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The Best Fiction Books » Best Fiction of 2021

Most recommended books.

new books fiction 2021

The Manningtree Witches by A. K. Blakemore

“A darkly sardonic story based on the real-life witch craze that took place during the early years of the English Civil War, when a self-declared ‘Witchfinder General’ took it upon himself to root out malefaction, moral corruption and heresy among the women left behind by their soldier husbands, sons and neighbours. The prose is deeply sensual and immersive; darkly sardonic, written in modern English but bejewelled with period-appropriate vocabulary. Blakemore is a published poet, and that comes through very strongly. Highly recommended.” Cal Flyn , Five Books Editor

new books fiction 2021

Detransition, Baby: A Novel by Torrey Peters

“The story centres on an unexpected pregnancy: Ames, who until recently was living as a woman, has impregnated his boss and sometime-lover Katrina. Feeling unable to cope with the idea of traditional fatherhood, he proposes an unusual solution—that they invite his ex-partner Reese, a beautiful but self-destructive trans woman, to co-parent alongside them. The result is a funny, provocative and often profound novel of ideas. I’ve thought about it a great deal since. I’d recommend it to anyone.” Cal Flyn , Five Books Editor

Browse book recommendations:

The Best Fiction Books

  • Best Books by Nobel Prize in Literature Winners
  • Best Fiction of 2021
  • Best Fiction of 2022
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  • The Best Novels
  • Thrillers (Books)
  • Women's Fiction

With so many novels to choose from, it's not easy to find the best fiction of 2021, books that are really worth spending your time reading. To help, we've collected all our books recommendations relating to the best fiction of 2021 here.

We also have a list of the:

Best mystery books of 2021

Best fantasy books of 2021

Best historical fiction of 2021

Best Science fiction of 2021

Part of our best books of 2021 series.

The Best Fiction of 2021: The Booker Prize Shortlist , recommended by Maya Jasanoff

The Best Fiction of 2021: The Booker Prize Shortlist - No One is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood

No One is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood

The Best Fiction of 2021: The Booker Prize Shortlist - The Promise by Damon Galgut

The Promise by Damon Galgut

The Best Fiction of 2021: The Booker Prize Shortlist - Bewilderment: A Novel by Richard Powers

Bewilderment: A Novel by Richard Powers

The Best Fiction of 2021: The Booker Prize Shortlist - A Passage North by Anuk Arudpragasam

A Passage North by Anuk Arudpragasam

The Best Fiction of 2021: The Booker Prize Shortlist - The Fortune Men: A Novel by Nadifa Mohamed

The Fortune Men: A Novel by Nadifa Mohamed

The Best Fiction of 2021: The Booker Prize Shortlist - Great Circle: A Novel by Maggie Shipstead

Great Circle: A Novel by Maggie Shipstead

This year the Booker Prize finalists include new work from previous shortlistees Richard Powers and Damon Galgut, a sweeping historical novel by Maggie Shipstead, and a fragmentary account of a life lived 'extremely online.' Maya Jasanoff , Harvard historian and chair of the 2021 judging panel, talks us through the best fiction of the past year.

This year the Booker Prize finalists include new work from previous shortlistees Richard Powers and Damon Galgut, a sweeping historical novel by Maggie Shipstead, and a fragmentary account of a life lived ‘extremely online.’ Maya Jasanoff, Harvard historian and chair of the 2021 judging panel, talks us through the best fiction of the past year.

The Best Science Fiction of 2021: The Arthur C Clarke Award Shortlist , recommended by Tom Hunter

The Best Science Fiction of 2021: The Arthur C Clarke Award Shortlist - The Infinite by Patience Agbabi

The Infinite by Patience Agbabi

The Best Science Fiction of 2021: The Arthur C Clarke Award Shortlist - Edge of Heaven by R B Kelly

Edge of Heaven by R B Kelly

The Best Science Fiction of 2021: The Arthur C Clarke Award Shortlist - Chilling Effect by Valerie Valdes

Chilling Effect by Valerie Valdes

The Best Science Fiction of 2021: The Arthur C Clarke Award Shortlist - The Animals in That Country by Laura Jean McKay

The Animals in That Country by Laura Jean McKay

The Best Science Fiction of 2021: The Arthur C Clarke Award Shortlist - The Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez

The Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez

The Best Science Fiction of 2021: The Arthur C Clarke Award Shortlist - Vagabonds by Hao Jingfang, translated by Ken Liu

Vagabonds by Hao Jingfang, translated by Ken Liu

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

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

The Best Thrillers of 2021 , recommended by Tosca Lee

The Best Thrillers of 2021 - Blacktop Wasteland by S.A. Cosby

Blacktop Wasteland by S.A. Cosby

The Best Thrillers of 2021 - Hi Five: An IQ Novel by Joe Ide

Hi Five: An IQ Novel by Joe Ide

The Best Thrillers of 2021 - The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman

The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman

The Best Thrillers of 2021 - These Women by Ivy Pochoda

These Women by Ivy Pochoda

The Best Thrillers of 2021 - Confessions on the 7:45: A Novel by Lisa Unger

Confessions on the 7:45: A Novel by Lisa Unger

Looking for a fantastic new thriller to read? We asked Tosca Lee , the bestselling author, to talk us through the International Thriller Writers 2021 shortlist. With their amazing characters, palpable tension, unique voices and incredible plot twists these thrillers achieve what every reader is looking for: a book they can't put down.

Looking for a fantastic new thriller to read? We asked Tosca Lee, the bestselling author, to talk us through the International Thriller Writers 2021 shortlist. With their amazing characters, palpable tension, unique voices and incredible plot twists these thrillers achieve what every reader is looking for: a book they can’t put down.

The Best Historical Fiction: The 2021 Walter Scott Prize Shortlist , recommended by Katharine Grant

The Best Historical Fiction: The 2021 Walter Scott Prize Shortlist - Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell

Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell

The Best Historical Fiction: The 2021 Walter Scott Prize Shortlist - The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel

The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel

The Best Historical Fiction: The 2021 Walter Scott Prize Shortlist - The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams

The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams

The Best Historical Fiction: The 2021 Walter Scott Prize Shortlist - A Room Made of Leaves by Kate Grenville

A Room Made of Leaves by Kate Grenville

The Best Historical Fiction: The 2021 Walter Scott Prize Shortlist - The Tolstoy Estate by Steven Conte

The Tolstoy Estate by Steven Conte

The Walter Scott Prize seeks to highlight the very best of historical fiction—and in 2021, we find the shortlist dominated by Australian writers. Katharine Grant , the acclaimed novelist and chair of the judges, returns to Five Books to discuss the cream of this year's crop, and the art of transforming the historical record into a creative exercise.

The Walter Scott Prize seeks to highlight the very best of historical fiction—and in 2021, we find the shortlist dominated by Australian writers. Katharine Grant, the acclaimed novelist and chair of the judges, returns to Five Books to discuss the cream of this year’s crop, and the art of transforming the historical record into a creative exercise.

The Best Novels of 2021 , recommended by Cal Flyn

The Best Novels of 2021 - Detransition, Baby: A Novel by Torrey Peters

little scratch by Rebecca Watson

The Best Novels of 2021 - Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson

Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson

The Best Novels of 2021 - Several People Are Typing by Calvin Kasulke

Several People Are Typing by Calvin Kasulke

It's been another vintage year for fiction. As book sales continue to soar, Five Books deputy editor Cal Flyn talks us through her personal highlights: the best new novels to be released in 2021. Her recommendations include a workplace comedy that unfolds through the medium of Slack, a "darkly sardonic" story of a 17th-century witch trial, and a witty novel-of-ideas examining trans parenthood.

It’s been another vintage year for fiction. As book sales continue to soar, Five Books deputy editor Cal Flyn talks us through her personal highlights: the best new novels to be released in 2021. Her recommendations include a workplace comedy that unfolds through the medium of Slack, a “darkly sardonic” story of a 17th-century witch trial, and a witty novel-of-ideas examining trans parenthood.

The Best Romance Books of 2021 , recommended by Natasha Tomic

The Best Romance Books of 2021 - The Heart Principle by Helen Hoang

The Heart Principle by Helen Hoang

The Best Romance Books of 2021 - Tin Queen by Devney Perry

Tin Queen by Devney Perry

The Best Romance Books of 2021 - Broken French by Tasha Boyd

Broken French by Tasha Boyd

The Best Romance Books of 2021 - Gray Hair Don’t Care by Karen Booth

Gray Hair Don’t Care by Karen Booth

The Best Romance Books of 2021 - The Intimacy Experiment by Rosie Danan

The Intimacy Experiment by Rosie Danan

Romance is one of the most widely read and commercially successful genres, a literary haven for those seeking a happy ending. Here, the book blogger and self-confessed romantic fiction addict Natasha Tomic chooses her top five romantic novels of 2021, and explains why it's the perfect escapist genre.

The Best Crime Fiction of 2021 , recommended by Sophie Roell

The Best Crime Fiction of 2021 - The Survivors: A Novel by Jane Harper

The Survivors: A Novel by Jane Harper

The Best Crime Fiction of 2021 - The Night Gate by Peter May

The Night Gate by Peter May

The Best Crime Fiction of 2021 - Shiver by Allie Reynolds

Shiver by Allie Reynolds

The Best Crime Fiction of 2021 - Lightseekers by Femi Kayode

Lightseekers by Femi Kayode

The Best Crime Fiction of 2021 - Reckless by R.J. McBrien

Reckless by R.J. McBrien

If you're into crime fiction as a form of relaxation, a wide range of books continue to be published, set in places around the world. Sophie Roell , editor of Five Books and a keen reader of the genre, picks out some of her favourites from 2021.

If you’re into crime fiction as a form of relaxation, a wide range of books continue to be published, set in places around the world. Sophie Roell, editor of Five Books and a keen reader of the genre, picks out some of her favourites from 2021.

Notable Novels of Fall 2021 , recommended by Cal Flyn

Notable Novels of Fall 2021 - Beautiful World, Where Are You: A Novel by Sally Rooney

Beautiful World, Where Are You: A Novel by Sally Rooney

Notable Novels of Fall 2021 - Harlem Shuffle: A Novel by Colson Whitehead

Harlem Shuffle: A Novel by Colson Whitehead

Notable Novels of Fall 2021 - The Man Who Died Twice by Richard Osman

The Man Who Died Twice by Richard Osman

Notable Novels of Fall 2021 - Something New Under the Sun: A Novel by Alexandra Kleeman

Something New Under the Sun: A Novel by Alexandra Kleeman

Notable Novels of Fall 2021 - Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth by Wole Soyinka

Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth by Wole Soyinka

Five Books deputy editor Cal Flyn offers a round-up of the notable novels that need to be on your literary radar in Fall 2021, including the hotly anticipated new book from Sally Rooney—set to dominate bestseller lists in the coming weeks—as well as eagerly awaited follow-ups from Richard Osman and Elizabeth Strout, and a return to more traditional fiction from Karl Ove Knausgård.

Notable New Novels of Summer 2021 , recommended by Cal Flyn

Notable New Novels of Summer 2021 - Second Place by Rachel Cusk

Second Place by Rachel Cusk

Notable New Novels of Summer 2021 - Lean Fall Stand by Jon McGregor

Lean Fall Stand by Jon McGregor

Notable New Novels of Summer 2021 - The Other Black Girl: A Novel by Zakiya Dalila Harris

The Other Black Girl: A Novel by Zakiya Dalila Harris

Notable New Novels of Summer 2021 - A River Called Time by Courttia Newland

A River Called Time by Courttia Newland

Notable New Novels of Summer 2021 - The Manningtree Witches by A. K. Blakemore

Foreign holidays are still looking unlikely for most of us this summer, but that doesn't mean we won't be able to find a spot in a park or garden to relax in the sun with a good book. Here, author and Five Books deputy editor Cal Flyn highlights some of the most notable new novels of summer 2021 to help you narrow down your reading options.

Foreign holidays are still looking unlikely for most of us this summer, but that doesn’t mean we won’t be able to find a spot in a park or garden to relax in the sun with a good book. Here, author and Five Books deputy editor Cal Flyn highlights some of the most notable new novels of summer 2021 to help you narrow down your reading options.

The Best of World Literature: The 2021 International Booker Prize Shortlist , recommended by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

The Best of World Literature: The 2021 International Booker Prize Shortlist - At Night All Blood Is Black by David Diop, translated by Anna Moschovakis

At Night All Blood Is Black by David Diop, translated by Anna Moschovakis

The Best of World Literature: The 2021 International Booker Prize Shortlist - The Dangers of Smoking in Bed: Stories by Mariana Enríquez, translated by Megan McDowell

The Dangers of Smoking in Bed: Stories by Mariana Enríquez, translated by Megan McDowell

The Best of World Literature: The 2021 International Booker Prize Shortlist - When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut, translated by Adrian Nathan West

When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut, translated by Adrian Nathan West

The Best of World Literature: The 2021 International Booker Prize Shortlist - The Employees: A workplace novel of the 22nd century by Olga Ravn, translated by Martin Aitken

The Employees: A workplace novel of the 22nd century by Olga Ravn, translated by Martin Aitken

The Best of World Literature: The 2021 International Booker Prize Shortlist - In Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova, by Sasha Dugdale

In Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova, by Sasha Dugdale

The Best of World Literature: The 2021 International Booker Prize Shortlist - The War of the Poor by Éric Vuillard, translated by Mark Polizzotti

The War of the Poor by Éric Vuillard, translated by Mark Polizzotti

Every year the International Booker Prize judges read dozens of novels from around the world, which are newly translated into English. Here Lucy Hughes-Hallett —award-winning author and chair of this year's judging panel—talks us through the six books that made their 2021 shortlist of the best world literature.

Every year the International Booker Prize judges read dozens of novels from around the world, which are newly translated into English. Here Lucy Hughes-Hallett—award-winning author and chair of this year’s judging panel—talks us through the six books that made their 2021 shortlist of the best world literature.

We ask experts to recommend the five best books in their subject and explain their selection in an interview.

This site has an archive of more than one thousand seven hundred interviews, or eight thousand book recommendations. We publish at least two new interviews per week.

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50 notable works of fiction

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

new books fiction 2021

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.

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new books fiction 2021

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46 Books We Can’t Wait to Read in 2021

Being stuck at home has its upsides..

new books fiction 2021

After a year of industry chaos and many delayed book releases, 2021 brings a bumper crop of new fiction and nonfiction books — including a collection by cultural critic Hanif Abdurraqib and much-anticipated novels from Kazuo Ishiguro, Rachel Cusk, and, yes, Jonathan Franzen. It also brings promising fiction debuts from writers such as the late Anthony Veasna So and poet Melissa Lozada-Oliva. Here’s everything you need to get you through this last stretch of indoor time.

