guardian review of books 2021

Best comics and graphic novels of 2021

Alison Bechdel on her exercise obsession and a spectacular cold war epic from Marvel veteran Barry Windsor-Smith are among this year’s finest

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Over the last 12 months, graphic novels have explored everything from injustice to hedonism. But perhaps unsurprisingly in a year that saw many reflect on their lives, a crop of fine memoirs dominated the shelves.

The biggest event of the year was the return of Alison Bechdel . The Secret to Superhuman Strength (Jonathan Cape) is a meditation on exercise and happiness that paints the Vermont cartoonist as a “neurotic wretch”, moving between sporting obsessions as relationships come and go. Karate, running, cycling, skiing and yoga all promise peace of mind, but it never lasts. Bechdel’s previous books have made her one of the superstars of graphic fiction, and this funny, perceptive and merciless account shows that, while her personal bests may have slipped, her talent remains undimmed.

Lauded in her native France, Élodie Durand’s Parenthesis (Top Shelf; translated by Edward Gauvin) is finally available in English. Durand’s young life was shattered by a tumour that brought severe memory loss, epilepsy, pill after pill and operation after operation. She draws tense consultations, giant tumours and gouged self-portraits in a desperately affecting book about the struggle to hold on to yourself when your world is in pieces.

Sabba Khan’s family moved from Kashmir to east London before she was born. The artist and architectural designer puts her overlapping identities at the heart of The Roles We Play (Myriad), which explores history, culture, family ties and psychotherapy. Imaginative framing, expressive sketches and thoughtful prose combine in a fascinating debut full of acute observations (after the 2005 London bombings, her headscarf has “grown louder than me”), with a recommended song for every chapter.

Where Khan explains herself with scrupulous care, Shira Spector’s Red Rock Baby Candy (Fantagraphics) spins a chaotic spectacle of bright collages and strange visions, her text bouncing off drum kits and reaching into bloodstains and ink spills. Vibrant illustrations sit alongside descriptions of her father’s cancer diagnosis and her attempts to conceive in an inventive debut memoir that’s as deeply felt as it is stylistically playful.

The finest British graphic novel of the year was In. by Will McPhail (Sceptre), a clever and touching account of a young illustrator dealing with his mother’s illness and his own ennui. This beautifully composed debut mixes nuanced observation with hipster satire, and scalpel-sharp one-liners about the things that don’t matter with stumbling attempts to articulate the things that do.

It has been some time since Barry Windsor-Smith was a promising newcomer – the comics veteran began his career drawing for Marvel 50 years ago – but Monsters (Jonathan Cape) is likely to be his defining work. This big, bruising epic about an attempt to create a cold war supersoldier features Nazi scientists, helicopter gunfights and psychic powers. But while Windsor-Smith doesn’t shirk on spectacle, he’s more interested in pulling back the curtain on sordid military-industrial compromises, and showing how hate leaches from one man to another in a study of violence, redemption and parenthood.

Exploitation echoes down the centuries in historian Rebecca Hall’s Wake (Particular), which delves into the neglected story of female slavery and resistance. Hall combines re-creations of revolts with an account of her own research, which is held back by unhelpful archivists and myopic official histories. She uncovers vital details, such as why women played a crucial role in slave-ship mutinies – they were often left unchained on deck. Aided by Hugo Martínez’s stark artwork, Hall compellingly describes the terror and resilience of people who were brought across the ocean in shackles and enslaved for generations, speaking of reckonings still to come.

Slavery shadows Dash Shaw’s Discipline (New York Review of Books), a startling, panel-free work that follows a Quaker family ruptured by the American civil war. Brother Charles abandons pacifism to fight for the Union, while his sister Fanny deals with schisms at home in a book whose powerful images spring out of white space. The seasons change as war takes its toll, and earnest letters – adapted from real correspondence – beat with tension beneath their matter-of-fact surface.

