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The Best Books of 2021

From radical nuns to gut-wrenching memoir, this year’s books hit us where it hurt..

new top books 2021

This was a big year in bookworld for the phrase “much-anticipated.” As publishers reinstated some semblance of normalcy after pandemic shipping delays, a bevy of marquee names beckoned readers with long-awaited follow-ups — and, in some cases, unexpected merch . The heavy hitters met with mixed success , but this year was still abundant with books that scribbled outside the lines, upended old conventions or freshened them up, and dug out stories we’d forgotten or never known to ask about. The best of the lot were invigorating — the kinds of books that crawl outside their text and into your life. And, of course, there was a new Franzen novel .

10. Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder

new top books 2021

This story of a resentful artist turned stay-at-home mom morphing into a dog claws its way out of the pile. Yes, the premise sounds a bit like it was found on the reject list at a B-movie studio, but Yoder’s commitment to describing the animal nature of parenting carries it through with maximal success. The protagonist grows a scruff of coarse hair above her sacrum and sniffs out bunnies in her yard; playtime with her son involves licking and biting. Her metamorphosis is a “a pure, throbbing state” that redirects her energy and moves her beyond learned helplessness. Yoder goes deep on the performative nature of mothering — how so much of it feels like a Marina Abramović performance in which strange creatures are invited to scream in our ears and wrestle raisins from our fuzzy pockets, all while we gaze ahead coolly. In a crowded field of novel-manifestos about the indignity of parenting, Nightbitch is primal and corporeal, a labor scream of a book.

9. The Copenhagen Trilogy by Tove Ditlevsen

Translated by tiina nunnally and michael favala goldman.

new top books 2021

For months this was my pitch to potential readers of The Copenhagen Trilogy : “You have to read this. It was so good I couldn’t finish it.” Blame my low tolerance for inhabiting someone else’s psychosis. These books percolate with the sickening anxiety of madness, a state that the best writers can render as a kind of hell. From her muffled young adulthood in Nazi-occupied Denmark to her rise as a writing wunderkind and spin into a romantically mangled, drug-fueled early adulthood, Ditlevsen’s autobiographical collection (composed of three formerly separate memoirs — Childhood, Youth, and Dependency — first published between 1967 and ’71) spares neither the writer nor the reader. This is not a tale of heroic endurance. It’s a sally inside the mind of a young writer who tentatively climbs toward professional success and familial stability, only to find that both are moving targets.

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

new top books 2021

The stories of enslaved Black Americans are still far too scarce, lost to time by a nation indifferent to more personal aspects of the experience. Miles, a Harvard historian and MacArthur fellow, had little definitive information about a simple embroidered sack found at a flea market in 2007, other than what it said: My great grandmother Rose mother of Ashley gave her this sack when she was sold at age 9 in South Carolina / it held a tattered dress 3 handfulls of pecans a braid of Roses hair. Told her It be filled with my Love always / she never saw her again / Ashley is my grandmother / Ruth Middleton / 1921

From there, she traces the likely lineage of this unlikely object — a bit of cotton that might have crumpled into dust, but instead carried a whole family’s legacy — and puts both what she learned and what might have been into this riveting book, which just won the National Book Award for Nonfiction. All That She Carried balances two aims: to share what it can of Ruth Middleton’s matrilineal family and to explore what their lives might tell us about the experiences of other Black women connected, thread by thread, to an uncertain past. The result is as delicate and determined as the story that inspired it.

7. I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness by Claire Vaye Watkins

new top books 2021

Forget reading for comfort. Watkins has no interest in the concept, for herself or for you. I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness follows a protagonist (also named Claire Vaye Watkins) who leaves her family behind as she smokes and ruminates and screws her way through the Mojave Desert, where she grew up. The story alternates with real (but edited) letters written by Watkins’s mother as a teenager and excerpts from Watkins’s father’s book about his role as Charles Manson’s “number one procurer of young girls.” The desert setting is as prickly and vast and mutable as Watkins’s writing; the book is a stern kick to the groin of heroic tales about the majesty of the American West. Watkins wrote two brilliant books before this — the otherworldly good story collection Battleborn and a terrifying enviro-novel, Gold Fame Citrus — but this is the work that should put her on the map. Watkins is a necessary writer for a changing American pastoral.

6. Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe

new top books 2021

For the first time, the U.S. has surpassed 100,000 deaths from drug overdoses in a single year — and opioid deaths accounted for more than 75 percent of those. Opioid overdose has grown so common that some cities have installed Narcan vending machines and pharmacies put up posters showing customers how to administer it. The epidemic has spilled into every corner of American life. In Radden Keefe’s meticulously reported and brilliantly assembled Empire of Pain, he traces that spill back to the family at the very center: the billionaire Sackler family, the owners of Purdue Pharma. Like Gilded Age barons before them, the Sacklers sat atop a massive fortune, behind a fortress of lawyers and corporate privacy screens, while their company pushed OxyContin onto prescription pads and out into America. It’s a blood-boiling story of American apathy — of a family more concerned with putting their name on museums than keeping people from harm, a pharmaceutical industry shrugging its shoulders at staggering death rates, and a medical community entirely unequipped to handle the surge.

5. Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

new top books 2021

In the very near future, an AF (Artificial Friend) named Klara, manufactured as a companion for a child, stands in the sunlit window of a quiet shop and narrates her yearning to be purchased and taken home. She’s childlike herself and exceptionally naïve; we are immediately endeared to her, though we know her insides are wire, her thoughts determined by code. Ishiguro has claimed his prose is nothing special, but over the course of his career, he has again and again managed to push readers into mourning for some of the most isolated members of society. Klara and the Sun glides in on tiptoe, tracing delicate circles around Klara’s time in the shop; her life with Josie, the young girl who takes her home; and the realization that Josie’s mother’s decision to genetically “lift” her daughter’s intelligence is costing the girl a normal life. Even in the book’s quietest moments, there’s a sense that humanity’s control over itself is on the line. And much like Ishiguro’s earlier book Never Let Me Go, this novel delivers a tender, enthralling twist.

4. Dear Senthuran: A Black Spirit Memoir by Akwaeke Emezi

new top books 2021

Sometimes a writer comes along who seems to float above language and direct it like a sorcerer, raising up whole worlds then sliding them out of the way. That’s Emezi. Dear Senthuran is their fourth book in three years (with another three on the way), and they organize this memoir — about their childhood in Nigeria; their role as an ogbanje, which they describe as a spirit reborn to cause suffering; and their painful, necessary gender-confirmation surgeries — as a series of letters to friends and family, a form that amps up the intimacy and penetration of the work. Emezi’s words emerge, bold and annunciatory.

3. One Friday in April: A Story of Suicide and Survival by Donald Antrim

new top books 2021

One Friday in April 2006, Antrim checked himself into the psychiatric facility at Columbia Presbyterian; late that summer he finally exited its doors, after several new medications had failed and innumerable group- and individual-therapy sessions, as well as about a dozen rounds of electroshock treatments that made it possible for him to at least “look forward to feeling well.” His memoir about the experience ought to immediately join the pantheon of classic works about the treacherous pull between life and death that can occur in one person’s mind. Antrim cracks himself wide open. The book is declarative and urgent, tracing the precise contours of suicidal thinking; it’s also quiet and engineered, a fully reasoned tour of a recalcitrant brain. “Maybe you’ve spent some time trying every day not to die, out on your own somewhere,” Antrim writes. “Maybe that effort has become your work in life.” One Friday in April may be remembered as the work of his own.

2. No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood

new top books 2021

I started the year thinking that Lockwood’s pseudo-autobiographical bait and switch irritated me too much to ever wiggle its way onto a list of my favorites. Then the damn thing crawled inside my head and refused to leave. If this sounds like the opposite of an endorsement for this book — which begins as a story about the noxious pull of the Twitterverse and turns into a family drama — that’s because when I first encountered it, I felt primed to reject a novel propelled by social-media discourse. (“The word toxic had been anointed, and now could not go back to being a regular word,” Lockwood writes. “It was like a person becoming famous. They would never have a normal lunch again, would never eat a Cobb salad outdoors without tasting the full awareness of what they were. Toxic. Labor. Discourse. Normalize.”) Here’s what’s kept me bouncing back to it: Lockwood doesn’t give a shit about the traditional novel or what anyone might want from it. She knows she can nab you with descriptions of the self-imposed suffocation of being Very Online before wringing your heart out with the tale of a dying infant. No One Is Talking About This flicks the Establishment in the face and giggles.

1. Matrix by Lauren Groff

new top books 2021

I wanted to live inside this novel, to peel apples and dig in the soil and repair the stone walls of the nunnery Groff manifests as she builds a life around Marie de France, the 12th-century poet and maybe-abbess about whom we know very little. And what a life Groff designs, unfurling Marie’s story in ribbons. Big, awkward, and of mildly noble heritage, the teenager is cast out of the French royal court by Eleanor of Aquitaine, whom she adores, and sent to starve in a dripping, tumbledown convent. But through sheer grit and wildly progressive plans, she spends the next decades turning the abbey into a paradise for women — a sheltered place where their work has meaning and their faith can catapult beyond unthinking ritual. Matrix practically draws blood in its bid to evince ecstasy, physical, spiritual, and emotional. This novel has its own racing heartbeat.

Honorable Mentions

Throughout 2021, I maintained a “Best Books of the Year (So Far)” list. Many of those selections appear above in my top 10 picks. Below are the rest of the books that stood out to me this year:

The Fourth Child, by Jessica Winter

The bloody pyrotechnics of anti-abortion organizations in the early ’90s, country-club drunks and their cruel domestic antics, the pre-internet teen scene in Buffalo: Jessica Winter’s sophomore novel is Franzen-esque in its broad sweep of a Rust Belt family coming down off the highs of mid-century American capitalism. (I say that as a huge compliment.) Winter starts with Jane Brennan’s accidental pregnancy in the late 1970s, then works through her tempestuous relationship with her shotgun husband and the push-and-pull dynamic with her eldest daughter Lauren, and finally into the utter displacement the Brennan family undergoes when Jane brings home Mirela, one of hundreds of thousands of “ Ceausescu’s children ” — Romanian children abandoned in orphanages in poor living conditions. Like Graham Greene before her, Winter is fascinated by the Catholic draw to suffering — Jane’s as a beleaguered mother, Lauren’s as a misunderstood young woman, and Mirela’s as a nearly feral outsider — and she manages to elegantly and movingly write a novel about faith that doesn’t proselytize or condemn.

Libertie, by Kaitlyn Greenidge

Greenidge debuted with a bang in 2016 with her novel We Love You, Charlie Freeman , about a Black family who agrees to participate in a psychological study more nefarious than it first seems. Libertie is a tamer work, though no less forceful and imaginative. Libertie is the dark-skinned, free-born daughter of a light-skinned doctor mother in Civil War–era Brooklyn. The story begins when an enslaved man named Ben Daisy is delivered to them in a coffin — alive. From there, Greenidge charts Libertie’s development from college student to young wife, and then stranger among family in Haiti, wondering where she belongs and whether she belongs to someone. Every bit of Libertie is rich and vibrant, offering the best of what historical fiction can do.

