new to me. I’ll confess I fell for the blurb on the back of The Interim (Two Lines Press): the great László Krasznahorkai calls him “an artist of immense stature”. As soon as I started reading, I had to agree. This novel, translated by Isabel Fargo Cole, is comic and terrifying and profound.

Elif Shafak

Author of The Island of Missing Trees (Viking)

This year, reading Anita Sethi’s I Belong Here (Bloomsbury) was an unforgettable journey. Sethi wrote this book after being the victim of a horrible racist attack on a train from Liverpool to Newcastle. The genius of the author is how she takes the narrative of hatred and discrimination hurled at her and turns it upside down by “going back to where she is from” – the landscapes of the north. Through long walks in nature as she finds a true sense of belonging, connectivity, renewal and hope, so do we, her readers. I found it not only deeply moving but also quietly transformative. Another read that stayed with me this year has been Kerri ní Dochartaigh’s fabulous Thin Places (Canongate). Born in Derry, at the height of the Troubles, the author’s voice is piercingly honest, movingly heartfelt. There is so much soul and knowledge and compassion, it gave me shivers.

Author of Burntcoat (Faber)

Sea State (Fourth Estate) by Tabitha Lasley completely took me by surprise. Part memoir, part investigation into oil-rig culture, part critique of gender and class dynamics, it’s incredibly compelling, often dark as the drilled-for product. Lasley infiltrates this masculine offshore industry, with its dangers, profit and comradeship. She also explores female loneliness and desire, accommodation of a male-designed world and the spaces where women hold power. Reissued this year with impassioned praise from fellow authors such as Marlon James, Patricia Lockwood and Max Porter, Mrs Caliban (Faber) by Rachel Ingalls is a work of true verve and imagination. Along with her suburban housewife and lab-tested reptilian lover, Ingalls deftly, wittily and rather incredibly liberates readers from the awfulness of convention to a state where weirdness and otherness are beautiful and right.

Author of Sorrow and Bliss (Weidenfeld and Nicolson)

After the joy of discovering that one of your favourite authors has a new book out can follow a peculiar kind of anxiety, because what if you don’t like it as much as the others? I needn’t have worried with Rachel Cusk’s Second Place (Faber). It is stunning, in all senses. Assembly (Hamish Hamilton) by Natasha Brown left me winded for how clever and sad and beautiful and spare it was. Truly the perfect novel. And I adored Ann Patchett’s new essay collection, These Precious Days (Bloomsbury), which I read in November and will end the year by listening to her read, as audio. Because it’s Ann Patchett, one time through isn’t enough.

Caleb Azumah Nelson

Author of Open Water (Viking)

This year, I loved Transcendent Kingdom (Viking) by Yaa Gyasi, the story of a family of four who travel from Ghana to Alabama to make a new life for themselves. Through the course of the novel, the family’s history begins to unfold, illuminating stories that have gone unspoken for generations. It’s a brilliant novel, with not a word out of place. I also really enjoyed Vanessa Onwuemezi’s Dark Neighbourhood (Fitzcarraldo), a collection of short stories from an unforgettable, searing voice. They occupy a hallucinatory landscape, often veering into the surreal, and each pulses with an electric energy.

Lauren Groff

Author of Matrix (Heinemann)

I have been in headlong love with Patricia Lockwood’s hilarious and subversive mind since her memoir Priestdaddy , but her first novel, No One Is Talking About This (Bloomsbury) , sent me reeling. Everything about this book, from its structure to its prose to the way it hits a reader unawares in the second half, is testament to Lockwood’s wicked genius. Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch (Fourth Estate) by Rivka Galchen flew a bit under the radar, but it is a wise meditation on the kind of hysterical scapegoating we see so often in the age of the internet, though based on a historical fact: that the mother of astronomer Johannes Kepler was once accused of witchcraft. I loved this book intensely when I read it this summer and have thought of it nearly every day through this strange autumn. I’ve been thinking deeply about anagogical literature recently and very few living writers write so achingly toward God as Kaveh Akbar. Real faith, Akbar writes in Pilgrim Bell (Chatto & Windus), “passes first through the body/ like an arrow”; each of the poems in this collection finds its target.

Chibundu Onuzo

Author of Sankofa (Virago)

My favourite nonfiction book published in 2021 was Otegha Uwagba’s We Need to Talk About Money (Fourth Estate). It’s a memoir that shows how money has affected every stage of Uwagba’s life, from growing up on a council estate, to winning a scholarship to a private school, to negotiating her salary when she entered the workforce. Uwagba is particularly nuanced about class and race. My favourite novel published in 2021 was Our Lady of the Nile (Daunt) by Scholastique Mukasonga. It’s set in the 1980s, in a Rwandan girls boarding school. It follows all the girlish intrigues, of who is the most popular, who is the prettiest, but this is no Malory Towers . Looming in the background is the coming genocide. Both playful and sinister, this is an excellent read.

Olivia Laing

Author of Everybody: A Book About Freedom (Picador)

Anyone with a mother ought to read My Phantoms by Gwendoline Riley (Granta), a novelist of uncompromising brilliance. It mines the same narrow, dangerous territory as Beryl Bainbridge and Ivy Compton-Burnett: the dysfunctional family unit. Riley homes in on the failing relationship between a mother and daughter, anatomised by way of astonishingly precise dialogue, alongside angular, razor-sharp sentences that delineate an entire emotional landscape. Ouch and wow. There’s a similar marvel of ventriloquism in Adam Mars-Jones’s Batlava Lake (Fitzcarraldo), a story about war and soldiers delivered by the hopeless, weirdly endearing Barry, which builds to a blindsiding final paragraph.

Sunjeev Sahota

Author of China Room (Harvill Secker)

Barbara Ehrenreich is an incisive diagnostician of societies and in Had I Known: Collected Essays (Granta) she is clear-eyed on the ways in which the American working class has been politically abandoned and culturally demonised. Much of the analysis applies to our own country. On the novel front, I could not recommend more strongly Gwendoline Riley’s My Phantoms (Granta): flinty, bracing, exquisite.

Anthony Doerr

Author of Cloud Cuckoo Land (Fourth Estate)

In The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (Allen Lane), David Graeber and David Wengrow offer an engrossing series of insights into how “the conventional narrative of human history is not only wrong, but quite needlessly dull”. They re-inject humanity into our distant forebears, suggesting that our prevailing story about human history – that not much innovation occurred in human societies until the invention of agriculture – is utterly wrong. I could have lived in the first hundred pages of Piranesi (Bloomsbury) by Susanna Clarke for ever. It’s a dream of a novel. Zorrie (Riverrun; published early next year) by Laird Hunt is a tender, glowing novel that is just as beautiful as Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead or Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams .

Ferdinand Mount

Author of Kiss Myself Goodbye: The Many Lives of Aunt Munca (Bloomsbury)

These days, I seem to read mostly female novelists from the colder parts of North America. You can’t get much farther north than the Ontario of Mary Lawson’s icy, compelling stories of calamity and redemption. A Town Called Solace (Chatto) keeps you breathless with anxiety, then relief and finally even joy. I felt the same total engagement with Gill Hornby’s Miss Austen (Arrow). She reconstructs in beautifully simple detail the story of Jane Austen’s sister, Cassandra, and her struggle to protect Jane in life and death. It is also an unforgettable account of an unremembered life.

Kehinde Andrews

Author of The New Age of Empire (Allen Lane)

David Harewood’s documentary Psychosis and Me was an eye-opener for his honesty in reflecting on his experiences in the mental health system. His book Maybe I Don’t Belong Here (Bluebird) is one of the most powerful testimonies to the impact of racism I have ever read. In a similar vein, Guilaine Kinouani’s Living While Black (Ebury) highlighted the severe problem of racism in the psychological professions that has hallmarked so much of our experiences in the UK, an unfortunate experience we have in common with our American cousins. I had been looking forward to learning more about one of the most important US civil rights activists Fannie Lou Hamer and Keisha Blain’s Until I Am Free (Beacon) did not disappoint.

Author of The Book of Form and Emptiness (Canongate)

Double Blind (Harvill Secker) by Edward St Aubyn is about nature, science, rapacious capitalism, psychoanalysis and human folly, and it is both moving and so funny I had to stop every few pages to wipe tears from my eyes. Nobody’s Normal (WW Norton) by Roy Richard Grinker is a compassionate, well-researched chronicle of the historical stigmatisation of mental illness. Since “normal” is a social construct, why can’t we change it? I love how Katie Kitamura can channel a mind and in Intimacies (Vintage) it is the mind of an unnamed interpreter living in The Hague, interpreting for a former president on trial for war crimes.​​

Monique Roffey

Author of The Mermaid of Black Conch (Vintage)

Still Life (Fourth Estate) by Sarah Winman gets my vote, not just for its mastery and sweep (Tuscany, the East End of London, war and beyond war, old gay ladies, young men) and the overarching theme of the power of love, but for its talking parrot as character, Claude. Claude gets some of the best lines. Also, Fortune (Peepal Tree Press) , by Amanda Smyth, another historic novel, a clandestine love story set amid Trinidad’s early oil drilling years in the 1920s. I also loved English Pastoral : An Inheritanc e (Penguin) by James Rebanks, out in paperback this year. His family have farmed the same land for 600 years. We’ve lost so much, but Rebanks gives us solutions and myth-busts; a poignant and sad book we need in a time of climate emergency.

Elizabeth Day

Author of Magpie (Fourth Estate)

My two favourite novels of the year were Sorrow and Bliss (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) by Meg Mason, for being hilarious, moving and utterly humane, and Damon Galgut’s The Promise (Chatto). The label “masterpiece” is far too liberally applied these days, but I did think Galgut’s book was deserving of it. In nonfiction, I enjoyed We Need to Talk About Money (Fourth Estate) by Otegha Uwagba, which challenged me to rethink my relationship with my finances and did so in a witty, intelligent and surprisingly touching way.

Author of The Echo Chamber (Doubleday)

Kevin Power’s long-awaited second novel, White City (Scribner), was a triumph. There’s not enough humour in contemporary fiction but Power brought the laughs and the pathos to this account of a young Dubliner, reared with privilege, who gets involved in a dodgy land deal in the Balkans. In nonfiction, I was impressed by Helen Joyce’s Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality (Oneworld), a scholarly, compassionate and courageous examination of a subject that’s sparked an unhelpful civil war within the LGBTQ community. Unlike those of her online counterparts, Joyce’s arguments are well researched, soundly made and avoid the toxicity that mars so much conversation on this topic.

Courttia Newland

Author of A River Called Time (Canongate)

Keeping the House (And Other Stories) by Tice Cin is a truly beautiful debut. A mistress of deftly sketched characters that become whole humans in a few lines, Cin tells stories of working-class, inner-city life steeped in truth, emotion and vulnerability. She is one of a new generation of writers who see the splendour of these streets and articulate it with great majesty. Jo Hamya’s Three Rooms (Vintage) is written in a classical style that’s no less incisive for its formality. From the first paragraph, I was hooked. Tension drips through every scene and Hamya depicts London so well. There’s quiet, raw power in this book and its author.

Cathy Rentzenbrink

Author of Everyone Is Still Alive (Phoenix)

I like a novel to grab me and The Book of Form and Emptiness (Canongate) by Ruth Ozeki gave me very peculiar dreams for a long time, as though it did not want to release me to other things. I enjoyed the robust style of Empireland (Penguin) by Sathnam Sanghera, an illuminating examination of the “toxic cocktail of nostalgia and amnesia” that still hugely influences our life today. Erudite and reassuring , Four Thousand Weeks (Vintage) by Oliver Burkeman persuaded me to accept that my time on Earth is finite so I should therefore not fritter it away in overwork and overwhelm.

Author of Razorblade Tears (Headline)

Her Name Is Knight (Thomas & Mercer) by Yasmin Angoe is a dazzling, suspenseful tale of international intrigue and revenge with a protagonist who is as deadly as she is beautiful. A feared assassin, Nena Knight soon finds her latest mission to be her most dangerous as it puts her life and her heart at risk. Arsenic and Adobo by Mia Manansala is a quirky, cosy mystery full of humour and heart with a clever heroine who is as talented in the kitchen as she is at a murder scene. A fantastic debut. The Heathens (Little, Brown) by Ace Atkins is pure, uncut, US southern noir with a modern social media twist. Few writers know the tortured soul of the south better than Atkins and he is at the top of his game here.