Black Buck by Mateo Askaripour (January 5)

This quick-witted, trenchant debut novel starts like a superhero origin story. Darren Vender (he describes himself as an “attractive black man” who is “taller than average”) is a manager at a Starbucks in Park Avenue, where he’s worked for four years. At night he returns to the three-story brownstone in gentrifying Bed-Stuy where he lives with his mother. Then one day at work Darren is overcome by an ability he never knew he possessed: He convinces a regular customer who always places the same order to purchase another drink instead. Turns out the customer is a bigwig who is impressed by Darren’s salesmanship, and he invites Darren to work at his start-up. What follows is a harrowing tale that operates at the fraught intersection of capitalism, race, and class. — Tope Folarin

The Wife Upstairs by Rachel Hawkins (January 5)

In this gripping reimagining of Jane Eyre that takes place in Birmingham, Alabama, Jane starts out as a dog-walker in Thornfield Estates, a wealthy gated community, where she soon finds out all that glitters is paste. She snares the attention of the mysteriously widowed Eddie Rochester, who recognizes that the secrets of Jane’s past perhaps mirror his own — and invites Jane to move in. She quickly gets access to a lifestyle she had only ever dreamed about, but something isn’t right: Eddie is distant. Strange noises come from upstairs. And she begins to realize she’s on a countdown to someone discovering who she really is. What would have happened if Jane Eyre had not been a naïve innocent with a heart of gold? Grab this page-turner and find out. — Nichole Perkins

Aftershocks by Nadia Owusu (January 12)

Billed as a memoir, Owusu’s book is so much more: a history of Africa’s relationship with the West, a clear-eyed depiction of the ties that bind — and the grievances that disconnect — Black people around the world, and an analysis of how broken families produce broken human beings. But it’s Owusu’s life story that will burrow into you. She is the product of a union between a proud Ghanaian man and a hopeful Armenian American woman who perceive their relationship as an expression of intimate love and grand idealism. Owusu relies on the language of earthquakes — foreshock, mainshock, aftershock — to describe what happens to her and her family once her parents’ marriage breaks apart. This is a book that will shake you to your core. — Tope Folarin

‘Detransition, Baby’ by Torrey Peters

Peters’s novel follows a trans couple, Amy and Reese, whose lives are turned upside down when Amy decides to detransition and become Ames. When Ames gets his lover/boss, Katarina, pregnant, things are flipped upside down once more. The word “polarizing” will be tossed around in discussions about this book , but mostly, Detransition, Baby will force you to think hard about family and queerness and motherhood and sex. And keep thinking about them long after you finish reading. — Madison Malone Kircher

The Rib King by Ladee Hubbard (January 19)

Hubbard’s second novel is as original, warm, and expertly researched as her debut, The Talented Ribkins, but with significantly more tragedy. A groundskeeper at a down-on-its-heels southern mansion watches with increasing furor as the house’s owner manipulates his employees for riches and glory. A quietly thrilling addition to what I hope becomes a flourishing Ladee Hubbardverse. — Molly Young

The World Turned Upside Down by Yang Jisheng (January 19)

Yang’s devastating history of the Chinese Cultural Revolution has been long in the making. First published four years ago in Hong Kong, The World Turned Upside Down is now finally available in English, thanks to translators and editors Stacy Mosher and Guo Jian. (Mosher and Guo are also responsible for translating Yang’s groundbreaking 2008 book Tombstone , about the Great Chinese Famine.) For Yang, who is 81 and still living in Beijing, the publication of such work is a testament to his political commitment and bravery: The World Turned Upside Down offers an unflinching account of the years 1966 to 1976, when China, under Mao, endured enforced starvation, mass purges, and constant double talk from government officials. This was gaslighting at a national scale. Cutting through decades of propaganda and revisionism, Yang’s much-needed corrective joins what one hopes is a new wave of reckonings, which includes Helen Zia’s Last Boat Out of Shanghai (2019) and Rana Mitter’s China’s Good War (2020). — Jane Hu

The Hare by Melanie Finn (January 26)

An elegant writer of unconventional thrillers, Finn has a gift for weaving existential and political concerns through tautly paced prose. The Hare is set in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, where we find a single mother scrapping for survival while cursed with a royally sociopathic ex-lover. One of many excellent books released by Two Dollar Radio, a family-run publisher out of Ohio. — Molly Young

Milk Fed, by Melissa Broder

Broder ( The Pisces ) is back with a new novel about a 24-year-old in Los Angeles named Rachel, who has an eating disorder, a disordered relationship with her mother, and a stand-up comedy hobby. (Honestly … that tracks.) At a therapist’s recommendation, Rachel goes on a 90-day detox from her mom and instead finds herself falling for a fro-yo heir, Miriam, whose family’s Judaism looks deeply different from Rachel’s own. A story about religion, sexuality, food, and feeling your fucked-up feelings. — Madison Malone Kircher

The Removed by Brandon Hobson (February 2)

Hobson’s last novel, Where the Dead Sit Talking , a Cherokee coming-of-age novel set in 1980s Oklahoma, was a finalist for the National Book Award, and I’ll eat my pajamas if his new novel — which is also set in Oklahoma and deepens Hobson’s themes of displacement and violence — doesn’t get a nom too. — Molly Young

My Year Abroad by Chang-Rae Lee

The suburban American hero of Lee’s new novel, Tiller, is a self-described “slightly-below-average guy in all categories” who gets caught up with Pong Lou, a borderline caricature of a Chinese American entrepreneur who sells drinks with alleged restorative qualities. The novel — set at a time when it was still possible to journey to China — alternates between Tiller’s whirlwind past, when he traveled across that country as Pong’s assistant, and his present, in which he’s residing in Middle America with a girlfriend who is under witness protection. As with Lee’s debut 1995 novel Native Speaker , or the more recent On Such a Full Sea (2014), which is set in a dystopian “New China,” this one subverts as many ethnic stereotypes as it perilously evokes. My Year Abroad is a syncopated surprise, with an ending that will be sure to leave you texting all your friends. —Jane Hu

100 Boyfriends by Brontez Purnell (February 2)

You could describe Brontez Purnell, who lives in Oakland, as a writer, choreographer, filmmaker, curator, actor, and artist, or you could just cover your bases and call him a “national treasure.” 100 Boyfriends is a collection of short stories so wrigglingly alive and counterculturally refreshing that it deserves a new noun — a pod of whales, a murder of crows, a jubilee of Brontez Purnell stories? I’d wager that he sets down the best first lines of any living writer. — Molly Young

Fake Accounts by Lauren Oyler (February 2)

A debut novel from critic Oyler, Fake Accounts chronicles a woman who, at the dawning of the Trump presidency, discovers her boyfriend is a decently famous Instagram conspiracy theorist. That discovery is revealed on the novel’s back cover — but it’s a second, even more dramatic twist that upends the nameless narrator’s life and got me hooked on this book. If you’re looking for fiction that understands the complexities of life online and the way that world seeps into reality, this is it. — Madison Malone Kircher

No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood (February 16)

Reading Patricia Lockwood raises questions. Questions such as, How can a person understand both herself and the world with such clarity? How does a person experience things so intensely and express them so buoyantly? Am I laughing or am I crying? Lockwood’s first novel is as crystalline, witty, and brain-shredding as her poetry and criticism. — Molly Young

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro (March 2)

When I heard that Ishiguro was coming out with a new novel, I gasped. Klara and the Sun is the writer’s first publication since winning the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature. And if you’re a ride-or-die Ishiguro reader (what other kind is there?), you won’t be disappointed. Narrated in his signature first person — which hovers somewhere between inscrutable and Very Big Feelings — the book’s protagonist is the eponymous Klara, an Artificial Friend who is hypersensitive to human emotions. As Klara carefully and lovingly observes others, the work of Ishiguro’s reader is to carefully and lovingly observe her. An ideal novel for our lonely present, exploring questions of alienation, emotional labor, failed communication, and what it means to love a world that refuses to love you back. —Jane Hu

The Committed by Viet Thanh Nguyen (March 2)

The protagonist of Nguyen’s 2015 novel The Sympathizer , a French-Vietnamese immigrant and North Vietnamese government mole, is a man forever caught between — between nations, identities, and his own morals. The last time we saw him, he was out at sea, off to an uncertain locale and praying for absolution and freedom. In this sequel to Nguyen’s Pulitzer winner, the same man has taken up residence in Paris, living in the country most implicated in the contradictions of his life as a colonial subject. Immersed in talk and conflict with left-wing intellectuals, junkies, and Vietnamese aunties, and haunted by dreams of torture and betrayal, the protagonist faces an even greater challenge than those he faced in the first novel. His mission, if he chooses to accept it, is to survive. — Kevin Lozano

Black Girl, Call Home by Jasmine Mans (March 9)

In this poetry collection, spoken-word artist Jasmine Mans pulls at all the threads of who she is as a Black queer woman from Newark, unravels herself, then puts herself back together via clear, precise language that brooks no argument. In the poem “Because I Am a Woman Now,” the speaker wants the comfort of a lie, but knows that womanhood means facing truth in new, vague ways. In “Momma Said Dyke at the Kitchen Table,” Mans decodes a mother’s reaction to a daughter’s coming out. Black Girl, Call Home moves from vignette to cultural criticism to ballad to eulogy to memoir with grace. — Nichole Perkins

The Twilight Zone by Nona Fernández (March 16)

Chilean novelist Nona Fernández has developed a reputation for composing unsettling portraits of life during Chile’s brutal military dictatorship, with stories that venture beyond the stiff and incomplete histories recorded by truth and reconciliation commissions. In her 2015 coming-of-age novella, Space Invaders , a group of friends piece together memories of a classmate who vanished after her father, a police agent, went into hiding. Fernández’s upcoming book, The Twilight Zone , translated from Spanish by Natasha Wimmer, is just as eerie. Its narrator, a documentarian living in modern-day Santiago, obsessively combs through the confessions of a former military officer to reimagine the final moments of the people he tortured and disappeared. In the process, she ventures beyond the historical records that present the Chilean dictatorship’s crimes as a series of isolated cases, revealing an alternate world that haunts the nation’s psyche. — Miguel Salazar

Fierce Poise by Alexander Nemerov (March 23)

Fans of Mary Gabriel’s exquisite Ninth Street Women , which tells the story of the mid-century New York City art boom from the perspective of five exceptional female painters, will rejoice over Fierce Poise , the first major biography of Helen Frankenthaler. Nemerov organizes his unconventional take into 11 distinct moments from the 1950s — the decade when Frankenthaler (barely out of college) developed her technique of staining a canvas with turpentine and pigment, married fellow artist Robert Motherwell, and worked toward her first major exhibition. Moody and textured, Fierce Poise celebrates, and mimics, Frankenthaler’s sweetly explosive paintings. — Hillary Kelly

There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job by Kikuko Tsumura (March 23)

There’s been a boom of workplace-set literature over the past five years or so—novels like Helen Phillips’s The Beautiful Bureaucrat, Hilary Leichter’s Temporary, and Halle Butler’s The New Me , which turn a deadpan focus on the stultifying rhythms and soul-killing mindlessness of the twenty-first century office. There’s No Such Thing As an Easy Job , by Japanese phenom Kikuko Tsumura (translated into English by Polly Barton), is the next candidate for this mini canon. The unnamed narrator is burnt out by the emotional stresses of her last job, so she wanders into an employment agency and asks for something easy and brainless. The agency complies, and while the series of bizarre and unexpected jobs she lands after that — hanging posters, writing copy for cracker boxes — free her from the tension of her old work, they also impose new questions about how we can separate any occupation from who we are. — Hillary Kelly

A Little Devil in America by Hanif Abdurraqib (March 30)

In Abdurraqib’s 2019 book Go Ahead in the Rain , a genre-bending tribute to A Tribe Called Quest, he blended criticism and historical analysis with personal essays and poetry. His upcoming collection, A Little Devil in America , is similar in approach and more expansive in scope, celebrating the rich and storied history of Black performance in the United States in a series of essays, reflections, and memories. From chapters on Soul Train and Whitney Houston’s musical career to historical analyses of dance marathons and meditations on blackface, Abdurraqib shares his love for Black performance — both onstage and in everyday life — and examines how it has been imagined, molded, and consumed by Black and non-Black audiences alike. — Miguel Salazar

The Intimacy Experiment by Rosie Danan (April 6)

This follow-up to Danan’s steamy 2020 debut The Roommate is filled with humor, healing, and heady good times (and, yes, that is a naughty pun). It inhabits the same world as Danan’s last book, and follows Naomi Grant — a former porn star and founder of a wildly successful sex-positive start-up — who now wants to share her unconventional expertise via live, in-person lectures but keeps finding that academia is too stubborn and old-fashioned to give her the time of day. When the handsome rabbi Ethan Cohen approaches her to teach a course on modern intimacy that he hopes will entice new blood to his synagogue, Naomi hesitates. Sex and religion, especially a religion she herself walked away from, don’t mix well, and this rabbi is way too hot for her not to corrupt. She decides to take the chance, and soon finds herself wondering: Who’s corrupting whom? — Nichole Perkins

The Book of Difficult Fruit by Kate Lebo

“Recipes,” Lebo writes in the introduction to this glorious mash-up of memoir, love note, and cookbook, “are rituals that promise transformation.” The transformations she chronicles here are those of the flesh, both human and fruit — journeys through maceration and tenderization. In 26 essays, each accompanied by recipes for jellies, tonics, or balms, Lebo writes about little-known fruits such as aronia and medlar, known only to niche gardeners and long-dead cooks, and more ubiquitous varieties, such as blackberry and pomegranate. Every sentence is as sensuous as the first bite into a cold, juicy plum. — Hillary Kelly

Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson (April 13)

Sincere and contemplative, Nelson’s debut novel is a love story about trauma, masculinity, and vulnerability. A young British-Ghanaian photographer falls for a dancer after a brief encounter in southeast London, and the two quickly develop a magnetic but undefined relationship, complicated by the fact that she lives in Dublin and dates one of his friends. During drunken excursions and sleepless nights, they bond over shared childhood experiences — both were among the only Black students at mostly white private schools — and a profound appreciation for Black artists from Isaiah Rashad to Zadie Smith. But as the relationship deepens, fissures begin to form. — Miguel Salazar

Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner (April 20)

In 2018, Michelle Zauner, lead singer of the band Japanese Breakfast, wrote an essay for The New Yorker titled “ Crying in H Mart ,” where she discussed her connections to shopping in the Asian market chain, tearing up in the food court as she watched people eat, and how it all reminded her of her mother, who had passed away a few years earlier. Now Zauner has expanded that into a memoir, about her mother, her own life, and the centrality of food . Crying in H Mart is palpable in its grief and its tenderness, reminding us what we all stand to lose. — Gabrielle Sanchez

Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri (April 27)

Jhumpa Lahiri craves difficulty. How else to explain the Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist’s midcareer pivot to working in Italian? Over the past decade, Lahiri, already bilingual in Bengali and English, committed herself to achieving fluency in a third tongue: She moved her family to Rome, published collections of essays she wrote in Italian, translated novels by Italian writer Domenico Starnone into English, and outlined her obsession with her adopted language in an essay for the The New Yorker . Now we get Whereabouts , a novel Lahiri wrote in Italian then translated to English herself. It follows a woman as she moves through the nameless Italian city where she lives, contemplating her relationships and the unexpected directions her life has taken. Come for the linguistic derring-do, stay for the introspection. —Madeline Leung Coleman

A Second Place by Rachel Cusk (May 4)

Cusk’s latest novel draws loosely from Lorenzo in Taos , the 1932 memoir by art patron Mabel Dodge Luhan about the time D.H. Lawrence came to stay with her in New Mexico. Second Place tells of a male artist, “L,” who visits the female narrator, “M,” tracing an arc from L’s arrival at M’s secluded home in “the marsh” and concluding with his sudden departure. The plot is simple, yet the way it unfolds is as nuanced as ever, narrated in M’s second person to someone offstage. As with Cusk’s Outline trilogy, it takes seriously the complex emotional geometries between ordinary people. Second Place is a deeply philosophical book about what happens when you confuse art with life. —Jane Hu

Vernon Subutex 3 by Virginie Despentes (May 11)

Either you’re already onboard with this series and need no convincing, or you’ve somehow missed the fact that a cool French writer has been pumping out hilarious and corrosive novels about contemporary urban life at the center and fringes of Paris. Despentes writes like Armistead Maupin, but about aging Gen-Xers instead of hippies and New Agers. — Molly Young

On Violence and Violence Against Women by Jacqueline Rose (May 18)

To write on violence — especially violence against women — is a hazardous task. Lingering on sexual violence could spectacularize, or even reenact it. But Rose, a British academic who is one of our leading feminist critics, contends that the far greater risk is to remain blind to it. Her new book of criticism is marked by her usual vigilance, even as it wades into the unfinished business of recent events. In chapters about subjects ranging from trans rights and the Me Too movement to the sexual trafficking of migrant women and children, Rose stays focused, weaving analyses of ongoing sexual violence through readings of literature. What drives the whole work is the writer’s unwavering belief that we cannot begin to change our world without confronting the many forms of violence against women that continue to constitute it. —Jane Hu

Heaven by Mieko Kawakami (May 25)

Kawakami is a literary celeb in Japan whose much-lauded novel Breasts and Eggs was published in America last year, the first of her three books to be translated into English. Inspired by Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra , Heaven is an investigation of the intrinsic trauma of violence in which a 14-year-old boy who is bullied and taunted for his lazy eye forges a bond with a teenage girl, another victim of the mindless cruelty of children. (It was translated from the Japanese by Sam Bett and David Boyd, who also did Breasts and Eggs .) Haruki Murakami has called Kawakami his favorite young writer, but don’t let that fool you into thinking their work is similar: Kawakami’s writing is as grounded as Murakami’s is flighty, as dedicated to the pared-down shape of her prose as he is to the wild arcs of his narratives. — Hillary Kelly

Burning Man: The Trials of D.H. Lawrence by Frances Wilson (May 25)

When D.H. Lawrence died in 1930, many critics considered him little better than a glorified pornographer. He’d published a slate of highly sexualized (and often autobiographical) novels, starting with The Rainbow in 1915 to Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1928, and the eventual 1960 obscenity trial over the latter in the U.K. only perpetuated his divisive reputation. In this hyperfocused biography, Wilson — Lawrence’s first woman biographer — unpacks those years of Lawrence’s life and sifts through three major crises that affected his work, marriage, and philosophy, asking how such a gifted and original storyteller ended up scorned by the literary establishment during his lifetime. — Hillary Kelly

Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch by Rivka Galchen

Galchen is an inventor and fabulist of the highest order: Her narratives are rigorous, antic creations that explore deceit, misinformation, identity, and the nature of knowledge. Her latest puzzle box of a novel is a surrealist horror story set in the 17th century. Narrated by Katharina Kepler — the herbalist mother of the famed German astronomer Johannes Kepler — the novel is constructed as a defense against the most serious of accusations: witchery. Written as a confession that Katharina offers to her next-door neighbor, the story is winding and hallucinatory, full of poison, gossip, and astral musings. Drawing partly from historical documents, the world Galchen creates feels more than just real. It feels haunted. — Kevin Lozano

