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The Best Books of 2021 Will Inspire, Enrage and Inform You
Including literary thrillers like Katie Kitamura's 'Intimacies', and a crime caper from double Pulitzer Prize-winner Colson Whitehead
Reading has the power to quiet our minds in disorientating moments, offering a sense of escapism which could hardly be more welcome in these somewhat chaotic times. Armed with a good book you have the power to educate and entertain yourself for hours, and all without the blue light comedown of an hour spent scrolling Twitter. In the infamous words of John Waters, which we could hardly improve upon, "If you go home with somebody, and they don’t have any books, don’t fuck ’em!"
We are not yet halfway through and already 2021 is already proving to be a stellar year for books if nothing else. Here's our pick of the lot.
A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders
George Saunders, literary heavyweight and author of the Booker Prize-winning Lincoln in the Bardo, here distills the knowledge which he teaches in his MFA class at Syracuse University. The book focuses on different short stories from writers Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol, asking questions which the reader can direct toward their own writing, with suggested exercises included too.
Olivia Ovenden
Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters
Making history as the first trans woman to make the longlist for the Women's prize, Torrey Peters's alluring debut novel is about the contradictions and complications of womanhood. In it Reese, a trans woman, is pulled back into the life of her ex Ames, who de-transitioned from being Amy, and who has got another woman pregnant during an affair. A complicated-sounded triangle which is clarified by the richly drawn characters and sense of truthfulness about love and life which Peters writes with.
OO
Memorial by Bryan Washington
In Washington's award-winning shot story collection, Lot, the titular story about brotherhood and the ties that bind us explodes in only a few pages. In his debut novel he is similarly perceptive of fractured relationships, telling the story of a couple, Mike and Benson, who are humming along just fine until Mike's father suddenly dies. While he travels back to Japan for the funeral, Benson is left with Mike's mother in a strange, claustrophobic living situation. Memorial captures how physical distance and jumbled timezones can make the people we love feel alien to us, while reminding us of the unwavering bonds of family.
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Asylum Road by Olivia Sudjic
In Olivia Sudjic's debut novel, Sympathy, an online obsession bloomed between a girl and her Instagram idol. Sudjic's follow-up is similarly rooted in the mind of a woman, this time through the eyes of Anya, who escaped Sarajevo as a child. The story begins with her getting engaged, yet the conflict of her childhood soon rears its head in present day. Through Sudjic's arresting prose we are led carefully along until you can't believe your eyes at at the sudden, and truly jaw-dropping, final paragraph.
OO
Luster by Raven Leilani
Raven Leilani's astonishing debut novel, written while being taught at NYU by Zadie Smith, is both brutal and beautiful. The story follows Edie, a Black woman trying to move through a world which is slowly crushing her. She begins a relationship with a married man, eventually moving in with his wife and Black adopted daughter, setting the stage for a strange connection between her and both these women. Posing urgent questions about Black art and identity, as well as the relationship between art and capitalism and the coded racism of the American suburbs, Luster is dizzying and unforgettable.
OO
The Unusual Suspect by Ben Machell
Journalist Ben Machell tells the remarkable story of real-life Robin Hood Stephen Jackley, a British university student with Asperger’s Syndrome, in this story which will surely be treated to a screen adaptation soon. Jackley used replica weapons to pull off a string of bank robberies before dispersing the notes –marked with RH – amongst the homeless and needy. An astonishing story which resonates at a time of staggering inequality, and one which asks salient questions about wealth redistribution.
OO
A Burning by Megha Majumdar
When Jivan witnesses a terrorist attack at a train station in India, she posts about the attack on Facebook, only to have police arrest her for her involvement in the incident. The debut novel from Majumdar, A Burning became a New York Times best-seller when released in America last year, and features an ending which comes crashing down around you.
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Let Me Tell You What I Mean by Joan Didion
This new Joan Didion collection – arriving at a moment where her lucid judgement is dearly needed – draws together work spanning her entire career, with explorations of a Gamblers Anonymous meeting and Hearst Castle, as well as character studies of Nancy Reagan, Ernest Hemingway and more. Though the writing predominantly comes from earlier in Didion's career, such is her ability to distill places and people to their essence that the insights feel both fresh and timeless.
OO
Sea State by Tabitha Lasley
After a significant break-up, journalist Lasley set off to write a book about life on oil rigs, intrigued by the idea of finding out what men are like “when women aren’t around”. Turns out, what with her being one and all, that the experiment was flawed from the start – not least because Lasley begins a relationship with a married rig worker – but it makes for an account that is grippingly candid and savagely self-aware.