Fintan O’Toole

Author of We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Ireland Since 1958 (Head of Zeus)

Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You (Faber) has really stayed with me. For all its wit and style, it has a deep seriousness about the world. Rooney has an old-fashioned belief that the novel can be a place in which the question of how we should live is continually at play. Damon Galgut’s The Promise (Chatto) sustains the same moral purpose while being funny, angry and absurd all at once. Paul Muldoon had a remarkable year. His conversations with Paul McCartney for The Lyrics (Allen Lane) spark endlessly fascinating reflections on the relationship between life and creativity. And his new collection, Howdie-Skelp (Faber), is dazzling, moving, profound and playful.

Author of Bessie Smith (Faber)

I loved Neil Bartlett’s Address Book (Inkandescent). It took me back to all the addresses I’ve lived in - the lesbian squat in Vauxhall, John le Carré’s house in Hampstead! Brilliantly written, interweaving seven different characters across various times, Bartlett’s precise storytelling pulled me in. I’m glad we have him. He is a pioneering chronicler of queer lives. Ian Duhig’s New and Selected Poems (Picador) is a must have, must read gathering of the best of his work. Always fascinating, Duhig is poetry’s best chronicler of both ordinary lives, strange lives. His eclectic and effervescent work draws on folklore and myth to tell the stories we never get to hear. Duhig is interested in everything. He makes his reader sit up and take stock. I was inspired by the beauty and the power of the fabulous collective 4 Brown Girls Who Write – their poetry reminds me of the strength and exhilaration of a collective voice. Beautifully produced by Rough Trade Books, each of the four poets produces a standalone pamphlet that comes to form part of an incredible whole. The perfect stocking pressie. I was touched by Michelle Zauner’s cathartic memoir about losing her mother, Crying in H Mart (Picador). Zauner writes about food, music, grief and love candidly, bravely.

Chris Power

Author of A Lonely Man (Faber)

Two novels that stunned me this year involve characters overwhelmed by the force of another’s personality. The narrator of Gwendoline Riley’s My Phantoms (Granta) reckons with her parents, one dead, one ailing, who emerge as both spiteful and pitiable. Riley is an immensely talented writer whose sentences cut like knives and she doesn’t flinch when blade meets bone. Similarly dauntless, in Second Place (Faber), Rachel Cusk abandons the distinctive style of her Outline trilogy for a new voice. When M invites L, a painter she admires, to her remote coastal home, psychic combat ensues. It’s a profound book and a funny one, which hasn’t been mentioned enough.

Megan Nolan

Author of Acts of Desperation (Jonathan Cape)

After the past few years, when even the most ignorant among us took to slinging around virology terms as though we knew what we were talking about, I’ve found myself drawn to accounts and oral histories of the Aids crisis. Let the Record Show (Farrar) by Sarah Schulman is profoundly moving, as most are, but also does the important work of reasserting the place of women and people of colour in the history of Act Up. Paul (Granta) by Daisy Lafarge is a mesmerising novel about a young woman’s trip to France and ensuing entanglement with a man whose grotesque secrets begin to surface. It moves at a pace it feels Lafarge invented herself. It’s enviably, coolly intelligent without ever becoming ironic or snide and just one more exposition of Lafarge’s many gifts following on from her poetry collection Life Without Air .

Joshua Ferris

Author of A Calling for Charlie Barnes (Viking)

Three great pleasures for me this year came from reliable sources. Jo Ann Beard’s essays in Festival Days (Little, Brown) are some of her finest. Dana Spiotta’s novel Wayward (Virago) is razor-sharp on any number of things, above all the insoluble ravages of time. Then there were three writers new to me whose books were both reinvigorating and enlightening: Angélique Lalonde’s Glorious Frazzled Beings (Astoria), Miriam Toews’s Fight Night (Bloomsbury) and Casey Plett’s A Dream of a Woman (Arsenal Pulp Press).

Lisa Taddeo

Author of Animal (Bloomsbury)

Magpie (Fourth Estate) by Elizabeth Day is that rare novel that moves and taunts like a thriller, but also envelops and comforts like Middlemarch . I didn’t want it to end, I wanted to read it in fancy bars for ever. As for The Right to Sex (Bloomsbury) by Amia Srinivasan , I cannot say enough about this book. How crucial. How brilliant. How absolutely gratifying to see a mind at work like Srinivisan’s, handling the profane and the erudite with equal clear, unflinching diamond prose.

Sathnam Sanghera

Author of Empireland (Viking)

My novel of the year would be A Calling for Charlie Barnes (Viking) by Joshua Ferris, a hilarious skewering of the American Dream by the man who must be the funniest writer we have. I also really appreciated The Anarch y (Bloomsbury) by William Dalrymple, out in paperback this year, which does a great job explaining the East India Company, responsible, more than anything else, for Britain’s involvement in the subcontinent. And Imperial Nostalgia (Manchester University Press) by Peter Mitchell, which explains how the delusions of the Raj continue to shape our national psychology today.

Joan Bakewell

Author of The Tick of Two Clocks: A Tale of Moving On (Virago)

The sensitivity of Susie Boyt’s story of family love, Loved and Missed (Little, Brown), wrings the heart: it shows tenderness to each, makes you care for all… a gentle masterpiece. The Promise (Chatto) by Damon Galgut is a remarkable tale of four generations of one South African family and of the country itself. Like his earlier books, which I have also enjoyed, it reveals him as a master of human complexity. No wonder it won the Booker. Mothering Sunday (Scribner) by Graham Swift was not published this year, I know, but was picked up by me at the secondhand stall of Didcot Parkway station. It’s now released as a film. Reading it, I discovered a total gem: not a word out of place, not a false sentiment. Can the film be as good?

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The Best Books to Read in 2021 

We may earn a commission if you buy something from any affiliate links on our site.

Throughout the year, we've been updating you on the best books our editors and writers have read. As we approach the end of the year, we're sharing our final verdicts, and offering some great reads for the slowed-down days and weeks ahead. Rather than a definitive “best of list,” this is simply what we've loved this year—and we hope that you do too. Happy reading!

Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters (January)

Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters

If I had the ability to momentarily wipe my memory, I'd use it to reread Detransition , Baby  for the first time. In Torrey Peters' searing novelistic debut, a recently detransitioned man impregnates his cis female boss and asks his ex-girlfriend, a trans woman longing for motherhood, to help raise the baby; the plot's uniqueness is matched by Peters's distinctive and kinetic voice, and the two intermingle to form an unforgettable portrait of gender, humanity, and family.—Emma Specter

Nora by Nuala O’Connor (January)

Nora by Nuala O'Connor

In her fiction, Nuala O’Connor has often explored the private lives of historical figures; she did it in 2015’s Miss Emily , about Emily Dickinson, and in 2018’s Becoming Belle , about singer and dancer Belle Bilton. She takes the same approach in Nora , a long but lively portrait of James Joyce’s wife and muse, Nora Barnacle Joyce. His companion for 37 years (and the mother of both his children), Nora has long sat at the center of Joycian lore; she was the model for Ulysses ’s Molly Bloom and, in her youthful trysts, inspired two characters in “The Dead.” With Nora , O’Connor leans into that context—as she does into Joyce’s famously filthy letters to his “wildflower of the hedges”—depicting a relationship as lousy with passion as it was with chaos. Joyce’s drinking and uselessness with money form a throughline, as do their constant moves between Italy, France, and Switzerland. (A poet as well as a novelist, O’Connor has a musical ear for language; Joyce and Nora never seem to lose their lilt.) Yes, literati like Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, Samuel Beckett, and Sylvia Beach make requisite appearances, but Nora is principally the story of a Galway girl and her “Jim,” eking out some semblance of an existence far from home. —Marley Marius

Aftershocks by Nadia Owusu

Nadia Owusu’s debut memoir, Aftershocks , has those residual tremors that follow an earthquake as its central metaphor, and the author had plenty of life-shaking events around which to orient her narrative. The daughter of an erudite Ghanaian U.N. official and an emotionally distant Armenian mother, Owusu grew up straddling cultures and following her impressive father. But the uneasiness in her life derived not from her fluid, third-culture upbringing but from the death of her father when Owusu was still a child; the abandonment of her mother; and a strained relationship with the stepmother who carried out the difficult process of raising her. There is something fairy tale–like about Owusu’s story, an orphan-like existence of struggle and survival, but there is no fairy godmother who rescues this heroine—just a growing sense of self-awareness to orient her in a troubling world. —Chloe Schama

Let Me Tell You What I Mean by Joan Didion (January)

Let Me Tell You What I Mean by Joan Didion

Even Didion’s B-sides are hits. This slim volume of uncollected nonfiction—mostly short essays she wrote for The Saturday Evening Post in the late ’60s as well as a few longer pieces for The New York Times and The New Yorker —is full of small pleasures: Didion’s trademark anti-sentimentality, for one; her rhythmic prose; her ruthlessness (see her assessments of gambling addicts, hippies, Nancy Reagan); her wit. In the charming “Telling Stories” (written for New West in 1978) we also get self-effacement: a piece about why she never made the grade as a young short story writer...complete with rejection notices compiled by her agent. “ Cosmopolitan: ‘too depressing.’ ” LOL. —Taylor Antrim

Milk Fed by Melissa Broder (February)

Milk Fed by Melissa Broder

Off the success of her 2018 debut novel, The Pisces , author and Twitter sensation Melissa Broder has crafted a dizzily compelling story of love, lust, addiction, faith, maternal longing, and...frozen yogurt. In Milk Fed , a young Los Angeles agent’s assistant battles her obsession with weight loss while simultaneously trying to bury her attraction to the zaftig Orthodox Jewish woman who works at the local fro-yo shop. The stealthy passion between the two women is given room to shine on the page; Broder’s sex writing is, as always, first-rate, but perhaps even more striking is her ability to lay bare the frantic interior calculus of disordered eating alongside the hypnotic pull of spirituality. This isn’t a book to pick up casually, particularly if you’ve struggled with food issues, but it will linger with you long after you’ve finished the final page. —Emma Specter

My Year Abroad by Chang Rae Lee (February)

My Year Abroad by Chang Rae Lee

My Year Abroad is an extraordinary book, acrobatic on the level of the sentence, symphonic across its many movements—and this is a book that moves : from the quaint, manicured town of Dunbar (hard not to read as a Princeton stand-in, where the author taught at the university for many years); to buzzing Shenzhen; to a Chinese bazillionaire’s compound, governed by a particularly barbaric modern feudalism; back to a landlocked American exurban town deemed Stagno, where the protagonist (the appropriately named, rudderless Tiller) has shacked up with a 30-something woman and her savant kid, both of whom are hunkering down because they’re quite probably part of the witness protection program. For all the self-proclaimed ordinariness of its protagonist, My Year Abroad is a wild ride—a caper, a romance, a bildungsroman, and something of a satire of how to get filthy rich in rising Asia. This isn’t a book that skates through its many disparate-seeming scenes, but rather unites them in the heartfelt adventure of its protagonist, who begins his year “abroad” as a foreign land to himself and arrives at something like belonging by the end of his story. —Chloe Schama

Gay Bar by Jeremy Atherton Lin (February)

Gay Bar by Jeremy Atherton Lin

There’s a particular pain to reading Gay Bar —a complex work in which author Jeremy Atherton Lin sets out to chronicle the gay clubs and bars of his youth in order to tell the story of LGBTQ+ spaces more broadly—during a pandemic, when queer nightspots are shuttering with no hope of government assistance. For that reason, though, Gay Bar is an essential read in 2021, especially for those who might be unfamiliar with the cultural and historical significance of the “gay bar.” Hopefully, appropriately mourning the queer spaces we’ve lost to gentrification, police violence, the AIDS crisis, and the simple passage of time can serve as a ritual to honor the significance of those spots. —Emma Specter

Tom Stoppard: A Life by Hermione Lee (February)

Tom Stoppard: A Life by Hermione Lee

When Tom Stoppard’s latest play, Leopoldstadt , opened in the West End of London in February, just weeks before the pandemic shuttered theaters, Stoppard told an interviewer that the show—his 23rd full-length work over a six-decade-plus career— was likely his last . If Leopoldstadt, a deeply personal piece that was hailed as a revelation by the critics who saw it during its truncated run, is indeed Stoppard’s last play, we now have Tom Stoppard: A Life , Hermione Lee’s magisterial biography, to remind us what we will have lost—and what a legacy Stoppard will leave behind. The 83-year-old author of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead , Travesties, The Real Thing, and Arcadia (and an Oscar winner for Shakespeare in Love ), to name just a few of his groundbreaking works, is almost without argument the greatest English-language playwright of the past 50 years, perhaps only rivaled for both quantity and quality by his fellow Brit, David Hare.