Slipping by Mohamad Kheir (June 8)

In this tremendous novel by the Egyptian novelist, we meet a mother who directs her son to obey the orders of his dead father; a young man who wakes up in a ditch only to discover he somehow missed his own wedding; and another man who discovers he can walk on water. Each anecdote brushes the edge of the miraculous before resolving into something more quotidian — until the commonplace ebbs away, and we are left to ponder the mysteries that remain. This is the first of Kheir’s four novels to be published in English, translated from the Arabic by Robin Moger. — Tope Folarin

The Woman in the Purple Skirt by Natsuko Imamura (June 8)

I’m a sucker for tales about female friendships that slide into obsession. The magnetism between women has so often been underestimated by history and literature that I’ll snap up the work of any author willing to go there. And Imamura isn’t just any writer. The Woman in the Purple Skirt , which took home Japan’s most prestigious literary award in 2019 and was translated from the Japanese by Lucy North, follows the aforementioned, otherwise nameless woman, as she sits in a park, watched by The Woman in the Yellow Cardigan. The two eventually become friends and their lives begin to mesh — but something is off, and one of the women is not what she seems. Not just another cheap thriller with a “you can’t trust anyone” conceit, Imamura’s latest is like Anita Brookner’s Look at Me , reimagined by a surrealist. — Hillary Kelly

Filthy Animals by Brandon Taylor (June 22)

Brandon Taylor had a hell of a 2020: His debut novel Real Life , about a queer Black biochemistry grad student barely getting by, was a critical darling that landed on the Man Booker shortlist and is now being developed into a film starring Kid Cudi. Filthy Animals , a new collection of linked stories, promises to delve into similar territory: young Midwesterners navigating cultural landmines and severed connections. A story about a man drawn into the open relationship between two dancers sounds especially Taylor, and especially biting. — Hillary Kelly

Survive the Night by Riley Sager (June 29)

Sager has turned out a thriller a year since his 2017 breakout hit Final Girls , about the lone survivor of a horror-movie-style massacre who’s confronted with her past ten years later. They’re all creepily atmospheric, easy to read without being fluffy, and fun as hell. Each book has also been better and more confident than the last, with 2020’s Home Before Dark deftly weaving together narratives from a writer who recounted his experience living in a haunted house (à la The Amityville Horror ) , and his daughter, who returns to renovate the house after her father’s death. Sager’s next offering, Survive the Night , sounds just as fun, creepy, and compelling, with the tagline: “It’s November 1991. George H. W. Bush is in the White House, Nirvana’s in the tape deck, and movie-obsessed college student Charlie Jordan is in a car with a man who might be a serial killer.” —Emily Palmer Heller

While We Were Dating by Jasmine Guillory (July 13)

At a time when we all want to escape our real lives, what could be more alluring than the sparkling world of a romance novel? In her latest book, rom-com doyenne Guillory whisks us away to Hollywood with one familiar face, a male lead from one her previous novels, and a fresh one, an A-list actress waiting for her next big film. Guillory is known for whirling readers around the dance floors of weddings and palaces with glittering charm and delicate care, and now we can’t wait to see what she does with the glamourous and messy love lives of movie stars. — Tara Abell

Afterparties by Anthony Veasna So (August 3)

The California-born son of Cambodian refugees, the late fiction writer So described inherited immigrant trauma with what Mary Karr called “mind-frying hilarity.” He published stories in The New Yorker and n+1 and died in December, at the age of 28 — nine months before the release of this debut story collection, which is one of the most exciting contributions to Asian American literature in recent years. Afterparties follows everyday life in a Cambodian American community, with a focus on a younger generation negotiating their families’ post-genocide trauma alongside the high jinks of American childhood. So wrote with a light touch, in contrast to Asian American refugee fiction that trafficks in melancholic inscrutability or melodrama. These stories are funny without being satirical, refreshingly realist, and generous in their levity. —Jane Hu

All’s Well by Mona Awad (August 3)

Awad is a dark genius, preternaturally gifted at creating vicious, hilarious tales about the depravity inside us. (Please read her 2019 novel Bunny , about a group of treacly, pink-beribboned MFA students who magically conjure up their ideal men — then ax them when the relationships don’t work out.) All’s Well is set in the theater world, where Miranda, a former actor still in pain from a horrific accident, is attempting to stage Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well . But the cast stages a coup: They want Macbeth . A wicked mash-up about opioid addiction, Bard nerds, Faustian deals, and a cursed play? Yes, please. — Hillary Kelly

Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice by Rupa Marya and Raj Patel (August 3)

Inflammation is both the metaphor and the stated subject of this ambitious interdisciplinary tome co-written by Patel, a journalist and activist, and Marya, a physician and composer. Together they map the connections between public health, social injustice, economic disparities, climate change, and ancestral trauma, making the case that our crappy world needs a new medical paradigm. — Molly Young

Paris Is a Party, Paris Is a Ghost by David Hoon Kim (August 3)

Henrik is a young Japanese man adopted by Danish parents and living in Paris, where he aspires to be a translator. When his girlfriend dies mysteriously, Henrik sets off on an investigation through the city’s seamy underbelly, confronting ghosts of all kinds. This is the debut novel of American writer David Hoon Kim, who himself lived in Paris and studied at the Sorbonne. He writes a mean sentence. — Molly Young

A Slow Fire Burning by Paula Hawkins (August 31)

A perfect novel for your end-of-summer ennui, for what will always feel like that moody last week of vacation before school starts again. Four years after her last novel Into the Water and six years years after her international hit The Girl on the Train , Hawkins returns with a new thriller, a murder mystery set on a London canal boat. A little damp and a little cold, we can already feel our bones chilling from the lurking suspense and characters as murky as the Thames. — Tara Abell

Matrix by Lauren Groff (September 7)

With its brilliant he said, she said structure and mythological underpinnings, Groff’s 2015 novel, Fates and Furies , ginned up chatter and racked up award nominations. Matrix takes a sharp left turn away from the novelist’s usual focus on contemporary Americans. Instead, it heads to the 12th century to follow Marie de France, a former lady-in-waiting to Eleanor of Aquitaine, whom the French court sends to England to run an impoverished abbey. Groff has a knack for dissecting the inner workings of cloistered communities (the scarred small town of The Monsters of Templeton , the doomed cult of Arcadia ) so it will be fascinating to see what she makes of the hive-like energy of an all-female community. — Hillary Kelly

Maggie Nelson needs no genre. Reading her books — The Argonauts , Bluets , On Cruelty — tends to make classification of any kind feel destructive, like it would slice through her writing’s vital connective tissue. The same will almost certainly be true of her forthcoming book On Freedom , which will ask how that most American of ideals helps and how it hinders us in four distinct arenas: art, sex, drugs, and the climate. Reading Nelson is like watching a prima ballerina deliver the performance of a lifetime: athletic, graceful, and awe-inspiring. — Hillary Kelly

Richard Powers does Big well. His last novel, 2018’s Pulitzer-winning The Overstory , is a luminous, 500-plus page collection of stories, set across centuries, about the interconnectivity of forests and the people who live among and nurture trees’ primeval glory and innate intelligence. It’s so expansive it feels like you’re watching his characters from space. So it’s no surprise that his next novel, billed as a major event, will leave the atmosphere. Bewilderment is about Theo Byrne, a widowed astrobiologist searching for life on distant planets, who decides to take his young son on a galactic mission. Expect soaring prose and wise lessons about the bonds between humans and Mother Earth. — Hillary Kelly

From what we know so far about Franzen’s first novel since 2015’s Purity , it sounds exceptionally Franzen. Crossroads , the first novel of a new trilogy called “A Key to All Mythologies” (phew), centers on the Hildebrandt family: father Russ and mother Marion, who are both eyeing the exit out of their marriage, and their nearly grown children, Clem, Becky, and Perry. Reportedly the first in a trilogy of untold page count, this volume starts in 1971 and is set, of course, in a Midwest suburb; the series will eventually work its way through three generations. Most intriguing, the title is a tongue-in-cheek play on the character Casaubon’s long-belabored, unfinished book from George Eliot’s Middlemarch . So until October, we’ll be waiting with bated breath for more details — and another inevitable round of Franzenfreude. — Hillary Kelly

new books fiction 2021

Dreaming of You by Melissa Lozada-Oliva (October 26)

A feverish story of young adulthood, exploring how fandom and obsession shape how we relate to the world. Lozada-Oliva’s verse novel borrows its name from Tejana pop star Selena Quintanilla’s 1995 album, released posthumously after she was murdered by the president of her fan club, and centers around a young Colombian-Guatemalan American poet grappling with heartbreak and a stalling career. She decides to summon Selena, her childhood hero, using improvised witchcraft — and is shockingly successful, only to watch helplessly as Selena is immediately catapulted back into stardom and out of the poet’s life. Using love notes, party gossip, self-reflections, and imagined dialogues — with strangers, exes, Selena, and even Selena’s killer — Dreaming of You navigates the complexities of Latinx identity, self-loathing, love, and the loneliness of drifting into adulthood. — Miguel Salazar

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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

new books fiction 2021

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.

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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 16 Best Fiction Books of 2021 to Devour

These novels are utterly captivating.

best books

2020 was filled with screens. We watched TV shows incessantly, even the bad ones (might I remind you of  Too Hot to Handle  and  Tiger King ?) We sat at our computers, hastily emailing and messaging our coworkers. We endured Zoom calls for any and every occasion and meeting, even the ones that most definitely could have been an email. And yes, we doomscrolled. If we've ever needed an excuse to indulge in a  really good book  (we don't!), 2021 is the time. Thankfully, this year is brimming with page-turners, must-reads, and novels that will make you ache over effortlessly refined sentence structure (just me?). That's why we've rounded up our favorite fiction picks of the new year. If it's out now, snag your copy; if not, get ready to prepare to pre-order.

Welcome to the new feminist frontier, literally. Anna North's provocative Western follows Ada, a 17-year-old who has to flee her town after she's unable to get pregnant a year into marriage. It features everything you ever wanted in a read: Queer cowgirls, a group of feminist outlaws, heists, and so much more. Think The Handmaid’s Tale meets season one of Westworld.

Marie Claire's February #ReadWithMC pick grapples with self-identity, queer parenting, and polyamorous relationships, all of which debut author Torrey Peters handles with dexterity and empathy. The writing is witty and exacting, the plot is raw and messy, and the culmination? You won't be able to put it down.

Nothing like a psychological thriller to kick off a new year that is hopefully not as psychologically disturbing as last year. In Ashley Audrain's pulsating fiction, a new mother begins to suspect not all is right with her baby.

This reimagined, modern adaptation of Jane Eyre trades in gothic mystery for Southern secrecy. In Rachel Hawkins' latest page-turner, expect the forbidden romance you loved in the original tale with all the modern, shiny trimmings.

So this one is actually not a fiction book, but we couldn't not include—it's that good. Nadia Owusu's powerful memoir chronicles her nomadic childhood and, perhaps an even more complicated journey, the one to self-discovery.

Welcome to the existential crisis we're all going through. You know, the paralyzing, catatonic state you enter when endlessly scrolling the social media void? Author Patricia Lockwood has captured that feeling. In her latest, a social media celebrity travels the world and becomes increasingly sucked into her virtual reality—until a shocking text brings her back to the real world. Meta yet relatable and sharp, you will be talking about No One Is Talking About This.

I'm sensing a theme here. In Lauren Oyler's Fake Accounts, social media serves as plot glue. The night before Donald Trump's inauguration in 2016, a young woman discovers her boyfriend is an infamous internet conspiracy theorist. Subversive and irreverent, Fake Accounts might finally compel you to swear off internet lurking...or make you lurk even more.

Author Naima Coster has achieved a rare thing: She's written a book both timely and timeless, one that transcends era and audience. Traversing perspectives and timelines, the reader follows two different families from North Carolina after their lives inextricably collide.

Obsessive calorie counter Rachel harnesses her compulsive energy into a fascination with Miriam, an Orthodox Jewish woman who works at a frozen yogurt shop. Dangerously delicious and utterly idiosyncratic, Milk Fed is the honest, compelling convergence of diet culture, religion, and sex that we've been craving.

Set in the ritzy, rapidly gentrifying beach town of Baxter Beach, Barbados, this novel examines issues of class, race, and lessons taught (and disobeyed) over generations. A plot driven by page-turning crime is balanced with subtle charter studies, making How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House just as thrilling as it is poignant.

In Chang-rae Lee's My Year Abroad, Tiller, an average-at-best student and Pong, a Chinese immigrant and entrepreneur, become an unlikely pair of businessmen. The story telling and format is radical, and that's what makes it so much fun.

Alexandra Andrew's buzzy new novel has all the makings of a book-turned-blockbuster. Our heroine Florence is an entry-level publishing employee who lands a dream gig assisting a big-time—and completely anonymous—writer. After a mysterious accident abroad makes her new boss go missing, Florence decides it might be time for some good, old fashion identity fraud.

Not really fiction, but we couldn't resit plugging this excellent work (and a #ReadWithMC bookclub pick!). Michelle Zauner's memoir is a delicious and satisfying read set in the popular Korean grocery store chain. Zauner thoughtfully tackles family, food, and grief.

When her husband of one year suddenly disappears (among the most mysterious of circumstances, as any "gripping thriller!" would have) a woman is left to discover the truth— and, protect her step-daughter, who as it happens, hates her. I kid, but it is gripping. Let the drama commence!

Zakiya Dalila Harris's brilliant debut is a sharp, sly, and wickedly-funny not-so-satrical peek inside the publishing industry's racial bias. In The Other Black Girl, editorial assistant Nella Rogers is the only Black person at her job until a new girl joins the team. But then, things start to get sinister...You'll tear through this nimble and quick-witted social commentary by flashlight under the covers.

The writer behind the widely popular nonfiction hit Three Women, Lisa Taddeo, is now gifting us with fiction. Bravely and boldly capturing generational female rage, Animal is the cathartic read of 2021.

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Megan DiTrolio is the editor of features and special projects at Marie Claire, where she oversees all career coverage and writes and edits stories on women’s issues, politics, cultural trends, and more. In addition to editing feature stories, she programs Marie Claire’s annual Power Trip conference and Marie Claire’s Getting Down To Business Instagram Live franchise.

Three seasons in, the ‘Abbott Elementary’ actress has turned Principal Ava into a fan-favorite. But James knows there’s so much more to her than her on-screen career.

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Including one that just might fill the Riverdale-shaped hole in your heart.

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Cue up Mike Reno and Ann Wilson’s “Almost Paradise."

The Indiana native is the first senior citizen to join Bachelor Nation.

Here's everything we know on the upcoming episodes.

All the dance numbers! All the show tunes!

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Netflix owes us answers after that ending.

The forthcoming book from 'We Are Not Like Them' authors Jo Piazza and Christine Pride asks the question: Who gets to make the choice to be a mom?

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Lots of steamy nudity ahead.

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new books fiction 2021

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The best books of 2021

John le Carré’s final novel, the race to make a vaccine and the conclusion of the groundbreaking Noughts and Crosses series… Guardian critics pick the year’s best fiction, politics, science, children’s books and more. Let us know in the comments what your favourite books have been.

  • The Observer’s best books of 2021, chosen by guest authors

Best fiction of 2021.

Sally Rooney’s much-anticipated third novel, Damon Galgut’s Booker-winning family saga and Kazuo Ishiguro’s take on AI - Justine Jordan chooses the best novels of the year.

Read the full list Best fiction of 2021

Children’s books

Best children’s books of 2021.

Imogen Russell Williams on reimaginings of King Arthur and Medusa, luminous fairytales and the conclusion to the unforgettable Noughts and Crosses series - plus books for young readers by Ben Okri and inaugural poet Amanda Gorman.

Read the full list Best children’s books of 2021

Crime and thrillers

Best crime novels and thrillers of 2021.

Final outings from John le Carré and Andrea Camilleri, plus three standout debuts - Laura Wilson picks five of the year’s best thrillers and crime novels.

Read the full list Best crime and thrillers of 2021

Science fiction

Best science fiction of 2021.

Adam Roberts selects five of the best science fiction novels of the year - from murder on a spaceship to a feminist utopia.

Read the full list Best science fiction books of 2021

Biography and memoir

Best biography and memoir books of 2021

Fiona Sturges rounds up the best celebrity autobiographies, from Brian Cox to Miriam Margolyes, as well as a poignant account of a woman who helped Aids patients and terrific studies of DH Lawrence and Barbara Pym.

Read the full list Best biography and memoir books of 2021

Best politics books of 2021.

The inside stories of Brexit, Sage and Unite, plus a reckoning with Britain’s imperial history - Gaby Hinsliff’s choice of books about politics and politicians.

Read the full list Best politics books of 2021

Best sport books of 2021.