Infinite Country, by Patricia Engel

America isn’t paradise , one of Engel’s characters thinks to herself in this tale of a cleaved immigrant family. Co-workers murder each other with semi-automatics, kids blow each other’s brains out at school. And violence isn’t held at bay by ICE; in fact, it’s often perpetuated by the people who fill the agency’s ranks. Infinite Country follows whats happens when one member of an undocumented Colombian family is deported. Engel writes beyond mere frustration or sadness or economic hardship — and she brings individuality to a story too often told in statistics and two-minute news reports.

‘Detransition, Baby’ by Torrey Peters

Reading this novel is like holding a live wire in your hand. The first novel by a trans woman to be nominated for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, it follows a triangle of people — Reese, a trans woman desperate to be a mother; her ex Ames (formerly Amy), who detransitioned and is living as a man again; and Ames’s boss Katrina, who is pregnant with his child and unsure about the prospect. But there is so much more than that — Detransition, Baby is populated like a Dickens village of the queer community, with married HIV-positive cowboys and IVF-entangled trans couples. Most refreshingly, it isn’t out to prove that a trans love triangle can move copies just as affectively as cis ones do; there’s no mimicry here. It is what it is, an eyes-wide-open escapade.

The Book of Difficult Fruit by Kate Lebo

In this mash-up of culinary history, cultural criticism, and memoir, the cookbook author and essayist chooses a different “difficult” fruit for every letter of the alphabet — things like authentic maraschino cherries made with poisonous bitter almond juice, little-known thimbleberry, inedible Osage orange. Some entries are almost entirely personal histories, but most move around more freely — like a chapter on juniper berries’ unwritten history as an abortifacient, or the story of the eugenicist horticulturist who domesticated blackberries for the masses. Through it all, you can connect the dots on humanity’s history of turning fruits into magical entities capable of tightening our skin, supercharging our diets, and making sense of evil in the world.

Aftershocks by Nadia Owusu (January 12)

Nadia Owusu’s young life was splintered into dozens of little pieces — her Armenian American mother left the family, her sometimes cruel stepmother joined it, and she moved between continents for her father’s work for the United Nations. Her memoir Aftershocks , structured as a series of reverberations, doesn’t assemble those bits together. “I have written for meaning rather than order,” she explains. She whisks together the fractured history of her father’s homeland of Ghana and her own privileged bubble inside sometimes bomb-strewn locales, then teaches herself to reread her own childhood history, to see beyond the story she has always told herself of who she is.

Under a White Sky, by Elizabeth Kolbert

Cornflower blue, Simpsons -esque skies may be a thing of the past if the environmental scientists get their way. In Under a White Sky , the Pulitzer-winning Kolbert examines — in terrifying detail — the measures researchers and climatologists have already taken (like electrifying the waters of the Chicago River so invasive Asian carp can’t make their way to other tributaries) or are considering (filling the atmosphere with light-reflecting particles to form a sunshield and, in turn, a powdery firmament) to reverse-engineer the ecological mess humanity has gotten itself into. This is definitely an “It’s Time to Worry” book, but it’s also a wise rumination on hubris — how factories and engines and our desire for Progress set a ticking time bomb on our planet, and how mankind now thinks it can mastermind a way to cut the fuse.

In the Quick, by Kate Hope Day

Forgive me for screaming, but In the Quick is Jane Eyre IN SPACE! The idea sounds unhinged, but its execution is so fresh and so understanding of Brontë and genre fiction that it all comes together in a wild Ad Astra meets Prep mash-up. In a not-so-distant America, orphaned young June Reed is sent to study at the space program her brilliant uncle founded after his early death. At the same time, a crew he sent deep into the solar system suddenly goes quiet. As June endures a punishing regimen of robotic sciences, physical fitness, and team-building exercises, she quietly works on the problem of where the crew might be and how best to save them. An entirely fun adventure.

Hot Stew, by Fiona Mozley

Lately I’ve been missing the sweaty rub of strangers’ arms in tight city streets and the faint smell of yeast rising up from bar floorboards. Cities are made for clamor and bustle, and the past year has emptied them of both. Mozley’s Hot Stew is just the sensorial knockout I needed, alive with the hoots and steam of a small patch of London’s Soho, where an unlikely group of tenants works to keep their building, a French restaurant with a brothel on top, out of a developer’s grip. Among the tenants are a sex worker and her carer, a homeless couple who inhabit the grates beneath the building, a policewoman, and a bright young thing — a mix just as chaotic as any group of strangers sharing walls and air in the city’s bowels. Mozley writes across the spectrum of humanity — a talented juggler who throws a dozen plates in the air and then catches each one as if it were nothing.

Fierce Poise by Alexander Nemerov (March 23)

A biography that intentionally blows up its subject’s own image. On the cover: A demure Helen Frankenthaler neatly seated on one of her pastel-soaked canvases in a salmon-pink button-down that could blend right in with the paint, a dainty cream headband holding back her Veronica Lake curls. Inside: A rollicking beat-by-beat saunter through the downtown 1950s art scene and a long-overdue reckoning with Frankenthaler’s oft-derided, so-called “feminine” work. Too pretty, too rich, too well-connected — these were the bombs lobbed at Frankenthaler even after she produced Mountains and Sea , the seemingly brushstroke-free, nursery-colored work that Nemerov claims launched the genre of color field painting. Nemerov admits to his subject’s privileges, but undoes the (jealousy-induced) fantasy that Helen, as he calls her, was just a painter of pretty little pictures. This Helen is a woman of the mind, a crucial component of America’s mid-century dominance in the art world, and, at times, a provocateur, even if she didn’t see it that way.

Painting Time, by Maylis de Kerangal

Give me the glorious tangle of page-long sentences, the piled-up cacophony of crowded prose. In Painting Time , French novelist de Kerangal (she whose book covers always lure me in) refuses to match form to subject matter, a collision that yields a stylistic wildness we need more of. Protagonist Paula Karst is a young Parisian decorative painter learning trompe l’oeil, “the art of illusion,” at an intense Belgian institute that churns out faux marble re-creators and faux bois conjurers, but not artists. Formerly a glassy-eyed layabout, decorative painting has molded Paula into a rigorous worker, and Painting Time accompanies her through that transformation. As she moves from Paris to Moscow to Rome and back again, it’s de Kerangal’s meticulous understanding of the tiny devotions that craftspeople make again and again — the thin strokes, the blended edges, the changing of brushes — that elevates Painting Time into a pulsing ode to creative labor.

Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987–1993 by Sarah Schulman

The first time I heard about ACT UP — the organization that formed to demand that the political establishment and scientific community take action on AIDS — was nine years after it was founded, when activist David Reid poured the ashes of a friend who’d died of the disease onto the White House lawn in 1996. “If you won’t come to the funeral,” he said, “we’ll bring the funeral to you.” The act was shocking to my 12-year-old self, but it’s not nearly as shocking as the history of neglect, contempt, and disgust for the gay community that thinker, archivist, and ACT UP activist Sarah Schulman writes about in Let the Record Show , a necessarily expansive and bombastic corrective of modern history. Using years of interviews and her own vast inside knowledge (the Times ’ Parul Sehgal called Schulman “ a living archive ”), Schulman charts ACT UP’s highly effective barricade-storming tactics, eventual sway over drug companies, and early ’90s fracture. Let the Record Show is as righteous and revelatory as its subject matter.

new top books 2021

I counted over 130 exclamation points in Second Place , Rachel Cusk’s first novel since the end of her highly celebrated, much-dissected Outline trilogy. For Cusk, well-known for her tight control over her prose, such bluster and exuberance demonstrate a more unwieldy new direction, an experimental phase. Protagonist M is the bombastic exclamation-point user, as she writes a letter to a friend about her miserable experience hosting L, a famed painter of the Lucian Freud variety, at her home in an English marsh. Seeing L’s work once helped to transform M’s life, and she hopes his presence will provoke another revelation. Second Place grapples with the contradictory desire to be muse and artist, and with the extraordinary tolerance that the world shows intolerable men.

Good Behaviour by Molly Keane

In the first scene of Good Behaviour , originally published in 1981 and reissued in May by the reliable folks at NYRB Classics, protagonist Aroon St. Charles kills her mother with the mere scent of a rabbit mousse. She puts the lunch tray in front of her, and Mummy trembles, cries, vomits, and promptly dies in “a nest of pretty pillows.” Is it intentional? Why no, not exactly, but it is a glorious introduction to this novel with a hungry, wolfish smile but no visible claws. Aroon is a child of the Irish aristocracy, raised in the early 20th century in a manse built by her ancestors; she’s bent on explaining her good intentions to the reader, though she seemingly understands very little of her own motivations. This is not a damp, woe-is-the-child redux: Good Behaviour includes very little good behavior, featuring instead delicious and deleterious accounts of illicit sex and wild high jinks, and a mother-daughter duo who can scrap with the best of them.

Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch by Rivka Galchen

Witch hunt! The phrase has enjoyed a renaissance, courtesy of our former POTUS, along with MeToo-ed men of all varieties. It reverts to its original meaning in this romp, from the cerebral and daring novelist and essayist Rivka Galchen , that’s set in 17th-century Germany, a time and place where women were hunted, jailed, taunted, and tortured for actually (supposedly) being witches. Galchen’s novel focuses on illiterate but brilliant Katharina Kepler — a real historical figure and the mother of the iconic astronomer Johannes Kepler — as her neighbors turn against her, bringing wild charges of hexing and poisoning. This parable about the dangers of many little lies is also a true guffawer, with a protagonist so sharp and self-righteous she may have a direct familial line to Olive Kitteridge. Read it to leave this century behind for a while.

Filthy Animals by Brandon Taylor (June 22)

All of Taylor’s stories of young midwestern ennui are A sides, but one tale from this new collection, “Anne of Cleves,” is particularly bound-for-the-anthologies good. Sigrid is on her first date with Martha when she asks her with which wife of Henry VIII she most identifies. Martha is an engineer, living outside the shimmery dome of the liberal arts, and she barely understands the question. But it reverberates underneath their whole relationship; for the next 30 pages, the two women slide toward one another and then away in a mating dance reminiscent of a Shirley Hazzard story, where sighs and shifting thighs make huge waves. And yes, Martha is an Anne of Cleves: strong, stoic, and capable of survival. Taylor’s energy is so focused, his characters so full and motley, that each of the 11 tales here (some of which are linked) fleshes out a small spinning world of its own.

Intimacies by Katie Kitamura

Katie Kitamura’s novels are like recently vacated rooms. The occupant’s scent is still there, the warmth of their hand on the doorknob, but the space itself is desolate. Intimacies is the story of an interpreter for an international court in The Hague who is lingering in an in-between space of her own — she cannot pin down her Dutch boyfriend, who moves between her and his estranged wife, or the charismatic, recently deposed African president whose words she worriedly translates as he stands trial at the court for crimes against humanity. Is she misreading everyone and everything in her adopted country? Is there a reason for her to feel this low-level dread? Like Muriel Spark in her darker moments, Kitamura taps into the most basic human fear: that we will never really know anyone.