In her authorized biography, Lee, who has previously written about Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, and Penelope Fitzgerald, shows a keen understanding of Stoppard’s work, making long-ago productions come to vivid life on the page, and writes empathetically, but with unsentimental clarity, about Stoppard’s sometimes complicated personal life. His marriage to author Miriam Stoppard, whom he had started seeing when he was still married to his first wife, was ended by his affair with actress Felicity Kendal, which was followed by a 10-year relationship with actress Sinead Cusack, which began during a rocky point in her marriage to Jeremy Irons. (In 2014, Stoppard married Sabrina Guinness , of the famed Guinness family and onetime girlfriend of the young Prince Charles, and today they live together in bucolic Dorset.) One notable feat: Stoppard seems to have stayed on good terms with all of his previous romantic partners, The saga of Tomás Straüssler, born in 1937, in Zlín, Czechoslovakia, a wartime refugee who later went on to be the celebrated playwright Tom Stoppard, is a story of almost novelistic proportions. In Tom Stoppard: A Life , we have an author up to the task of telling it. —Stuart Emmrich

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro (March)

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

While the announcement of a new book by Kazuo Ishiguro would be greeted with feverish anticipation under normal circumstances, his latest novel comes with an added weight of expectation, as it is his first since being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2017 . The beauty of Klara and the Sun is how neatly it dovetails with his 2005 dystopian masterpiece, Never Let Me Go , exploring similar questions of love and sacrifice through the lens of sci-fi. Set in the near future, the titular Klara is a solar-powered Artificial Friend, purchased from a department store by a lonely teenager named Josie; her reliance on the sun becomes an allegory for their relationship, with a subtle environmental subtext woven in as well. To explain too much of the plot would be to deny the strange, eerie pleasure of watching it unfold, but it’s a world that feels richly imagined and meticulously constructed, even while its mysteries continue to reveal themselves. Klara and the Sun once again marks Ishiguro as a master of the ache of missed opportunities and lost connections, as he unpicks the tangled web of how we forge relationships with others and how we deny them too. —Liam Hess

The Fourth Child by Jessica Winter (March)

The Fourth Child by Jessica Winter

Jessica Winter’s The Fourth Child begins with an epitaph from Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child , a work of domestic horror in which a supernaturally unlovable fifth child disturbs the happy equilibrium of a complacent family. The difficulties of the fourth child that are introduced in The Fourth Child are neither supernatural nor entirely unlovable, but this child does disrupt the balance of the family into which she’s adopted, causing the mother, Jane, who has removed her new daughter from a bleak and somewhat murky existence in a Eastern European orphanage, to question the dimensions of her supposedly altruistic act. (Her family is faster to query Jane’s motivations.) Jane is a do-gooder, a devout Catholic and accidental anti-abortion activist raising her three biological children and one unruly orphan adoptee in upstate New York in the early ’90s. As those specific markers imply, this is a work of precise social realism, in which the intricate tableau of detail offers a backdrop for larger questions about morality, family, and obligation. —Chloe Schama

Love Like That By Emma Duffy Comparone (March)

Love Like That By Emma Duffy Comparone

At the top of the list of books that have sucked me in without me really knowing why is Emma Duffy Comparone’s debut collection of sharp short stories. The stories in this reminded me of early Mary Karr, with subtly female obligations—of caregiving, career, the ever-present need to cater to the male ego—woven through each tale as sometimes sinister forces, and then picked apart with Comparone’s edgy wit. Her protagonists are jagged, hard-edged women and girls, but they are also, in their unique and quirky way, quite lovable. —Chloe Shama

Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York by Alexander Nemerov (March )

Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York by Alexander Nemerov

Neither conventional biography nor arm’s-length critical appraisal, Alexander Nemerov’s Fierce Poise shines a light on Helen Frankenthaler’s early artistic breakthrough by blending both forms. Eleven specific and crucial days—from May 19, 1950, to January 26, 1960—are given an almost novelistic treatment to imbue revealing moments in the painter’s life and work with color, shading, feeling, mood, and historical and social settings. If the book occasionally wanders into a kind of assumed verisimilitude, with an omniscient narrator rendering scenes with a level of detail that seemingly belies available historical and biographical facts—well, think of it as the price of admission to a thrillingly alive account of a woman unapologetically pursuing her own vision in an era and a milieu largely defined by men. —Corey Seymour

The Beauty of Living Twice by Sharon Stone (March)

The Beauty of Living Twice by Sharon Stone

Sharon Stone’s memoir opens with her waking up at the hospital after experiencing a brain hemorrhage that nearly killed her in 2001. Having emerged as the quintessential sex symbol of ’90s Hollywood thanks to roles in hits like Casino and Basic Instinct , the actor’s flourishing career was stopped dead in its tracks by the health scare. Stone has spoken in broad strokes about the “nine-day brain bleed” and its aftereffects on her career, but never with as much candor as she does in The Beauty of Living Twice . Trim and elegantly written with her wicked sense of humor on full display, the memoir is catnip for fans who have never managed to crack the exterior of the elusive star. The behind-the-scenes anecdotes from her four-decade career are predictably fabulous, as are her general musings on relationships, sex, love, and religion. But it’s the personal revelations detailing the actor’s journey to rebuild her life after waking up in that hospital bed that will leave readers with a renewed appreciation for Stone and her tenacity. —Keaton Bell

The Hard Crowd: Essays 2000-2020 by Rachel Kushner (April)

The Hard Crowd: Essays 2000-2020 by Rachel Kushner

Kushner, the author of three acclaimed novels, including 2018’s dazzling prison-set The Mars Room , turns her fierce intellect to nonfiction in this essay collection. Her interests—vintage cars and motorcycles, the art world, the late Denis Johnson (whose work is clearly an influence here), tough underground scenes of all kinds—won’t surprise readers of her fiction, but there’s a rigorous specificity to the essays that draws you in. The unmissable lead essay, “Girl on a Motorcycle,” is a thrilling road-racing adventure set in Baja California, and “ Not With the Band ” (originally published in Vogue ) offers insight into Kushner’s misspent youth, bartending at San Francisco rock venues. The Hard Crowd is wild, wide-ranging, and unsparingly intelligent throughout. —Taylor Antrim

Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner (April)

Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner

Indie rock fans may know Michelle Zauner as the face of the solo musical act Japanese Breakfast, but her debut memoir, Crying in H Mart —which chronicles Zauner’s struggle to retain her Korean identity in the wake of her mother’s death—is sure to establish her as a singular literary talent. The book’s descriptions of jjigae, tteokbokki, and other Korean delicacies stand out as tokens of the deep, all-encompassing love between Zauner and her mother, a love that is charted in vivid descriptions of her mother after death; in a time when people around the world are reckoning with untold loss due to COVID-19, Zauner’s frankness around death feels like an unexpected yet deeply necessary gift. —Emma Specter

The Last Thing He Told Me by Laura Dave (May)

The Last Thing He Told Me by Laura Dave

Was The Last Thing He Told Me engineered to become a prestige drama? Probably not, but reading it you do get the sense that it's the kind of book to get a producer’s gears turning: mysterious disappearance; lively, somewhat lonesome heroine; sulky stepdaughter along for the ride. The book is set mostly in northern California, where the protagonist, a furniture-maker-slash-artist called Hannah, has made a home with her husband, Owen, and his stepdaughter Bailey. The public implosion of Owen’s company leads to his disappearance and ignites Hannah’s quest to try to figure out what’s happened—not just where he’s gone, but why he’s left behind a rather large duffel bag full of cash and, as it turns out, a very light imprint on the world before she met him. The Last Thing He Told me goes down like the limited series it will almost certainly become—Julia Roberts has signed on to a production engineered by Hello Sunshine—light and bright, despite its seemingly seedy undertones. - Chloe Schama

Second Place by Rachel Cusk (May)

Second Place by Rachel Cusk

A friend once described a Cusk novel—2014’s Outline —as a glass of Sancerre: very dry, very cold, totally perfect. To (perilously) extend this metaphor let’s call Cusk’s new novel Second Place a weird wonderful glass of orange wine, unfiltered, even funky. It takes place on the tidal coastline of England, where a woman (a novelist of “little books”) invites a once prominent painter to come and stay with her and her husband in their guest house (the “second place” of the title). She does this out of an inchoate need to invite disorder and chaos into her life—and perhaps kick off a love affair? No dice. The painter, called L, a wonderfully narcissistic and entitled creation, arrives with a young mistress and proceeds to wreak havoc on everyone’s life (the narrator’s grown daughter and her boyfriend are in residence as well). If the above sounds like a comedy, it’s not: the stakes in Cusk’s slim, erudite novel are too high. Second Place is about how to survive the perils of middle age, how to find both security and freedom in equal measure, and how human longing shades, all too easily, into self-destruction. —Taylor Antrim

House of Sticks by Ly Tran (June)

House of Sticks by Ly Tran

House of Sticks is a book that will assault and warm your heart at the same time—a classic immigrant tale, told from the perspective of a Vietnamese child who settled with her family in New York City in the early ‘90s with little to no knowledge about life in America. But even without the resources that many take for granted, Tran’s family was able to eke out a living, first by setting up a kind of family-run sweatshop in their cramped apartment and eventually by buying a nail salon. As a sort of follow up to the devastating expose on nail salon workers published by the New York Times in 2015, House of Sticks can at times read like a more three-dimensional portrait of the life of one of these aestheticians. (Tran worked alongside her mother and father in the salon.) But it is also much more: a coming of age story, A New York hustle, a battle with a father who not only maintains an ironclad sense of filial duty, but also, fueled by his paranoia, exercises irrational control over things like vision correction. (In another elegant examination of absence, the book recounts what a fundamental challenge it is to move through the world without basic ability to see.)—Chloe Schama

The Other Black Girl  by Zakiya Dalila Harris

The Other Black Girl by Zakiya Dalila Harris

The racism of the publishing industry gets a long-overdue interrogation in this brilliant debut, in which Zakiya Dalila Harris expertly captures the mise-en-scene of a young Black woman's discomfiture at no longer being the "only one" at the lily-white publishing company at which she works. The novel takes some bold stylistic risks that pay off beautifully, leaving the reader longing for more of Harris's words and unique view on the world.—Emma Specter

With Teeth by Kristin Arnett (June)

Kristen Arnett’s debut Mostly Dead Things established her as an expert in all things related to the macabre—particularly when they’re queer-inflected and set in central Florida—and her latest effort, With Teeth , is a more-than-worthy successor. The novel revolves around Sammie, a dissatisfied suburban mother longing for more while questioning her commitment to her wife and son, and takes the reader on a winding journey through all the grief, love, fear and occasional rage that accompanies family-making. There’s never been a parenting novel quite like this before, though it seems more than likely to spawn a sub-genre. —E.S.

