Best Books 2021 fiction reading list. With so many novels being published last year it's not easy to discern which are the best books for 2021 and within that group which are worth the read.
Don't waste time trolling through endless book reviews instead take a look at this 2021 best book list for readers to find some of the best books to read as we start 2022. This is recommended reading that is unlikely to disappoint.
Description
Alice, Felix, Eileen and Simon are still young but life is catching up with them. They desire each other, they delude each other, they get together, they break apart. They have sex, they worry about sex, they worry about their friendships and the world they live in. Are they standing in the last lighted room before the darkness, bearing witness to something? Will they find a way to believe in a beautiful world? From the bestselling author of Normal People.
Description
From her place in the store, Klara, an Artificial Friend with outstanding observational qualities, watches carefully the behaviour of those who come in to browse, and of those who pass in the street outside. She remains hopeful a customer will soon choose her, but when the possibility emerges that her circumstances may change for ever, Klara is warned not to invest too much in the promises of humans. In Klara and The Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro looks at our rapidly changing world through the eyes of an unforgettable narrator to explore a fundamental question: what does it mean to love?
Description
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of All the Light We Cannot See comes a triumph of imagination and compassion, a soaring story of resilience, hope – and a book. Bound together by a single ancient text, the unforgettable characters of Cloud Cuckoo Land are dreamers and outsiders figuring out the world around them: thirteen-year-old Anna and Omeir, an orphaned seamstress and a cursed boy, on opposite sides of the formidable city walls during the 1453 siege of Constantinople; teenage idealist Seymour and octogenarian Zeno in an attack on a public library in present-day Idaho; and Konstance, decades from now, who turns to the oldest stories to guide her community in peril.
Description
A breath-taking debut novel that chronicles the journey of generations of one American family, from the centuries of the colonial slave trade to the current era. An Oprah's Book Club 2.0 title. New York Times Bestseller.
Description
This is the story of two women living in different times: Marian Graves who lived unconventionally and became an obsessive aviator; and Hadley Baxter, a Hollywood actress who many years later plays the role of Marian in a movie about her life. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2021. New York Times Bestseller.
Description
Poppy and Alex have nothing in common. She's a wild child; he wears khakis. She has insatiable wanderlust; he prefers to stay home with a book. And somehow, ever since a fateful car share home from college many years ago, they are the very best of friends. For most of the year they live far apart--she's in New York City, and he's in their small hometown--but every summer, for a decade, they have taken one glorious week of vacation together. Until two years ago, when they ruined everything. Now they have one week to fix everything. If only Poppy can get around the one big truth that has always stood quietly in the middle of their seemingly perfect relationship. What could possibly go wrong?
Description
Harlem Shuffle is driven by an intricate plot that plays out in a beautifully recreated Harlem of the early 1960s. It's a family saga masquerading as a crime novel, a hilarious morality play, a social novel about race and power, and a love letter to Harlem.
Description
This is a story about a life lived in two halves. It's about what happens when real life collides with the increasing absurdity of a world accessed through a screen. It's about where we go when existential threats loom, and the high stakes of reality that claim us back. It's about living in world that contains both an abundance of proof that there is goodness, empathy, and justice in the universe, and a deluge of evidence to the contrary. Irreverent and sincere, poignant and delightfully profane, No One Is Talking About This is a meditation on love, language and human connection from one of the most original voices of our time. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2021.
Description
The Promise charts the crash and burn of a white South African family, living on a farm outside Pretoria. The Swarts are gathering for Ma's funeral. The younger generation, Anton and Amor, detest everything the family stand for - not least the failed promise to the Black woman who has worked for them her whole life. After years of service, Salome was promised her own house, her own land... yet somehow, as each decade passes, that promise remains unfulfilled. As the country moves from old deep divisions to its new so-called fairer society, the lost promise of more than just one family hovers behind the novel's title. Winner of the Booker Prize 2021.