Something New Under the Sun by Alexandra Kleeman

Kleeman doesn’t do maudlin — she forces you to look into the fun-house mirror until you realize that what you’re seeing is reality. Something New Under the Sun starts off as a Hollywood send-up, when a novelist arrives on the set of a film adaptation of his work and discovers he’s actually a babysitter for the tabloid-ravaged teen bopster playing the lead. He also realizes he’s in a hellscape where water is scarce, a commodity for the yacht set, and WAT-R — a molecular near copy of the real stuff — is pumping out of every other faucet and plastic bottle in California. Because this is Kleeman, the plot is far less important than the view along the way. Her writing is cool, detached, and DeLillo-ish, the urgency red hot. Reading it while the West crackles, it’s easy to imagine this book may someday be a vital artifact from our era of climate twilight.

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

The British press has been singing the praises of Wilson’s wise, brutally honest, expansive consideration of Lawrence’s “middle years” — the time from 1915 to 1925 when he wrote Women in Love and The Rainbow , exiled himself from England, and tried to found a utopian community in New Mexico. American readers haven’t picked up on it yet, but it’s time to change that! For all the hoo-ha that once surrounded his reputation and antics, Lawrence is now considered a sturdy, capital- I Important writer. Nonetheless, his novels don’t make it to syllabi, and his life hasn’t been called up for a feverish prestige biopic. Wilson writes without undue flattery or inflation about this decade of Lawrence’s life, when he was convicted of spying for Germany and darted across America to meet a mildly mad heiress and produced some of the century’s most enduring novels. This is a biography on fire, brilliant with tiny anecdotes and broad assertions about English literature alike.

Harlem Shuffle, by Colson Whitehead

Whitehead knows how to slither into a new literary identity with perfect ease. He started his career writing magic-sprinkled novels about zombies, elevator-repair workers, and John Henry before publishing The Underground Railroad in 2016 and The Nickel Boys in 2019, both investigations of cruelty inflicted upon Black Americans. These books became runaway hits of the change-the-author’s-life variety. How to switch things up again? Harlem Shuffle is a zooming, maniacal caper; the fact that it’s wrapped up in a historical novel is a sweet little bonus. There’s too much (read: just enough) plot for one sentence to do it justice, but let’s leave things here: A scheme by a madcap cast of characters to rob a swanky uptown hotel canters alongside a potent reconstruction of mid-century Harlem’s buoyant vibes.

The Days of Afrekete by Asali Solomon

Liselle is a private-school teacher in a tony Philadelphia neighborhood; her lawyer husband, Winn, just lost an election for state representative, and the FBI is investigating him for his campaign’s behavior. Set around a dinner party Liselle is reluctantly hosting, Solomon’s insightful  The Days of Afrekete  dives back and forth between Liselle’s cracking veneer and her memories of an intoxicating relationship (with the brilliant, unconventional Selena) that once constituted her world. It’s in the nitty-gritty that Solomon nails things — Liselle’s fretting over whether financial success has recast her as an out-of-touch Black woman; the rightfully chaotic depictions of sexually ambiguous entanglements. The publisher describes The Days of Afrekete as  Sula  plus  Mrs. Dalloway ; Toni Morrison and Virginia Woolf may be towering names to live up to, but Solomon is on the right track.

Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout

The Lucy Barton universe keeps expanding. Strout published My Name Is Lucy Barton, the gentle blockbuster introducing the character, in 2016, then broadened the web with the interconnected stories in Anything Is Possible , set in Lucy’s quiet Illinois hometown. Now Strout has written a more linear follow-up with Oh William! , which takes place about 20 years after the events of the first book and sees Lucy widowed and reconnecting with her first husband, the titular William. Strout’s placid prose and unswerving style go down as easily as ever. In other hands, this novel might reek of franchise aspirations, but the Pulitzer-winning author remains as devoted as ever to storytelling that prods at life’s big questions about trauma, loneliness, and the search for a hand to hold in the dark.

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60+ Books You Need to Read in 2021

How many of these new releases are in your reading list?

best books 2021

Every product on this page was chosen by a Harper's BAZAAR editor. We may earn commission on some of the items you choose to buy.

For readers, 2021 has been poised to be all the more exciting, with new releases from the likes of Kazuo Ishiguro and Lauren Groff—not to mention many can’t-miss debuts—on the horizon. If you’re still putting together your Goodreads wish list for the year, make sure to consider some of these anticipated titles.

Beasts of a Little Land by Juhea Kim

Beasts of a Little Land by Juhea Kim

Some people say that all stories are about either love or war. Set against the backdrop of early 20th-century Korea, Kim’s epic debut novel is about both. As children, an orphan boy and a girl sold by her family to a courtesan school form a deep friendship—but as they grow older and get swept up in the fight for Korean independence, the two must decide how much they are willing to sacrifice for one another.

Monster in the Middle by Tiphanie Yanique

Monster in the Middle by Tiphanie Yanique

7 years after releasing her debut novel, Land of Love and Drowning , Yanique is back with a sweeping new novel for the ages—a multigenerational love story spanning New York City, Ghana, and the Virgin Islands across decades.

Harper The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois by Honoree Fanonne Jeffers

The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois by Honoree Fanonne Jeffers

When a National Book Award-nominated poet decides to venture into fiction, it’s an understatement to say that the bar is set pretty high. Even so, it seems Jeffers has cleared that bar with ease: the acclaimed writer’s debut novel follows the story of one American family from early white settlers’ appropriation of Native lands, through the African slave trade and Civil War, all the way into today’s tumultuous times.

G.P. Putnam's Sons The Turnout by Megan Abbott

The Turnout by Megan Abbott

From gymnastics to cheerleading, Abbott is a master at exploring the sinister underbelly of stereotypically feminine pursuits, and her latest—a psycho-thriller about a family-run ballet school whose ecosystem is upended by the arrival of a stranger—is no exception.

Berkley The Heart Principle by Helen Hoang

The Heart Principle by Helen Hoang

Hoang’s latest romance puts readers through the wringer, but the happy ending is well worth it. After accidentally going viral, violinist Anna Sun should be celebrating her success; instead, she’s wrestling with burnout. When her boyfriend suggests they see other people, Anna sees it as a chance to figure out who she is apart from others’ expectations of her—but at what cost?

I Love You but I've Chosen Darkness by Claire Vaye Watkins

I Love You but I've Chosen Darkness by Claire Vaye Watkins

In Watkins’ hotly anticipated new novel, a writer struggling from postpartum depression boards a flight to a professional engagement in Reno that turns into a rambling journey of reckoning. A mother separated from the demands of motherhood, she plumbs the depths of her past and traverses the Mojave in search of an ever-elusive sense of closure.

Palmares by Gayle Jones

Palmares by Gayle Jones

After 20 years of silence, Toni Morrison’s protégée returns this fall with the story of Almeyda, an enslaved Black girl who flees the plantations of Brazil and escapes to a fugitive settlement called Palmares – a safe haven for Black Brazilians fleeing captivity. Of course, reaching Palmares marks only the beginning of Almeyda’s journey. Soon after, she sets off across colonial Brazil in search of her lost husband.

This Thing Between Us by Gus Moreno

This Thing Between Us by Gus Moreno

Let’s face it: there’s something kind of sinister about the Alexas and Siris and Google Home Maxes of the world. We’ve entrusted them with our homes, our families, and our most private information, all in hopes that they’ll make our lives a bit easier—but at what cost? Moreno explores the answer to that question in this gripping thriller, which follows a widower tormented by the smart speaker his late wife left behind.

The Charm Offensive by Alison Cochrun

The Charm Offensive by Alison Cochrun

Card-carrying members of Bachelor Nation, look alive! Cochrun’s swoon-worthy debut follows a producer on a Bachelor -esque reality show whose idealistic view of romance gets upended when he starts to develop feelings for the show’s lead, a handsome—and very awkward—tech genius who’s taken the job to rehabilitate his image.

Misfits: A Personal Manifesto by Michaela Coel

Misfits: A Personal Manifesto by Michaela Coel

When it premiered on HBO last year at the height of the pandemic, Coel’s groundbreaking series I May Destroy You may indeed have destroyed more than a few viewers—but it saved a lot of them, too. This fall, the writer embraces that legacy with her new book, which serves as an impassioned ode to never fitting in.

Flatiron Books Tell Me How to Be by Neel Patel

Tell Me How to Be by Neel Patel

If you like stories about families coming to terms with long-held secrets, Patel’s self-assured debut should be on your radar. As the one-year anniversary of her husband’s death approaches, seemingly perfect Renu questions whether she chose the wrong life; in Los Angeles, her commitment-phobic son Akash is still waiting for his to begin. When Akash returns to Illinois to help Renu sell the family house, both mother and son come face to face with their past regrets.

What Storm, What Thunder by Myriam J.A. Chancy

What Storm, What Thunder by Myriam J.A. Chancy

An ensemble cast of Haitians must contend with the aftermath of a 7.0 magnitude earthquake in Clancy’s unmissable first novel, which has already earned praise from writers such as Edwidge Danticat and Zinzi Clemmons. Across Port-au-Prince—Haiti’s capital—produce sellers, NGO architects, and wealthy expats alike navigate the fallout from the disaster.

Fight Night by Miriam Toews

Fight Night by Miriam Toews

Fight Club for girls, this isn’t. The bestselling Women Talking author’s new book follows three generations of women—irrepressible Grandma, her nine-year-old granddaughter Swiv, and Swiv’s pregnant mother—as they fight to survive in Toronto.

Wild Tongues Can't Be Tamed edited by Saraciea J. Fennell

Wild Tongues Can't Be Tamed edited by Saraciea J. Fennell

With a standout roster of authors that includes Naima Coster, Elizabeth Acevedo, and Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Wild Tongues Can’t Be Tamed is the kind of anthology we’d gladly wait all year for. In fifteen works of poetry and essays—from tales of the supernatural to takedowns of anti-Blackness—this collection offers something for just about every kind of reader.

Win Me Something by Kyle Lucia Wu

Win Me Something by Kyle Lucia Wu

Growing up biracial between New Jersey and Upstate New York, Willa Chen got used to never fitting in. But when she begins nannying for the Adriens, a wealthy white family living in New York City’s Tribeca neighborhood, Willa suddenly becomes acutely aware of all the things she never had as a girl. Winsome and tender, Wu’s debut novel is about a girl who must confront her out-of-place childhood in her search for a solid sense of self.

God of Mercy by Okezie Nwoka

God of Mercy by Okezie Nwoka

Forget what you think you know about the divine and let Nwoka’s bewitching novel introduce you to the Igbo village of Ichulu—home to Ijeoma, a girl who can fly. As the people of Ichulu and the surrounding villages wrestle with their gods, Ijeoma is forced into exile, where she must reckon with her growing powers while navigating a hostile world.