Intimacies by Katie Kitamura (July)

Intimacies by Katie Kitamura

Katie Kitamura established herself as a master of cool disquiet with her 2017 breakout, A Separation , a taut and cosmopolitan near-mystery about a young woman moving across the globe in search of her soon-to-be ex-husband, who has gone missing. Her fourth novel, Intimacies , is wholly set in the rainy municipality of The Hague, but its spirit is no less unmoored. The unnamed narrator is living in a city that does not feel like home, filling a temporary job as a translator in a war-crimes court and staying in the emptied apartment of a lover who may or may not be reconciling with his wife. There’s more than a tinge of danger to the story, with war crimes and street violence playing a small part in the narrative, while messages encoded in Dutch art and libraries curated by interior designers enliven the book’s intense interiority. Kitamura writes with forceful, direct prose that makes for a bracing read and leaves the reader mesmerized. As the narrator understands, “The appearance of simplicity is not the same thing as simplicity itself.” —Lauren Mechling

Wayward by Dana Spiotta (July)

Wayward by Dana Spiotta

Agile intelligence combines with an almost ruthless lack of sentimentality in the novels of Dana Spiotta, from 2001’s Lightning Field to 2016’s Innocents and Others. These are gloriously cool books, deftly assembled, brimming with mood—and full of outcasts and misfits who can’t quite assimilate to modern culture. For fans of Spiotta, her fifth novel, Wayward , is something new: a strikingly human and affecting story of a woman in her fifties going through what you might call, in a more ordinary book, a midlife crisis. In Wayward , Sam’s flight out of conventional suburban housewifery is turned over with a kind of forensic (and mordantly hilarious) scrutiny. In the opening pages she leaves her husband and buys a very specific tumbledown house in the decrepit heart of downtown Syracuse, New York. She then plunges into various obsessions: quasi-feminist Facebook groups, nightwalking, stand up comedy, weightlifting. Through it all Sam both yearns for her teenage daughter, Ally—who is furious at her mother for leaving the family—and refuses to fit any expectations of what a good mother should be. Wayward is a hymn to iconoclasm, a piercing novel about what we lose and gain by when we step out of life’s deepest worn grooves. — Taylor Antrim

Agatha of Little Neon by Claire Luchette (August)

Agatha of Little Neon

In Claire Luchette’s remarkable debut, Agatha, a nun, is transplanted, along with her pious sisters, to a halfway house in the “tuckered-out town” of Woonsocket, Rhode Island, where they are entrusted with the wellbeing of a lonesome cast of characters who want little to do with them. What follows is a coming-of-age story of sorts in which Agatha, attracted to the order for its promise of belonging, begins to learn that true comfort lies in greater knowledge of oneself. Written in a bracing, acerbic, and darkly comic tenor, the book is a surprisingly buoyant and fast-paced read, a modern and sly spin on the meaning of devotion. —Chloe Schama

Ghosts by Dolly Alderton (August)

The action in Ghosts , an astonishingly assured debut from the journalist Dolly Alderton, takes place after Nina George Dean turns 32. She’s a food writer with a London flat that she adores (not least because she owns it), a second book mere moments from going to press, two well-meaning parents in the suburbs, and a wide circle of close friends, including an ex with whom she’s stayed unproblematically close. When Nina meets the doting and superhero-handsome Max through a dating app—the culture surrounding which Alderton renders in all its mortifying (and hilarious) inanity—she can’t believe her luck. But her house of cards soon starts to cave in: her dad’s health takes a turn; she feels estranged from her oldest friend; the proposal for her next book isn’t really coming together; her downstairs neighbor is a nightmare; and after several blissful months, she’s getting radio silence from Max. True to its title, Ghosts teems with them—the shades of past loves and old selves, especially—besides interrogating the Internet-era phenomenon of being “ghosted,” and resorting to stalking a man’s LinkedIn profile for signs of life. Deftly observed and deeply funny, Ghosts considers where we find, and how we hold onto love with what might well be described as haunting precision. —Marley Marius

Afterparties by Anthony Veasna So (August)

Afterparties: Stories

Following a six-figure bidding war for his debut short story collection last year, the 28-year-old Anthony Veasna So passed away unexpectedly in December. That collection, however, more than lives up to the initial hype. A series of vignettes documenting the lives and loves of Cambodian-American families in California’s Central Valley with warmth, generosity, and irreverent humor, Afterparties showcases So’s dazzling prose, which ricochets between meditations on food and family, an eclectic array of pop culture references, and the weightier implications of the intergenerational trauma passed down by those who fled the Khmer Rouge genocide in the 1970s. (The afterparties of the title are, with So’s typically dark wit, a coded reference to the bittersweet nature of passing on the traditions of the home country within the Cambodian diaspora.) So’s observations on queer life today are particularly incisive. In one instance, a charming love story blossoms between a righteous tech entrepreneur and a world-weary young teacher obsessed with Moby Dick , with the couple finding a strange poetry in the rhythms and routines of casual sex. These movingly intimate windows into the immigrant experience leave a powerful imprint, even if the experience of reading So’s work is tinged with the sadness of knowing that he clearly had so much left to say. —L.H.

Everything I Have Is Yours: A Marriage by Eleanor Henderson (August)

Everything I Have Is Yours: A Marriage

Marriage memoirs are like confessions—the more honest the better. And Eleanor Henderson’s mesmerizing chronicle of her two-decade marriage is ruthless. The love story is there: Eleanor falls hard for Aaron in a record shop in Florida in 1997. She is 17. He is a 25-year-old straight-edge dreamboat, “teeth as white as his T-shirt. Around his neck, a string of wooden Krishna beads was wound three times, tight as a choker.” She brings him to Vermont with her for college and then to graduate school in Virginia (marrying him along the way). Eleanor is a novelist, ambitious, upwardly mobile. Aaron is none of those things. He’s moody, wounded, seemingly unemployable, and given to secrets. Henderson’s headlong narrative (she writes as if she’s conducting an exorcism) pulls their dynamic into painful focus. She builds a life—a career, a house, two boys—he tears it all apart with his mood swings, his addictions, mysterious ailments: rashes, sores on his skin, aches that keep him awake all night. A medical mystery develops—does he have Morgellons disease? Schizophrenia? Some other psychiatric condition? Does alcohol help? Does marijuana? Most chillingly: does the specter of hard drugs, glimpsed but never fully seen, hang over the marriage? Leave him , the reader thinks. But life, of course, is not so simple, and rarely has codependency been chronicled with such precision, such poignancy. Everything I Have Is Yours is a kind of tragedy but it’s an astonishingly humane one too. —Taylor Antrim

Last Summer in the City by Gianfranco Calligarich (August)

Last Summer in the City

First published in 1973, Gianfranco Calligarich’s Last Summer in the City seems to limn his own life: Like Calligarich, the novel’s protagonist, Leo Gazarra, leaves Milan for Rome and a writing job, and when that job disappears, spends his summer days at the beach and his nights drifting from party to party, woman to woman. If this sounds like a glittering, solipsistic idyll—well, sure, from the outside; but Leo’s perspective and Calligarich’s rendering turns la dolce vita into something more akin to Camus’s L’Etranger in a contemporary-ish urban setting. Out of print for years, this welcome new translation is elegiac and heart-rending. —Corey Seymour

Misfits by Michaela Coel (September)

Is there anything Michaela Coel can’t do? Not only has the 33-year-old writer, director, producer, and actor brought two brilliant shows to life (the hysterical Chewing Gum and searingly raw I May Destroy You), she’s now leaving her mark on the literary world with her debut nonfiction book, Misfits: A Personal Manifesto. Coel covers everything—growing up in London public housing, reckoning with trauma, adjusting to the demands of fame—with her signature wit and wisdom, making it clear that her narrative power transcends the small screen. Coel’s is a voice that jumps off the page, and it’s one we’re lucky to have applied to whichever story she chooses to tell. —Emma Specter

The Magician by Colm Tóibín (September)

The Magician

It’s hard not to talk about Colm Tóibín’s latest novel, The Magician , in the loftiest of terms, as something staggering, or dazzling, or an achievement. Yet given the epic sweep of the book—which at once offers a haunting and heartrendingly intimate portrait of its protagonist, the German writer Thomas Mann, and a richly drawn sense of place as it travels through a politically turbulent early-20th-century Europe to America and back again—these accolades feel deserving. As in Tóibín’s 2004 novel, The Master (which charts the life of Henry James), the struggle that underpins Mann’s conflicted inner world is one of sexuality, with Tóibín conveying his unknowability even to those closest to him with a strange, elegiac beauty. Part of the charm of the novel is the forensic approach Tóibín takes to his subject, neither condemning him for the sometimes selfish decisions he makes and the distance he keeps from the people who love him nor defining a writer who is clearly a hero of his in purely hagiographic terms. (Indeed, at times the book reads almost like a biography with its eye for detail and considered pace.) The Magician is an immersive and intentionally meandering book but one that always rewards your patience, especially in a haunting final section that sees Mann look back at his life and all that he’s lost. If you’re willing to give yourself over to the vast and stunningly realized world that Tóibín conjures around Mann, you’ll find yourself savoring every page. —Liam Hess

I Wished by Dennis Cooper (September)

After a 10-year hiatus, the enfant terrible of gay fiction, Dennis Cooper, returns with I Wished, which may just be his most surreal, disturbing, vulnerable work yet (which is saying a lot). The book draws once again from the life of Cooper’s late friend George Miles—most famously memorialized in Cooper’s George Miles Cycle from the 1990s, which spanned five books and 11 years—with whom he had a brief sexual affair and who eventually died by suicide. But Cooper is firm that this is not a sixth installment but instead something more nebulous and open-ended. Exploring the darkest corners of desire and transgression with Cooper’s intoxicating balance of formal experimentation (the book is variously narrated by Nick Drake, Santa Claus, and John Wayne Gacy Jr.) and frank descriptions of sex that move between the savage and deeply tender, it’s a weird and occasionally wonderful tribute to his friend, as well as a powerful work of autofiction. —L.H.

Harrow by Joy Williams (September)

Joy Williams’s fiction—both otherworldly and sharply realist, equally strange and transfixing—inspires fierce loyalty among those who discover it. And there are more and more of us following the overdue publication of The Visiting Privilege: New and Collected Stories in 2015. Here was the 500-page definitive collection of Williams’s best short stories, written over a five-decade career, that together conjured a looking-glass America of misfits and outcasts, of life lived at the margins and at psychological extremes. Her new disturbingly strange novel, Harrow , offers a starkly fascinating vision of ecological apocalypse. This is Williams’s first since 2000’s The Quick and the Dead and is another coming-of-age story—though Harrow is more fractured and darker than that (magnificent) novel. Teenage Khristen sets off across a dystopian American landscape after her boarding school shuts down—and encounters cultish lunacy among a community of survivalists on the shores of a toxic lake. —Taylor Antrim

A Calling for Charlie Barnes by Joshua Ferris (September)

A Calling for Charlie Barnes

For those who fell in love with Joshua Ferris’s debut, Then We Came to the End (I did), A Calling for Charlie Barnes feels like  a return to the comic-existential themes of that first book: What is work, and why do we do it? Rather than an office, the setting here is Charlie Barnes’s basement, where he’s been camped out for several years trying to get his long-floundering money-management business to take off (a fitting transformation of the office architecture after a year-plus of WFH). Except the runway for his floundering business has been so long that it seems like he may forever occupy this state of perpetual taxi. But then some news: Charlie is dying of cancer—or at least he thinks it’s likely that he is—and he begins to ponder just how he’s spent the minutes and years and decades of his life. What follows is a quasi-stream-of-consciousness romp through his love affairs and misadventures. —C.S.

On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint by Maggie Nelson (September)

On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint

With her distinctive blend of personal history and critical theory, Maggie Nelson’s books—from the haunting collage of poetry and prose charting her aunt’s 1969 murder that spanned Jane: A Murder and The Red Parts, to her genre-defying meditation on queer family, The Argonauts (2015)—have always elided easy definition. It comes as a surprise, then, to see her latest book laid out in four clear parts as she turns her gaze to one of the most ineluctable—and politically charged—subjects in America today: freedom. In typically offbeat style, however, the very first line announces in all caps: “STOP HERE IF YOU WANT TO TALK ABOUT FREEDOM.” What Nelson is after is finding a new way of talking about freedom, examining it through the lenses of what art, sex, drugs, and the climate mean in relation to that word right now, and moving between first-person anecdotes and intense critical examination with the utmost readability. Nelson’s approach is one that ultimately seeks liberation and transcendence—whether sexual, narcotic, or purely biological—even as she delves into some of the deepest, darkest corners of the human psyche. —L.H.

Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen (October)

Jonathan Franzen’s pleasure bomb of a novel Crossroads takes place in New Prospect, an Illinois suburb that could be a Norman Rockwell backdrop were it not for the rumblings of the women’s liberation movement and the war in Vietnam. It’s 1971 and the Hildebrandt family lives in a drafty house that the local church provided to patriarch Russ, a God-fearing and self-loathing associate minister who has not only fallen for a pixie-like widow but blames his desires on his wife, Marion. They have four children: young Judson; Becky, the golden-girl cheerleader who isn’t half as boring as she might seem; college-age Clem, tormented by guilt over the inequitable draft and his lust for a worldly older student; and Perry, whose extraordinary mental wiring leads to the manic episode that is one of the book’s many tours de force. The most operatic and astonishing portion might belong to Marion, whose dutiful Christmas cookie baking and ghostwriting of her husband’s sermons are insufficient outlets for her pain and brilliance. Unbeknownst to anyone in her family, she visits her “paid friend,” a therapist who discreetly works out of a dentist’s office. This book relies on novella-length backstories that are as beguiling and alive as the scenes set in the novel’s present, but Marion’s moment in the spotlight is a standout, a masterpiece in the tradition of Nathanael West and the American grotesque. New prospects are what keep the narrative so engrossing, each section expanding on and deepening the poignancy of what has come before. Fifty years after the novel’s setting, America’s primary story is one of social unrest, but it’s personal unrest that commands Franzen’s fascination and unassailable talent. Tiny moments—a glance in the mirror, a bus-seating slight—explode into entertaining vignettes stuffed with the secrets and sins that keep us all truly unknowable from the people to whom we consider ourselves closest. As he has in his previous five novels, Franzen marries the sympathetic and damning, the serious and the comic, faith and folly. Good writers can sustain nuance. Few can take human contradiction and make it half as entertaining and intimate as Franzen does. The 500-plus pages fly by and cohere into a magnificent portrait of an American family on the brink of implosion. The first in a planned trilogy, Crossroads is Act I of what’s bound to be an American classic. —Lauren Mechling

Orwell’s Roses by Rebecca Solnit (October)

Orwell’s Roses

Throughout the Trump administration, the term Orwellian was invoked with enough frequency to become all but meaningless. Now, almost a year after Trump’s ouster, comes a brand-new piece of nonfiction from celebrated author and journalist Rebecca Solnit that reconsiders George Orwell’s legacy once and for all. In Orwell’s Roses, Solnit examines Orwell’s lifelong fascination with gardening from all possible directions, tracking his life from his English childhood to his time fighting in the Spanish Civil War and his adult fixation with authoritarianism. And, while she’s at it, she follows the gardening motif to several surprising conclusions, including dictator Josef Stalin’s obsession with lemon growing and novelist Jamaica Kinkaid’s critique of colonialism as it applies to the flower garden. The task that Solnit has set for herself in this book is mighty, but she’s more than up to it as a writer and a thinker; nobody who reads it will ever think of Nineteen Eighty-Four in quite the same way. —E.S.