Description
An epic, sweeping tale of love and loss set in the midst of the Great Depression in 1930s America, by bestselling author of The Nightingale. Like others at the time, Elsa Martinelli and her family eat and breathe and drown in the inescapable dust of Texas and eventually migrate to California, looking for a better life - which is nowhere to be found.
Description
Based on the true World War II story of the heroic librarians at the American Library in Paris, this is the unforgettable story of romance, friendship, family, and the power of literature to bring us together. New York Times Bestseller.
Description
Sunday Times Bestseller. A lifetime holding it together. One party will bring it crashing down. Malibu: August, 1983. It's the day of Nina Riva's annual end-of-summer party, and anticipation is at a fever pitch. Everyone wants to be around the famous Rivas. Malibu Rising is a story about one unforgettable night in the life of a family: the night they each have to choose what they will keep from the people who made them . . . and what they will leave behind. From the author of the bestselling novel Daisy Jones & The Six.
Description
Two young people meet at a pub in South East London. Both are Black British, both won scholarships to private schools where they struggled to belong, both are now artists - he a photographer, she a dancer - trying to make their mark in a city that by turns celebrates and rejects them. Tentatively, tenderly, they fall in love. But two people who seem destined to be together can still be torn apart by fear and violence.
Description
What can a father do, when the only solution offered to his rare and troubled boy is to put him on psychoactive drugs? What can he say when his boy comes to him wanting an explanation for a world that is clearly in love with its own destruction? The only thing for it is to take the boy to other planets, even while fostering his son's desperate campaign to help save this one. Oprah's Book Club 2.0 selection for 2021.
Description
Lucy Barton is a successful writer living in New York, navigating the second half of her life as a recent widow and parent to two adult daughters. A surprise encounter leads her to reconnect with William, her first husband - and longtime, on-again-off-again friend and confidante. Oh William! is a novel about the myriad mysteries that make up a marriage, about discovering family secrets, late in life, that rearrange everything we think we know about those closest to us, and the way people continue to live and love, against all odds.
Have you read any of these novels? What do you think of this list of 15 Best Books 2021 in the fiction genre? Let us know in the comments section below. As always happy reading.
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Best Books 2021 Fiction List
In this best books 2021 fiction reading list you will find a collection 15 novels that were published in 2021 and have done at least one of three things: become best sellers soon after publication, have made it to book lists like Oprah's Book Club and / or have achieved critical acclaim by being shortlisted for prestigious awards like the Booker Prize.Don't waste time trolling through endless book reviews instead take a look at this 2021 best book list for readers to find some of the best books to read as we start 2022. This is recommended reading that is unlikely to disappoint.
- Beautiful World Where Are You? by Sally Rooney
- Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
- Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr
- The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
- Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead
- People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry
- Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead
- No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood
- The Promise by Damon Galgut
- The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah
- The Paris Library by Janet Skeslien Charles
- Malibu Rising by Taylor Jenkins Reid
- Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson
- Bewilderment by Richard Powers
- Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout
| 1. Beautiful World Where Are You? | |
|---|---|
|
By Sally Rooney |
|
 |
Buy This Book at: Fishpond Mighty Ape Book Depository Amazon FREE audio version at: Audible with 3 month trial. |
Alice, Felix, Eileen and Simon are still young but life is catching up with them. They desire each other, they delude each other, they get together, they break apart. They have sex, they worry about sex, they worry about their friendships and the world they live in. Are they standing in the last lighted room before the darkness, bearing witness to something? Will they find a way to believe in a beautiful world? From the bestselling author of Normal People.
| 2. Klara and the Sun | |
|---|---|
|
By Kazuo Ishiguro |
|
 |
Buy This Book at: Fishpond Mighty Ape Book Depository Amazon FREE audio version at: Audible with 3 month trial. |
From her place in the store, Klara, an Artificial Friend with outstanding observational qualities, watches carefully the behaviour of those who come in to browse, and of those who pass in the street outside. She remains hopeful a customer will soon choose her, but when the possibility emerges that her circumstances may change for ever, Klara is warned not to invest too much in the promises of humans. In Klara and The Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro looks at our rapidly changing world through the eyes of an unforgettable narrator to explore a fundamental question: what does it mean to love?