Grand Central Publishing Seeing Ghosts: A Memoir by Kat Chow

Seeing Ghosts: A Memoir by Kat Chow

A veteran journalist and podcaster (she co-founded NPR’s Code Switch ), Chow turns her incisive gaze inward for her first book. Chronicling the aftereffects of her mother’s unexpected death from cancer, Chow’s memoir traces her extended family’s path across the globe to draw a startlingly intimate portrait of grief.

Atria Books The Shimmering State by Meredith Westgate

The Shimmering State by Meredith Westgate

What if you could access the memories of those around you? That’s the premise of Westgate’s dystopian first novel, which follows Lucien and Sophie to a Los Angeles rehab center dedicated to treating abusers of a powerful new drug called Memoroxin. The two have no memory of each other, but are inexplicably drawn to one another all the same, in this Eternal Sunshine

for a new era.

The President and the Frog by Carolina de Robertis

The President and the Frog by Carolina de Robertis

De Robertis has carved out a niche for herself as a writer of playful, inventive novels that challenge our understanding of society, and her latest is no exception. A journalist visits a former Latin-American president in the lush gardens of the president’s modest home to discuss his life and legacy. Once a revolutionary who was jailed for inciting insurrection, the former president claims to have survived solitary confinement with the help of an unexpected companion: a deeply philosophical frog.

We Are Not Like Them by Christine Pride and Jo Piazza

We Are Not Like Them by Christine Pride and Jo Piazza

Ever since they met as children, Black TV anchor Riley and her white best friend Jen have been closer than sisters. Even as adults, they can’t imagine anything ever coming between them—until Jen’s police officer husband shoots an unarmed Black teenager, and Riley is tasked with covering the story. Bestselling author Piazza and debut novelist Pride join forces for this deeply urgent novel about a heartbreakingly American phenomenon.

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Keely Weiss is a writer and filmmaker. She has lived in Los Angeles, New York, and Virginia and has a cat named after Perry Mason.

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Our 20 Favorite Books of 2021

Playful, majestic, dazzling. These titles stole our hearts.

best books 2021

Our editors handpick the products that we feature. We may earn commission from the links on this page.

2021 marked the release of new books by some of our most prominent authors—among them Richard Powers, Jonathan Franzen, Louise Erdrich, Amor Towles, Ann Patchett, Anthony Doerr, Colson Whitehead, and Maggie Shipstead, whose latest works made it onto our Top 20 List. Some of them, like Shipstead’s Great Circle, are epics in which the heroes and heroines’ adventures light up the reader’s imagination, while others go a bit more micro. For example, Whitehead’s Harlem Shuffle is a 1960s period piece in which a furniture dealer gets suckered into a caper; Erdrich’s The Sentence is a contemporary novel set in a Minneapolis bookstore exactly like the one the author owns.

Two of the debut novels on our list—the breathtaking The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois , by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, and Nathan Harris’s The Sweetness of Water —were also selected for Oprah’s Book Club. Fiction from rising stars Patricia Engel, Mariana Enriquez, and Virgina Feito also wowed us.

Maggie Nelson is one of America’s leading intellectuals, and her brilliant collection, On Freedom , is a must-read for anyone who wants to deconstruct the most urgent social debates of the day. And the The Man Who Lived Underground , which Richard Wright wrote in the 1940s but was unable to get published at the time, underscores that great literature never loses its relevance: His tale of police brutality and racial inequality reads like it happened today. And then there’s Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Annette Gordon Reed’s On Juneteenth, her stirring personal ode to a holiday that is only now finally getting its due.

And for fun, New York, My Village , by Uwem Akpan, satirizes the self-serious book publishing business, while James LaPine’s sublime Putting It Together is a reminder, amid all our world’s uncertainty, that making art and sharing it with audiences is one of those life-affirming acts we were put on this planet for.

Drumroll, please...

Cloud Cuckoo Land, by Anthony Doerr

The man who lived underground, by richard wright.

This previously unpublished novel, written in the 40s by the iconic author of Native Son , indicts police brutality and white supremacy through the terrifying saga of Fred Daniels, a Black man framed for double murder. Wright’s publisher refused to release the book at the time, deeming it incendiary. But this powerful, eerily prescient allegory finally saw the light of day earlier this year, at last getting the platform it has long deserved.

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

This sweeping kitchen-table epic is the Great American Novel told through the family and ancestors of its protagonist, Ailey Pearl Garfield. Their narratives are anchored in centuries of oppression, sexual violations, and wounds made bearable by the humor, love, and resilience of Black matriarchs, then and now.

On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint, by Maggie Nelson

The acclaimed author of The Argonauts challenges, excites, and ignites with this cerebral mélange of reporting, memoir, and scholarship on topics ranging from cultural appropriation to climate change, to the distinction between obligation and responsibility. Settle in and observe Nelson’s mind at work and on fire.

Great Circle, by Maggie Shipstead

Shipstead’s exhilarating feminist epic is an ode to independence, persistence, and aviation. Marian Graves is the unforgettable protagonist at the heart of this Booker-nominated novel, who from an early age wants only to learn to fly. How she manages to make this dream come true as an orphan growing up in early-20th-century Montana is a study in courage, a thrilling ascent into a writer’s untethered imagination.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux Putting It Together, by James Lapine

The three-time Tony winner and Theater Hall of Fame inductee recounts the making of storied musical Sunday in the Park with  George , which he created with Stephen Sondheim. This illustrated book includes scintillating behind-the-scenes conversations with cast and crew. Anyone interested in how art is made will love Lapine’s tale of legends in collaboration.

The Sweetness of Water, by Nathan Harris

Newly freed in Old Ox, Georgia, two brothers, Prentiss and Landry, work on the homestead of George and Isabelle Walker—a couple mourning their son presumed lost to the Civil War—while also exploring the boundaries of their independence. A forbidden romance between Confederate soldiers underscores the tension between intimacy and duplicity in this singular debut, which also demonstrates how simple acts—of valor or violence—can ripple through time and space.

The Lincoln Highway, by Amor Towles

Towles’s picaresque tale is a paean to American mythology and the innocence of youth. In June 1954, four boys—Emmett, a Nebraska teenager just released from juvie; his little brother, Billy, a savant; Duchess, a streetwise hustler; and Woolly, heir to a Manhattan fortune—hit the road, staking out their dreams on opposite coasts but each drawn inevitably to New York. The author of A Gentleman i n Moscow has delivered a novel at once magical and melancholy.

New York, My Village, by Uwem Akpan

When Ekong Udousoro ventures from Nigeria to Manhattan to work as a book publishing fellow, he’s at first entranced and then gradually disillusioned by the patronizing, cultural superiority of his American colleagues. This satiric first novel, by the author of the memoir Say You’re One of Them , is both hilarious and spot-on.

Infinite Country, by Patricia Engel

Fifteen-year-old Talia escapes an all-girls correctional facility in the Colombian mountains on a mission to get back to Bogotá, where her father is waiting with her plane ticket to the U.S. It’s her one chance to unite with her mother and the siblings she has never met. Alternating between Talia’s journey and her parents’ struggles as undocumented immigrants separated by deportation, Engel’s astounding novel is an ode to family and heritage.

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Crossroads, by Jonathan Franzen

His strongest work since The  Corrections , Franzen’s sumptuous new novel maps the interior lives of the Hildebrandts, a suburban family mired in the quicksand of desire and deceit. It’s Christmas 1971, and a disingenuous pastor, his depressed wife, and their four children are torn between religious beliefs and roiling cultural change. Franzen embroiders his narrative with piercing social observation, an American Balzac.

Bewilderment, by Richard Powers

A grieving astrophysicist, his neuroatypical 9-year-old son, and the fern-fringed trails and waterfalls of Tennessee’s Smoky Mountains: From these elements the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The  Overstory weaves a gorgeous, generous heartbreak of a novel that mourns our ailing planet, as well as our ailing souls.

Harlem Shuffle, by Colson Whitehead

The two-time Pulitzer winner tilts genre on its head with an immersive, witty tale about a heist run amok. As the 1960s commence, Ray Carney, a Harlem furniture dealer, gets sucked into a hotel robbery. Afterward he dodges dangers real and imagined, glomming onto an American Dream that shrugs off his aspirations.

Hogarth The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, by Mariana Enriquez

An emerging Argentine star goes for Gothic gold, gleefully poking the scars of friendships and attraction in this spine-tingling, luminous collection whose enthralling characters all dance across the spectral line between our world and the beyond.

Mrs. March, by Virginia Feito

Feito’s electrifying debut novel opens a scary window into a husband’s gaslighting and its effects on his increasingly unhinged wife, Mrs. March... or is the gaslighting just in her head? Our heroine is beginning to fear that the walls of the Marches’ sumptuous Manhattan apartment have ears. Elisabeth Moss is set to star in the film version.

Intimacies, by Katie Kitamura

In the aftermath of her father’s death, the narrator of Kitamura’s crystalline novel trades New York for The Hague, translating in the World Court for a West African dictator accused of ethnic cleansing while fumbling through a tortuous romance. Kitamura is drawn to seductions, sexual and otherwise, and her slim, graceful novel punches above its weight, reckoning with the ways we deceive each other and ourselves.

These Precious Days: Essays, by Ann Patchett

To read this collection is to be invited into that sacred space where a writer steps out from behind the page to say  Hello; let’s really get to know each other.  Stoic, kindhearted, fierce, funny, brainy, Patchett’s essays honor what matters most “in this precarious and precious life.”

The Sentence, by Louise Erdrich

The 2021 Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist for The Night Watchman returns with a beguiling ode to bibliophiles set in an unnamed bookstore in Minneapolis that very closely resembles BirchBark, the shop Erdrich owns in real life. Her quirky, captivating characters—ex-con Tookie chief among them—care deeply about each other and our troubled world, but perhaps their deepest passion is for...books.

Major Labels, by Kelefa Sanneh

From Beyoncé to Kurt Cobain to De La Soul, the stars align in this virtuosic survey of popular music’s seven pillars: rock, R&B, country, punk, hip-hop, dance, and pop. Sanneh brings a contagious zeal for genres and cross-fertilizations to artists and records that are now playlists for an increasingly diverse America. “Over the past half-century, many musicians and listeners have belonged to tribes,” he writes. “What’s wrong with that?”

On Juneteenth, by Annette Gordon-Reed

A Harvard law professor and author of  The Hemingses of Monticello,  which won both the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize, Gordon-Reed is the textbook definition of public intellectual; and yet she gets personal in this slender, evocative memoir, blending textures from her small-town Texas girlhood with the unofficial celebration of slavery’s demise and the broader canvas of race in America, as when she integrated her public school: “My great-great-aunt…the one who lived in Houston and was also quite extravagant—bought boxes and boxes of dresses, tights, blouses, skirts, and hats from the most upscale department store in the city at the time, Sakowitz… Making sure I was dressed to the nines was her contribution to the civil rights movement.”