I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness by Claire Vaye Watkins (October)

I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness

Claire Vaye Watkins’s first novel, Gold Fame Citrus , was a portrait of the American West. But framed as a postapocalyptic fever dream and published around the same time as several other novels dealing with end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it themes (Edan Lepucki’s California , Emily St. John Mandel’s Station 11 ), its landscape seemed more like a backdrop than a character in its own right. It’s different in her latest, I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness , where the brutal, arid, electric terrain of remote California and Nevada crackles across almost every page. The story is narrated by a writer, Claire (several names and details map onto Watkins’s own life), who has returned home to Nevada for some light book promotion and semi-heavy drug use with college friends who have remained in the state. The trip is an escape from her marriage and her baby and crashes into long vignettes and characters from her past—a hippy father who procured nubile teens for Charles Manson before he thought better of the whole project and an artist mother who makes magic in the desert before succumbing to the plague of opioids that has decimated so much of the country. The book is trippy and beautiful, slippery and seductive—a unique psycho-geography of a region that is integral to the American vision and yet seems to have too few literary chroniclers. —C.S.

Silverview by John Le Carré (October)

What a gift to have a posthumous novel by John le Carré, a writer who gave us a world of intricate spycraft, government mendacity and corrupt capitalist overlords that was as unromantic as it was immersive and transporting. Silverview is le Carré’s 26th novel and it is a familiar tune played in a minor key, a slight but elegant story of western collapse, of a spy service (MI6) struggling to justify itself, and intent on stamping out those who would question its dubious victories. The 33-year-old Julian Lawndsley is a familiar protagonist in late le Carré, a well-meaning if slightly limited man of slender means who in this case has chucked in a life of finance to open a bookshop in a small English town. The early scenes are taut and graceful at once—a le Carré hallmark: Edward Avon, a retired grandee who seems to be Polish swans into the bookshop and recruits Julian to make something more of his small business, a Republic of Literature he suggests, a gathering place for book lovers in the community. Of course, Avon is not what he seems and this slim novel patiently spins out his backstory, as an agent of MI6 who has not been as loyal as the service would like. Silverview ’s twists and turns will surprise no le Carré devotee, but it is an enjoyable coda to a unforgettable career. —T.A.

These Precious Days: Essays by Ann Patchett (November)

These Precious Days: Essays

“How other people live is pretty much all I think about,” Patchett writes in the exquisite title essay of her new collection, These Precious Days, which became a minor sensation when it was published by Harper’s magazine in January. “Curiosity is the rock upon which fiction is built.” It’s something that holds true across Patchett’s powerful but unassuming body of work, which is difficult to sum up tidily—mostly because what Patchett writes about is just that: her boundless interest in the lives of everyday people. In her fiction, they could be people with fraying familial bonds, people high on the revelatory joy of a new friendship, or people who find themselves in wildly unlikely situations, as in her award-winning 2001 novel, Bel Canto . But in These Precious Days, her first nonfiction work in eight years, Patchett turns the lens back not just on herself but on the relationships she’s forged throughout her career as a writer too, in essays that vary in length but seamlessly balance Patchett’s piercing emotional and intellectual insights with a welcoming charm. Still, the justified centerpiece of the collection is the title essay, which charts her unlikely friendship with Tom Hanks’s assistant Sooki Raphael during quarantine, after Hanks recorded the audiobook for Patchett’s previous novel, The Dutch House (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize). Enchanted by Raphael’s outlook on life and her abilities as a painter, Patchett documents their journey together in the most intimate of terms as Raphael deals with a terminal cancer diagnosis. It’s an unforgettable portrait of love, loss, and the wonders of friendship that will leave you both devastated and dazzled. —L.H.

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Best Mysteries and Thrillers of 2021

APRIL 6, 2021

by Flynn Berry

A poignant and lyrical novel that asks what is worth sacrificing for peace—and provides some answers. Full review >

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Violence and love go hand in hand in this tale of two rough men seeking vengeance for their murdered sons. Full review >

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This cockeyed, suspenseful exploration of roads not taken is a dizzying delight. Full review >

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THRILLER & SUSPENSE

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Scandinavian noir at its noirest. It’s hard, maybe unthinkable, to imagine how Hancock will follow it up. Full review >

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by Zakiya Dalila Harris

A biting social satire–cum-thriller; dark, playful, and brimming with life. Full review >

AUG. 3, 2021

by Stephen King

Murder most foul and mayhem most entertaining. Another worthy page-turner from a protean master. Full review >

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by Sergei Lebedev

A darkly absorbing intellectual thriller by one of Russia's boldest young novelists. Full review >

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A clever, funny mystery peopled with captivating characters that enhance the story at every quirky turn. Full review >

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A textbook one-sitting read whose fiendishly inventive details only intensify its remorseless momentum. Full review >

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An entertaining literary thriller that traces intrigue from the writer’s mind to the latest headlines. Full review >

JULY 20, 2021

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Combines disarming sensitivity to the nuances of the tangled relations among the characters with sledgehammer plotting. Full review >

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by Kaoru Takamura ; translated by Allison Markin Powell & Marie Iida

Takamura’s challenging, genre-confounding epic offers a sweeping view of contemporary Japan in all its complexity. Full review >

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The 23 most popular books of the past year, according to Goodreads members

When you buy through our links, Business Insider may earn an affiliate commission. Learn more

• If you're looking for a great new book, it can be difficult to know where to start.
• The books on this list are the most popular reads among Goodreads members in the past year.
• The titles range from new romances to classics and everything in between.

Because there are nearly infinite books in the world, it can be difficult to know which one to pick up next. When I don't know what to read, I turn to fellow readers for the books they've read and adored, gravitating towards the titles I hear my friends mention over and over again. 

Similarly, the internet can provide plenty of word-of-mouth reviews and rankings. The books on this list come from the most popular Goodreads members picked up in the last year, according to the 2021 Goodreads Reading Challenge (where readers aim to read as many books as they can in one year). Goodreads is the world's largest platform for readers to rate, review, and discover new book recommendations, with over 125 million members sharing their favorite reads.

If you're looking to start off the new year right with a great new read, here are some of the most popular books readers are snagging right now. 

The 23 most popular books right now, according to Goodreads members:

"the midnight library" by matt haig.

Available at Amazon and Bookshop , from $13.29

Nora Seed feels stuck in her life, bound to the choices she made that she still isn't sure were right. When Nora is ready to leave it all behind, she finds herself in a peculiar library, where each of the infinite books offers a portal to a parallel world, showing her all the many ways her life could have been slightly or drastically different, had she made other decisions.

"The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue" by V.E. Schwab

Available at Amazon and Bookshop , from $16.19

" The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue " is a genre-bending fantasy book about a young woman named Addie who, in 1714, makes a bargain with a dark god and becomes cursed to be forgotten by everyone she meets. Addie's story spans three centuries and countless countries — until she meets a boy in New York City in 2014 who can finally remember her.

"The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo" by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Available at Amazon and Bookshop , from $9.42

Evelyn Hugo was an iconic Hollywood actress, just as notoriously remembered for her seven marriages as she was for her movie performances. Finally ready to tell her story, Evelyn Hugo chooses a little-known journalist named Monique, who goes to Evelyn's luxurious apartment to hear the truth behind Evelyn's lifetime of friendships, ambitions, and many loves.

"To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee

Available at Amazon and Bookshop , from $7.19

Considered one of the greatest novels of all time , " To Kill a Mockingbird " is an unforgettable historical fiction novel from 1960 that follows young Jean Louise Finch during a time of great racial inequality in her community. Her father, Atticus Finch, is a lawyer defending a Black man wrongly accused of a terrible crime as he faces a community desperate for a guilty conviction.

"The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Available at Amazon and Bookshop , from $12.44

" The Great Gatsby " is a classic about the wealthy Jay Gatsby, set during the Jazz Age in New York. When Nick Carraway moved to Long Island to find a job in New York City as a bond salesman, he meets his next-door neighbor, Jay Gatsby, who throws extravagant parties and is constantly in pursuit of the stunning Daisy Buchanan.

"Where the Crawdads Sing" by Delia Owens

Available at Amazon and Bookshop , from $9.98

Kya Clark is known to most as the "Marsh Girl," running barefoot and wild in her quiet fishing village, having attended only one day of school. When a popular young boy is murdered, Kya's story unravels as the town accuses her of causing his death.

"1984" by George Orwell

Available at Amazon and Bookshop , from $7.48

" 1984 " is an iconic science fiction novel that imagines a dystopian future ruled by a totalitarian state, perpetually at war and at the mercy of strong propaganda. Winston Smith works at the Ministry of Truth, rewriting historical records to conform to the state's version of events while secretly dreaming of rebellion and imagining what life would be like without Big Brother.

"Pride and Prejudice" by Jane Austen

Available at Amazon and Bookshop , from $5.47

" Pride and Prejudice " is a cherished, classic Jane Austen romance between Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy. Loved for their unique relationship comprised of witty banter and flirting, Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy fall for each other in this story of class, wealth, and the duty of marriage.

"The Song of Achilles" by Madeline Miller

Available at Amazon and Bookshop , from $10.35

In this Greek mythology-inspired tale , Patroclus is an awkward young prince, exiled by his father because of a misunderstanding when he meets the legendary Achilles. As the two form a unique relationship, Helen of Sparta is kidnapped and Achilles, along with all the heroes in Greece, joins the cause against Troy as they face a choice between love and fate.

"The Vanishing Half" by Brit Bennett

Available at Amazon and Bookshop , from $15.70

Though the Vignes twin sisters grew up identical in their small, southern community, their lives split in young adulthood as one sister now lives in the same community with her Black daughter while the other passes for white in a white community. A beautiful story of influence and decisions emerges as their lives intersect over generations when their daughters finally meet.

"The Guest List" by Lucy Foley

Available at Amazon and Bookshop , from $13.09

Set on a remote island off the coast of Ireland, a fascinating group of friends and family converge to celebrate the marriage of a rising television star and an ambitious magazine publisher. When someone is found dead, everyone becomes a suspect with their own strange and mysterious potential motives.

"People We Meet on Vacation" by Emily Henry

Alex and Poppy became best friends on a happenstance summer road trip in college, spurring a tradition of summer trips together — until two years ago, when everything changed between them. Though they haven't spoken since, Poppy desperately needs her best friend back and reaches out to Alex to see if they can try to rekindle their friendship in this adorable romance.

"It Ends with Us" by Colleen Hoover

Available at Amazon and Bookshop , from $12.99

Ryle Kincaid is a stunning, assertive neurosurgeon with a soft spot for only Lily, who can't believe her luck that there's a spark between them. As the two fall into a passionate relationship, Lily can't help but think of her first love, Atlas. As her relationship with Ryle becomes more and more complicated, Atlas reappears and further complicates everything.

"The Four Winds" by Kristin Hannah

Available at Amazon and Bookshop , from $14

" The Four Winds " is an award-winning historical fiction novel that illuminates the Dust Bowl era of the Great Depression, where farmers faced deadly droughts that often forced them from their land. To learn more about why we love this book, you can check out our review here.

"Malibu Rising" by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Available at Amazon and Bookshop , from $16.80

Famous surfer Nina Riva is preparing to host her iconic, annual party with her equally famous siblings, though she doesn't know the party will be literally up in flames by morning. As each sibling's story unravels, this historical fiction novel traverses from the party in 1983 to the Rivas' childhood, revealing long-buried secrets and spinning the present entirely out of control.