Miranda Collinge
Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson
Written entirely in the second person, Azumah Nelson’s debut novel – which went to Viking after a nine-way auction – is a modern love story that pulls the reader close. A young Black British couple, he a photographer, she a dancer, are drawn together by their shared educational experiences and cultural obsessions, but can they withstand the deeper sociological currents pulling them apart?
MC
Fake Accounts by Lauren Oyler
The premise of the debut novel from Lauren Oyler, a literary critic infamous for her spiky reviews, asks an awful question: what if you found out your boyfriend was secretly a famous online conspiracy theorist? How the narrator subsequently becomes tangled in the the fictional online world, and the stranger than fiction real world, after her discovery feels like a maze which you want to stay lost in. Fake Accounts shows us a glitch in the simulation of life, confirming Oyler's writing is both funny and fearless.
OO
No One is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood
Patricia Lockwood's debut novel also finds itself trapped inside the web of the internet, here via a nameless protagonist whose feed on the 'portal' we scroll through with her, skimming past people being called out and laughing ahahaha! over the anointed meme for the next 48 hours. In the second half of the novel, Lockwood finds common ground with her memoir, Priestdaddy, addressing complicated issues like right-wing ideology, abortion and the politics of women's bodies. She does so with a mixture of righteous indignation and quiet resignation which feel very much like the outrage and inactivity which the internet inspires.
OO
Klara and The Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
In his first novel since he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, masterful storyteller Kazuo Ishiguro tells the story of Klara, an Artificial Friend who keenly observes the shop she is in. Given the praise which met his 2005 novel Never Let Me Go, Ishiguro returning to science fiction is an exciting prospect considering how well he imbues it with deeply human sentiments.
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Acts of Desperation by Megan Nolan
The debut novel from journalist Megan Nolan will inevitably earn her comparisons to Sally Rooney for being another young female Irish writer, yet while Nolan's writing similarly captures a sense of millennial ennui, it features the same dark streak which characterises her non-fiction writing. This obsessive love story is one which consumes the main character, and the reader as they become engulfed with them.
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Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi
The awaited follow-up to Yaa Gyasi's brilliant 2016 novel Homegoing tells the story of a Ghanaian family of immigrants living in Alabama. The characters are contrasting portraits of America, Gifty a PhD candidate at Stanford studying neuroscience, her brother Nana a talented athlete who died of a heroine overdose, and their mother who is suicidal and bed-bound.
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Milk Fed by Melissa Broder
Melissa Border's imagination, which gave us the story of a woman falling in love with a merman in The Pisces, returns with another wonderfully strange story. Milk Fed explores themes of sexual hunger and appetite through the story of a young Jewish woman on a calorie control diet which her religion mandates. Her escape, and the woman that feeds her, is a tale of love and nourishment.
OO
The Committed: a novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen
Nguyen earned himself no less than a Pulitzer for his mesmerising 2015 debut novel, The Sympathizer, about an unnamed French-Vietnamese undercover communist agent who escapes Saigon in 1975 for Los Angeles, where he finds himself consulting on a Hollywood film about, of all things, the Vietnam War. In this anticipated follow-up, the narrator is in Paris, where he finds an equally reputable new line of work: drug dealing.
MC
Hot Stew by Fiona Mozley
You might have seen photos of what Soho used to look like, but the smells and sounds of dingy Dean Street restaurants are less familiar. This is the world which the Booker-shortlisted author of Elmet plunges us into in this raucous story of wealth and poverty butting up against each other in a townhouse under siege in grubby London.
OO
First Person Singular: Stories by Haruki Murakami
Haruki Murakami's latest set of short stories, all told in (you guessed it!) the first person, are not clearly marked as fiction or memoir. From childhood memories to stories about basketball or jazz, a figure which may be Murakami keeps occasionally drifting into view.
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Second Place by Rachel Cusk
Given Cusk’s unblinking view of the dark truths of human relationships (see her Outline trilogy for starters), it’s hard to know whether to shed a tear or rub your hands in glee for the characters in her new novel, who are sure to be tested to their limits. A fraying mother invites an acclaimed to artist to visit the remote coastal home she shares with her husband and – soon – grown-up daughter and partner too. What could possibly go right?
MC
Miranda Collinge is the Deputy Editor of Esquire, overseeing editorial commissioning for the brand. With a background in arts and entertainment journalism, she also writes widely herself, on topics ranging from Instagram fish to psychedelic supper clubs, and has written numerous cover profiles for the magazine including Cillian Murphy, Rami Malek and Tom Hardy.
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