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Leigh Haber is Vice President, Books, Oprah Daily and O Quarterly. She is also Director of Oprah's Book Club. 

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A former book editor and the author of a memoir, This Boy's Faith, Hamilton Cain is Contributing Books Editor at Oprah Daily. As a freelance journalist, he has written for O, The Oprah Magazine, Men’s Health, The Good Men Project, and The List (Edinburgh, U.K.) and was a finalist for a National Magazine Award. He is currently a member of the National Book Critics Circle and lives with his family in Brooklyn.  

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The 10 Best Fiction Books of 2021

new top books 2021

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

10. Klara and the Sun , Kazuo Ishiguro

new top books 2021

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

Buy Now: Klara and the Sun on Bookshop | Amazon

9. Open Water , Caleb Azumah Nelson

new top books 2021

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

Buy Now: Open Water on Bookshop | Amazon

Read more about the best entertainment of the year: TV shows | Movies | Songs | Albums | Podcasts | Nonfiction books | YA and children’s books | Movie performances | Video games | Theater

8. Afterparties , Anthony Veasna So

new top books 2021

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

Buy Now: Afterparties on Bookshop | Amazon

7. Cloud Cuckoo Land , Anthony Doerr

new top books 2021

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

Buy Now: Cloud Cuckoo Land on Bookshop | Amazon

6. The Life of the Mind , Christine Smallwood

new top books 2021

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

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

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

new top books 2021

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

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

4. Detransition, Baby , Torrey Peters

new top books 2021

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

Buy Now: Detransition, Baby on Bookshop | Amazon

3. My Monticello , Jocelyn Nicole Johnson

new top books 2021

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

Buy Now: My Monticello on Bookshop | Amazon

2. The Prophets , Robert Jones, Jr.

new top books 2021

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

Buy Now: The Prophets on Bookshop | Amazon

1. Great Circle , Maggie Shipstead

new top books 2021

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

Buy Now: Great Circle on Bookshop | Amazon

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The 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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For Journalists, “Gaza Is Unprecedented,” and Deadly

By Parul Sehgal

Is There Hope for the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women?

By Rachel Monroe

These Are the 55 Best New Books to Read in 2021

Add these to your reading pile right now.

best books of 2021

We've been independently researching and testing products for over 120 years. If you buy through our links, we may earn a commission. Learn more about our review process.

So what should you read next ? This year, there are lots of exciting new releases from some of our favorite authors, as well as stunning debut books from a diverse group of newcomers in just about every genre you can think of. For 2021, many of our top book picks offer us critiques on our society today, a peek into complicated family dynamics, steamy romance novels that will remind you that love isn't dead after all, spooky thriller books that will send shivers up your spine, historical books that dip back into the past and creepy ghost stories that will keep you up past your bedtime.

And while some of these books may not be on shelves quite yet (or may be delayed due to supply chain issues), you should hit that preorder button anyway. Ordering books in advance not only gives you mail to look forward to that isn't a bill, but it helps support authors too. If you think we've missed something that should be included on our list, let us know in the comments — we always love discovering new books. Sound off about what you thought if you've read one of our favorites, too!

Ashley Audrain The Push: A Novel

The Push: A Novel

Fans of psychological thrillers, crack open this one about the relationship between mothers and daughters. Before Blythe's daughter is born, she wants to create the deep bond she never had with her own mom. But when Violet arrives, she's convinced something's wrong with her little girl. The tragic events that follow will make you question her sanity and the story she's telling us.  

RELATED:  The 35 Best Psychological Thriller Books to Scare Yourself Silly

Una Mannion A Crooked Tree: A Novel

A Crooked Tree: A Novel

One fateful night, 15-year-old Libby's harried single mom orders her sister Ellen, 12, to get out and walk home after their bickering gets to be too much. What follows not only shatters the girls' innocence, but sets off a chain of events that reveals the darkness in their sleepy town. This novel drives home how one moment can change everything. 

Joan Didion Let Me Tell You What I Mean

Let Me Tell You What I Mean

Joan Didion needs no introduction, and neither does this incisive collection of works, mostly drawn from early in her career. Topics include Martha Stewart, a Gamblers Anonymous meeting, writing itself and her own doubts about it all. Didion fans shouldn't sleep this one, and neither should anyone else. 

Rachel Hawkins The Wife Upstairs: A Novel

The Wife Upstairs: A Novel

The plot might feel familiar in this feminist twist on a classic gothic romance. Broke dog walker Jane has her sights on the wealthy Eddie Rochester. Eddie's got a past, but then again, so does she. Read to find out whether either of them can ever escape their secrets, or if their forbidden tryst is doomed to failure.

Sarah Moss Summerwater: A Novel

Summerwater: A Novel

A creeping aura of disquiet pervades this quietly unsettling novel set in a cluster of cottages in rural Scotland. Lacking cell service, the families spend their days watching each other's movements through the blinds, learning perhaps a little too much about the others. It's a slow burn, but the payoff at the end will leave you breathless. 

Cherie Jones How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House: A Novel

How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House: A Novel

This transporting novel set in Barbados reveals the way even the most disparate lives are interconnected. It delves into wealth and class, love and crime — and the emotional turmoil that roils in a rapidly gentrifying area and the people who live there.  

RELATED: 25 Books By Black Authors to Add to Your Reading List

Caitlin Horrocks Life Among the Terranauts

Life Among the Terranauts

In a series of vivid, immersive short stories, we meet characters living in ever-so-slightly fanciful realities and others navigating deeply human experiences that could be ripped from our own lives. Whether you enjoy sci-fi, realistic fiction or bite-sized escapes from the real world, you'll find something to love here. 

Brandon Hobson The Removed: A Novel

The Removed: A Novel

The Echota family is never the same after their son Ray-Ray is killed in a police shooting. His mother Maria struggles with her husband Edgar's worsening dementia, while their daughter Sonja leads a solitary life and her brother Edgar battles drug addiction. As the anniversary of Ray-Ray's passing approaches, Maria and Edgar take in a foster son whose arrival just might be the change the family needs. 

Abigail Dean Girl A: A Novel

Girl A: A Novel

After Lex escapes from an abusive childhood, she does her best to put it all behind her. But when her mother dies in prison and leaves their family home to her and her siblings, the woman formerly known as "Girl A" has to reconnect with the only people who really know what happened to them. This gripping story about family dynamics and the nature of human psychology will hold you tight all the way through. 

Nancy Johnson The Kindest Lie: A Novel

The Kindest Lie: A Novel

When Ruth gets pregnant as a teenager, she gives up her son for adoption and leaves town for an Ivy League education, hoping they're both on a path toward better things. But she never really gets over him, so when her husband wants to start a family years later, she's drawn back home to find out what happened to her baby. What follows is a heart-wrenching story of family, racism, poverty and love. 

RELATED:  The 20 Best Feminist Books to Put on Your Reading List This Year

Chang Rae-Lee My Year Abroad: A Novel

My Year Abroad: A Novel

This wildly original novel carries us across the world as Tiller, a mediocre college kid, gets tied up with Pong, an international businessman who takes him on the trip of a lifetime. We bounce between those adventures and the life Tiller finds afterward with Val, a single mom in witness protection, as he tries to figure out what it all means. It's by turns dark, humorous and almost sneakily insightful. 

Leesa Cross-Smith This Close to Okay: A Novel

This Close to Okay: A Novel

We all carry our past with us, and that's never clearer than in this powerful story about two strangers who come together when they both need someone the most. Recently divorced therapist Tallie Clark pulls over when she sees Emmett about to jump from a bridge. She coaxes him to safety, and over the course of the emotional weekend that follows, we learn that Emmett's not the only one who needed saving. 

Jennifer Ryan The Kitchen Front: A Novel

The Kitchen Front: A Novel

You'll feel like you stepped back in time with this historical fiction set in WWII Britain. Four women from very different walks of life compete in a cooking competition to become a presenter on the BBC, and learn a lot about themselves — and each other — along the way. It's uplifting, a little scandalous and even includes recipes so you can cook along with them.  

Patricia Lockwood No One Is Talking About This: A Novel

No One Is Talking About This: A Novel

This fragmented, genre-bending story about a woman who earns social media fame and wonders about what "the portal" is doing to society, her brain and the people who use it, feels both strange and intimately familiar. It's bizarre, oddly funny, at times piercing and absolutely a must-read for all of us social media users.

Emily Layden All Girls: A Novel

All Girls: A Novel

When scandal strikes a prestigious New England Prep School, all of the students handle the fallout a bit differently. This striking debut follows nine young women as they navigate their own coming-of-age in the shadow of a controversy that feels all too familiar. 

Kazuo Ishiguro Klara and the Sun: A novel

Klara and the Sun: A novel

The hotly-anticipated latest novel from Nobel Prize in Literature-winner Kazuo Ishiguro deals with themes both personal and universal, familiar and futuristic. The 2017 Nobel committee described Ishiguro's books as "novels of great emotional force" that "uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world." Read this one and you'll understand why. 

Sarah Penner The Lost Apothecary: A Novel

The Lost Apothecary: A Novel

If you've ever wanted to really get back at someone, have we got a book for you. In 18th century England, a secret apothecary sells disguised poison to the victims of oppressive men. That is, until a client makes a horrible mistake. Meanwhile, in modern-day England, an aspiring historian stumbles onto the story with potentially devastating results. 

courtesy of Kaitlyn Greenidge Libertie: A Novel

Libertie: A Novel

Growing up in Brooklyn during the Reconstruction, Libertie knows her physician mother wants Libertie to follow a similar path. But instead, Libertie accepts the proposal of a Haitian man to pursue a new life, only to discover she's still not his equal on the island. Inspired by the story of one of the first Black female physicians in the U.S., this is a gorgeous meditation on what freedom means.

Sharon Stone The Beauty of Living Twice

The Beauty of Living Twice

In a gorgeous memoir that talks about how she put her life back together after a massive medical event, actress and humanitarian Sharon Stone lets us all in to her world. Whether you've followed her work or not, this slice of life makes a great read. 

Morgan Jerkins Caul Baby: A Novel

Caul Baby: A Novel

The Harlem Melancons are powerful and prosperous, thanks to their magical caul that has healing properties. When neighbor Leila turns to them to save her baby and the deal falls through, it sets off a chain of events that will reverberate through the Melancon clan and Harlem itself. This engrossing story is rich with mystery, page-turning tension and the powerful ways family can hold us even in toxic circumstances. 

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Biden ‘privately defiant’ over chaotic 2021 Afghanistan withdrawal, book says

The Internationalists details how the president was determined to leave a country in which 2,324 US troops were killed since 2001

Joe Biden is “privately defiant” that he made the right calls on the US withdrawal from Afghanistan in summer 2021, a new book reportedly says, even as the chaos and carnage that unfolded continues to be investigated in Congress.

“No one offered to resign” over the withdrawal, writes Alexander Ward, a Politico reporter, “in large part because the president didn’t believe anyone had made a mistake. Ending the war was always going to be messy.”