| 3. Cloud Cuckoo Land | |
|---|---|
|
By Anthony Doerr |
|
 |
Buy This Book at: Fishpond Mighty Ape Book Depository Amazon FREE audio version at: Audible with 3 month trial. |
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of All the Light We Cannot See comes a triumph of imagination and compassion, a soaring story of resilience, hope – and a book. Bound together by a single ancient text, the unforgettable characters of Cloud Cuckoo Land are dreamers and outsiders figuring out the world around them: thirteen-year-old Anna and Omeir, an orphaned seamstress and a cursed boy, on opposite sides of the formidable city walls during the 1453 siege of Constantinople; teenage idealist Seymour and octogenarian Zeno in an attack on a public library in present-day Idaho; and Konstance, decades from now, who turns to the oldest stories to guide her community in peril.
| 4. The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois | |
|---|---|
|
By Honorée Fanonne Jeffers |
|
 |
Buy This Book at: Fishpond Mighty Ape Book Depository Amazon FREE audio version at: Audible with 3 month trial. |
A breath-taking debut novel that chronicles the journey of generations of one American family, from the centuries of the colonial slave trade to the current era. An Oprah's Book Club 2.0 title. New York Times Bestseller.
| 5. Great Circle | |
|---|---|
|
By Maggie Shipstead |
|
 |
Buy This Book at: Fishpond Mighty Ape Book Depository Amazon FREE audio version at: Audible with 3 month trial. |
This is the story of two women living in different times: Marian Graves who lived unconventionally and became an obsessive aviator; and Hadley Baxter, a Hollywood actress who many years later plays the role of Marian in a movie about her life. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2021. New York Times Bestseller.
| 6. People We Meet on Vacation | |
|---|---|
|
By Emily Henry |
|
 |
Buy This Book at: Fishpond Mighty Ape Book Depository Amazon FREE audio version at: Audible with 3 month trial. |
Poppy and Alex have nothing in common. She's a wild child; he wears khakis. She has insatiable wanderlust; he prefers to stay home with a book. And somehow, ever since a fateful car share home from college many years ago, they are the very best of friends. For most of the year they live far apart--she's in New York City, and he's in their small hometown--but every summer, for a decade, they have taken one glorious week of vacation together. Until two years ago, when they ruined everything. Now they have one week to fix everything. If only Poppy can get around the one big truth that has always stood quietly in the middle of their seemingly perfect relationship. What could possibly go wrong?
| 7. Harlem Shuffle | |
|---|---|
|
By Colson Whitehead |
|
 |
Buy This Book at: Fishpond Mighty Ape Book Depository Amazon FREE audio version at: Audible with 3 month trial. |
Harlem Shuffle is driven by an intricate plot that plays out in a beautifully recreated Harlem of the early 1960s. It's a family saga masquerading as a crime novel, a hilarious morality play, a social novel about race and power, and a love letter to Harlem.
| 8. No One Is Talking About This | |
|---|---|
|
By Patricia Lockwood |
|
 |
Buy This Book at: Fishpond Mighty Ape Book Depository Amazon FREE audio version at: Audible with 3 month trial. |
This is a story about a life lived in two halves. It's about what happens when real life collides with the increasing absurdity of a world accessed through a screen. It's about where we go when existential threats loom, and the high stakes of reality that claim us back. It's about living in world that contains both an abundance of proof that there is goodness, empathy, and justice in the universe, and a deluge of evidence to the contrary. Irreverent and sincere, poignant and delightfully profane, No One Is Talking About This is a meditation on love, language and human connection from one of the most original voices of our time. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2021.
| 9. The Promise | |
|---|---|
|
By Damon Galgut |
|
 |
Buy This Book at: Fishpond Mighty Ape Book Depository Amazon FREE audio version at: Audible with 3 month trial. |
The Promise charts the crash and burn of a white South African family, living on a farm outside Pretoria. The Swarts are gathering for Ma's funeral. The younger generation, Anton and Amor, detest everything the family stand for - not least the failed promise to the Black woman who has worked for them her whole life. After years of service, Salome was promised her own house, her own land... yet somehow, as each decade passes, that promise remains unfulfilled. As the country moves from old deep divisions to its new so-called fairer society, the lost promise of more than just one family hovers behind the novel's title. Winner of the Booker Prize 2021.