There was hedonism too this year, in the return of Brecht Evens, whose The City of Belgium (Drawn and Quarterly) explores a bacchanalian nightscape. Three characters, their lives on the edge of change, dance their way through lurid bars and dark passageways in a swirl of tall tales and lush inking. Evens is a master of crowd scenes and colour, and his psychedelic symphony bleeds into a pensive, washed-out dawn that suggests that even the wildest trips must end sometime.

Simon Hanselmann drew a webcomic every day for the first nine months of the pandemic. The collected Crisis Zone (Fantagraphics) sees his longstanding cast of witches and anthropomorphic animals cram themselves into a house, bicker, shoot pornography and take drugs. They are hit by Covid and become the subjects of a reality TV show in a provocative and funny descent into social-media notoriety and violence.

For something more wholesome, settle down with Esther’s Notebooks (Pushkin; translated by Sam Taylor), in which cartoonist Riad Sattouf lays out a series of strips based on his friend’s daughter’s Paris schooldays. They’re not exactly escapist – racism and the spectre of terrorism intrude on the playground frighteningly early – but these three funny, insightful volumes, packed with phone envy, classroom politics and friendship, are a comic treat.

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clock This article was published more than  2 years ago

50 notable works of fiction

The novels, by prize-winners as well as newcomers, that wowed us this year.

Newcomers and established prize winners alike stunned us this year with exceptional novels. These 50 standouts are worth your consideration.

“ Afterparties ,” by Anthony Veasna So

Stories about Cambodian Americans burst with as much compassion as comedy in this bittersweet collection by a young writer who died last year.

“ Apples Never Fall ,” by Liane Moriarty

Joy Delaney is missing, and her husband is the prime suspect. But, as always, the author of “ Big Little Lies ” has some twists in store.

“ Assembly ,” by Natasha Brown

A middle-class Black woman exhausted by the stressors of unfulfilling success decides to opt out of treatment for her recently diagnosed breast cancer.

“ Beautiful World, Where Are You ,” by Sally Rooney

The author of “ Normal People ” transforms a deceptively simple plot — four people struggling to define their relationships — into a nuanced study of power dynamics.

“ Black Buck ,” by Mateo Askaripour

This effervescent debut about an ambitious African American man is an irresistible comic novel about the tenacity of racism in corporate America.

“ The Chosen and the Beautiful ,” by Nghi Vo

In this reimagined “ Great Gatsby ,” partygoers drink demon blood, sorcery twists the beams of reality, and Jay Gatsby is a bisexual vampire. Finally, the story makes sense.

Need more recommendations? Ask the Book World team.

“ The Committed ,” by Viet Thanh Nguyen

The sequel to the Pulitzer Prize-winning “ The Sympathizer ” continues the story of a Viet Cong spy, now retired and working in France for a Chinese drug lord.

“ Creatures of Passage ,” by Morowa Yejidé

In a mythological version of D.C., a woman drives a haunted taxi while her murdered twin embarks on a posthumous revenge mission against the men who lynched him.

“ Damnation Spring ,” by Ash Davidson

An experienced logger and his young wife in Northern California suspect a defoliant being used to clear brush is poisoning their community.

“ Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch ,” by Rivka Galchen

In 17th-century Germany, Johannes Kepler’s mother stands trial for witchcraft, and Galchen’s retelling is a magical brew of absurdity and brutality.

“ Fake Accounts ,” by Lauren Oyler

A Brooklyn blogger, full of intellectual superiority and self-loathing, discovers that her boyfriend is an online conspiracy theorist. But is she any more authentic?

“ The Final Revival of Opal & Nev ,” by Dawnie Walton

A collage of voices tells the story of Opal Jewel (a “Black girl from Detroit”) and Nev Charles (“a goofy white English boy”), musicians who got their start as an unlikely 1970s duo.

“ The Four Winds ,” by Kristin Hannah

Faced with starvation during the Depression, a Texas woman drives her two children to California, where her dreams of an oasis collide with reality.

“ Good Company ,” by Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney

The discovery of an old photo alongside her husband’s supposedly lost wedding ring prompts a woman to reassess her past and her marriage.