Ward’s book, The Internationalists: The Fight to Restore Foreign Policy After Trump, will be published next week. Axios reported extracts on Friday.

Ward adds: “Biden told his top aides, [national security adviser Jake] Sullivan included, that he stood by them and they had done their best during a tough situation.”

Ward quotes an unnamed White House official as saying: “There wasn’t even a real possibility of a shake-up.”

The US invaded Afghanistan in October 2001, a month after the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington. The Taliban, which had sheltered the leader of al-Qaida, Osama bin Laden, was soon ousted but fighting never ceased.

Figures for the total US death toll in the country since 2001 vary. The United States Institute of Peace, an independent body established by Congress, says that 2,324 US military personnel, 3,917 US contractors and 1,144 allied troops were killed during the conflict. More than 20,000 Americans were wounded.

“For Afghans,” the institute goes on , “the statistics are nearly unimaginable: 70,000 Afghan military and police deaths, 46,319 Afghan civilians (although that is likely a significant underestimation) and some 53,000 opposition fighters killed. Almost 67,000 other people were killed in Pakistan in relation to the Afghan war.”

Hundreds of thousands were displaced. Furthermore, according to the Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs at Brown University, “ four times as many [US] service members have died by suicide than in combat in the post-9/11 wars [including Iraq and other campaigns], signaling a widespread mental health crisis”.

Biden entered office determined to withdraw, and in late summer 2021 US forces pulled out, leaving the defense of the country to US-trained Afghan national forces.

The Taliban swiftly overran that opposition, and soon scenes of chaos at Kabul airport dominated world news. Tens of thousands of Afghans who sought to leave, fearing Taliban reprisals after a 20-year US occupation, were unable to get out. More than 800 US citizens were left behind, notwithstanding Biden’s promise on 18 August that troops would stay until every US citizen who wanted to leave had done so.

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Ward, Axios said, quotes a senior White House official as saying: “There’s no one here who thinks we can meet that promise.”

On 26 August, 13 US service members were killed in a suicide attack. Three days later, a US drone strike killed 10 Afghan civilians , seven of them children. No Americans faced disciplinary action over the strike, which a US air force inspector general called “ an honest mistake ”.

According to Axios, Ward also details extensive infighting over the withdrawal between the Departments of State and Defense.

Biden, Ward says , tended to favour the state department, having been chair of the Senate foreign affairs committee, and to be wary of the Pentagon, having been vice-president to Barack Obama through eight years of inconclusive war.

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  • South and central Asia

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10 Best Netflix TV Shows That Are Based on Books, Ranked

T here's a special magic about opening a book and getting lost in the story unfolding between the front and back covers. There's another special kind of magic when those words are transformed onto the screen. Filmmakers and showrunners don't always get it right, failing to capture what made the original work so special, but, sometimes, screen adaptations of beloved books understand the story and make changes when necessary that add to the story.

Netflix has many book-to-screen adaptations present in its massive library. Much of the attention goes to films. However, TV series give creatives a fantastic opportunity to expand on the source material and explore other areas their movie counterparts don't always have time to delve into. Here are the 10 best Netflix TV shows based on books, ranked.

Anne with an E (2017-2019)

Anne with an e.

Cast R.H. Thomson, Dalila Bela, Geraldine James

Main Genre Documentary

Adapted from Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery, the Canadian historical drama Anne with an E follows a young girl named Anne in the late-1800s. At just 13, Anne has already faced a great deal of heartache. Her parents died, she had to work as a servant, and she lived in an orphanage. Getting adopted should be her salvation, but a misunderstanding brought her to a family hoping for a boy. Now Anne must see if she can still find a place within this new family living on a farm called Green Gables.

What Makes It Great

A key characteristic of Anne is that she's super talkative. This could've made her annoying, but instead endeared audiences to her. It also helps that the adults who initially rejected her aren't painted as wholly evil, heartless adults. Mr. and Ms. Cuthbert (not married) are great characters in their own right, and seeing their relationship with Anne grow is sweet.

This Netflix TV adaptation tackles issues present in many series with a similar setup: family trauma, bullying, gender roles, etc. And with solid acting coupled with strong characterization, this show stands out as one of the best.

Mindhunter (2017-2019)

Release Date 2017-10-00

Cast Holt McCallany, Anna Torv

Main Genre Thriller

Mindhunter is adapted from Mindhunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit by John E. Douglas and Mark Olshaker. While most recent true crime films and TV shows are focused primarily on those committing the crime, Mindhunter pays attention to the individuals solving them. For those curious about how criminal profiling and behavioral science got its legs, this is the perfect show to binge.

In the 1970s, FBI agents Holden and Bill, as well as psychologist Wendy put their talents together to interview convicted serial killers about their crimes with the hope it'll aid in current and future cases.

Sure, getting into the minds of depraved criminals can be fascinating, but learning about those who interact with them can be especially engaging — it sure is in Mindhunter . It's also a refreshing angle within the true crime sphere, as viewers aren't going to see many gory, violent scenes when watching the show. Sensationalizing the narratives in that way would take away from the character study at the heart of the show's premise.

Related: 10 Underrated Movies Based on True Crimes

The Baby-Sitters Club (2020-2021)

Adapted from The Baby-Sitters Club by Ann M. Martin. The Baby-Sitters Club is a simple story perfect for young viewers or those who want to bask in nostalgia for the popular book series. A group of middle schoolers in Connecticut decide to forego lemonade stands or Girl Scouts and instead turn to babysitting to earn extra cash. But these young entrepreneurs in training soon learn about all the complications of running their own business. Among them is Kristy, president of the club, who is determined to make sure they succeed.

There's a reason the original series sold more than 180 million copies (according to Scholastic ). The story is simple; no dragons or magical powers or quests to save the world. But this series is proof that sometimes common scenarios are just as entertaining. Each member of the club is unique and feels like an actual pre-teen. When the characters narrate the thoughts going on in their head, it invites viewers to get even closer to them. The blending of the struggles of the babysitting venture and light family and friendship conflicts makes this an easy watch.

Shadow and Bone (2021-2023)

Shadow and bone.

Cast Ben Barnes

Main Genre Sci-Fi

Adapted from Shadow and Bone and Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo. Shadow and Bone is set in a fictional world where magical beings called Grisha exist. One storyline follows Alina Starkov who discovers she's the Sun Summoner, a sought-after entity. The Darkling wants Alina to join his side to conquer the Fold, an area run by beasts. But soon their interests clash.

Another plotline follows the Crows, a ragtag group of criminals tasked with abducting the Sun Summoner. The leader of Crows, Kaz, is not just motivated by the money that will await them once the job is done, but also by the chance of getting revenge.

Some fans wondered how showrunners would fuse the storylines. In the books, Alina and the Crows' stories never intersect. They had to change several things, so they could exist at the same time. Arguably, the Crows deserved their own show. Still, the attention to detail in the world-building, from the costume to the set design, is pleasing to those familiar and new to the Grishaverse. The six crows shone in each scene they were in, with their quippy banter, intense fight scenes, and reluctant, found family vibes .

You (2018-Present)

Release Date 2018-00-00

Cast Victoria Pedretti, Ambyr Childers, Carmela Zumbado, James Scully, Penn Badgley

Main Genre Drama

Adapted from You by Caroline Kepnes. Somehow, the author of the book series and the creatives behind the show You managed to get millions of people invested in the life of a stalker and murderer. Joe Goldberg works at a bookstore in New York when he develops a crush on Guinevere Beck. Scrolling through her social media isn't enough to quell his curiosity about her. Soon, Joe turns to tracking her movements, breaking into her apartment, and other disturbing acts to get closer to her.

Even apart from the obvious illegal behaviors, Joe has pretty unlikable traits. He can be pretentious, judgmental, and entitled. However, that's also what makes following him so intriguing: Joe's inner monologue and thoughts are unsettling, but you can't look away. Viewers aren't exactly rooting for Joe and don't condone what he's doing, yet he isn't written off easily as a villain. Part of it is due to the great performance from Penn Badgley , and part of it is the sharp script.

Lupin (2021-Present)

Based on a character created by Maurice Leblanc, Lupin is a French thriller about a man named Assane Diop who is a thief looking to pull off a major heist. His family came to France from Senegal in search of better opportunities. Instead, Assane's father was framed by his boss for stealing an expensive piece of jewelry. Later, his father died in prison, leaving the then-teenage Assand to survive by himself. Now as an adult, after reading about a fictional thief named Arsène Lupin (the character created by Leblanc), Assana decides it's time for payback.

Viewers are immediately rooting for Assane because of all he went through as a child, but there's also something so satisfying about him taking down wealthy, callous individuals. He's not a perfect character, and the show depicts how his vengeance has impacted his relationship with his wife and son. It's essential in thrillers relying on heists that the protagonist seems smart and capable, and Assane fits the bill. From his disguise as a janitor in the Louvre to a rich man looking to buy the same item he's planning to steal keeps viewers on their toes.

Related: 10 Netflix Shows Like Lupin to Watch Next

Heartstopper (2022-Present)

Heartstopper.

Release Date 2022-04-22

Cast Joe Locke, William Gao, Cormac Hyde-Corrin, Yasmin Finney, Kit Connor

Genres Drama, Romance

Rating TV-14

Read Our Season 2 Review

Adapted from Heartstopper by Alice Oseman. A little bit of coming-of-age. A heaping of romance. A serving of comedy. And even a dash of sports drama. Heartstopper has many elements wrapped up in a charming story about two teenagers falling in love despite the pressures and obstacles surrounding them. Charlie is in a secret relationship with another boy at school. He shouldn't have feelings for his classmate and rugby player Nick, but he does. When Nick asks him to join the rugby team, Charlie senses it's time for a change.

Despite having so many different elements, the show manages to feel cohesive. Sure, some parts are more comedic and others heavier, especially when getting into parts where other students bully Nick and Charlie because of their sexuality. Yet this all adds to the authenticity of the experience, adequately showing the highs and lows of figuring out who you are as a teenager.

Maid (2021)

Cast Andie MacDowell, Anika Noni Rose, Nick Robinson, Billy Burke

Main Genre Comedy

Genres Comedy, Documentary

Adapted from Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother's Will to Survive by Stephanie Land, Maid is a miniseries that details the life of Alex, a woman living in Seattle who was in an abusive relationship. She decides to leave him, taking her daughter with her, and together they move into a shelter. As she tries to pick up the pieces of her life, Alex works as a maid though she has dreams of becoming a writer.

Knowing the story is based on a memoir makes the events sadder and more frustrating. So much has happened to Alex, and you'd hope that once she left her relationship things would get easier for her. Unfortunately, she faced roadblock after roadblock, sometimes from those whose job it was to help her. Margaret Qualley tapped into the quiet strength and resilience of Alex's character perfectly. The show is inspiring in a way that doesn't feel like an exaggerated self-help book.

The Haunting of Hill House (2018)

The haunting of hill house.