Nicholas Wroe picks the best books about sport, covering everything from racism on the pitch to the history of female cycling - as well as memoirs by Billie Jean King and Rob Burrow.

Read the full list Best sport books of 2021

Best science books of 2021.

Ian Sample on a history of quarantine, a biography of the family that helped to fuel the US opioid crisis and the inside story of how the Oxford vaccine was made.

Read the full list Best science books of 2021

Best poetry books of 2021.

Covid-19 and the climate crisis haunt much of this year’s poetry, including Michael Rosen’s response to his experience in intensive care and Kate Simpson’s hopeful environmentally-themed anthology - Rishi Dastidar picks the best collections.

Read the full list Best poetry books of 2021

Comics and graphic novels

Best comics and graphic novels of 2021.

The return of Alison Bechdel, a cold war epic and a nuanced observation of a mother’s illness - James Smart marks a year of excellent graphic books.

Read the full list Best comics and graphic novels of 2021

Best music books of 2021.

Alexis Petridis chooses the best books about music and musicians - including Sinéad O’Connor’s striking memoir, Paul McCartney’s autobiography in lyrics and the story of a stolen piece of Nina Simone’s chewing gum.

Read the full list Best music books of 2021

Best food books of 2021.

A fascinating memoir of food and grief, Stanley Tucci’s life story in recipes and new cookbooks from Ruby Tandoh and the Ottolenghi test kitchen - Rukmini Iyer selects the best food books of the year.

Read the full list Best food books of 2021
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The Best Books We Read in 2021

By The New Yorker

Illustration of hand writing

“ De Gaulle ,” by Julian Jackson

Black and white cover image of an archival photograph of Charles de Gaulle in military uniform with men in suits and the...

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

Red black and yellow book cover with an old drawing of 5 people and a horse.

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

Black and white image of two children leaning out of a vintage car window. The title of the book covers part of the image.

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

Photograph of a hand reaching up to a phone on a desk where two framed pictures one of a building and one of a redheaded...

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

A statue against a red background.

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

Bright green cover with an illustration of a horse stuck in black oil at the center.

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

Blue image of an opera stage where one character points a sword at another character who lies on the floor in the...

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

Pink and orange abstract art cover with the title 'Not one day printed in large text.

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

Black and white photograph of Tom Stoppard with the title and author's name printed over it in blue and white type.

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

Beige cover with a simple drawing of a shirt and tie and green die.

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

White image of an embroidered piece of fabric with buttons and a needle and thread with text over it.

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

Red cover of a detail of Sailor and Girl  by German painter Otto Dix.

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

Orange cover with an image of an orange flower field and white and black text.

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

Orange and yellow illustration of two hands reaching out for one another.

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 .
  • Kyle Chayka on the year in vibes .
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The Upper West Side Cult That Hid in Plain Sight

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Booklover Book Reviews

Booklover Book Reviews

New Books Released in 2021: Top picks of the new fiction

Hands up all those who love browsing what’s new in books and the upcoming fiction releases? Many of the best books I read in 2020 were fiction titles that caught my eye from the 2020 new books lists , and 2021 is shaping up as another great year for reading.

📖 Related Reading: 2022 New Book Releases – My Top Picks  and my Favourite Reads of 2021 .

New Release Books 2021 - New Books 2021

Bookshops are dreams built of wood and paper. They are time travel and escape and knowledge and power. Jen Campbell

And, while we love nothing more than popping into our local bookstores, browsing curated 2021 new release books lists online is really the best alternative when we are not able.

Disclosure: If you click a link in this post and make a purchase, I may earn a small commission. Note links will take readers in the US, UK or Canada to their local Amazon store (if available) and in all other cases, to an online book retailer that ships the title to your region.

Join me on my adventures browsing the new books in 2021

Here each month in 2021, I will discuss my top picks of the new books published and the upcoming fiction releases. Links in this article will take you to more detail about each title and, when I have been lucky enough to read it, open up my full review in a new tab.

So read on to see which new books and upcoming releases have caught my attention so far this year.

New Book Releases 2021, November & December

New Books 2021 – November & December Releases

As usual, the publishers are offering up several big-name bestselling author new releases to round out the year, just in time for the 2021 festive season gift guides. But for those who love taking a chance on a debut author, a couple of those still feature amongst our top picks of the November-December book releases.

New literature & drama

New Books 2021 - The Sentence

In new novel The Sentence , Pulitzer Prize-winning author Louise Erdrich ( The Round House , The Night Watchman ) asks what we owe to the living, the dead, to the reader and to the book. According to Publisher’s Weekly, it ‘offers profound insights into the effects of the global pandemic and the collateral damage of systemic racism’ and is one of her most illuminating works to date.

A small independent bookstore in Minneapolis is haunted from November 2019 to November 2020 by the store’s most annoying customer. Flora dies on All Souls’ Day, but she simply won’t leave the store. Tookie, who has landed a job selling books after years of incarceration that she survived by reading with murderous attention, must solve the mystery of this haunting while at the same time trying to understand all that occurs in Minneapolis during a year of grief, astonishment, isolation, and furious reckoning. Find out more>>

New fiction books 2021 - Wish You Were Here

Prolific author Jodi Picoult ‘s 2021 release Wish You Were Here is inspired by recent events. Diana O’Toole’s life is going perfectly to plan. She’s up for promotion to her dream job (art specialist at Sotheby’s) and she’s about to fly to the Galápagos where she’s convinced her surgeon boyfriend, Finn, is going to propose. But then the virus hits New York City and Finn breaks the news: the hospital needs him, he has to stay. But he insists she still go. Once she’s in the Galápagos, the world shuts down around her, leaving her stranded in paradise. With only intermittent news from the outside world, she finds herself examining everything that’s brought her to this point and wondering if there’s a better way to live. But not everything is as it seems… Find out more >>

New Release Books 2021 - Call of the Penguins

Okay, so I am preternaturally drawn to anything involving these especially cute creatures, but Call of the Penguins by Hazel Prior ( Ellie and the Harpmaker ) sounds like a delightful read. Fiercely resilient and impeccably dressed, Veronica McCreedy has lived an incredible 87 years. Most of them alone, in her huge house by the sea. But Veronica has recently discovered a late-life love for family and friendship, adventure and wildlife. More specifically, a love for penguins! And so when she’s invited to co-present a wildlife documentary, far away in the southern hemisphere, she jumps at the chance. Even though it will put her in the spotlight, just when she thought she would soon fade into the wings. Perhaps it’s never too late to shine? Find out more >>

New thriller reads

Latest book releases - All Her Little Secrets

Debut author Wanda Morris’ All Her Little Secrets – Ellice Littlejohn seemingly has it all: an Ivy League law degree, a well-paying job as a corporate attorney in midtown Atlanta, great friends, and a “for fun” relationship with a rich, charming executive, who just happens to be her white boss. But everything changes one morning when she arrives at work and finds him dead with a gunshot to his head. And then she walks away like nothing has happened. Why? Ellice has some dark secrets. She can’t be thrust into the spotlight. People are gossiping, the police are suspicious, and Ellice, the company’s lone black attorney, is promoted to replace her boss – a dream-come-true. But she just can’t shake the feeling something is off. Find out more >>

New fiction - The Extinction Trials

Science fiction thriller The Extinction Trials , bestselling author A.G. Riddle’s new book is described as ‘an uplifting, standalone story about people struggling against impossible odds to save their families in a world gone crazy—with a surprise ending unlike anything you’ve ever read before’.

The end… is only the beginning. After a mysterious global event known only as “The Change,” six strangers wake up in an underground research facility. They soon learn that they’re part of the Extinction Trials—a scientific experiment to restart the human race. But the Extinction Trials hides a very big secret. And so does the world outside. Find out more >>

Captivating new historical fiction

New fiction - Lily, A Tale of Revenge

Lily: A Tale of Revenge by Rose Tremain – Abandoned at the gates of a London park one winter’s night in 1850, baby Lily Mortimer is saved by a young police constable Sam Trench and taken to the London Foundling Hospital. Lily enjoys a brief childhood idyll fostered by an affectionate family in rural Suffolk, before she’s returned to the Hospital and punished for her rebellious spirit. Released into the harsh world of Victorian London, Lily becomes a favoured employee at Belle Prettywood’s Wig Emporium, but all the while she is hiding a dreadful secret… Over the years, policeman Sam has kept watch over her, and when he meets Lily again, there is an instant attraction. Lily is convinced that Sam holds the key to her happiness – but might he also be the one to uncover her crime and so condemn her to death? Find out more >>

New book releases - Beasts of a Little Land

Beasts of a Little Land by Juhea Kim – An epic story of love, war, and redemption spanning half a century, set against the backdrop of the Korean independence movement, following the intertwined fates of Jade, a young girl sold to a courtesan school and JungHo, the penniless son of a hunter. This debut novel takes readers from the perfumed chambers of a courtesan school in Pyongyang to the glamorous cafes of a modernizing Seoul and the boreal forests of Manchuria, where battles rage, and Juhea Kim’s unforgettable characters forge their own destinies as they wager their nation’s. Immersive and elegant, Beasts of a Little Land unveils a world where friends become enemies, enemies become saviours, heroes are persecuted, and beasts take many shapes. Find out more >>

Other notable new releases include:

new books fiction 2021

Recent Book Releases

New Books 2021 October

New Books in 2021 – October Releases

October is typically a big month in publishing as people begin preparing their Christmas book wishlists, and 2021 is no exception. We have highly anticipated new book releases to look forward to from international bestselling authors Amor Towles, Matthew Reilly, Jenny Colgan and Christian White, along with some lesser-known writers’ attention-grabbing thriller and historical mystery fiction synopses.

New fiction thrills

New Books 2021 - Wild Place by Christian White

Wild Place is the much anticipated new novel from international bestselling psychological thriller author Christian White ( The Nowhere Child and The Wife and The Widow ). He is known for his devious plot twists.

In the summer of 1989, a local teen goes missing from the idyllic suburb of Camp Hill in Australia. As rumours of Satanic rituals swirl, schoolteacher Tom Witter becomes convinced he holds the key to the disappearance. When the police won’t listen, he takes matters into his own hands with the help of the missing girl’s father and a local neighbourhood watch group. But as dark secrets are revealed and consequences to past actions are faced, Tom learns that the only way out of the darkness is to walk deeper into it.

Wild Plac e peels back the layers of suburbia, exposing what’s hidden underneath – guilt, desperation, violence – and attempts to answer the question: Why do good people do bad things?   Read my review >>

New book releases - No One Will Miss Her

No One Will Miss Her by Kat Rosenfield – I will admit it was the striking and evocative cover design that first caught my attention, but a quick read of the blurb and I found this new release offers a lot more substance to chew on. Two devious women from opposite worlds discover the dangers of coveting someone else’s life, and it is Detective Ian Bird’s job to figure out how that led to a murder in the hard-luck town of Copper Falls in rural Maine. What particularly appeals to me is that apparently one of these women, Lizzie, narrates their story from beyond the grave. Find out more >>

New release books - The Last Time She Died - October 2021

The Last Time She Died by Zoe Sharp – A family gather to mourn the death of their beloved husband and stepfather. No one but Detective John Byron sees the young woman with the white-blonde hair hiding in the shadows watching them, but then she is gone. She breaks into the family’s home and waits for them to return and call the police. When arrested, she smiles calmly at the outraged family and says she is Blake Claremont, the deceased’s daughter. But Blake is presumed dead… she vanished 10 years ago. The first in a new Blake & Byron Thrillers series. Find out more >>

Historical mysteries

New fiction books - The Fossil Hunter

Tea Cooper ( The Cartographer’s Secret , The Woman in the Green Dress ) is known for her sweeping historical dual timeline mystery fiction and this new release The Fossil Hunter sounds like a fascinating read. A fossil discovered at London’s Natural History Museum leads one woman back in time to nineteenth-century Australia and a world of scientific discovery and dark secrets in this compelling historical mystery. Find out more >>

October new book releases - The Egyptian Mystery, Penny Green

The reading world can never have enough feisty female sleuths… The Egyptian Mystery is the new book (#11) in Emily Organ’s bestselling Penny Green Victorian Mystery Series. “Dead men don’t just walk out of hotels…” Penny faces her most baffling case yet. Egyptologist Charles Hamilton is found dead in his hotel room, but then his body vanishes and his wife goes missing too. Find out more >>

Literary new release books

New fiction releases October 2021 - The Lincoln Highway

Few new releases are more highly anticipated than a new book from Amor Towles ( Rules of Civility , A Gentleman in Moscow ) and early praise of The Lincoln Highway suggests it has been worth the wait. In June, 1954, eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson is driven home to Nebraska by the warden of the juvenile work farm where he has just served 15-months for involuntary manslaughter. His mother long gone, his father recently deceased, and the family farm foreclosed upon by the bank, he’d planned to pick up his eight-year-old brother, Billy, and head to California where they could start their lives anew. But it seems two friends from the work farm had hidden in the trunk of the car, and have a different plan for him… one that involves a fateful journey in the opposite direction-to the City of New York. Read my review >>

New book releases 2021 - The Impossibel Truths of Love

In The Impossible Truths of Love by Hannah Beckerman, when Nell’s father makes a deathbed declaration that hints at a long-held secret, it reignites feelings of isolation that have plagued her for years. Her suspicions about the family’s past only deepen when her mother, Annie, who is losing her memories to dementia, starts making cryptic comments of her own. Thirty-five years earlier, Annie’s life was upended by a series of traumas—one shock after another that she buried deep in her heart. The decisions she made at the time were motivated by love, but she knew even then that nobody could ever understand—let alone forgive—what she did. As the two women’s stories unravel, a generation apart, Nell discovers the devastating truth about her mother’s past and her own. An emotionally powerful story of identity, memory and nature of family. Find out more>>

Fun new fiction releases

As we approach the end of another year, and the Christmas season, many like me are seeking lighter, fun new fiction for my reading pile. Well, look no further than prolific authors Matthew Reilly and Jenny Colgan’s latest book releases:

New Books 2021 - The One Impossible Labyrinth

The One Impossible Labyrinth by Matthew Reilly – As a long time, unabashed fan of this author’s globe-trotting action-adventure Jack West Jr series , I look forward to the supreme escapist read this grand finale will be but also sadness at saying goodbye to these characters, after a 16-year reader journey since the first title Seven Ancient Wonders in 2005. He has made it to the Supreme Labyrinth. Now Jack West Jr faces one last race – against multiple rivals, against time, against the collapse of the universe itself – a headlong race that will end at a throne inside the fabled labyrinth. Note: This may not be available to readers worldwide until Jan2022. Update: Read my review >>

New Books 2021 - The Christmas Bookshop

The Christmas Bookshop by Jenny Colgan – I am not typically one to read Christmas-themed novels, but ever since I fell in love with the geeky charm of Jenny Colgan’s Resistance Is Futile I have been wanting to go back for another bite. The prospect of spending Christmas with her perfect sister Sofia does not appeal to Carmen but she has perilously little cash and few options. Frankly, Sofia doesn’t exactly want her prickly sister Carmen there either, but she has a client who needs help revitalizing his dusty and disorganized bookshop on the picturesque streets of historic Edinburgh. Carmen takes on the job, intrigued despite herself. Find out more >>

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New Book Releases September 2021

Top Picks of the New Release Books in September 2021

September 2021 sees highly anticipated new releases from reader favourites like Sally Rooney, Liane Moriarty, Chris Hammer and Anthony Doerr, along with some intriguing new speculative fiction.