"The Silent Patient" by Alex Michaelides

Alicia Berenson had a seemingly perfect life with a painting career, a beautiful home, and a photographer husband until one night her husband returned home and Alicia shot him five times in the face and never spoke again. As Theo Faber, a criminal psychotherapist, attempts to work with Alicia to get her to talk, his own twisted motives emerge in this gripping psychological thriller with many versions of the truth.

"Anxious People" by Fredrik Backman

Available at Amazon and Bookshop , from $13.12

When a bank robbery goes terribly wrong, eight strangers find themselves being held hostage in an apartment with more in common than they imagined. Each anxious for their own reasons, the tensions mount as the police surround the apartment in this thought-provoking story of compassion where all the pieces slowly fit together.

"Red, White & Royal Blue" by Casey McQuiston

Available at Amazon and Bookshop , from $9.97

First Son Alex Claremont-Diaz has a long-running nemesis: Prince Henry. When the tabloids catch the two in a confrontation, the plan for damage control includes staging a fake friendship between the boys in this fun, fan-favorite Queer romance.

"Normal People" by Sally Rooney

Available at Amazon and Bookshop , from $9.33

Connell and Marianne pretend not to know each other in school, dropping the facade when Connell picks his mother up from a housekeeping job at Marianne's house. The two form a peculiar connection, drifting apart and back together over the years in this story about class, friendship, and human nature.

"The Hobbit, or There and Back Again" by J.R.R. Tolkien

Available at Amazon and Bookshop , from $12.92

Originally written for the author's children, " The Hobbit " is a beloved prequel to the " Lord of the Rings " series where readers are introduced to the fantasy world of Middle-earth. When Bilbo Baggins is tricked into hosting a party, the wizard Gandalf convinces him to join him and a group of dwarves on an adventure to retrieve a treasure guarded by a dragon, igniting an epic tale adored by readers of all ages.

"Beach Read" by Emily Henry

Available at Amazon and Bookshop , from $7.35

January Andrews is a bestselling romance author, plagued with writer's block and staying at a beach house to try and write a new novel by her editor's deadline. When she meets the next-door literary fiction writer named Augustus, they decide to switch genres in an attempt to escape their creative ruts.

"The Last Thing He Told Me" by Laura Dave

Available at Amazon and Bookshop , from $13.50

Before Hannah's new husband, Owen, disappears, he manages to slip her a note reading "protect her," which she knows refers to his 16-year-old daughter, Bailey. When the FBI arrests Owen's boss and comes to their home unannounced, Hannah and Bailey realize Owen isn't who they thought and must uncover the truth behind his disappearance while building a future together of their own.

"The Duke and I" by Julia Quinn

Available at Amazon and Bookshop , from $8.27

" The Duke and I " is the first Regency-era romance in the " Bridgerton " series, about Daphne Bridgerton who agrees to a fake courtship with Simon Basset, the Duke of Hastings. While Daphne needs her own prospects to soar and the Duke intends to avoid marriage altogether, their plan seems to be working perfectly — until the two can't deny the spark that seems to be igniting between them. If you love this book already, check out our list of other Julia Quinn novels to find your next great romance read. 

• Main content

The Best Freida McFadden Books Ranked, According To Readers

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Whether you're super-active on "BookTok" — a corner of TikTok devoted to literary pursuits — or just on multiple waitlists at your local library, you're probably aware of the name Freida McFadden. McFadden, who is a licensed and practicing physician and was born in New York, has written dozens upon dozens of intense thriller books within just the past few years alone. According to her website's official bio , "​[McFadden] lives with her family and black cat in a centuries-old three-story home overlooking the ocean, with staircases that creak and moan with each step, and nobody could hear you if you scream. Unless you scream really loudly, maybe."

This pithy, clever little personal note illustrates McFadden's work pretty perfectly, as the author specializes in disturbing, gripping, and extraordinarily dark stories about murder, intrigue, and madness. So which of her books are the very best? Looper combed reviews on Goodreads and Amazon to figure out which McFadden books are most beloved by her readers — and here are the top five best, although unlike these movies, they're not too disturbing to actually finish .

5. The Teacher (2024)

One of Freida McFadden's most recent releases — as of this writing — is also one of her very best. A recent champion on the Kindle eBook charts, "The Teacher"  — which even beat out books by the perennially popular auhor Colleen Hoover , another dominating force in literary fiction — tells the story of Eve, who teaches math at the local high school, Caseham, and loves pretty much everything about her job. Plus, she's married to Nate, who  also teaches at Caseham and is particularly handsome, which makes him an object of desire even amongst the young students. Unfortunately for Eve, she has to deal with one snag in her perfect life: Addie, a student she views as a troublemaker who was caught in the middle of a dangerous sex scandal the previous year. Addie is now in Eve's class, and Eve slowly grows suspicious of Addie's true motives.

"The Teacher" has a strong rating on both Goodreads and Amazon , and we won't spoil the ending here ... but it'll keep you guessing until the last few pages, and then leave you stunned. If you have Kindle Unlimited, "The Teacher" is free to read through the subscription.

4. The Locked Door (2021)

One of Freida McFadden's earlier efforts has, apparently, stood the test of time. "The Locked Door," another excellent thriller from the author, ranks fourth on our list, tells a horrifying story of generational trauma, abuse, and murder. As a child, protagonist Nora Davis has no idea that while she happily resides in her family home, her father is kidnapping and hurting women in the house's basement. He's eventually arrested and put in prison, and years later, Nora has left that part of her life behind ... or so she thinks. When a murder victim surfaces who bears the same injuries her father once inflicted upon women, Nora begins to worry about her own secrets.

McFadden is an expert at coming up with the most diabolical, devasting plots — complete with endless twists and turns — and "The Locked Door" is yet another example of that. From Nora's horrifying past to her frightening future, viewers will be taken on an intense ride ... and they won't believe where they end up, based on the positive buzz on Goodreads and Amazon . "The Locked Door" is also available on Kindle Unlimited.

3. The Inmate (2022)

Knowing someone's dangerous secrets can be a terrifying thing — which is exactly the dilemma that Brooke Sullivan faces in Freida McFadden's 2022 thriller "The Inmate." It's frightening enough that Brooke is set to start a job at a maximum security prison, working as a nurse practitioner for any number of violent inmates, but one in particular presents particular danger. That inmate? Shane Nelson, known for being particularly impulsive and for his constant attacks, who just so happens to be Brooke's ex-boyfriend; not only that, but he's  only behind bars because Brooke put him there. The two were an item in high school until Shane, a star quarterback, was accused of committing  multiple murders, and Brooke was able to testify against him. Now, he's waiting for as she begins her new job — and who knows what he'll do.

Mixing together a dangerous setting — which she also explores in books like "Ward D," which takes place in a high-security psychiatric ward — and long-held secrets is definitely this author's specialty, and the book has high ratings on Amazon and Goodreads for a reason. Like many of McFadden's other books, it's available on Kindle Unlimited.

2. Never Lie (2022)

When happy newlyweds Tricia and Ethan decide to go looking for their perfect house, their realtor shows them something unexpected: a massive, isolated mansion once occupied by psychiatrist Dr. Adrienne Hale. Years before the couple visits, Adrienne vanished from her home during a massive blizzard and was never seen again — and while Ethan is completely unfazed by the house's past, Tricia has her suspicions about what really happened to the doctor. It's then that Tricia discovers a massive number of cassettes in a secret room tucked away in the home, which detail every single session Adrienne ever had with every single patient ... and Tricia decides that if she listens to as many as possible, she might be able to figure out exactly what happened.

It's safe to say you'll  never really guess how "Never Lie" shakes out, since this book keeps both Tricia and the reader guessing for the entire experience. It's such a gripping story that it's number two on this list based on its Goodreads and Amazon reviews, and, once again, it's available to borrow on Kindle Unlimited.

1. The Housemaid & The Housemaid's Secret, tied (2022 & 2023)

When it comes to Freida McFadden's work, there's a reason that "The Housemaid" remains her most beloved and well-known book; it's easily her best work. The story focuses on Millie, a down-on-her-luck woman living in her car who's trying to outrun her past who gets an incredible opportunity when Nina Winchester, a wealthy woman with a huge home, asks to hire her as a housemaid. Millie, offered a room of her own and a stable place to live, is absolutely thrilled, but things start to break down somewhat when she begins working at the house. Nina is a difficult boss, to say the least, while her husband Andrew Winchester seems incredibly kind at first. As time goes on, Millie discovers some horrifying secrets about the Winchesters ... and she can only turn to the groundskeeper, Enzo, for help.

The first book was a smashing success — and is reportedly getting an on-screen adaptation — so naturally, McFadden released a sequel, "The Housemaid's Secret," in 2023, which picks up shortly where the first novel left off. (A third book, "The Housemaid is Watching," is expected later in 2024.) In the second installment, Millie ends up working for another family, the Garricks, but immediately notices that the wife is conspicuously absent ... and her husband Douglas Garrick might be a violent man. Once again, Millie has to ensure that the vulnerable person in the house is protected ... by any means necessary. "The Housemaid" has excellent reviews on Amazon and Goodreads , and "The Housemaid's Secret" followed in its footsteps with a high rating on Goodreads and Amazon as well. As with the rest, both of McFadden's "Housemaid" books are on Kindle Unlimited.

How did we determine Freida McFadden's best books?

So how did we determine which Freida McFadden books would reign supreme? We checked reviews on two major aggregators — Goodreads, which serves as a social media hub for readers across the world, and Amazon, which began its life  only selling books and is still one of the most popular places to buy both physical books and Kindle books. When it comes to McFadden's work, people have plenty to say, whether they're obsessed with her work or have some critiques here and there, so it's easy to determine which of the prolific writer's books are most popular — and well-regarded.

McFadden's books may not be for everyone; sensitive readers might have trouble with how unflinchingly dark her approach can be at times, so it can also be vital to check any trigger warnings before picking up one of her novels. Still, you might find yourself totally enthralled — especially if you choose one of these five books.

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The Cellist: A Novel (Gabriel Allon Book 21) Kindle Edition

#1 New York Times Bestseller

“The pace of “The Cel­list” never slack­ens as its ac­tion vol­leys from Zurich to Tel Aviv to Paris and be­yond. Mr. Silva tells his story with zest, wit and su­perb tim­ing, and he en­gi­neers enough sur­prises to star­tle even the most at­ten­tive reader.“— Wall Street Journal

From Daniel Silva, the internationally acclaimed #1 New York Times bestselling author, comes a timely and explosive new thriller featuring art restorer and legendary spy Gabriel Allon.

Viktor Orlov had a longstanding appointment with death. Once Russia’s richest man, he now resides in splendid exile in London, where he has waged a tireless crusade against the authoritarian kleptocrats who have seized control of the Kremlin. His mansion in Chelsea’s exclusive Cheyne Walk is one of the most heavily protected private dwellings in London. Yet somehow, on a rainy summer evening, in the midst of a global pandemic, Russia’s vengeful president finally manages to cross Orlov’s name off his kill list.

Before him was the receiver from his landline telephone, a half-drunk glass of red wine, and a stack of documents.…

The documents are contaminated with a deadly nerve agent. The Metropolitan Police determine that they were delivered to Orlov’s home by one of his employees, a prominent investigative reporter from the anti-Kremlin Moskovskaya Gazeta . And when the reporter slips from London hours after the killing, MI6 concludes she is a Moscow Center assassin who has cunningly penetrated Orlov’s formidable defenses.

But Gabriel Allon, who owes his very life to Viktor Orlov, believes his friends in British intelligence are dangerously mistaken. His desperate search for the truth will take him from London to Amsterdam and eventually to Geneva, where a private intelligence service controlled by a childhood friend of the Russian president is using KGB-style “active measures” to undermine the West from within. Known as the Haydn Group, the unit is plotting an unspeakable act of violence that will plunge an already divided America into chaos and leave Russia unchallenged. Only Gabriel Allon, with the help of a brilliant young woman employed by the world’s dirtiest bank, can stop it.

Elegant and sophisticated, provocative and daring, The Cellist explores one of the preeminent threats facing the West today—the corrupting influence of dirty money wielded by a revanchist and reckless Russia. It is at once a novel of hope and a stark warning about the fragile state of democracy. And it proves once again why Daniel Silva is regarded as his generation’s finest writer of suspense and international intrigue.