Release Date 2018-10-12

Cast Victoria Pedretti, Carla Gugino, Kate Siegel, Henry Thomas, Timothy Hutton, Michiel Huisman, Elizabeth Reaser

Main Genre Horror

Adapted from The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson. Horror novels don't get television adaptations too often, but The Haunting of Hill House is luckily one of the selected few. This dual-timeline narrative centers on the Crain family during their living in a house that forever changed their lives and the present day when, as adults, they are still coming to terms with the events.

In the early-90s, the Crains move into Hill House with plans to remodel and sell it. Their stay was meant to be short, but the home proved to be more of a fixer-upper than they anticipated. Soon, unexplained occurrences raise questions about the house's origins.

The Haunting of Hill House has episodes that are genuinely terrifying and not just due to cheap jump scares. It's apparent that director Mike Flanagan took care in how he crafted this story. Some horror films and shows suffer from shallow characters, as they are more plot-driven stories. Each member of the Crain family feels important and fully fleshed out. Additionally, the present timeline is still packed with tension and high stakes as we see how much the characters are still suffering. No matter who viewers are following or when, they'll never be bored.

Firefly Lane (2021-2023)

Adapted from Firefly Lane by Kristin Hannah. Friendship stories are often tossed aside to favor romantic ones, which is where Firefly Lane comes in to fill a gap. Kate and Tully meet in the '70s, when Tully moves in nearby. Kate comes from a "normal" family, though she feels stifled by them at times. Tully grew up in a chaotic household, thanks to her free-spirited mother who doesn't handle her responsibilities. The show flashes between their time as teens and as adults when their differing personalities help each other grow and cause friction.

Objectively, Tully and Kate fit common character archetypes. Tully is wild, loud, and outgoing; Kate is shy, insecure, and sheltered. However, the time given to developing their backstories and bringing viewers closer into their inner worlds help viewers understand there's more to it than that. Women friendships are depicted as pure, with zero conflict or inherent cattiness. Kate and Tully's relationship is complex, showing that real, heartwarming friendships are often a mix of the good and bad.

10 Best Netflix TV Shows That Are Based on Books, Ranked

False claim martial law declared in DC; video shows 2021 inauguration security | Fact check

new top books 2021

The claim: Martial law was declared in Washington, DC

[ En Español : Falsa afirmación: ley marcial en DC; video muestra medidas de seguridad en 2021 | Hechos ]

A Jan. 28 Facebook post ( direct link , archive link ) shows a video clip of armed soldiers, military equipment and barricades around the Capitol in Washington, D.C.   

“BREAKING NEWS: MARTIAL LAW in the White House in Washington!!” the post reads in Spanish.

A similar claim on X, formerly Twitter, was shared more than 200 times.   

More from the Fact-Check Team: How we pick and research claims | Email newsletter | Facebook page

Our rating: False

There has been no marshal law declaration. The video is from January 2021 and shows security measures outside the U.S. Capitol for President Joe Biden's inauguration

No federal martial law in the US since 1941

The video clip in the post was taken more than three years ago, in January 2021, close to Biden’s inauguration ceremony, which traditionally takes place outside of the U.S. Capitol.

The same scene shown in the Facebook video can be seen in MSNBC footage posted to YouTube on Jan. 14, 2021 , showing troops outside the Capitol. The arrangement of vehicles behind the soldiers matches in both videos.

The exact footage used in the Facebook post can be seen in a tweet from Jan. 19, 2021.

More than 20,000 National Guard troops were mobilized before the inauguration due to the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, which aimed to overturn the 2020 presidential election results. The attack led to deaths, injuries and hundreds of arrests.

The video clip also shows the U.S. Capitol, not the White House, contrary to the claim.

Fact check Video shows heightened security ahead of Biden inauguration ceremony

The claim referred to martial law, but the White House has not declared martial law, and no credible news reports suggest otherwise.

There is no official definition of martial law, but it generally refers to the practice of imposing military control over a civilian government during times of war, rebellion or natural disaster.

Federal and state officials have declared martial law 68 times in U.S. history, but it hasn't happened on the federal level since the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, according to the Brennan Cen ter.

USA TODAY reached out to the users who shared the post for comment but did not immediately receive a response.

AFP and Univision also debunked the claim

Our fact-check sources:

  • MSNBC (YouTube), Jan. 15, 2021, Thousands Of Troops Descend On Washington Ahead Of Inauguration | Stephanie Ruhle | MSNBC
  • @Lukewearechange, Jan. 19, 2021, tweet
  • USA TODAY, Jan. 14, 2021,  Over 20,000 National Guard troops to provide security against inauguration threats in Washington
  • USA TODAY, Jan. 8, 2021, National Guard provide additional security at US Capitol following pro-Trump riot
  • Department of Justice, accessed Feb. 14, Martial Law in Times of Civil Disorder
  • Brennan Center for Justice, Aug. 20, 2020, Martial Law in the United States: Its Meaning, Its History, and Why the President Can’t Declare It

Thank you for supporting our journalism. You can subscribe to our print edition, ad-free app or e-newspaper here .

USA TODAY is a verified signatory of the International Fact-Checking Network, which requires a demonstrated commitment to nonpartisanship, fairness and transparency. Our fact-check work is supported in part by a grant from Meta .

Florida basketball breaks into Top 25 for first time since 2021. Here's where UF is ranked

new top books 2021

Florida basketball broke into the AP Top 25 for the first-time in head coach Todd Golden's two-year tenure, coming in at No. 24 in this week's AP Top 25.

The Florida Gators (18-7, 8-4 SEC) have won seven of their last eight games since a 1-3 conference start, with their lone loss coming by one-point at Texas A&M on Feb. 3.

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Since the Texas A&M loss, Florida has won three straight including back-to-back wins last week over LSU (82-80) and at Georgia (88-82). On Saturday, UF rallied back from 11 points down in the first half to beat the Bulldogs.

“It means a lot to get a road game victory," Florida guard Walter Clayton Jr. said. "That’s always big. The big rivalry for me – I’ve said it multiple times – is FSU. Georgia was the rivalry after that, so I’m glad we got the win for the fans.”

It's the first time that UF basketball is ranked in the Top 25 since holding a No. 20 ranking the week of Dec. 6, 2021, during Mike White's final season as coach.

Florida is one of six SEC teams ranked in the AP Top 25, a list that includes Tennessee (5), Alabama (13), Auburn (14), Kentucky (17) and South Carolina (20).

In the USA Today coaches poll, Florida remained unranked, receiving 40 votes.

Florida will get a showdown with another ranked team, playing at No. 13 Alabama on Wednesday night (7 p.m., ESPN2). The Gators then will return home to host Vanderbilt on Saturday at the O'Connell Center (1 p.m. tip, SEC Network).

4 things a doctor who's written best-selling books about aging does daily in the hope of living longer

  • Our lifestyle choices are the biggest indicator of how long we will live, a doctor said. 
  • Dr. Michael Greger shared the four things he does daily in to boost his longevity. 
  • Greger mostly eats plant-based whole foods and exercises daily. 

Insider Today

Dr. Michael Greger has written four New York Times bestsellers on the subject of longevity and healthy living. 

He’s dedicated his career to studying how nutrition and lifestyle factors can increase lifespan and shares his findings in his books and charity, Nutritionfacts.org

Greger then applies his findings to his own life, he told Business Insider, and is a huge advocate of life-lengthening habits, such as eating a healthy diet and staying active .

Greger shared four things he tries to do daily to live the longest, healthiest life possible. 

Eat berries, cruciferous vegetables, and flax seeds 

“The most important thing we can do is we can follow the Blue Zones example and center our diets around whole plant foods,” Greger said.

Blue Zones are small regions — such as Loma Linda, California — where the population lives around 10 years longer than the country’s average.

People in Blue Zones tend to eat a diet high in fruits, vegetables, legumes, nuts, and seeds and low in refined sugar, animal products, and ultra-processed foods . The Blue Zone diet is similar to the Mediterranean diet, which is widely considered the healthiest way to eat .

“Basically real food that grows out of the ground,” Greger said.

Greger primarily, but not exclusively, eats plants. “I certainly try not to be a hypocrite and try to eat the diet that I recommend to everybody,” he said. 

More specifically, he tries to eat berries and cruciferous vegetables daily. He often blends these into a smoothie that he sips throughout the day. 

Breakfast, meanwhile, will typically be oats with cherries, walnuts, pumpkin seeds, and cocoa powder.

“For kind of a morning-time chocolate-covered cherry sensation,” he joked.

Cruciferous vegetables, such as broccoli, cabbage, and cauliflower, contain nutrients such as sulforaphane, a compound that can neutralize toxins and reduce inflammation, while berries are rich in antioxidants, which help fight cell damage, Greger said on his YouTube channel. 

Greger also eats one tablespoon of ground flax seeds every day because they contain high quantities of lignans, which are linked to a reduced risk of cardiovascular disease. He sprinkles this on his oats or adds it to a smoothie. 

Use a treadmill desk 

Being sedentary, or sitting 10 or more hours a day, is linked to a higher risk of dying early, while an active lifestyle is known to have a huge range of health benefits, from improving heart health to reducing the risk of cancer . 

Whenever Greger works from home, he walks all day on a treadmill desk set to two to three miles per hour. He estimated that he walks around 14 miles a day. 

“That keeps me from being sedentary, but it doesn't really give me exercise per se,” he said. 

Get his heart rate up 

Greger makes sure that he gets his heart rate up every day in some way, aiming to do 90 minutes of moderate or 40 minutes of vigorous exercise. 

But he was on the road for a speaking tour when he spoke to BI and is the first to admit that maintaining healthy habits can be tough when you’re traveling. So he works with what he has available. 

“This new apartment I have by the airport is on the 18th floor, so I try to jog up 18 floors every day,” he said. 

He also packs a resistance band and does burpees if the place where he’s staying doesn’t have enough stairs. 

Eat calories earlier in the day 

Eating earlier rather than later is thought to be beneficial for health and longevity because of how our circadian rhythm works, Greger said. 

The exact same number of calories eaten in the evening causes less of a blood sugar spike in the morning, and we absorb fewer triglycerides, the fat the body converts unused calories into, he said. 

In a 2022 review of studies involving 485 adults, researchers found that participants who consumed most of their calories earlier in the day lost more weight than those who did the opposite despite eating a similar amount overall.

They also saw bigger improvements in their blood sugar and cholesterol levels.

“If you're going to eat any kind of junk, you eat it in the morning because the body's better able to handle it,” he said.

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Books Fall Preview: Fiction

20 New Works of Fiction to Read This Season

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

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By Joumana Khatib

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

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

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

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

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

Ecco, Sept. 7 | Read our review

‘ Apples Never Fall ,’ by Liane Moriarty

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

Holt, Sept. 14 | Read our review

‘ Harlem Shuffle ,’ by Colson Whitehead

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

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

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

‘ palmares ,’ by gayl jones.