“ Great Circle ,” by Maggie Shipstead

Best feel-good books of 2021

A soaring work of historical fiction about a “lady pilot” in the mid-20th century intertwines with the tale of a modern-day celebrity portraying the trailblazer in a biopic.

“ Harlem Shuffle ,” by Colson Whitehead

The two-time Pulitzer Prize winner has written a rollicking crime novel about a furniture salesman who gets pulled into an ill-advised robbery scheme.

“ Hell of a Book ,” by Jason Mott

This National Book Award winner follows a Black author’s book tour that turns surreal when an imaginary friend materializes.

“ Hour of the Witch ,” by Chris Bohjalian

In rich detail, Bohjalian conjures 17th-century Massachusetts in this gripping tale of a woman determined to win independence and seek justice.

“ How Beautiful We Were ,” by Imbolo Mbue

The new novel by the author of “Behold the Dreamers” is set in an unnamed African country where villagers fall prey to the false promises of an American oil company.

“ How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House ,” by Cherie Jones

This lavish, cinematic debut, set mostly in Barbados during the summer of 1984, juxtaposes people at a tony resort with the local residents struggling to get by.

“ Hummingbird Salamander ,” by Jeff VanderMeer

The “Annihilation” author’s latest thriller takes place in an environmentally ravaged near future, where a social outcast embarks on a deadly rescue mission to save the globe.

“ I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness ,” by Claire Vaye Watkins

A new mother abandons her family and flies to Reno, Nev., setting in motion an audaciously candid story about the crush of conflicted feelings a baby can inspire.

“ Infinite Country ,” by Patricia Engel

A Colombian family living in the United States is divided by deportation, each member weathering the psychic pain of being “split as if by an ax.”

“ Intimacies ,” by Katie Kitamura

A woman working in The Hague as an interpreter becomes embroiled in a war crimes trial involving the former president of a war-torn African nation.

“ Land of Big Numbers ,” by Te-Ping Chen

Chen, an American journalist once based in Beijing, crafts a story collection about an array of Chinese characters driven to take control of their fates.

“ Libertie ,” by Kaitlyn Greenidge

A young Black woman from Reconstruction-era Brooklyn ponders the notion of freedom after she marries, moves to Haiti and realizes that neither the man nor her new home live up to expectations.

“ The Lincoln Highway ,” by Amor Towles

The author of “A Gentleman in Moscow” starts his new novel in 1954 Nebraska, as two brothers, headed to California to find their mother, get derailed by some juvenile delinquents.

Best book covers of 2021

“ Lorna Mott Comes Home ,” by Diane Johnson

After her French husband’s latest affair, an American woman ditches Europe for San Francisco to “prove, to herself if to no one else, that you can make a new life at any age.”

“ The Magician ,” by Colm Tóibín

Though 500-plus pages, Tóibín’s novel about Nobel Prize-winning writer Thomas Mann canters along with graceful prose and delightful cameos.

“ Malibu Rising ,” by Taylor Jenkins Reid

The author of “Daisy Jones and the Six” serves up a mix of celebrity culture and family drama as four children, abandoned by their rock star dad, raise themselves.

“ My Monticello ,” by Jocelyn Nicole Johnson

The standout novella in this debut collection follows a descendant of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, who takes shelter at Monticello from a white supremacist mob.

“ No One Is Talking About This ,” by Patricia Lockwood

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Lockwood’s debut follows a social media star whose absurdist travails online come to a grinding halt when a gutting tragedy hits IRL.

“ Of Women and Salt ,” by Gabriela Garcia

Beginning in 19th-century Cuba, Garcia’s novel follows five generations of women as they flail against forces that are unmistakably patriarchal, capitalist and colonial.

“ Oh William! ,” by Elizabeth Strout

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Olive Kitteridge” revisits Lucy Barton as she accompanies her ex-husband on a journey to understand a grim puzzle from his past.

“ The Other Black Girl ,” by Zakiya Dalila Harris

A workplace satire about a Black woman trying to make it in publishing transforms into a surreal thriller involving a covert brainwashing effort.

