Our 20 Favorite Books of 2021
Playful, majestic, dazzling. These titles stole our hearts.
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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...
An allusive Greek text casts a spell across millennia, capturing a glittering array of characters—from a teenager in 1453 Constantinople to an eco-terrorist in present day Idaho—in this opulent marvel of a novel by the Pulitzer-winning author of All the Light We Cannot See.
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This previously unpublished novel, written in the 40s by the iconic author of Native Son, indicts police brutality and white supremacy through the terrifying saga of Fred Daniels, a Black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.
Harper The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois, by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
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.
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.
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 in Moscow has delivered a novel at once magical and melancholy.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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 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.
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.”
Leigh Haber is Vice President, Books, Oprah Daily and O Quarterly. She is also Director of Oprah's Book Club.
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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