Criminal suspense

Apples Never Fall - New Books

Liane Moriarty ( Big Little Lies , Nine Perfect Strangers , The Last Anniversary ) was a worldwide #1 bestseller well before the recent award-winning TV series adaptations. In her new novel Apples Never Fall , Joy Delaney and husband Stan have done well for themselves. Four wonderful grown-up children. A family business to envy. The golden years of retirement ahead of them. So when Joy vanishes – no note, no calls, her bike missing – it’s natural that tongues will wag. How did Stan scratch his face? And who was the stranger who entered and suddenly left their lives? What are they all hiding? But for the Delaney children there is a much more terrifying question: did they ever know their parents at all? Find out more >>

Treasure & Dirt - New Release Books

Chris Hammer’s Martin Scarsden crime series ( Scrublands, Silver , Trust ) has earned him a legion of fans who, like me, will be eager to get their hands on a copy of his new standalone novel, Treasure & Dirt . In the desolate outback town of Finnigans Gap, police struggle to maintain law and order. Thieves pillage opal mines, religious fanatics recruit vulnerable young people and billionaires do as they please. Then an opal miner is found crucified and left to rot down his mine. Nothing about the miner’s death is straightforward, not even who found the body. Sydney homicide detective Ivan Lucic is sent to investigate, assisted by inexperienced young investigator Nell Buchanan. Read my review of this criminally good crime fiction >>

Speculative fiction releases in September

5 Minds - New Book Releases

According to early reviewers, Guy Morpuss’ speculative debut novel 5 Minds is brilliantly inventive and a must read for fans of The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle . The Earth’s population has been controlled. Lifespans are limited to 80 years, except for those who agree to become a commune. Five minds sharing one body, each living for four hours at a time, but with a combined lifespan of nearly 150 years. Alex, Kate, Mike, Sierra and Ben have already spent 25-years together in what was once Mike’s body, their frequent personality clashes leading to countless arguments. Wanting to buy upgrades for their next host body, they travel to a Death Park where time can be gambled like money. But things go very wrong when Kate accepts a dangerous offer, and one of them disappears. It’s hard enough to catch a murderer. It’s almost impossible when you might be sharing a body with them . Find out more >>

The Book of Form and Emptiness - New in Books

The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki ( A Tale for the Time Being ) is about grief, resilience, creativity and psychological difference. It is about the importance of reading, and an observation of the mess consumer culture has got us into. It is an affirmation of the power of community. It is funny, kind, wise, urgent and completely irresistible. After his father dies, Benny Oh finds he can hear objects talking: teapots, marbles and sharpened pencils, babbling in anger or distress. His mother starts collecting things to give her comfort. Overwhelmed by the clamour of all the stuff, Benny seeks refuge in the beautiful silence of the public library. There, the objects speak only in whispers. There, he meets a homeless poet and a mesmerising young performance artist. There, a book reaches out to him. Not just any book: his own book. And a very important conversation begins. Find out more >>

Immersive literary fiction

Cloud Cuckoo Land - New Fiction

Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr ( All The Light We Cannot See ) is dedicated to ‘the librarians then, now and in the years to come’ and sounds like a modern classic in the making. Bound together by a single ancient text, the unforgettable characters in this ambitious novel are dreamers and outsiders figuring out the world around them: thirteen-year-old Anna and Omeir, an orphaned seamstress and a cursed boy, on opposite sides of the formidable city walls during the 1453 siege of Constantinople; teenage idealist Seymour and octogenarian Zeno in an attack on a public library in present-day Idaho; and Konstance, decades from now, who turns to the oldest stories to guide her community in peril . Find out more >>

Bewilderment - New Books 2021

Shortlisted for this year’s Booker Prize, Bewilderment by Richard Powers ( The Overstory ) has been described as a ‘taut ecological parable’. Robbie is a 9-year old boy with Asperger’s-like traits, a precocious intelligence, a prodigious memory and exquisitely tuned to loss. His father, Theo, is an astrobiologist, consumed with finding signs of life in the cosmos and raising Robbie alone after the tragic death of his wife. As Robbie’s behaviour grows more unmanageable, Theo seeks out an experimental treatment that enables Robbie to pattern his emotional responses on the recorded brainwave activity of his late mother. But as government funding is pulled, Robbie suffers a precipitous decline with heart-breaking consequences. Find out more >>

Relationship dramas

Beautiful World Where Are You - New Release Books 2021

Beautiful World, Where Are You is the highly anticipated new contemporary drama from Salley Rooney ( Normal People , Conversations With Friends ). Alice, a novelist, meets Felix, who works in a warehouse, and asks him if he’d like to travel to Rome with her. In Dublin, her best friend, Eileen, is getting over a break-up, and slips back into flirting with Simon, a man she has known since childhood. Alice, Felix, Eileen, and Simon are still young―but life is catching up with them. They desire each other, they delude each other, they get together, they break apart. They worry about their friendships and the world they live in. Are they standing in the last lighted room before the darkness, bearing witness to something? Will they find a way to believe in a beautiful world? Find out more >>

Portrait of a Scotsman - Books, New Releases

Portrait of a Scotsman (A League of Extraordinary Women Book 3) by Evie Dunmore sounds like the perfect antidote to the current bombardment of ‘deep and meaningful’ in the media. Going toe-to-toe with a brooding Scotsman is rather bold for a respectable suffragist and Oxford scholar but when the aspiring artist and banking heiress Hattie Greenfield finds herself at the altar with the darkly attractive financier Lucian Blackstone what else is she to do? When the bewitching daughter of his business rival all but falls into his lap, Lucian, a self-made man holding vast wealth but little power, sees political opportunity. He has no room for his new wife’s romantic notions… until a journey to Scotland paints everthing in a different light. Find out more >>

August 2021 Books, New Releases - New in Fiction

What’s New in Books in August 2021

There are some big industry names releasing new books and several intriguing debuts that will be difficult for bookish souls to resist. Here are my top picks of the new book releases in August 2021.

Fresh literary fiction

New Book Releases - Once There Were Wolves - August 2021

2020 was a breakout year for Aussie author Charlotte McConaghy with her epic climate fiction title Migrations (aka The Last Migration ) topping the international bestseller lists. Now she is back with another suspenseful literary fiction release, Once There Were Wolves .

Inti Flynn arrives in Scotland with her twin sister, Aggie, to lead a team tasked with reintroducing fourteen grey wolves into the remote Highlands, despite fierce opposition from the locals. She hopes to heal not only the dying landscape, but Aggie too, unmade by the terrible secrets that drove them out of Alaska. When Inti’s wolves surprise everyone by thriving, she begins to let her guard down, even opening up to the possibility of love. But when a local farmer is found dead, she’s unable to accept her wolves could be responsible and makes a reckless decision to protect them, testing every instinct she has.   Read my review of this mesmerizing novel >>

Books New Releases 2021 - We Are the Brennans

Tracey Lange’s debut We Are the Brennans is receiving high praise from early reviewers. When 29-year-old Sunday Brennan wakes up in a Los Angeles hospital, bruised and battered after a drunk driving accident she caused, she swallows her pride and goes home to her family in New York. She’d deserted them all―and her high school sweetheart―five years before with little explanation, and they’ve got questions. The longer she stays, however, the more she realizes they need her just as much as she needs them. A richly layered, deft exploration of the staying power of shame―and the redemptive power of love―in an Irish Catholic family torn apart by secrets . Find out more >>

New in Books - The Reading List - August 2021

Sara Nisha Adam’s debut The Reading List has been described “a quietly beautiful novel about the magic of books and the joy of human connection” by Newsweek. West London widower Mukesh is grieving his wife. Aleisha is a bright but anxious teenager working at the local library, who discovers a list of novels she’s never heard of before in a returned book and sets out to read them all. These books transport Aleisha from the painful realities she’s facing at home. When Mukesh enters the library, seeking to forge a connection with his bookworm granddaughter, she shows him the list and these shared reading experiences build a connection between two lonely souls. Find out more >>

New Book Releases - The Last Chance Library

Freya Sampson’s debut The Last Chance Library  sounds like another heartwarming fiction release tailor-made for bookish souls. June Jones emerges from her shell to fight for her beloved local library, and through the efforts and support of an eclectic group of library patrons, she discovers life-changing friendships along the way.  Find out more >>

August 2021 mystery thrillers

While authors Joanne Harris ( Chocolat , Five Quarters of the Orange ) and Stephen King ( The Shining , Mr Mercedes ) have distinctly different writing styles, common to both are loyal fan bases eager to get their hands on copies of their new books.

New Books 2021 - A Narrow Door

A Narrow Door marks an incendiary moment for St Oswald’s school. For the first time in its history, a headmistress is in power, the gates opening to girls. Rebecca Buckfast has spilled blood to reach this position. Barely forty, she is just starting to reap the harvest of her ambition. As the new regime takes on the old guard, the ground shifts. And with it, the remains of a body are discovered. But Rebecca is here to make her mark. She’ll bury the past so deep it will evade even her own memory, just like she has done before. After all… You can’t keep a good woman down. Find out more >>

New Books Stephen King - Billy Summers

Billy Summers is a killer for hire and the best in the business. But he’ll do the job only if the target is a truly bad guy. And now Billy wants out. But first there is one last hit. Billy is among the best snipers in the world, a decorated Iraq war vet, a Houdini when it comes to vanishing after the job is done. So what could possibly go wrong? How about everything… This can’t-put-it-down novel features a compelling and surprising duo who set out to avenge the crimes of an extraordinarily evil man. It’s about love, luck, fate, and a complex hero with one last shot at redemption. Find out more >>

New Books August 2021 - In My Dreams I Hold A Knife

Six friends. One college reunion. One unsolved murder. Told in racing dual timelines, with a dark campus setting and a darker look at friendship, love, obsession, and ambition,  In My Dreams I Hold A Knife   is an addictive, propulsive read. Find out more >>

Historical mystery & coming of age

New Book Releases - Clark and Division

Set in 1944 Chicago, Edgar Award-winner Naomi Hirahara’s eye-opening new mystery Clark and Division about a young woman searching for the truth about her revered older sister’s suspicious death, brings into focus the struggles of one Japanese American family released from mass incarceration at Manzanar during World War II. A heartbreakingly real crime fiction plot with rich period detail inspired by true events. Find out more >>

New Books - The People We Keep

What does it mean to feel at home in the world? To find our true family? In Allison Larkin’s new book The People We Keep a young songwriter steals a car, hits the road, and struggles against all odds to try to find the answer. About the people we choose—and even more importantly the people who choose us—this novel is both a profound love letter to creative resilience and a reminder that sometimes even tragedy can be a kind of blessing. Find out more >>

New book releases July 2021

What’s New in Books in July 2021

Whether you are in lockdown or out and about enjoying holiday down-time, the new release books in July are sure to interest a wide range of readers. Here are my picks of the best new fiction books out this month.

New thrillers and suspense novels

The Night She Disappeared - Books, new releases July 2021

One of the biggest name book releases in July 2021 is bestselling thriller author Lisa Jewell’s The Night She Disappeared exploring the power of toxic relationships, obsession and the murkier reaches of the human psyche.

Teenage mother Tallulah goes out on a date while her mother Kim babysits, but never returns. Desperate to find her, Kim contacts her friends and learns Tallulah and her boyfriend were last seen heading to a party at an abandoned mansion in the woods the locals call Dark Place. Over a year on their disappearance remains unsolved, but could a note discovered in the woods lead to the truth about what happened that night? Read my review >>

new books fiction 2021

A Voice in the Night by Sarah Hawthorn is an addictive thriller of twists and turns from a striking new voice.

Following a bitter separation, Lucie moves to London to take up a position with a prestigious law firm. It seems an optimistic new beginning, until one day she receives a hand-delivered note with the strange words:  At last I’ve found you. A shock I‘m sure. But in time I‘ll explain. Martin. As a young intern in New York, Lucie had fallen in love with a married man called Martin, who was tragically killed in the 9/11 attacks. Could her long-dead lover have staged his own disappearance under the cover of that fateful day 20 years ago? Or is someone else stalking her, or her vivid imagination is playing tricks?   Read my review >>

More new literary mysteries in July 2021

Intimacies - New in Books

In Intimacies by Katie Kitamura , an interpreter has come to The Hague to escape New York and work at the International Court. A woman of many languages and identities, she is looking for a place to finally call home but she’s drawn into simmering personal dramas: her lover is still entangled in his marriage, her friend witnesses a ‘seemingly’ random act of violence, and she’s pulled into an explosive political controversy when she’s asked to interpret for a former president accused of war crimes. Find out more >>

The Painting - New books 2021

Alison Booth ( The Philosopher’s Daughters ) is back with new mystery novel The Painting . When Anika Molnar flees Hungary not long before the break-up of the Soviet Union, she carries only a small suitcase and a painting from her family’s hidden collection. Living with her aunt in Sydney, the painting hangs in pride of place in her bedroom, until one day it is stolen. As sinister secrets from her family’s past cast suspicion over the painting’s provenance, she embarks on a gripping quest to uncover the truth. Read my review >>

July 2021 Historical Fiction

The Forest of Vanishing Stars - New in Books 2021

My top pick of the historical fiction releases this month is The Forest of Vanishing Stars by Kristin Harmel, the New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Lost Names .

An evocative coming-of-age World War II story about an isolated and lonely but resourceful young woman Yona who was brought up by an old woman in the Eastern European wilderness after being kidnapped from her wealthy German parents as a child, who after learning what’s now happening in the outside world, uses her knowledge of the wilderness to help Jewish refugees escape the Nazis—until a secret from her past threatens everything. Find out more >>

July’s fresh science fiction

A Psalm for the Wild-Built - New books 2021

In novella A Psalm for the Wild-Built (Monk & Robot #1) from Hugo award-winning Becky Chambers… It’s been centuries since the robots of Panga gained self-awareness and laid down their tools, and wandered, en masse, into the wilderness, never to be seen again; now just urban legend. One day, the life of a tea monk is upended by the arrival of a robot, there to honor the old promise of checking in. The robot cannot go back until the question of “what do people need?” is answered. But the answer to that question depends on who you ask, and how. They’re going to need to ask it a  lot . Find out more >>

Appleseed - New book releases 2021

Matt Bell’s Appleseed is being described as a breakout novel and a pulse-pounding novel of ideas. Set over 3 timelines – in eighteenth-century apple orchards in Ohio, fifty years from now when climate change has ravaged the Earth and a thousand years into the future when North America is covered by a massive sheet of ice – this novel is part speculative epic, part tech thriller, part reinvented fairy tale, and an unforgettable meditation on climate change; corporate, civic, and familial responsibility; manifest destiny; and the myths and legends that sustain us all. Sounds epic. Find out more >>

Book releases to warm the heart

Home - New in Books

In Home by Penny Parkes , Anna Wilson travels the world as a professional housesitter – stepping into other people’s lives – caring for their homes, pets and sometimes even neighbours. But growing up in foster care, all she has ever really wanted is a proper home of her own, filled with family, love and happy memories. Her friends may have become her family of choice, but Anna is still stuck in that nomadic cycle, looking for answers, trying to find the courage to put down roots and find a place to call home. Find out more >>

The Other Side of Beautiful - Books, new release July 2021

Kim Lock’s The Other Side of Beautiful has been described as Lost & Found   meets  The Rosie Project . Mercy Blain’s house has just burnt down, and since she hasn’t left that house for 2-years, this goes beyond the disaster it would be for most people. She goes to her not-quite-ex-husband Eugene’s house, but it turns out she can’t stay there, either. So, after the chance purchase of a cult classic camper van, Mercy embarks on a road trip with her sausage dog, Wasabi, and a mysterious box of cremated remains. Find out more >>

New in Books June 2021

What’s New in Books in June 2021

Whether you are looking forward to your summer holidays or snuggling up with a rug and hot chocolate like I am here in the southern hemisphere, June is a great month for reading. Here’s my selection of the best new fiction books on offer.

New romance novels

Two Steps Onward - Books New Releases

Most book lovers will have heard of Graeme Simsion’s breakout bestselling non-neurotypical rom-com trilogy starring Don Tillman – The Rosie Project , The Rosie Effect and The Rosie Result . But did you know that in 2017, Simsion teamed up with his wife author Anne Buist to write Two Steps Forward , a soup-for-the-soul midlife romance set on the famous Camino de Santiago pilgrim’s trail?

Two Steps Onwards is the pair’s wise, witty and wine-filled follow-up, set on the less-travelled Chemin d’Assise and Via Francigena trail to Rome. It’s about helping the people you love, and knowing when to let go. Figuring out what you really want in life. And seizing your chances, before it’s too late. Read my review >>

Very Sincerely Yours - New release romance books, June 2021

In Very Sincerely Yours , the new romantic comedy from Kerry Winfrey (‘Waiting for Tom Hanks’) newly single vintage toy store assistant Theodora has a crush on children’s show host Everett St James, and summons up the courage to write to him, just like his much younger fans do – after all, he always gives them sound advice. Low and behold, he starts writing back! Hard for a booklover to resist a sweet epistolary novel. Find out more >>

Someone I Used To Know - New Books 2021

Bestselling romance author Paige Toon’s latest happy-tear-jerker, Someone I Used To Know , is a heart-wrenching and romantic story about Leah, George and Theo, at fifteen and then what seems like a lifetime later. It’s about healing scars, second chances, love for the family we’re born into and the one we build along the way, and discovering the courage to love again. Recommended for fans of Beth O’Leary and Sally Thorne. Find out more >>

New thrillers and mysteries in June

Falling by TJ Newman - New Book Releases June 2021

Falling by TJ Newman , a former bookseller, now experienced flight attendant, is one of the most raved about debut thrillers of June 2021 — like the films  Die Hard and  Speed  on steroids (Library Journal) and Jaws  at 35,000 feet ( Don Winslow ).

You just boarded a flight to New York. There are one hundred and forty-three other passengers onboard. What you don’t know is that thirty minutes before the flight your pilot’s family was kidnapped. For his family to live, everyone on your plane must die. The only way the family will survive is if the pilot follows his orders and crashes the plane. Enjoy the flight… An early contender for my best book of 2021.  Read my review >>

Related Read: Another June 2021 book release set in the sky is Hostage by Clare Mackintosh .