“ Our Country Friends ,” by Gary Shteyngart

Blending the ludicrous and poignant, the “Absurdistan” author channels Chekhov with the tale of eight city-dwellers who relocate to Upstate New York to ride out the pandemic.

“ Outlawed ,” by Anna North

North puts a feminist twist on the Western in this alt-history about an on-the-run midwife who falls in with the Hole in the Wall Gang, a sapphic iteration of the Jesse James gang.

“ The Personal Librarian ,” by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray

Two authors teamed up for this historical novel about J.P. Morgan’s personal librarian, Belle da Costa Greene, a Black woman who passed for White.

“ The Prophets ,” by Robert Jones Jr.

This remarkable debut, a finalist for a National Book Award, recounts a love story between two enslaved men who dare flout their owners’ intended use of them for breeding by choosing to love each other instead.

“ Rites ,” by Savannah Johnston

The debut collection, with stories about Indigenous characters in rural Oklahoma, portrays the aching, farcical nature of existence with stunning economy.

Best graphic novels of the year

“ Secrets of Happiness ,” by Joan Silber

Every chapter in this novel spins to a new character, each looking for the secret to happiness. (Spoiler alert: They do not all find it.)

“ The Sentence ,” by Louise Erdrich

Erdrich’s first novel since winning a Pulitzer Prize takes place in a Minnesota bookstore where employees are haunted by the ghost of their most annoying customer.

“ The Sweetness of Water ,” by Nathan Harris

In this exceptional debut — given the Oprah seal of approval — a grieving White landowner befriends two recently emancipated Black men amid the tension of post-Civil War Georgia.

“ That Summer ,” by Jennifer Weiner

Two women with the same name end up corresponding after one receives an email meant for the other. It’s all a random coincidence. Or is it?

“ Velvet Was the Night ,” by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

The style-shifting author of “Mexican Gothic” (and a Book World columnist) goes noir with an adrenalized, darkly romantic tale of two people looking for the same mysterious woman.

“ The Vixen ,” by Francine Prose

Comedy and tragedy intermingle as a junior editor for a 1950s publishing house is tasked with making an erotic thriller — based on the life of convicted spy Ethel Rosenberg — “less bad.”

“ Wayward ,” by Dana Spiotta

An underemployed woman, unhappy in marriage, despondent in her middle-aged body and rebuffed by her teenage daughter, decides to upend her life and flee the circumstances.

Best children's books of 2021

“ What Strange Paradise ,” by Omar El Akkad

After a harrowing journey toward a supposedly better life, a 9-year-old Syrian refugee washes up on a small Mediterranean island and tries to evade capture.

“ With Teeth ,” by Kristen Arnett

This scathingly frank story of motherhood conjures up the disturbing mixture of devotion and alienation endured by anyone raising a child they don’t understand, don’t even like.

“ A Woman of Intelligence ,” by Karin Tanabe

In the 1950s, a brilliant former U.N. interpreter, who gave up her career to raise children, comes alive when she accepts an undercover assignment from the FBI.

A note to our readers: We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.

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Book Reviews

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 Best Reviewed Fiction of 2021

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

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 .

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

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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4 New Horror Books Spiked With Dread and Profound Unease

Our columnist reviews this month’s haunting new releases.

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By Gabino Iglesias

Gabino Iglesias is a writer, editor, literary critic and professor. He is the Bram Stoker and Shirley Jackson award-winning author of “The Devil Takes You Home.”

Simone St. James is known for brilliantly mixing thriller elements with supernatural mayhem, and MURDER ROAD (Berkley, 342 pp., $29) , her most recent novel, offers readers plenty of both.

During the summer of 1995, April and Eddie are on their way to a resort for their honeymoon when a wrong turn sends them down a dark road in the middle of the night. The newlyweds pick up a hitchhiker, and then realize the young woman is bleeding. April and Eddie take the woman to a hospital, but she dies.