It’s been two decades since Jones released a new novel, and she returns with a multipart series centered on Almeyda, a young enslaved girl in colonial Brazil, who makes her way to a utopia where Black people are free. After the settlement is destroyed, Almeyda crosses the country in search of her lost husband.

Beacon Press, Sept. 14 | Read our review

‘ Bewilderment ,’ by Richard Powers

As with his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Overstory,” Powers’s new book encourages readers to look beyond ourselves. A widowed father, Theo, is an astrobiologist researching the possibility of life throughout the galaxy. His son, Robin, is struggling with outbursts at school and difficult emotions, but finds relief in an experimental neurofeedback therapy, which allows him to access his dead mother’s feelings.

Norton, Sept. 21 | Read our review | Read our profile of Powers

new top books 2021

‘ The Wrong End of the Telescope ,’ by Rabih Alameddine

Mina, a trans Lebanese American doctor, arrives in Lesbos to volunteer at a refugee camp, and the experience takes on an unexpectedly personal dimension after she meets Sumaiya, a Syrian woman trying to hide the extent of her illness from her family.

Grove, Sept. 21 | | Read our review | Read our profile of Alameddine

‘ Chronicles From the Land of the Happiest People on Earth ,’ by Wole Soyinka

The Nobel laureate’s first novel in nearly 50 years reads like a sendup of an imaginary Nigeria, equally a mystery and political satire, centered on a black market for human flesh and the doctor trying to get to the bottom of what’s going on.

Pantheon, Sept. 28 | Read our review | Read our profile of Soyinka

‘ Cloud Cuckoo Land ,’ by Anthony Doerr

In his first novel since he won a Pulitzer Prize for “All the Light We Cannot See,” Doerr follows five characters across a millennium, from 15th-century Constantinople to a futuristic spaceship, all linked by a love of books, myth and storytelling.

Scribner, Sept. 28 | Read our review | Read our profile of Doerr

‘ Crossroads ,’ by Jonathan Franzen

Set in the 1970s in a Chicago suburb, this novel, the first in a planned trilogy, follows the Hildebrandt family. Russell, an associate pastor whose ethical code is wavering, and Marion, who deals with long-buried traumas, head up the family, which goes on to confront moral and spiritual questions.

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Oct. 5 | Read our review

‘ Reprieve ,’ by James Han Mattson

It’s 1990s Nebraska, and a group of four contestants is close to completing an escape room known for its horrors. But when one of them is killed by an intruder, the survivors — including a love-struck international student who came to track down a former teacher and a grieving teenage girl — are left to reckon with a bigger challenge involving guilt, race and power.

William Morrow, Oct. 5 | Read our review

‘ The Lincoln Highway ,’ by Amor Towles

Set over a 10-day stretch in 1954, this new novel from the author of “A Gentleman in Moscow” follows a teenager trying to rebuild his life. Emmett has returned to Nebraska after serving a sentence for involuntary manslaughter, with plans to collect his younger brother and start fresh in California. But when he discovers two unexpected interlopers, his path is radically redirected, leading him on a picaresque journey to New York.

Viking, Oct. 5 | Read our review | Read an excerpt

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

An author (also named Claire Vaye Watkins) leaves behind her husband and child for a book event in Nevada, where she re-encounters old friends, memories and, most important, desires.

Riverhead, Oct. 5 | Read our review

‘ The Wandering Earth ,’ by Cixin Liu

Liu has built an international following for his groundbreaking speculative trilogy, “The Three-Body Problem,” which leaps from Beijing to Inner Mongolia to a far-off planet. This collection, translated by Ken Liu, Elizabeth Hanlon, Zac Haluza, Adam Lanphier and Holger Nahm, promises to take us “to the edge of the universe and the end of time.” The title novella inspired a popular film adaptation.

Tor Books, Oct. 12

‘ State of Terror ,’ by Hillary Rodham Clinton and Louise Penny

After four years of political turmoil and diminished American standing overseas, Ellen Adams joins a new presidential administration, headed by a former rival, as secretary of state. At the president’s first congressional address, a State Department employee receives a coded threat — and before long, a wave of terrorist attacks threaten to upend the global order.

Simon & Schuster/St. Martin’s Press, Oct. 12 | Read our review

‘ The Pessimists ,’ by Bethany Ball

The Connecticut suburbs are the backdrop for this new satire following three couples, anchored by an upscale school with a megalomaniacal headmistress. Before long, prepper impulses, wandering eyes and a cancer diagnosis emerge, and rattle each of the marriages. Welcome to the neighborhood!

Grove, Oct. 12 | Read our review

‘ Monster in the Middle ,’ by Tiphanie Yanique

The present-day romance between Fly, a musician, and Stela, a science teacher, in New York City is interspersed with tales of their ancestors’ past loves and losses, in the Virgin Islands, Ghana and the United States.

Riverhead, Oct. 19 | Read our review

‘ Lemon ,’ by Kwon Yeo-sun. Translated by Janet Hong.

In 2002, as South Korea hosts the World Cup, a striking teenage girl is found dead. The country is transfixed, nicknaming the case the High School Beauty Murder. Years later, the case is still unsolved. The victim’s sister, Da-On, still obsessed with the murder, revisits some of its principal figures in unnerving, elliptical chapters. Kwon is a Korean author, and this is her first book translated into English.

Other Press, Oct. 26 | Read our review

‘ Our Country Friends ,’ by Gary Shteyngart

Shteyngart, the author of “Super Sad True Love Story,” “Little Failure” and other books, offers readers what may be the first major pandemic novel. In March 2020, a group of friends gather in the country to weather the pandemic together. The ensemble includes the Levin-Senderovskys, a Russian American family; a fabulously wealthy Korean American app developer; and a movie star, whose presence threatens to upend it all.

Random House, Nov. 2 | Read our review

‘ The Perishing ,’ by Natashia Deón

It’s 1930s Los Angeles, and Lou, a teenage girl, wakes up in an alleyway with no recollection of how she got there. She eventually becomes the first Black journalist for The Los Angeles Times but is unnerved by memories from the past and the future; before long she wonders if she’s a god with a specific purpose.

Counterpoint, Nov. 2

Explore More in Books

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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.

For people of all ages in Pasadena, Calif., Vroman’s Bookstore, founded in 1894, has been a mainstay in a world of rapid change. Now, its longtime owner says he’s ready to turn over the reins .

The graphic novel series “Aya” explores the pains and pleasures of everyday life in a working-class neighborhood  in West Africa with a modern African woman hero.

Like many Nigerians, the novelist Stephen Buoro has been deeply influenced by the exquisite bedlam of Lagos, a megacity of extremes. Here, he defines the books that make sense of the chaos .

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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COMMENTS

  1. The Best Books of 2021

    Intimacies By Katie Kitamura In Kitamura's fourth novel, an unnamed court translator in The Hague is tasked with intimately vanishing into the voices and stories of war criminals whom she alone can...

  2. Best Sellers

    9 weeks on the list THE WISH by Nicholas Sparks Maggie Dawes, a renowned travel photographer, struggles with a medical diagnosis over Christmas. Buy When you purchase an independently ranked book...

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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...

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    Best Books 2021 — Goodreads Choice Awards Votes Cast: 4,756,261 BEST BOOKS OF 2021 Announcing the winners of the Annual Goodreads Choice Awards, the only major book awards decided by readers. Congratulations to the best books of the year! View results New to Goodreads? Get great book recommendations! Start Now Categories Fiction Want to Read

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    Appleseed By Matt Bell $27.99 Custom House Fiction For some years Bell, the author of "Scrapper" and "Cataclysm Baby," has had climate and apocalypse on his mind. This excellent novel continues and...

  6. 46 Best New Books 2021

    The best novels and nonfiction books coming out in 2021, including Second Place by Rachel Cusk, Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen, Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro, and A Little Devil in America ...

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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...

  8. The Best Books of 2021

    5. Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro. Photo: Publisher. In the very near future, an AF (Artificial Friend) named Klara, manufactured as a companion for a child, stands in the sunlit window of a ...

  9. 66 Best Books of 2021

    Beasts of a Little Land by Juhea Kim. Now 41% Off. Some people say that all stories are about either love or war. Set against the backdrop of early 20th-century Korea, Kim's epic debut novel is ...

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    Penguin Random House (Credit: Penguin Random House) A Passage North by Anuk Arudpragasam In the Booker Prize-shortlisted A Passage North the narrator looks back at a lost love affair, and reflects...

  11. 20 Best Books of 2021- The Year's Top Book Releases

    2021 marked the release of new books by some of our most prominent authors—among them Richard Powers, Jonathan Franzen, Louise Erdrich, Amor Towles, Ann Patchett, Anthony Doerr, Colson Whitehead, and Maggie Shipstead, whose latest works made it onto our Top 20 List.

  12. The 10 Best Fiction Books of 2021

    10. Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro The eighth novel from Nobel Prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro, longlisted for the Booker Prize, follows a robot-like "Artificial Friend" named Klara, who...

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    Illustration by June Park " De Gaulle ," by Julian Jackson 2021 in Review New Yorker writers reflect on the year's highs and lows. This superb biography of the former French leader brilliantly...

  14. These Are the 55 Best New Books to Read in 2021

    For 2021, many of our top book picks offer us critiques on our society today, a peek into complicated family dynamics, steamy romance novels that will remind you that love isn't dead after...

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    Browse all the featured books and save up to 15% at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply. Explore more on these topics. Best books of the year. Best books of 2021. Damon Galgut. Booker ...

  16. Times Critics' Top Books of 2021

    TRAVELING BLACK: A Story of Race and Resistance, by Mia Bay. (The Belknap Press of Harvard University.) In this superb history, the question of literal movement becomes a way to understand the...

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    The Department's top priority is to ensure students can access the maximum financial aid possible to help them pursue their higher education goals and bring college in reach for more Americans. Since the new 2024-25 FAFSA form became available on Dec. 30, nearly 4 million forms have been successfully submitted.

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    The 21st book in the Gabriel Allon series. A private intelligence service plans an act of violence that will aid Russia and divide America. Buy 11 weeks on the list THE LAST THING HE TOLD ME by...

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  24. Update 11:30 p.m.: Bettge is new Moscow mayor; Lewis, Parker and

    What our best books say about us. Easter, lilies and a caution for pet owners ... Bettge is new Moscow mayor; Lewis, Parker and Taruscio named to city council. Nov 2, 2021 Nov 2, 2021 Updated Nov ...

  25. 4 Things a Longevity Doctor Does Daily to Live Longer

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  26. 20 New Works of Fiction to Read This Season (Published 2021)

    ' Palmares ,' by Gayl Jones It's been two decades since Jones released a new novel, and she returns with a multipart series centered on Almeyda, a young enslaved girl in colonial Brazil, who...

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    The five dance floors will be covered by top DJs: Hector Oaks, Rhadoo, Petre Inspiresсu, Raresh (A:rpia:r), Mick Wills, Etienne, Vlada, Nikita Zabelin and others. Entrance: 3,000 rubles ($40 ...