When You Are Mine - 2021 book releases

In Gold Dagger winner Michael Robotham ‘s new standalone novel When You Are Mine , Philomena McCarthy (the daughter of a London gangster) has defied the odds and become a promising junior officer with the Metropolitan Police. Called to the scene of a domestic assault, she rescues Tempe Brown, the girlfriend of a decorated detective. The incident is hushed up, but Phil has unwittingly made a dangerous enemy with powerful friends. For me, the most intriguing of the June 2021 psychological thriller releases.  Find out more >>

Mrs England - New in Books June 2021

Mrs England is a new gripping feminist mystery from bestselling author Stacey Halls ( The Familiars  and  The Foundling ). West Yorkshire, 1904.  Young nurse Ruby May takes a position looking after the children of wealthy couple Charles and Lilian England. As she adapts to life at the isolated Hardcastle House, Charles is welcoming but it becomes clear there’s something not quite right about the beautiful, mysterious Mrs England. Hard for this booklover to look past a Rebecca-esque Edwardian mystery.  Find out more >>

Literary and historical fiction releases

Geraldine Verne's Red Suitcase - Books, New Releases

Jane Riley’s debut novel The Likely Resolutions of Oliver Clock was feel-good fiction at its finest, and accordingly one of my favourite reads in 2020 .

In her 2021 release  Geraldine Verne’s Red Suitcase , her titular character is grieving the loss of her husband. Jack had two dying wishes: that his wife scatter his ashes somewhere ‘exotic’, and that she not give up on life once he was gone. He intended to spur her on to new adventures, but despite clinging to her red suitcase, Geraldine Verne hasn’t left the house for 3-months. It takes an accident for her to accept help and heartbroken Meals on Wheels volunteer Lottie brings with her more than cottage pie. A gloriously unlikely friendship blossoms. Read my review >>

Still Life - New Fiction Books

My pick of June 2021’s more literary book releases is  Still Life by Sarah Winman ( Tin Man ,  When God Was a Rabbit ). It moves from the Tuscan Hills and piazzas of Florence, to the smog of London’s East End and spans four decades, and is described as a big-hearted story of two people brought together by love, war, art and the ghost of E.M. Forster. When Joanna Cannon calls a new book ‘utterly beautiful’ and Graham Norton says it is ‘sheer joy’, it goes straight on my wishlist. Find out more >>

The Personal Librarian - New Books 2021

From bestselling historical fiction author Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray, comes The Personal Librarian – a fictional account of the remarkable true story of J. P. Morgan’s personal librarian, Belle da Costa Greene, a Black American woman who became famous in high-society for her intellect, style, and wit, all while forced to hide her true identity and pass as white in order to retain the role she deserved and leave a lasting legacy. Love reading fiction based on fact.  Find out more >>

May 2021 Books New Releases

What’s New in Books in May 2021

As a rule, May usually turns out a bumper crop of new books, with 2021 is proving no exception. There really is a wonderfully diverse range of books in the new fiction releases lists for us to discuss this month.

Highly anticipated literary fiction

New Books 2021 - Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead

Amongst the most highly anticipated of the May 2021 book releases is Maggie Shipstead’s Great Circle . With a title as grand as its scope, settings and page count, and superlatives such as ‘breathtaking epic’ and ‘masterpiece’ being bandied about, this is on my ‘must-make-time-to-read’ list.

An unforgettable story of Marion, a daredevil female aviator determined to chart her own course in life, at any cost and, a century later, a vibrant canny Hollywood actress determined to bring her story to life on the big screen and liberate herself in the process —this emotional, meticulously researched novel spans Prohibition-era Montana, the Pacific Northwest, Alaska, New Zealand, wartime London, and modern-day Los Angeles. Find out more >>

More noteworthy literary fiction releases:

2021 Book Releases - How Lucky by Will Leitch

How Lucky by Will Leitch – Remember what I said about diversity? This debut about a fiercely resilient young man living with a severe physical disability and his efforts to solve a crime mystery that unfolds right outside his house, is being described as ‘as suspenseful and funny as it is moving,’ and earning high praise for the authenticity of its first-person narrative.  Find out more >>

Mary Jane by Jessica Anya Blau – Described as Almost Famous  meets  Daisy Jones & The Six , this tale of a 14-year-old girl’s coming of age in 1970s Baltimore, caught between her straight-laced family and the progressive one she nannies for—who are secretly hiding a famous rock star and his movie star wife for the summer—sounds like a great holiday read. Find out more >>

Upcoming releases – science fiction & fantasy

New release books - The Kingdoms by Natasha Pulley

The Kingdoms , a new release genre-bender from bestselling author Natasha Pulley ( The Watchmaker of Filigree Street ) is being compared the writing of Stuart Turton and David Mitchell , some of my favourite authors.

In a London occupied by the French empire, Joe Tournier is a British slave. He has a job, a wife, a baby daughter. But he also has flashes of a life he cannot remember, in a world where English is spoken in England, and not French. Then he receives a postcard of a lighthouse built just six months ago, that was first written nearly one hundred years ago by a stranger who seems to know him very well. “Come home, if you remember.” Joe’s journey to unravel the truth will take him to a remote Scottish island, and back through time itself as he battles for his life – and for a very different future. Find out more >>

Recent book releases May 2021 - The Ones We're Meant To Find

One of the most original new fiction releases this month is The Ones We’re Meant to Find  by Joan He. It’s described as ‘a gripping and heartfelt YA sci-fi with mind-blowing twists’.

Cee has been trapped on an abandoned island for 3 years and 17 days without any memories of how she arrives or her life prior. All she knows is that somewhere out there, she has a sister named Kay that she is desperate to find. In a world apart, 16-year-old STEM prodigy Kasey Mizuhara is also living a life of isolation. The eco-city she calls home is one of eight levitating around the world, built for people who protected the planet―and now need protecting from it. While Kasey, an introvert and loner, doesn’t mind the lifestyle, her sister Celia hated it. Popular and lovable, Celia preferred the outside world. But no one could have predicted that Celia would take a boat out to sea, never to return. Find out more >>

New crime thrillers – May 2021

There’s rarely a shortage of new crime fiction and mystery thrillers, so popular is the genre, but the deeper psychological intrigue offered by these upcoming releases particularly caught my attention.

new books fiction 2021

Before You Knew My Name by Jacqueline Bublitz – 18yr-old Alice arrived in New York carrying only cash and a camera. One month later, she is an unidentified murder victim. Ruby Jones is also trying to start over but lonelier than ever. Until she finds Alice’s body by the Hudson River. Alice is sure Ruby is the key to solving the mystery of her life – and death. And Ruby finds herself unable to let Alice go. Find out more >>

The Last Thing He Told Me by Laura Dave – Before Owen Michaels disappears, he smuggles a note to his new wife, Hannah:  protect her . He means his 16-year-old daughter who lost her mother tragically as a child; who wants nothing to do with her new stepmother. Hannah soon realises that Owen isn’t who he said he was, and his daughter might hold the key to discovering his true identity, and why he disappeared. Find out more >>

Finally, we turn our attention to some of the best of May’s lighter new releases, books that will give you the warm and fuzzies.

May 2021 Contemporary Romance Novels

new books fiction 2021

People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry – Poppy and Alex have nothing in common but have been the best of friends since college. They live far apart, but every summer, for a decade, they have taken one glorious week of vacation together. Until 2 years ago, when they ruined everything and haven’t spoken since. Now realising that’s when she was last truly happy, and determined to fix everything, Poppy convinces Alex to join her on one more vacation. Find out more >>

The Beautiful Fall by Hugh Breakey – Every 179 days Robbie forgets everything. He knows this because last time it happened he wrote himself a letter explaining it all. To survive the forgetting, Robbie leads a solitary, regimented life. Speaks to no one if he can avoid it. But then, with twelve days left before his next forgetting, Julie invades his life. Young, beautiful—the only woman he can ever remember meeting. Read my review >>

April 2021 Book Releases - New Fiction

What Was New in Fiction in April 2021

Drama & romance.

The Road Trip - Beth O'Leary - New 2021 romance novels

I absolutely adored Beth O’Leary’s first romantic comedy novels The Flatshare and The Switch , and now her third, The Road Trip , is one of my most hotly anticipated 2021 fiction releases.

Addie and her sister are about to embark on an epic road trip to a friend’s wedding in rural Scotland. The playlist is all planned and the snacks are packed. But, not long after setting off, a car slams into the back of theirs. The driver is none other than Addie’s ex, Dylan, who she’s avoided since their traumatic break-up two years earlier. Dylan and his best mate are heading to the wedding too, and they’ve totalled their car, so Addie has no choice but to offer them a ride. Sounds like the perfect romantic comedy setup. I cannot wait to read this one. Find out more >>

Other Women - Cathy Kelly - New women's fiction 2021

Other Women by Cathy Kelly has been described as “a refreshingly honest story about female friendship and marriage – and all the great loves of our life”.

Three women. Three secrets. Three tangled lives… Sid wears her independence like armour. So when she strikes up a rare connection with unlucky-in-love Finn, they are both determined to prove that men and women can just be friends. Can’t they? Marin has the perfect home, attentive husband, two beloved children – and a secret addiction to designer clothes. She has it all, so why can’t she stop comparing herself to other women? Bea believes that we all have one love story – and she’s had hers. Now her life centres around her son and support group of fierce single mums – the women she shares everything with. Well, apart from the one secret she can’t tell anyone… Find out more >>

More April 2021 chick lit releases sure to tug on the heartstrings:

new books fiction 2021

Twice Shy by Sarah Hogle – Maybell Parrish lives in her head, her real life full of painful disappointments. So, inheriting an old manor from an eccentric Great Aunt provides her a chance to change things. If she can find a way to get on with grouchy but gorgeous groundskeeper and co-inheritor Wesley. Find out more >>

Life’s Too Short by Abby Jimenez – Vanessa’s mother and sister never saw the age of 30, so she’s been living every moment as if it were her last. But after her half sister suddenly leaves her in custody of her baby, life goes from “daily adventure” to “next-level bad” (now with bonus baby vomit in hair). Enter the surprisingly helpful hot lawyer next door, Adrian and his geriatric Chihuahua. Find out more >>

New historical & mystery fiction

The Dictionary of Lost Words - New 2021 Historical fiction releases US

There are many intriguing new historical fiction titles being released in April 2021.

While Pip Williams’ award-winning The Dictionary of Lost Words was released in Australia last year, I just wanted to highlight that it is now being released worldwide.

In this remarkable debut based on actual events, as a team of male scholars compiles the first  Oxford English Dictionary , one of their daughters decides to collect the “objectionable” words they omit… Set during the height of the women’s suffrage movement with the Great War looming, Esme’s ‘Dictionary of Lost Words’ reveals a lost narrative, hidden between the lines of a history written by men.  Read my review >>

New Books 2021 - The Plague Letters

The Plague Letters by V L Valentine – London, 1665. Within the growing pile of plague-ridden corpses in his churchyard, Rector Symon Patrick discovers one that’s unique. Someone is performing terrible experiments upon the dying. Desperate to discover who, Symon joins a society of eccentric medical men who have gathered to find a cure for the plague… Find out more >>

The Last Bookshop in London by Madeline Martin – Inspired by the true WWII history of the few bookshops to survive the Blitz, this is a timeless story of wartime loss, love and the enduring power of literature. Through blackouts and air raids as the Blitz intensifies, Grace Bennett discovers the power of storytelling to unite her community in ways she never dreamed. Find out more >>

New in crime & mystery thrillers – April 2021

Books New Releases - When the Stars Go Dark

When the Stars Go Dark by Paula McLain –  Detective Anna Hart is hiding away from the world. But then a series of local disappearances reach into her past. Can solving them help her heal? This deeply affecting new crime mystery weaves together actual cases of missing persons, trauma theory, and a hint of the metaphysical. Find out more >>

Missing Pieces by Tim Weaver – This chunky new thriller has earned rave early reviews. Rebekah Murphy knows too much… She knows she’s alone on an abandoned island with a killer on her trail. She knows that to get home, she must live to understand why this is happening. She knows someone tried to kill her for a secret. What she doesn’t know is what that secret is… . Find out more >>

March 2021 Book Release - New Fiction

March 2021 Book Releases

Haunting historical fiction.

The Women of Chateau Lafayette - New historical fiction March 2021

March is Women’s History Month, and quite fittingly there are some fantastic new historical fiction releases with strong female leads on offer.

First up, the highly anticipated The Women of Chateau Lafayette by Stephanie Dray. This chunky new fiction is based on the true story of an extraordinary castle in the heart of France and the remarkable women bound by its legacy. I love multiple time/narrative perspectives, and this novel features three – a founding mother (1774), a daring visionary (1914) and a reluctant resistor (1940). Described as “an intricately woven and powerfully told, sweeping novel about duty and hope, love and courage, and the strength we take from those who came before us” this sounds like a must-read. > (opens in a new tab)”>Find out more >>

The Lost Apothecary - March Historical fiction novel

Sarah Penner’s ‘subversive and intoxicating’ debut The Lost Apothecary , has featured in all the ‘highly anticipated 2021 fiction’ lists. Could this cover be any more beautiful?

In eighteenth-century London, secret apothecary shop owner Nella sells women well-disguised poisons to use against the oppressive men in their lives. But her fate is jeopardized when a young patron makes a fatal mistake, sparking a string of consequences that echo through the centuries. In present-day London, when aspiring historian Caroline Parcewell stumbles upon a clue to the unsolved apothecary murders that haunted London 200 years prior, her life collides with the apothecary’s in a stunning twist of fate—and not everyone will survive. Find out more >>

New mystery and literary suspense

The Vines by Shelley Nolden - March 2021 Mystery Book Release

The Vines by Shelley Nolden – A shuttered hospital on New York’s North Brother Island, the site of century-old quarantines and human experiments. When Finn, a young urban explorer, glimpses an enigmatic beauty through the foliage, intrigue turns to obsession as he seeks to uncover her past–and his own family’s dark secrets. Find out more >>

Who Is Maud Dixon? by Alexandra Andrews – A ‘stylish and sharp’ character-driven literary suspense thriller set in mysterious Marrakesh, about a secretive famous novelist and ambitious assistant locked in a struggle for fortune and fame. Described by Maria Semple as ‘part Patricia Highsmith, part  All About Eve  and pure fun’. Find out more >>

New romance and drama releases

Last Bookshop - New romance novels March 2021

In The Last Bookshop by Emma Young, Cait’s best friends have always been books – along with the rare souls who love them as much as she does, like grandmotherly June. When Cait set up her bookshop right in the heart of the city, she thought she’d skipped straight to ‘happily ever after’, but things are changing fast. When June’s sudden interest in Cait’s lacklustre love life and a handsome ‘Mystery Shopper’ force her to concede there may be more to life than her shop and cat, luxury chain stores are circling the prime location and a personal tragedy is brewing. Soon Cait is questioning the viability of both the shop and life she’s shaped around it. An unlikely band of allies are determined she won’t face these questions alone; but is a love of books enough to halt the march of time and progress? Read my review of this heartwarming novel >>

The Speed of Light - March 2021 Womens fiction

The Speed of Light by Elissa Grossell Dickey – A provocative debut novel told in intersecting timelines over a tumultuous, defining year in one woman’s life. After an MS diagnosis and walking away from “a fixer” but possibly the love of her life, one morning at the university where Simone works, gunshots ring out. In a temporary safe place and terrified, her mind racing, her past year comes into focus. Find out more >>

Second First Impressions by Sally Thorne – From the bestselling author of  The Hating Game comes the clever and funny story of a muscular, tattooed, ‘selfish rich boy’ hired as an assistant to two eccentric 90yr-old women, under the watchful eye of ‘serious’ hardworking retirement home manager Ruthie. Find out more >>

Also new in books in March 2021:

Klara and the Sun - March science fiction

Klara and The Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro –  The latest novel from this Nobel and Booker Prize-winner, features an unforgettable narrator. From her place in a store Klara, an Artificial Friend with outstanding observational qualities, watches the behaviour of those who come in to browse and who pass on the street outside, remaining hopeful that a customer will soon choose her. Find out more >>

Infinite by Brian Freeman – Car crash victim Dylan is haunted by glimpses of  himself . A psychiatrist claims he’s undergoing a hypnotherapy treatment based on every choice he makes creating an infinite number of parallel universes, and Dylan’s doppelgänger has staked a claim to his world. Find out more >>

February 2021 New Fiction Releases

February 2021 New Release Books

The romance of reading.

A Lady's Formula for Love by Elizabeth Everett - February new romance novels

It seems appropriate that we kick off my top picks of the new books in February with some romance.