The couple soon learn the hitchhiker is just one of many who’ve met their demise on Atticus Line. The road, according to locals, is haunted by a ghost known as the Lost Girl, “a stupid legend,” who has allegedly been killing people for decades. Under pressure because of the unsolved murders, the police unsuccessfully try to pin the killing on the couple, and after they are cleared of any wrongdoing, April and Eddie stick around and try to get to the bottom of things. But the newlyweds have their own dark past, and as it catches up to them, so does the darkness that haunts Atticus Line.

Fast, chilling, entertaining, unexpectedly touching, and with two broken, memorable characters at its core, this might be St. James’s best novel yet.

Argentina’s new wave of horror fiction is quickly finding an international audience, and in the process, has introduced the world to literary giants like Mariana Enríquez and Samanta Schweblin. Now, Marina Yuszczuk joins that list of Argentine horror stars with THIRST (Dutton, 241 pp., $28) .

The book, which is translated by Heather Cleary, is a unique vampire novel full of eroticism and feminist rage. The story takes place in two different periods. First we follow a female vampire escaping persecution, making her way across Europe over the centuries and finally landing in Buenos Aires, where she experiences the city’s early days as well as the yellow fever pandemics of the late 1800s. Eventually, she’s forced to go into hiding in a cemetery. The second part of the book follows a divorced mother who’s dealing with her own mother’s declining health and who receives a strange old photo from an ailing woman that links her to the vampire.

This gripping tale is full of queer representation and lush, lyrical passages, all while exploring death with an air of nihilism. “We’re all standing at death’s door,” Yuszczuk writes. “Someone has to be next in line.” Vampires are making a comeback, and Yuszczuk is spearheading their revival with this bloody novel.

In addition to scaring readers, the tales in THROUGH THE NIGHT LIKE A SNAKE: Latin American Horror Stories (Two Lines Press/Calico, 228 pp., paperback, $16.95) are meant to elicit a profound sense of unease, and they pull it off with flying colors.

The anthology collects 10 stories from some of Latin America’s best purveyors of what the editor Sarah Coolidge calls “narrativa de lo inusual” — narrative of the unusual. In Mariana Enriquez’s “That Summer in the Dark,” translated by Megan McDowell, two young friends become obsessed with serial killers and then must confront the reality of a murderer in their own building. Maximiliano Barrientos’s “The Third Transformation,” translated by Tim Gutteridge, is a superb body horror nightmare full of mystery and also breathing meat flowers with teeth. Julián Isaza’s “Visitor,” translated by Joel Streicker, is the funniest story in the collection, and perhaps the one with the greatest twist. It follows an elderly woman who rescues an alien and develops a symbiotic relationship with it that leads to murder.

These stories — relentlessly unsettling as they are — serve as a fantastic introduction to a growing movement that’s bound to enrich, and help diversify, speculative fiction for years to come.

STITCHES (Viz Media, 112 pp., $18) combines the art of Junji Ito, perhaps the world’s most renowned mangaka, with the brief, punchy short stories of Hirokatsu Kihara, translated by Jocelyne Allen, to craft a delectable collection of illustrated scary stories.

Nine very short tales (more horrific morsels than full stories) make up this book, and they all share some cohesive elements: They open with a blunt opening line like “This happened when M was in elementary school,” followed by a supernatural event and then a surprising twist.

Ito and Kihara fully embrace horror in these tiny tales. In “Face,” a woman sprouts a small face on the back of her neck that must be removed by a priest. “Library” is about the ghost of a young girl who haunts a school library. “The Play” tells of a special staging of “Pinocchio” in which an otherworldly presence insists on participating. “Folk Dance” and “The Kimono” are opposite sides of the same coin: In the former, a photographer fails to capture an image of a dancing specter; in the latter, a friendly, playful ghost shows up in a family picture.

Ito, whose classics like “Uzumaki” and “Tomie” are horror staples, is a master at creating creepy details and expressive faces that help carry Kihara’s succinct terrors. Together, the two masters create their own brand of dark magic.