• Book 21 of 24 Gabriel Allon
• Print length 480 pages
• Language English
• Sticky notes On Kindle Scribe
• Publisher Harper
• Publication date July 13, 2021
• File size 3763 KB
• Page Flip Enabled
• Word Wise Enabled
• Enhanced typesetting Enabled
• See all details

• Next 3 for you in this series $36.66
• All 23 available for you in this series $213.11

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From the Publisher

Editorial Reviews

“The pace of The Cel­list never slack­ens as its ac­tion vol­leys from Zurich to Tel Aviv to Paris and be­yond. Mr. Silva tells his story with zest, wit and su­perb tim­ing, and he en­gi­neers enough sur­prises to star­tle even the most at­ten­tive reader.”  — Wall Street Journal

“Expertly crafted …. The best spy story of the year.” — Bob Woodward

“This book has a twist that is sure to give you chills.” — Today Show

“Few reading experiences bring me more joy than opening up the new Gabriel Allon novel every summer.”  — CrimeReads

“Akin to a diabolical game of chess, The Cellist is a sophisticated voyage through the world of concert halls, art museums, lavish receptions and the occasional chase scene—all delivered with Silva’s crafty dry wit and innuendo.” — Bookreporter.com

About the Author

Daniel Silva is the award-winning, #1  New York Times bestselling author of The Unlikely Spy, The Mark of the Assassin, The Marching Season, The Kill Artist, The English Assassin, The Confessor, A Death in Vienna, Prince of Fire, The Messenger, The Secret Servant, Moscow Rules, The Defector, The Rembrandt Affair, Portrait of a Spy, The Fallen Angel, The English Girl, The Heist, The English Spy, The Black Widow, House of Spies, The Other Woman, The New Girl, The Order, and The Collector . He is best known for his long-running thriller series starring spy and art restorer Gabriel Allon. Silva’s books are critically acclaimed bestsellers around the world and have been translated into more than thirty languages. He lives with his wife, television journalist Jamie Gangel, and their twins, Lily and Nicholas.

Product details

• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B08L3NB7FL
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Harper (July 13, 2021)
• Publication date ‏ : ‎ July 13, 2021
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• File size ‏ : ‎ 3763 KB
• Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
• Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
• Print length ‏ : ‎ 480 pages
• Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ 0008280754
• #108 in Suspense Action Fiction
• #261 in Espionage Thrillers (Kindle Store)
• #302 in Historical Thrillers (Books)

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The Cellist: A Novel (Gabriel Allon Book 21)

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About the author

Daniel silva.

Daniel Silva is the award-winning, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Unlikely Spy, The Mark of the Assassin, The Marching Season, The Kill Artist, The English Assassin, The Confessor, A Death in Vienna, Prince of Fire, The Messenger, The Secret Servant, Moscow Rules, The Defector, The Rembrandt Affair, Portrait of a Spy, The Fallen Angel, The English Girl, The Heist, and The English Spy. His books are published in more than thirty countries and are bestsellers around the world. He serves on the United States Holocaust Memorial Council and lives in Florida with his wife, CNN special correspondent Jamie Gangel, and their two children, Lily and Nicholas.

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Best Samsung Galaxy deals: S24, Buds, Watches and more

Samsung’s Galaxy lineup is made up of several different types of devices, and if you’re in the market for some savings, you’ll often find Samsung Galaxy tech among the best headphone deals , the best smartwatch deals , the best tablet deals , and the best phone deals . With so many different devices among the Galaxy lineup, and with so many Samsung Galaxy deals out there for the picking, we rounded up what we feel are the best Samsung Galaxy deals to shop right now. Reading onward you’ll find discounts on some of the best tablets , best smartwatches , and best wireless earbuds the Samsung Galaxy lineup has to offer, as well as some impressive discounts on Galaxy phones.

• Samsung Galaxy Buds 2 — $97, was $150
• Samsung Galaxy Buds 2 Pro — $170, was $230
• Samsung Galaxy S24 — as low as $265, was $860
• Samsung Galaxy Watch 5 Pro — $340, was $450
• Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 5 — as low as $500, was $1,000
• Samsung Galaxy Tab S8 Ultra (128GB) — as low as $565, was $1,100
• Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra (512GB) — as low as $670, was $1,420
• Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 5 — as low as $1,000, was $1,800

Samsung Galaxy Buds 2 — $97, was $150

If you’re looking for headphone deals but you want an alternative to Apple’s AirPods , you should consider the Samsung Galaxy Buds 2 . The wireless earbuds have great battery life that’s made even better with an included charging case. While some of the other Galaxy Buds out there include the Galaxy Buds Live, Galaxy Buds Pro, and Galaxy Buds+ , but with the Galaxy Buds 2’s active noise-cancelation you can block out unwanted sounds and keep your focus on whatever you’re working on, watching, or listening to. You can also control the headphones with touch controls on each earbud, and they connect easily to any Bluetooth device.

Samsung Galaxy Buds 2 Pro — $170, was $230

The Galaxy Buds 2 Pro are the high-end model of Samsung’s Galaxy Buds earbuds. They make great competition for the best wireless earbuds even if they don’t make everyone’s list, and with their Intelligent Active Noise-Cancelation technology they compare well with the best noise-canceling headphones . The Galaxy Buds 2 Pro produce high quality audio whether you’re listening to music, watching movies, or talking on the phone, and they pair easily with any Bluetooth device.

• Match with Mom: Samsung Galaxy Watch 6 has a BOGO deal for Mother’s Day
• Best smartwatch deals: Samsung, Google, Apple, Fitbit, and Garmin
• Best Samsung deals: The Galaxy S24 Ultra is up to $750 off

Samsung Galaxy S24 — as low as $265, was $860

The Samsung Galaxy S24 is Samsung’s newest flagship smartphone. It’s a great phone to shop if you’re looking for the newest tech and software you can get in a smartphone, but it’s also a great phone to shop if you’re looking for some of the best phone deals currently taking place. The S24 features Galaxy AI to help with chatting, searching, translating, and even photography. The camera system features a 3x zoom that has AI assistance, and the S24’s display checks in at 6.2-inches and Full HD resolution.

Samsung Galaxy Watch 5 Pro — $340, was $450

The Samsung Galaxy Watch 5 Pro is a great smartwatch to consider if you’re hoping to look good on the trail and out on the town. It’s an all-purpose smartwatch that has plenty of tracking features but also maintains a refined visual style. It’s capable of tracking sleep patterns and helping you improve your overall sleep quality, as well as track your outdoor adventures whether you’re running, swimming, rowing, or many other different forms of activity.

Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 5 — as low as $500, was $1,000

Samsung has really nailed down the design of the horizontally folding phone with the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 5 . It offers supreme portability when folded, yet doesn’t sacrifice a full-screen phone experience. It has a ton of modern smartphone features such as an impressive camera array and the ability to make hands-free video calls.

Samsung Galaxy Tab S8 Ultra (128GB) — as low as $565, was $1,100

The Samsung Galaxy Tab S8 Ultra is not only a recommended choice if you’re searching for tablet deals , but also for laptop deals . That’s because the tablet can also function as a laptop through its separately sold keyboard cover, and it works with Samsung DeX if you want the full desktop computer experience. The device’s 14.6-inch Super AMOLED touchscreen with 2960 x 1848 resolution and a 120Hz refresh rate works great for both forms, while performance won’t be lacking through its Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 processor. The Galaxy Tab S8 Ultra comes with the S Pen, which is a stylus that will serve as an additional input option, and it supports microSD cards up to 1TB for additional storage space. If you like listening to music while working, your favorite playlists will sound amazing on the tablet’s quad speakers tuned by AKG and Dolby Atmos .

Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra (512GB) — as low as $670, was $1,420

The Galaxy S24 smartphone lineup has been some fierce competition for Apple’s iPhone lineup, with the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra coming in on the larger end of the lineup’s spectrum and making some fierce competition for the Apple iPhone 15 Pro Max . The S24 Ultra offers some of the most impressive hardware you can find in a smartphone, as its larger sizes allows more room for the camera system, a powerful processor, and a larger battery that can last all day on a single charge. With its larger size comes a larger display, and it’s got some major visibility upgrades, with Corning Gorilla Armor that reduces reflections and improves clarity even in direct sunlight.

Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 5 — as low as $1,000, was $1,800

The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 5 is a premium foldable phone and we consider it among the best folding phones . It comes in at a higher price point than most smartphones, but it features a range of new tech that makes it worth it. The camera system allows you to take hands-free photos using Flex Mode, and for even more clarity an Auto Frame Rate feature sets the optimal exposure so you video stays bright from start to finish. The Z Fold 5 is super durable and gets great battery life, even with the ability for multitasking with three windows open on the screen at one time.

More Unmissable Deals

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• Best refurbished MacBook deals: Get a MacBook Air for $140 and more
• Best refurbished laptop deals: How to find cheap used computers
• Cheapest Prices

Whether for work, play, or anything in between, a new tablet can make a nice addition to your tech lineup. They’re perfect for kids and professionals, and most brands have something at a price point for everyone. Tablets also make some great tech for some savings, as even the best tablets often see a discount. There are a lot of tablet deals out there, and among them are some of the best Samsung tablet deals, best iPad deals, and best Surface Laptop and Surface Pro deals we’ve seen. Below you’ll find what we feel are the best tablet deals to shop right now, as well as some information on why each might best suit your tablet needs. Samsung Galaxy Tab A7 Lite (32GB) -- $90, was $160

If you need an Android tablet for simple tasks like browsing the internet and watching streaming shows, the affordable Samsung Galaxy Tab A7 Lite may be enough for you. Its 8.7-inch screen is decent with WXGA+ resolution, while maintaining portability so you can easily hold the tablet in one hand. Its internal storage is limited at 32GB, but you can expand it by up to 1TB using a microSD card. For the clumsy ones, the Samsung Galaxy Tab A7 Lite is perfect for you because it's protected by a sturdy metal frame.

While the openness of the Android ecosystem means there’s no shortage of options to choose in terms of smartwatches, Samsung’s Galaxy Watch family leads the pack by a wide margin.

The Galaxy Watch 6 marks the wearable’s fifth generation (there was never a Galaxy Watch 2), which means the line has had plenty of time to evolve and mature. Samsung’s decision to embrace Wear OS two years ago and expand the lineup in new directions with an adventurous “Pro” model and the return of the much-loved rotating bezel means that there’s now a Galaxy Watch for just about everyone.

One of the best smartwatches can add a lot to both your fitness routine and your day-to-day style, and the Apple Watch lineup is one people turn to frequently. The Apple Watch Series 9 is the current most recent release, but the Apple Watch Series 8 is still plenty capable, and it makes for great savings because it’s a generation old at this point. There are some Apple Watch 8 deals currently taking place, and we’ve tallied them below for your saving pleasure. So whether you’re starting a new fitness routine or cleaning up your wardrobe, don’t hesitate to shop the best Apple Watch 8 deals while they last. Apple Watch Series 8 (GPS + Cellular, 45mm) (refurbished) — $255, was $273

This is the Apple Watch Series 8 45mm size, which is the largest you’ll find in an Apple Watch 8. It also has built-in GPS and the ability to connect to your cellular plan for connectivity anywhere you get a signal. This is a refurbished model of the Apple Watch 8. Shopping refurbished is a great way to land some savings, and you can do so knowing this watch is backed by Amazon’s renewal standards. It will still have all of the great features people love about the Apple Watch Series 8, including advanced health features and access to Apple’s software ecosystem.

The Book Review’s Best Books Since 2000

Looking for your next great read? We’ve got 3,228. Explore the best fiction and nonfiction fiction nonfiction Short stories Historical fiction Poetry Thrillers Science fiction Mysteries Experimental fiction Horror Speculative fiction Satire Fantasy Romance Graphic novels Climate fiction Fiction Anthologies History Biographies Memoirs Science Narrative nonfiction Essays Investigative reporting Music Religion Sociology Politics True crime Sports Travel Art Letters Philosophy Food Media Current Events Climate change Nonfiction Anthologies from 2000 – 2023 2023 2022 2021 2020 2019 2018 2017 2016 2015 2014 2013 2012 2011 2010 2009 2008 2007 2006 2005 2004 2003 2002 2001 2000 chosen by our editors.

The 10 Best Books of 2023

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The complicated, generous life  of Paul Auster, who died on April 30 , yielded a body of work of staggering scope and variety .

“Real Americans,” a new novel by Rachel Khong , follows three generations of Chinese Americans as they all fight for self-determination in their own way .

“The Chocolate War,” published 50 years ago, became one of the most challenged books in the United States. Its author, Robert Cormier, spent years fighting attempts to ban it .