First up, a delightful Victorian romance with a feisty leading lady. A Lady’s Formula for Love is Elizabeth Everett’s debut novel and the first book in a planned series, The Secret Scientists of London . Lady Violet is keeping secrets. She founded a clandestine sanctuary for England’s most brilliant female scientists and she is using her genius on a confidential mission for the Crown. But the biggest secret of all is the feelings she has for her solitary and reserved protection officer Arthur Kneland. Find out more >>

Related reading: My Top Intelligent Rom-Com Novels

new books fiction 2021

The Things We Leave Unfinished by Rebecca Yarro s – A divorcee starting over clashes with a bestselling writer seeking to complete her grandmother’s unfinished novel. Told in alternating timelines, this story examines the risks we take for love, the scars too deep to heal, and the endings we can’t bring ourselves to see coming. Find out more >>

The Moroccan Daughter by Deborah Rodriguez – From the author of the bestseller The Little Coffee Shop of Kabul , comes a modern story about four different women, of forbidden love, secrets and revelations, set in a country steeped in honour and tradition. Read my review >>

New mystery and suspense

New Books 2021 - The Sanatorium

Sarah Pearse’ debut gothic novel The Sanatorium is earning her high praise from early reviewers. ‘This spine-tingling, atmospheric thriller has it all: an eerie Alpine setting, sharp prose, and twists you’ll never see coming’ according to Richard Osman, and the Irish Times are calling it ‘genuinely scary’.

Elin Warner has taken time off from her job as a detective, so when she receives an invitation out of the blue to celebrate her estranged brother’s recent engagement she has little choice but to accept. But the venue, an isolated hotel (recently renovated sanatorium) high up in the Swiss Alps is the last place she wants to be, particularly when a storm threatens and people start vanishing… Find out more >>

new books fiction 2021

The Paris Affair by Pip Drysdale – From the bestselling author of The Sunday Girl and The Strangers We Know , a new thriller set in Paris starring Harper Brown an arts journalist who dreams of being a hard-hitting reporter. She’s hot on the trail of a murderer – and the scoop of a lifetime…That’s if the killer doesn’t catch her first. Read my review >>

The Spiral by Iain Ryan – A ‘rollercoaster crime noir thriller’ (Independent) with the inventiveness of The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle . After being shot twice by a colleague (now dead), Emma’s quest for answers set her on a dangerous, spiralling journey into the heart of darkness. Read my review >>

Literary and historical fiction

Space Hopper by Helen Fisher - February 2021 historical fiction

Helen Fisher’s Space Hopper (published as Faye, Faraway in the US) is one of the most highly anticipated new releases of 2021. A heartfelt, spellbinding, and irresistible debut novel for fans of  The Time Traveler’s Wife and  Outlander  (tick and tick!) that examines loss, faith, and love.

Although Faye is happy with her life, the loss of her mother as a child weighs on her mind even more now that she is a mother herself. In an extraordinary turn of events, she finds herself back in her childhood home in the 1970s. Faced with the chance to finally seek answers to her questions – but away from her own family – how much is she willing to give up for another moment with her mother? Read my review >>

new books fiction 2021

The Paris Library by Janet Skeslien Charles – Another release with lots of buzz recommended for fans of  The Lilac Girls  and  The Paris Wife . This story of romance, friendship, family and the power of literature to bring us together, is based on the true WWII story of heroic librarians at the American Library in Paris. Find out more >>

My Year Abroad by Chang-rae Lee – From award-winning author of  Native Speaker  and  On Such a Full Sea , an exuberant, provocative story about a young American life transformed by an unusual Asian adventure – and about the human capacities for pleasure, pain, and connection.  Find out more >>

January 2021 New Book Releases

January 2021 New Fiction Releases

Thrilling new page-turners.

The Wife Upstairs - January crime thriller releases

Rachel Hawkins’ The Wife Upstairs is one of the most hotly-anticipated new books of 2021. A modern retelling of the gothic classic Jane Eyre , this is the story of Jane (a broke, light-fingered dog-walker working in a wealthy gated-community in Alabama) who sees an opportunity in the recently widowed, rich, brooding and handsome Eddie Rochester. His wife, Bea, a beautiful and successful businesswoman had drowned in a boating accident with her best friend, their bodies lost to the deep. Can she, plain Jane, win Eddie’s heart before her past–or his–catches up to her?

Apparently with ‘a fresh feminist sensibility’ this novel ‘flips the script’ on a timeless tale of forbidden romance, ill-advised attraction, and a wife who just won’t stay buried. Find out more >>

Related reads: The Madwoman Upstairs by Catherine Lowell

new books fiction 2021

In Shiver by Allie Reynolds , things turn deadly when five snowboarding friends reunite for a weekend in the French Alps. Someone has deliberately stranded them together at the remote mountaintop resort to find out the truth about Saskia’s mysterious disappearance a decade prior. Milla’s not sure what’s worse: the increasingly sinister things happening around her or the looming snowstorm that’s making escape even more impossible. All she knows is that there’s no one on the mountain she can trust…

From Reynolds, a former competitive snowboarder, authenticity of subject and setting (one ideal for a locked-room thriller) is assured. This is a chilling dramatic thriller.  Read my full review >>

My Best Friend's Murder - Psychological thriller 2021

More new psychological crime thrillers:

My Best Friend’s Murder by Polly Phillips – This debut domestic drama explores a toxic but layered friendship and is a gripping read full of secrets, lies and dark motivations. Read my review >>

The Coffinmaker’s Garden by Stuart McBride – Ex-DI Ash Henderson races to catch a serial killer while a storm batters the Scottish Coast and a garden with buried human remains is falling into the North Sea. 

January 2021 literary mystery & historical fiction

new books fiction 2021

What Could Be Saved by Liese O’Halloran Schwarz is described as a delicious hybrid of mystery, drama, and elegance: rich with detail, lush in language, and capable of keeping you on the edge of your seat.

With a narrative alternating between two time periods and distinctly different settings, Bangkok 1972 and Washington DC 2019, this novel depicts the secret lives and affairs of young elegant parents Genevieve and Robert Preston, and now daughters Laura and Bea as adults seeking answers to their brothers’ childhood disappearance while their once formidable mother slowly slides into dementia. This sounds like an enthralling and moving story about sibling love, rivalry and loyalty. Find out more >>

More thought-provoking literary fiction releases:

Waiting for the Night Song by Julie Carrick Dalton – A novel about childhood friendships ruptured by the high price of long-held secrets; a love song to the natural beauty around us and call to fight for what we believe in.

The Price of Two Sparrows by Christy Collins – Her award-winning novella The End of Seeing was deeply moving, so expectations are high for Collins’ first full-length work exploring issues of community and prejudice, religion and nature in the modern world. Read my review >>

Science fiction & fantasy in January 2021

The Effort - January 2021 Science Fiction Release

Sci-fi dystopian novels were notably absent from my Best Books of 2020 list due to my recent avoidance of the genre… the real news being worrisome enough! But as we collectively look toward brighter horizons, this new January 2021 science fiction release The Effort by Claire Holroyde sounds too good to let pass by.

Featuring a diverse ensemble cast of characters from around the globe and exploring the question, ‘How would we respond if we knew an asteroid equivalent to that which ended the reign of the dinosaurs were on a collision course with earth?’, Publishers Weekly have said its deeper themes about human nature make this apocalyptic thriller more than escapist reading. Can this small highly skilled team find a way to neutralize the greatest threat the world has ever seen before mass hysteria hits or world leaders declare World War III? Sounds provocative. Find out more >>

new books fiction 2021

The last of my picks of January’s new book releases is the quirky fantasy novel We Could Be Heroes by Mike Chen .

Jamie wakes up with no memories but can read and erase other people’s—a power he uses to hold up banks to buy coffee, cat food and books. Zoe is also searching for her past and uses her abilities of speed and strength to deliver fast food and occasionally beat up bad guys. When the archrivals meet in a memory-loss support group, they realize the key to revealing their hidden pasts and saving countless people may be trusting each other, and themselves.

Chen’s debut, the heartfelt Here and Now and Then ranks among my favourite time-travel novels, so if anyone can pull off this oddball superhero story premise in 2021 it is him. Find out more >>

What to read next? 👉 Check out these December 2020 New Fiction Releases you may have missed and my favourite reads of 2020 .

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Five Fresh Fiction Picks That Everyone Will Be Talking About

These three new novels and two story collections will knock your winter socks off.

new fiction novels short stories 2024

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This season’s new crop of novels and short stories includes five superstars: breathtaking exhibitions of the power of fiction to leap centuries and continents and even the bounds of reality. For mud-season haters, these books will make bad weather and sappy holidays a distant dream.

Leaving , by Roxana Robinson

They were lovers long ago, in college, but when they run into each other at an opera house in Manhattan as a long-married architect and a divorced grandmother, they are shocked to realize their connection is even more powerful than it was back then. What they don’t realize at first, as their hearts and bodies come slowly back to life, as daily lives that once seemed perfectly acceptable become unbearably dreary, is that they are no longer free to easily change their circumstances. Somehow balancing operatic intensity with deeply intelligent emotional realism (particularly with regard to the role of adult children in their parents’ lives), Robinson’s novel reinvents our understanding of the possibilities, and limits, of midlife. Sorry, we're not going to talk about the ending.

The Bullet Swallower , by Elizabeth Gonzalez James

Quentin Tarantino meets One Hundred Years of Solitude in this technicolor fable of a Mexican family cursed by the greed of its ancestors and haunted by an ageless (but not heartless) spirit sent to claim their crooked souls. Part of the story unfolds in 1895, when Antonio Sonoro crosses the border into Texas to rob a train, runs afoul of local lawmen, and survives a gunshot wound to the face that earns him the nickname that titles the book. But even worse: He’s adopted by an unwelcome but un-losable sidekick, a dandy British sharpshooter. Another thread is set in the 1960s, when Mexican movie star and family man Jaime Sonoro uncovers the evil genealogy of his clan—and with it, what he imagines could be the role of his dreams. Remember to breathe as this gleefully gory melodrama thunders toward its fateful climax.

The Fox Wife , by Yangsze Choo

This utterly captivating novel revolves around the idea that there are foxes among us—magical shape-shifting creatures who appear as humans, only better-looking, cleverer, and much more agile. Choo’s bewitching heroine, Snow, is one of them, and when we first meet her, she’s on a mission to avenge the death of her baby daughter, which involves going undercover as a servant to a kind old lady and tracking a shady photographer across early-20th-century Manchuria and Japan. Snow—who candidly assures us, “I am not a good girl at all”—is on a collision course with private investigator Bao, hired to look into the death of a young woman in the pleasure district. Bao has a superhuman skill of his own: He can hear lies. And he doesn’t believe in foxes. Yet. So lively and sharp-edged, it unfolds almost like an animated cartoon in your head.

Neighbors and Other Stories , by Diane Oliver

You’ll want to put this collection of short stories, written by a preternaturally gifted 22-year-old Black woman who died in a motorcycle accident in 1966 one month before her graduation from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, on your shelf alongside Toni and Zora—yes, it’s that good. As a time capsule of the civil rights period, it reveals from the inside the heartbreaking experiment that was desegregation. The title story concerns a Black family agonizing over whether to send their child to be the first to cross the color line at school. Another shadows four teenagers as they take a table in a department store restaurant; a third follows a Black girl to a white women’s college. A story about a teenager on a European exchange program where she is a curiosity of zoo-like proportions is deepened by a poignant sense of the bright life that was cut short.

The Best That You Can Do , by Amina Gautier

Gautier's prizewinning short-story collection reflects the acrobatic range of a writer who has made the form her own, seamlessly integrating social commentary into her storytelling. The first of five sections, “Quarter Rican,” contains linked stories, many very brief, brimming with the life of a mixed-race family scattered over households and generations, the youngest of which think “Police la di da” is one of the lines of the Spanish Christmas song. The last section, “Caretaking,” examines the relationship between a Jamaican caretaker and her frail client, sprinkling in scenes from Mrs. McAllister’s long life in Brooklyn, some nostalgic and some stone-cold. Between these two near-novellas, many stories sparkle with sharp, of-the-moment details—at a club with the password “Becky,” white girls’ tears are on tap; at a Juneteenth family reunion, the main event is a piñata called Karen.

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new books fiction 2021

What Should You Read Next? Here Are the Best Reviewed Books of the Week

Featuring new titles by leslie jamison, phillip b. williams, sarah ruiz-grossman, and more.

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Leslie Jamison’s Splinters , Phillip B. Williams’ Ours , and Sarah Ruiz-Grossman’s A Fire So Wild all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week.

Brought to you by Book Marks , Lit Hub’s home for book reviews.

1. Ours by Phillip B. Williams (Viking)

3 Rave • 2 Positive Read an excerpt from Ours here

“…a vast and rapturous feat of fabulism … This is a 19th-century historical epic created with both a vivacious enthusiasm for folkloric traditions and a deep contemplation of what it means to be freed from the violent machine of slavery in the U.S. … Williams has a voice that soars across each page, breathing life into his dazzling array of characters–the lovers and the malcontents, the queer and the mystical, the brazen and the cautious.”

–Dave Wheeler ( Shelf Awareness )

2. The Variations by Patrick Langley (New York Review of Books)

2 Rave • 1 Positive • 1 Mixed

“Langley is a mesmerizing guide to Selda’s music and the fantastical world of the hospice, a ‘variously demonized, patronized, scorned, venerated, vilified, and today largely ignored and near-bankrupted institution.’ This is exquisite.”

–Publishers Weekly

3. A Fire So Wild by Sarah Ruiz-Grossman (Harper)

1 Rave • 2 Positive • 1 Mixed Read Sarah Ruiz-Grossman’s list of books for the climate apocalypse here

“As the characters’ paths twine with fervor, Ruiz-Grossman’s engaging tale offers a vivid exploration of modern-day disparities within the timeless and universal search for belonging and self-determination.”

–Leah Strauss ( Booklist )

1. Splinters by Leslie Jamison (Little Brown and Company)

6 Rave • 4 Positive • 2 Mixed Listen to an interview with Leslie Jamison here

“This one is slimmer, less digressive, more focused on Jamison’s singular experience [than The Recovering ]. But it, like its predecessor, makes a particular life ramify more broadly in intriguing and poignant ways … About the bewildering nature of new motherhood, the implosion of Jamison’s marriage, parenting solo, dating as a single mother, coping with illness and lockdown. But it is also about storytelling … Though this well of grief and guilt is not dramatized, it is not unglimpsed. Jamison writes around the hole in her story, and we can feel the gravity of its pull in her presentation of herself … Her ferocious honesty, her stringent refusal to sugarcoat, her insistence on inhabiting and depicting moments in all their evanescence and incandescence make her one of the most compelling and trustworthy memoirists we have.”

–Priscilla Gilman ( The Boston Globe )

2. Out of the Darkness: The Germans, 1942-2022 by Frank Trentmann (Knopf)

“Terrifically insightful … There is so much telling detail in the story: the fluent legal nonsense, the struggle with authority, the inner psychological conflict, all tacitly overshadowed by the recent memory of the Third Reich … This book runs to 838 pages, but barely a word is wasted. Trentmann is a skillful and unflashy storyteller with flickers of gentle irony.”

–Oliver Moody ( The Times )

3. Strong Passions: A Scandalous Divorce in Old New York by Barbara Weisberg (W. W. Norton & Company)

2 Rave • 3 Positive • 1 Mixed

“Riveting … Weisberg reassembles the story with the clear determination to treat both sides equally, and without leering … She cloaks the jagged facts of the case in the soft trappings of their social backdrop to soften their impact. Nevertheless, sharp edges pierce the velvet veil … By letting public and private records reanimate this vivid chapter of the past, Weisberg tells a story that fiction could not touch.”

–Liesl Schillinger ( The New York Times Book Review )

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The 25 Non-Fiction Books We're Most Excited For in 2024

These reads could teach you something new, and maybe even change your life.

a collage of various books

WAS ONE OF your 2024 goals to read more? Or maybe learn something new? Non-fiction is the perfect book genre to open your mind and ease yourself back into reading. And with such a broad category of books, there's something for everyone. Historical deep-dives (perfect for someone who gets lost down Wikipedia rabbit holes), self-help books (expert-driven reads when you need advice), and everything in between all fall under this wide umbrella.

2024 is another great year for non-fiction books. We've got science-based explorations of memory, various books on how to inject more positivity into your life, and even meditations on deer (yes, deer ) to help you feel more in touch with the outdoors . And if you're a big pop culture nerd, there's also exciting books on music, movies, and sports that'll teach you the ins and outs of those exciting industries that fans (us included!) can't get enough of.

The Age of Deer: Trouble and Kinship with our Wild Neighbors

The Age of Deer: Trouble and Kinship with our Wild Neighbors

Those interested in nature writing, or at least how humans connect to the world around them, will enjoy The Age of Deer . Erika Howsare explores the constant presence of deer, interviewing animal control officers, a museum interpreter examining the history of deers, and even a woman who raises orphaned fawns.

Release Date: January 2

Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet

Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet

If climate change has you worried about the future of the planet, check out Not the End of the World . This 2024 read will not only provide some uplifting news about the state of the world, but also offers guidance on how to create a more sustainable lifestyle and contribute to a better planet.