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Trump promotes Lee Greenwood's 'God Bless The USA Bible': What to know about the book and its long journey

• Former president Donald Trump encourages supporters to buy Lee Greenwood's "God Bless The USA Bible," a project inspired by Nashville country musician's hit song.
• Resurgent version of Greenwood's Bible project a modified version from original concept, a change that likely followed 2021 shake-up in publishers.

After years with few updates about Lee Greenwood’s controversial Bible, the project is again resurgent with a recent promotion by former President Donald Trump.

“All Americans need to have a Bible in their home and I have many. It’s my favorite book,” Trump said in a video posted to social media Tuesday, encouraging supporters to purchase the “God Bless The USA Bible.” “Religion is so important and so missing, but it’s going to come back.”

Greenwood — the Nashville area country musician whose hit song “God Bless the USA” inspired the Bible with a similar namesake — has long been allies with Trump and other prominent Republicans, many of whom are featured in promotional material for the “God Bless The USA Bible.” But that reputational clout in conservative circles hasn’t necessarily translated to business success in the past, largely due to a major change in the book’s publishing plan.

Here's what to know about the Bible project’s journey so far and why it’s significant it’s back in the conservative limelight.

An unordinary Bible, a fiery debate

The “God Bless The USA Bible” received heightened attention since the outset due to its overt political features.

The text includes the U.S. Constitution, Bill of Rights, Declaration of Independence, Pledge of Allegiance, and the lyrics to the chorus to Greenwood’s “God Bless The USA.” Critics saw it as a symbol of Christian nationalism, a right-wing movement that believes the U.S. was founded as a Christian nation.

A petition emerged in 2021 calling Greenwood’s Bible “a toxic mix that will exacerbate the challenges to American evangelicalism.” From there, a broader conversation ensued about the standards by which publishers print Bibles.

Gatekeeping in Bible publishing

Greenwood’s early business partner on the project, a Hermitage-based marketing firm called Elite Source Pro, initially reached a manufacturing agreement with the Nashville-based HarperCollins Christian Publishing to print the “God Bless The USA Bible.”  

As part of that agreement, HarperCollins would publish the book but not sell or endorse it. But then HarperCollins reversed course , a major setback for Greenwood’s Bible.

The reversal by HarperCollins followed a decision by Zondervan — a publishing group under HarperCollins Christian Publishing and an official North American licensor for Bibles printed in the New International Version translation — to pass on the project. HarperCollins said the decision was unrelated to the petition or other public denunciations against Greenwood’s Bible.

The full backstory: Lee Greenwood's 'God Bless the USA Bible' finds new printer after HarperCollins Christian passes

A new translation and mystery publisher

The resurgent “God Bless The USA Bible” featured in Trump’s recent ad is an altered version of the original concept, a modification that likely followed the publishing shake-up.

Greenwood’s Bible is now printed in the King James Version, a different translation from the original pitch to HarperCollins.

Perhaps the biggest mystery is the new publisher. That manufacturer is producing a limited quantity of copies, leading to a delayed four-to-six weeks for a copy to ship.  

It’s also unclear which business partners are still involved in the project. Hugh Kirkman, who led Elite Service Pro, the firm that originally partnered with Greenwood for the project, responded to a request for comment by referring media inquiries to Greenwood’s publicist.

The publicist said Elite Source Pro is not a partner on the project and the Bible has always been printed in the King James Version.

"Several years ago, the Bible was going to be printed with the NIV translation, but something happened with the then licensor and the then potential publisher. As a result, this God Bless The USA Bible has always been printed with the King James Version translation," publicist Jeremy Westby said in a statement.

Westby did not have the name of the new licensee who is manufacturing the Bible.

Trump’s plug for the “God Bless The USA Bible” recycled language the former president is using to appeal to a conservative Christian base.

“Our founding fathers did a tremendous thing when they built America on Judeo-Christian values,” Trump said in his video on social media. “Now that foundation is under attack perhaps as never before.”

'Bring back our religion’: Trump vows to support Christians during Nashville speech

Liam Adams covers religion for The Tennessean. Reach him at [email protected] or on social media @liamsadams.