Joan Didion’s distinctive prose and sharp eye were tuned to an outsider’s frequency, telling us about ourselves in essays that are almost reflexively skeptical. Here are her essential works .

Each week, top authors and critics join the Book Review’s podcast to talk about the latest news in the literary world. Listen here .

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Best Android apps in 2024

There are millions of apps on the Google Play Store, but these are the ones we think deserve a spot on your Android phone.

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Essential apps, customization apps, audio and video apps, communication apps, productivity apps, reading apps, sports apps.

The Google Play Store has millions of apps and games for you to download and make the most of your Android phone . Of course, not all the apps are worth downloading and installing on your phone, as most of them are duds that don't necessarily add any value to your smartphone experience. If you are new to the world of Android and don't know where to begin, then you've come to the right place. Read on to find a list highlighting the best Android apps across different categories like essential, customization, audio, and video apps, and more.

You'll eventually have your very own list of favorites once you get used to Android and find a footing, but the ones I've mentioned in the collection below will help you get started. I've included a good mix of both new and older yet popular apps in this list, so you get a pretty good mix overall. You'll also find both free and paid apps on the list, so be sure to explore the full list to check out all your options, complete with alternatives. Let's dive in!

Best Android games in 2023

I'll start with some essential apps for improving your Android experience, like VPN apps and password managers . These apps don't exactly fit into a particular category I'll mention later on, but they are very useful and are sure to improve your overall experience of using the phone. From easier file management to allowing you to automate your entire Android experience, these are definitely worth a look.

Solid Explorer

Many Android phones — including Google's Pixel phones — come with a default file explorer these days. But if you want an advanced file explorer that lets you do more than just browse the files on your device, then consider checking out the Solid Explorer. There's a lot to like about this particular file explorer, including its support for FTP, SFPT, WebDav, SMB/CIFS, and even cloud services. Solid Explorer also features Material Design, and it works very well on almost all devices out there. It comes with a 14-day free trial, after which you'll have to pay a one-time fee to use it, but it's worth considering if you happen to be a power user who needs more than just a basic file browser.

If you're looking for a reliable password manager to keep all your passwords in one place, then you might want to check out Bitwarden. It's a no-frills password manager that lets you access all of its core features without paying a fee. This includes some must-have features like a secure password generator and multi-device syncing. Alternatively, you can pay for the Premium tier to access additional features such as a built-in two-factor authenticator, file sharing, and more. The best part of all? It's open-source. Who doesn't love some good old open-source software?

Tasker is one of the most complex applications out there, as it has a bit of a learning curve to it. But once you get a grasp of it, you'll quickly realize that it's one of the most powerful applications that lets you automate a lot of things on your device. It can automate almost every aspect of your smartphone usage and have it work the way you want it to. This will reduce a lot of manual input and repetitive behavior by setting automatic actions to the parameters and conditions you want. It's also a Swiss tool of sorts and serves as a workaround for adding amazing smartphone functionality. If you can think of it, Tasker can probably pull it off. It's a paid app on the Play Store, but you can get it for free with the Google Play Pass.

There are tons of customization apps on the Google Play Store that lets you change everything from your phone's homescreen to app icons. I am highlighting three of the best and most popular customization apps out there.

The Backdrops app is one of the best tools for customizing your smartphone and making it truly yours. It's a wallpaper app that gives you a ton of options to choose from. One of the best things about this particular application is that the wallpapers are curated into different categories, and you can set them directly from the app. Aside from some "premium" collections, the app is free to use so that you can get a variety of high-quality wallpapers. Changing the wallpaper goes a long way in customizing the look of your Android homescreen , and Backdrops is easily one of the best places to find some good options.

Nova Launcher

Nova Launcher is easily one of the oldest and most popular applications on this list. It has gotten better over the years and now comes with a host of features that let you take Android customization to a whole new level. Some noteworthy features of the Nova Launcher include the ability to back up and restore your homescreen setups, and theme icons, customize the app drawer, app dock, and more. Most of the Nova Launcher features are available for free, so you can put on your creative hat and go crazy on the customization without spending any money. Paying a one-time premium fee will get you features like gesture controls, unread count badges for apps, icon swipe actions, and more.

Zedge is yet another application that you may have heard of in the past. It's essentially a place to grab some good notification tones and alarms for your device. If you're one of the few users who still download and customize those aspects of your phone, then Zedge is a good app to check out. The app also offers other elements like wallpapers to theme your device, so I'd say it's a pretty good app with plenty of customization options. Zedge is a free application that lets you pay for some premium features, so be sure to check it out.

There's no shortage of music and video streaming applications on the Google Play Store, but I wanted to highlight some unique options for you to check out. These are my top picks for audio and video apps right now.

Plex is easily one of the top picks in this section, as it's an all-around media center app that lets you stream both video and audio on the go. The app lets you access your Plex server on your Android device, meaning you can carry your library of media files with you everywhere. All you have to do is install a Plex server on your own computer to stream from it when you're on the move. It comes with a ton of other useful features that'll take your streaming experience to a whole new level. You will, however, have to subscribe to Plex Pass or make a one-time purchase to unlock all the Plex features on your Android phone, so keep that in mind.

VLC for Android

VLC is probably the best app for watching downloaded videos that exist in your phone's storage. It's a pretty big deal on a PC, and it's also available for Android with the same feature set. VLC supports playing a wide variety of videos, an endless number of formats (no matter how ancient or non-standard they are), and closed captions (if you have a separate subtitle file). What's more, it's completely free and has no ads to hurt your media experience.

Poweramp is very similar to VLC, except this one is for audio instead of video files. This is one of the best apps for playing music files that are locally stored on your smartphone. It's probably not going to win any awards for UI design, but Poweramp focuses on function over form, and it works as advertised without any issues. It has a powerful audio engine with support for hi-res audio, a handful of music formats, a built-in equalizer, internal 64-bit processing, and a bunch of tweaks, so you can make sure your music sounds the way you want it to sound. You can have Poweramp for a $4.99 one-time purchase, and it's definitely worth it if you prefer sideloading your own music instead of relying on a streaming service.

You're probably familiar with a lot of communication apps like WhatsApp and Telegram, so I wanted to highlight some different options to consider. Check out the recommendations below if you want to try something new to stay in touch with your friends and your loved ones:

Signal is your best bet if you care about both security and privacy. It uses the same encryption protocol as WhatsApp, so you get the same end-to-end encryption you'd get there. Signal, however, is backed by a non-profit foundation instead of a "big tech" company, and they also have a less invasive privacy policy. It's definitely worth a look if that's something you're interested in, although you also have to bear in mind that it has considerably fewer users than Telegram or WhatsApp.

Textra is easily one of Android's best and most reliable texting apps. So if you text a lot, then this is an excellent messaging app to have on your phone. It's highly customizable and comes with a lot of themes to customize. In terms of features, you get chat heads, scheduled messages, the ability to copy part of a message, group messaging, and blacklisting. Textra is considerably better than many other SMS apps shipped by OEMs, so give it a shot in case you're looking to replace the stock SMS app on your phone.

As you probably already know, Discord is slowly becoming a popular player in the social media space. While originally geared towards the gaming community, it has gotten much bigger through 2020 and has started to host communities (called "servers" inside the app) of all kinds. The app is extremely flexible, allowing for voice and video calls similar to Google Meet. You can also create separate channels on the fly or even adds bots to your server to add various functionalities.

While a smartphone can't replace a fully-fledged computer for productivity, there's still a lot you can do on your phone when you're on the move. There are tons of applications out there that'll let you get a lot of things done on your phone, and here are the ones that are worth considering:

Evernote is a powerful note-taking app that'll help you organize your important notes across different platforms. This app lets you save all kinds of notes, including text, images, audio, or even a mix of them, and make them available across multiple platforms. One of the best things about Evernote is that it features optical character recognition, which makes the text in images searchable. This comes in handy if you happen to save a lot of images as your notes and need to copy text from them to your device.

Business Calendar 2 Planner

A good calendar app goes a long way in helping you stay organized, which is why I believe you should consider downloading Business Calendar 2. It's a powerful calendar app that acts as your complete personal organizer, giving you features of a calendar, schedule planner, and task organizer.

Spark is one of the best email apps out there that comes with a lot of awesome features. It can intelligently prioritize your emails, be smart about notifications, and even allow you to collaborate with your team over emails. Some other noteworthy features of this particular email client include intelligent search, quick replies, email scheduling, snoozing emails, and more.

Dedicated e-readers are, for the most part, not necessary anymore for people that like to store digital copies of their books. While dedicated e-readers still have their own set of advantages, you can grab any smartphone or tablet and have a very similar experience to e-readers. It is, however, important to pick the right apps, and I believe the ones mentioned below will help you access all of your content easily and painlessly and discover new books online.

Amazon Kindle

Kindle was formerly just a lineup of e-readers from Amazon, but there's now a Kindle app for Android devices that gives you the same functionality without having an e-reader. This app gives you access to Amazon's extensive library of books, comics, newspapers, and magazines and allows you to read what you want at any given moment easily. Some of them also have Audible narration if you're more into hearing than reading, and you can explore several genres, new releases, and more within the app.

If you prefer sideloading e-books to your phone manually instead of relying on a service like Kindle, then you might want to check out Lithium. This app will let you read the e-books that are locally stored on your phone. It's built based on Material Design guidelines and allows you to read e-books saved on EPUB files. It automatically detects which e-book you're reading, allows you to highlight, add notes to books, change to night/sepia themes for easier reading, and more. It's free of ads, which is great for an uninterrupted reading experience. You can also choose to pay a one-time fee to purchase the Pro version of the app and get some additional functionalities, custom themes, more highlight colors, etc.

Feedly is a bit different from other recommendations in this category. It won't let you read e-books, but it allows you to follow news websites and blogs to read in one place. It curates articles from various online sources; you don't have to download and install multiple news apps on your device. Feedly is simple to use and is available to download for free from the Google Play Store.

It's easy to fire up the Google app or ask Google Assistant for the latest sports updates. It's a pretty good way to get all the latest scores and updates about the sports you follow, but what if you need more details or something that gives you a detailed breakdown of the scores? That's exactly why you need a dedicated sports app that sends real-time updates with a more comprehensive look at the scores and statistics.

theScore aims to be an all-in-one hub for everything sports. It allows you to read news from various sports, such as football, soccer, basketball, and more. You can even use it to follow the major leagues and competitions such as the NFL, the NBA, the Premier League, La Liga, and UEFA Champions League, as well as a handful of others from different sports. theScore app gives you live coverage of games, complete with scores updated in real-time and stats throughout the game. It also gives you a curated feed based on your preferences and even allows chatting within the app.

The ESPN app gives you similar functionality to theScore app as an all-in-one hub for sports stuff. It allows you to read up on the news from a variety of different sports and leagues and gives you live coverage of sports matches. It's also from a more reputable sports outlet, and if you're an ESPN+ subscriber, you can watch live sports coverage and ESPN+ originals without cable or TV right from your smartphone.

CBS Sports, as the name suggests, is made by the CBS group, and the app allows you to keep track of your favorite sports and teams. You can watch some of your favorite games on CBS Sports, including the UEFA Champions League, Europa League, the NFL, and mixed martial arts tournaments. CBS All Access subscribers will be able to watch a variety of exclusives, as well as all major sporting events.

Finally, the NFL app is a must-have for football fans. This app is packed with a lot of features, including live local/primetime games as well as live Playoffs and the Super Bowl. It allows you to watch videos, highlights, and replays of every game, and it keeps football fans in the loop even throughout the off-season with news, highlights, stats, and more. If you only care exclusively about football and do not give as much thought to other sports, then this might be better than the other two options mentioned above. You can also stream on-demand videos through a Chromecast, although you cannot stream live games due to license restrictions. But there are plenty of other things to like about it, so be sure to check it out.

Lots of great apps to check out on Android

It's tough to pick the single best application out of all the options mentioned on the list. The essential apps are an absolute no-brainer, and the ones like Solid Explorer and Tasker help improve the overall experience whether you have one of the best phones , like the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra , or a solid budget phone like the Pixel 7a . Having a good file explorer on your phone with support for things like FTP, SFPT, WebDav, SMB/CIFS will go a long way in helping you access a bunch of different files right from your phone.

Similarly, password Managers like Bitwarden are also important to have if you have a ton of online accounts on your phone. I skipped the usual suspects like WhatsApp, Netflix, and others in favor of highlighting some unique applications under different categories to help you get a well-rounded experience on your phone, so be sure to check them out if you're looking for more suggestions.