Release Date: January 9

Buy It Here

Learning to Love Midlife: 12 Reasons Why Life Gets Better with Age

Learning to Love Midlife: 12 Reasons Why Life Gets Better with Age

Rather than looking at aging as an emotional obstacle, what if you could avoid a midlife crisis altogether? Learning to Love Midlife wants to help readers see getting older as an exciting new chapter in life.

Release Date: January 16

Infectious Generosity: The Ultimate Idea Worth Spreading

Infectious Generosity: The Ultimate Idea Worth Spreading

Chris Anderson, the head of TED (as in the viral TED Talks), wants to help the world become more optimistic. His advice? Be more generous. In providing various anecdotes, including his personal narrative of TED's increasing popularity, Anderson wants to prove that kindness and charity can lead to a better society.

Release Date: January 23

Come Together: The Science (and Art!) of Creating Lasting Sexual Connections

Come Together: The Science (and Art!) of Creating Lasting Sexual Connections

We at Men's Health are all about helping readers improve their sex lives. So of course we're excited about Come Together , which seeks to dispel myths people have about sex in relationships (sexual satisfaction doesn't have to wane over time ) and examines the common obstacles that stops couples from having great sex lives, along with how to get over them.

Release Date: January 30

Fight Right: How Successful Couples Turn Conflict into Connection

Fight Right: How Successful Couples Turn Conflict into Connection

While Come Together will help you fix your sex life, Fight Right wants to help you fix how you approach conflict. When tension arises in your relationship, Drs. John and Julie Gottman want to ensure you stay calm and work to find understanding when you and your partner are at odds.

Never Not Working: Why the Always-On Culture Is Bad for Business--and How to Fix It

Never Not Working: Why the Always-On Culture Is Bad for Business--and How to Fix It

If you've ever been called a "workaholic," this book is for you. Whether you're a manager or just a very stressed employee, Malissa Clark breaks down why constantly working is bad for both individuals and for businesses.

Release Date: February 6

The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center

The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center

While you may think your partner is the only friend you need, this book is set out to prove you wrong. Rhaina Cohen argues that not only are friendships important, but they should be considered just as important, if not more, than romantic relationships.

Release Date: February 13

Cocktails with George and Martha: Movies, Marriage, and the Making of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Cocktails with George and Martha: Movies, Marriage, and the Making of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Deep dive into Hollywood history with this look at Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf ?–starting with the original 1962 play, then the 1966 film starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, and the story's lasting impact today.

The Fast: The History, Science, Philosophy, and Promise of Doing Without

The Fast: The History, Science, Philosophy, and Promise of Doing Without

Fasting is a fascinating part of our social, religious, and political history. John Oakes looks to examine how the idea of fasting (both in terms of food and in terms of more spiritual ideas of "fasting") have impacted humans over time, and how the idea of doing less overall can improve our lives.

Practical Optimism: The Art, Science, and Practice of Exceptional Well-Being

Practical Optimism: The Art, Science, and Practice of Exceptional Well-Being

It's easy to fall into pessimism and obsess over the worst. That's why Practical Optimism looks to give readers a way to cope during hardship, while maintaining an overall bright outlook on life. No matter what's getting you down, Practical Optimism wants to show you there's still things worth looking forward to.

Release Date: February 20

Why We Remember: Unlocking Memory's Power to Hold on to What Matters

Why We Remember: Unlocking Memory's Power to Hold on to What Matters

Take a deep dive into the latest research on memory with Why We Remember . In addition to teaching you how to recall things better, the book explores the power of memory in our lives, and how we can, through memory, improve our brain's relationship to trauma, healing, and more.

Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection

Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection

Imagine yourself at work, stumbling through a presentation, frustrated you can't get your point across. Charles Duhigg's Supercommunicators wants to ensure nothing ever gets lost in translation for you again with this book on how storytelling skills can improve how you have conversations.

Languishing: How to Feel Alive Again in a World That Wears Us Down

Languishing: How to Feel Alive Again in a World That Wears Us Down

When your mental health takes a dip, Languishing is here for you. Corey Keyes' new book aims to reconstruct how we see self-help and mental wellness, while building up readers' resilience to get through hardships.

Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout

Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout

Avoid burnout with Slow Productivity , a book that looks to teach employees everywhere that the key to doing your best isn't in working to your limit, but slowing down and changing your expectations. If work overwhelms you and you're eager for a change, you might want to check out this upcoming read.

Release Date: March 5

3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool

3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool

If you're a fan of music history, 3 Shades of Blue dives into the creation of the jazz album Kind of Blue , made by three of the genre's greats–Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Bill Evans, along with many, many others involved in the project. Get an inside look into how great music is made, and explore the moment jazz reached its popularity peak.

The Heart and the Chip: Our Bright Future with Robots

The Heart and the Chip: Our Bright Future with Robots

Daniela Rus, a computer scientist, answers all the questions you may have about the future of robotics and how it's intertwined with the future of humanity. This optimistic look at our technological future is great for anyone who loves deep dives into science.

Charlie Hustle: The Rise and Fall of Pete Rose, and the Last Glory Days of Baseball

Charlie Hustle: The Rise and Fall of Pete Rose, and the Last Glory Days of Baseball

Baseball fans will love this biography of Pete Rose, who became one of the sport's great players and managers before becoming embroiled in a major betting scandal in the 1980s. O'Brien's book details Rose's career and his downfall from interviews with Rose, his associates, and archival records.

Release Date: March 26

Uptime: A Practical Guide to Personal Productivity and Wellbeing

Uptime: A Practical Guide to Personal Productivity and Wellbeing

Want to improve your work-life balance and learn how to use your time wisely? Google's Executive Productivity Advisor (yes, that's a real title) provides actionable steps and advice for how to become the best version of you both at work and in your personal life

Release Date: April 2

Somehow: Thoughts on Love

Somehow: Thoughts on Love

Somehow is a meditative look at how love impacts our lives. With anecdotes from her own life, Lamott offers a warming dive into how we all share affection, and provides lessons for anyone who needs to appreciate the love in their life more.

Release Date: April 9

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New Scientist

The best new science fiction books of January 2024

By Alison Flood

New science fiction isn’t thick on the ground this January, but there are some gems to look forward to – including a new novel from sci-fi supremo Alastair Reynolds, who wrote our fab New Scientist Christmas short story this year, Lottie and the River . I am also really looking forward to Esmie Jikiemi-Pearson’s debut novel, which is a space opera with grand ambitions, and to Alice McIlroy’s creepy psychological thriller The Glass Woman , in which a scientist is implanted with tech that has resulted in the loss of her memories. And if I’m feeling brave enough, I’ll be reading Tlotlo Tsamaase’s Womb City. If that isn’t enough and you’re looking for more suggestions for the year ahead, do check out our sci-fi columnist Sally Adee’s tips for 2024 reading .

The 22 best non-fiction and popular science books of 2023

Machine Vendetta by Alastair Reynolds . I’ll always snap up a new Alastair Reynolds. This latest is in his Prefect Dreyfus series, and sees Dreyfus investigating the death of Invar Tench, a police officer who worked to maintain democracy among the 10,000 city-states orbiting the planet Yellowstone.

The Principle of Moments by Esmie Jikiemi-Pearson . This space opera is the first novel from Jikiemi-Pearson and it sounds amazing, moving from 6066 on the planet Garahan, where humans are indentured labourers for the emperor’s war machine, to London in 1812 and the time-travelling Obi, who meets a girl from another time in the British Museum. We are told it’s for fans of Becky Chambers, V.E. Schwab and N. K. Jemisin – all must-reads for me. It sounds like the perfect antidote to any January blues.

The Glass Woman by Alice McIlroy . This is a psychological thriller pitched as “B lack Mirror meets Before I Go to Sleep by way of Severance ":­ it follows a scientist, Iris, who volunteers to be the test subject for an experimental therapy that will see tech inserted into her brain. But she now no longer has her memories, so doesn’t know why she volunteered for the treatment in the first place – or even what it is. This sounds creepily brilliant, and I’ll be whiling away January commutes and evenings with it for sure.

Womb City by Tlotlo Tsamaase . The Handmaid’s Tale meets Get Out ? That’s quite a tall order, but this Africanfuturist horror novel sounds like it will be enjoyably terrifying. It takes place in a cruel surveillance state, where Nelah is trapped in a loveless marriage in which her every move is monitored by her police officer husband, via microchip. When she buries a body following a car accident, the ghost of her victim starts hunting down the people she loves. Our sci-fi columnist Sally Adee has tipped it as one to watch out for.

Thirteen Ways to Kill Lulabelle Rock by Maud Woolf . This sounds like a lot of fun. It’s set in the near future, where celebrities can make clones of themselves (known as “Portraits”) to take on their various duties. We are following the story of the 13 th copy of the actor Lulabelle Rock, who is out to eliminate her predecessors.

Ava Anna Ada by Ali Millar . Set in the near future, when the heat is spiralling, this novel takes place over a week when Anna and Ava become caught up in their own world and find themselves reckoning with who they really are. Ian Rankin, no less, describes it as “[Philip K.] Dick's They meets early Iain Banks or Ian McEwan in this novel of a near-future family meltdown”, which is every bit “as gripping as it is horrifying”.

The best new science fiction books of December 2023

Klova by Karen Langston . A decade after the death of his partner Neav, Ink wakes to find he has no concept of the past, and can only think of her in the present tense. He appears to be part of a new “amnesia crisis”. But could this be down to a corruption in the code of the artificial language, Klova, that enables everyone to think and speak?

Necropolis Alpha by Chris M. Arnone . This slice of cyberpunk sci-fi is Arnone’s follow-up to his novel The Hermes Protocol and follows an “Intel Operative” with cybernetic enhancements as she tries to steal data from the offices of an evangelical preacher.

Alastair Reynolds and Esmie Jikiemi-Pearson are two of the authors setting their novels in space this January. Alamy Stock Photo

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BOOKS FALL PREVIEW: Nonfiction

11 New Works of Nonfiction to Read This Season

A deeply reported look at the woman behind Roe vs. Wade, an investigation of lawbreaking animals, another hilarious essay collection from Phoebe Robinson — and more.

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By Miguel Salazar and Joumana Khatib

‘ Brothers on Three: A True Story of Family, Resistance, and Hope on a Reservation in Montana ,’ by Abe Streep

In 2018, the Arlee Warriors, a boy’s high school basketball team on Montana’s Flathead Indian reservation, was in the midst of a buzzing championship run as its town reeled from a cluster of suicides. Streep, who previously profiled the team for The New York Times Magazine , delves into the lives of the players, the town’s collective trauma and the therapeutic power of basketball in Arlee, where the sport “occupies emotional terrain somewhere between escape and religion.”

Celadon Books, Sept. 7 | Read our review

‘ The Family Roe: An American Story ,’ by Joshua Prager

In his third book, Prager sets out to tell the stories of the overlooked women behind the 1973 Supreme Court decision. Using interviews, letters and previously unseen personal papers, Prager tells the story of Roe through the life of Norma McCorvey, whose unwanted pregnancy gave way to the Supreme Court case, and three other protagonists: Linda Coffee, the lawyer who filed the original lawsuit; Curtis Boyd, a fundamentalist Christian turned abortion provider; and Mildred Jefferson, the first Black woman to graduate from Harvard Medical School.

Norton, Sept. 14 | Read our review

‘ Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law ,’ by Mary Roach

In 1659, an Italian court heard a case against caterpillars after locals complained of them trespassing and pilfering local gardens. In the years since, humans have come up with innovative ways to deal with jaywalking moose, killer elephants, thieving crows and murderous geriatric trees. After a two-year trip across the world, Roach chronicles these methods in her latest book, covering crow blasting in Oklahoma and human-elephant conflict specialists in West Bengal. The result is a rich work of research and reportage revealing the lengths that humanity will go to keep the natural world at bay.

‘ The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century ,’ by Amia Srinivasan

Srinivasan, an Oxford professor, has developed an enthusiastic following for her shrewd writing in The London Review of Books, with topics ranging from campus culture wars to the intellect of octopuses. Her 2018 meditation on the politics of sex served as a launchpad for this highly anticipated book, which draws on — and complicates — longstanding feminist theory in six essays on pornography, desire, capitalism and more.

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Sept. 21 | Read our review

Tell us: What new nonfiction are you most eager to read ?

‘ please don’t sit on my bed in your outside clothes: essays ,’ by phoebe robinson.

Robinson, an actress, comedian and co-creator of the podcast 2 Dope Queens, wrote her latest book of essays during the pandemic, taking up everything from Black Lives Matter to dating under lockdown to commercialized self care. Of course, there’s plenty of levity — her way of coping. “If I can make you laugh and forget your problems for a moment, then I did something,” she writes.

Tiny Reparations Books, Sept. 28 | Listen to Robinson on the Book Review podcast

new books fiction 2021

‘ Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters ,’ by Steven Pinker

How can a species capable of calculating the age of the universe be so vulnerable to conspiracy theories, folk wisdom and groupthink? Rationality is in critically short supply at a time when humanity faces its greatest challenges yet, argues Pinker, a Harvard cognitive psychologist. Through mental exercises and geeky but accessible writing on topics ranging from cartoons to climate change to Andrew Yang’s presidential campaign, Pinker hopes to save reason — and, by extension, society — from extinction.

Viking, Sept. 28 | Read our review

‘ Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival and Hope in an American City ,’ by Andrea Elliott

Dasani was a precocious and spunky 11-year-old with limitless potential when Elliott, a Times investigative journalist, first met her at a Fort Greene homeless shelter in 2012. That encounter led to a five-part series shadowing Dasani as she navigated child poverty in New York City. For this book, Elliott immersed herself in the lives of Dasani and her family for eight years, at times slipping past security guards at the shelter. She also traces the family’s ancestry back to a North Carolina slave plantation, telling a vivid and devastating story of American inequality.

Random House, Oct. 5 | Read our review | Listen to Elliott on the Book Review podcast

‘ All of the Marvels: A Journey to the Ends of the Biggest Story Ever Told ,’ by Douglas Wolk

This book is an ambitious attempt to wrestle with the Marvel Comics universe, a web so expansive that almost no one has bothered to read all of its half-million pages (and counting). No one, that is, besides Wolk, who has pored over yellowing originals from at garage sales, abandoned copies at his local Starbucks and even collections on show at Burning Man. The result is 400 pages of insights — for Marvel fans and casual readers alike — and what they reveal about American dreams and fears over the past 60 years.

Penguin Press, Oct. 12 | Read our review

‘ The Loneliest Americans ,’ by Jay Caspian Kang

In his essays and commentaries , Kang, a contributor to the Magazine who also writes a newsletter for The Times’s Opinion section, has been interrogating the ideas underpinning Asian American identity for years. His nonfiction debut is a culmination of these efforts, blending memoir, historical writing and reportage as he questions the usefulness of this identity in describing people who live profoundly different realities conditioned by class, language and ethnicity.

Crown, Oct. 12

‘ The Genome Defense: Inside the Epic Legal Battle to Determine Who Owns Your DNA ,’ by Jorge L. Contreras

The ACLU had never before filed a patent case when a policy analyst and civil rights lawyer teamed up in 2005 to challenge a decades-long practice allowing private companies to patent naturally occurring human genes. Jorge L. Contreras, a law professor at the University of Utah, interviewed nearly 100 lawyers, patients, scientists and policymakers in this behind-the-scenes history of Molecular Pathology vs. Myriad Genetics, a long-shot lawsuit that culminated in a landmark 2013 Supreme Court decision that opened the human genome to the benefit of researchers, cancer patients and everyday Americans.

Algonquin, Oct. 26

‘ The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth ,’ by Sam Quinones

Our understanding of the opioid epidemic is indebted in part to Quinones and his eye-opening first book, “ Dreamland ,” which connected the dots between OxyContin’s popularity and a booming heroin market. In this follow-up, Quinones explores the neuroscience of addiction, lays out how the crisis has morphed and deepened with the spread of synthetic drugs, and celebrates the slow efforts at rebuilding community in hard-hit counties across America.

Bloomsbury, Nov. 2 | Read our review

Explore More in Books

Want to know about the best books to read and the latest news start here..

In her new memoir, “Splinters,” the essayist Leslie Jamison  recounts the birth of her child  and the end of her marriage.

The Oscar-nominated film “Poor Things” is based on a 1992 book by Alasdair Gray. Beloved by writers, it was never widely read  but is now ripe for reconsideration.

Even in countries where homophobia is pervasive and same-sex relationships are illegal, queer African writers are pushing boundaries , finding an audience and winning awards.

In Lucy Sante’s new memoir, “I Heard Her Call My Name,” the author reflects on her life and embarking on a gender transition  in her late 60s.

Do you want to be a better reader?   Here’s some helpful advice to show you how to get the most out of your literary endeavor .

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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  29. 11 New Works of Nonfiction to Read This Season (Published 2021)

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