| 10. The Four Winds | |
|---|---|
|
By Kristin Hannah |
|
 |
Buy This Book at: Fishpond Mighty Ape Book Depository Amazon FREE audio version at: Audible with 3 month trial. |
An epic, sweeping tale of love and loss set in the midst of the Great Depression in 1930s America, by bestselling author of The Nightingale. Like others at the time, Elsa Martinelli and her family eat and breathe and drown in the inescapable dust of Texas and eventually migrate to California, looking for a better life - which is nowhere to be found.
| 11.The Paris Library | |
|---|---|
|
By Janet Skeslien Charles |
|
 |
Buy This Book at: Fishpond Mighty Ape Book Depository Amazon FREE audio version at: Audible with 3 month trial. |
Based on the true World War II story of the heroic librarians at the American Library in Paris, this is the unforgettable story of romance, friendship, family, and the power of literature to bring us together. New York Times Bestseller.
| 12. Malibu Rising | |
|---|---|
|
By Taylor Jenkins Reid |
|
 |
Buy This Book at: Fishpond Mighty Ape Book Depository Amazon FREE audio version at: Audible with 3 month trial. |
Sunday Times Bestseller. A lifetime holding it together. One party will bring it crashing down. Malibu: August, 1983. It's the day of Nina Riva's annual end-of-summer party, and anticipation is at a fever pitch. Everyone wants to be around the famous Rivas. Malibu Rising is a story about one unforgettable night in the life of a family: the night they each have to choose what they will keep from the people who made them . . . and what they will leave behind. From the author of the bestselling novel Daisy Jones & The Six.
| 13. Open Water | |
|---|---|
|
By Caleb Azumah Nelson |
|
 |
Buy This Book at: Fishpond Mighty Ape Book Depository Amazon FREE audio version at: Audible with 3 month trial. |
Two young people meet at a pub in South East London. Both are Black British, both won scholarships to private schools where they struggled to belong, both are now artists - he a photographer, she a dancer - trying to make their mark in a city that by turns celebrates and rejects them. Tentatively, tenderly, they fall in love. But two people who seem destined to be together can still be torn apart by fear and violence.
| 14. Bewilderment | |
|---|---|
|
By Richard Powers |
|
 |
Buy This Book at: Fishpond Mighty Ape Book Depository Amazon FREE audio version at: Audible with 3 month trial. |
What can a father do, when the only solution offered to his rare and troubled boy is to put him on psychoactive drugs? What can he say when his boy comes to him wanting an explanation for a world that is clearly in love with its own destruction? The only thing for it is to take the boy to other planets, even while fostering his son's desperate campaign to help save this one. Oprah's Book Club 2.0 selection for 2021.
| 15. Oh William! | |
|---|---|
|
By Elizabeth Strout |
|
 |
Buy This Book at: Fishpond Mighty Ape Book Depository Amazon FREE audio version at: Audible with 3 month trial. |
Lucy Barton is a successful writer living in New York, navigating the second half of her life as a recent widow and parent to two adult daughters. A surprise encounter leads her to reconnect with William, her first husband - and longtime, on-again-off-again friend and confidante. Oh William! is a novel about the myriad mysteries that make up a marriage, about discovering family secrets, late in life, that rearrange everything we think we know about those closest to us, and the way people continue to live and love, against all odds.
Have you read any of these novels? What do you think of this list of 15 Best Books 2021 in the fiction genre? Let us know in the comments section below. As always happy reading.
Related Posts
Whitcoulls Top 100 Books List 2021-2022
Oprah's Book Club Titles List
15 Top Bestselling Self-Help Books in 2022
30 Best Books of the Decade 2000-2010 List of Literary Fiction
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