Year-End Lists

The New York Times: 100 Notable Books of 2021

• Afterparties
  Anthony Veasna So
• Appleseed
  Matt Bell
• Beautiful World, Where Are You
  Sally Rooney
• Bewilderment
  Richard Powers
• The Book of Mother
  Violaine Huisman
• Build Your House Around My Body
  Violet Kupersmith
• Burnt Sugar
  Avni Doshi
• A Calling for Charlie Barnes
  Joshua Ferris
• Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth
  Wole Soyinka
• Cloud Cuckoo Land
  Anthony Doerr
• Crossroads
  Jonathan Franzen
• Detransition, Baby
  Torrey Peters
• Ghosts of New York
  Jim Lewis
• Harlem Shuffle
  Colson Whitehead
• How Beautiful We Were
  Imbolo Mbue
• Intimacies
  Katie Kitamura
• Kink
  R.O. Kwon and Garth Greenwell (editors)
• Klara and the Sun
  Kazuo Ishiguro
• Libertie
  Kaitlyn Greenidge
• A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself
  Peter Ho Davies
• Light Perpetual
  Francis Spufford
• The Lincoln Highway
  Amor Towles
• The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois
  Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
• The Magician
  Colm Tóibín
• The Morning Star
  Karl Ove Knausgaard
• My Monticello
  Jocelyn Nicole Johnson
• My Year Abroad
  Chang-rae Lee
• The Netanyahus

  An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family
  Joshua Cohen
• No One Is Talking About This
  Patricia Lockwood
• Oh William!
  Elizabeth Strout
• One Last Stop
  Casey McQuiston
• Our Country Friends
  Gary Shteyngart
• Playlist for the Apocalypse
  Rita Dove
• The Plot
  Jean Hanff Korelitz
• The Promise
  Damon Galgut
• The Prophets
  Robert Jones Jr.
• Razorblade Tears
  S.A. Cosby
• Send for Me
  Lauren Fox
• The Sentence
  Louise Erdrich
• Something New Under the Sun
  Alexandra Kleeman
• Strange Beasts of China
  Yan Ge
• The Sun Collective
  Charles Baxter
• The Trees
  Percival Everett
• Velvet Was the Night
  Silvia Moreno-Garcia
• The War for Gloria
  Atticus Lish
• Wayward
  Dana Spiotta
• What Strange Paradise
  Omar El Akkad
• When We Cease to Understand the World
  Benjamín Labatut
• Winter Recipes from the Collective
  Louise Glück
• The Wisteria Society of Lady Scoundrels
  India Holton
• All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days

  The True Story of the American Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler
  Rebecca Donner
• America and Iran

  A History, 1720 to the Present
  John Ghazvinian
• America on Fire

  The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s
  Elizabeth Hinton
• American Baby

  A Mother, a Child, and the Shadow History of Adoption
  Gabrielle Glaser
• The American War in Afghanistan

  A History
  Carter Malkasian
• Beautiful Country
  Qian Julie Wang
• Better to Have Gone

  Love, Death, and the Quest for Utopia in Auroville
  Akash Kapur
• Between Two Kingdoms

  A Memoir of a Life Interrupted
  Suleika Jaouad
• Catching the Wind

  Edward Kennedy and the Liberal Hour, 1932-1975
  Neal Gabler
• The Chancellor

  The Remarkable Odyssey of Angela Merkel
  Kati Marton
• Churchill's Shadow

  The Life and Afterlife of Winston Churchill
  Geoffrey Wheatcroft
• The Contrarian

  Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power
  Max Chafkin
• The Copenhagen Trilogy

  Childhood; Youth; Dependency
  Tove Ditlevsen
• Crying in H Mart
  Michelle Zauner
• Dirty Work

  Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America
  Eyal Press
• Doomed Romance

  Broken Hearts, Lost Souls, and Sexual Tumult in Nineteenth-Century America
  Christine Leigh Heyrman
• Empire of Pain

  The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty
  Patrick Radden Keefe
• The Engagement

  America's Quarter-Century Struggle Over Same-Sex Marriage
  Sasha Issenberg
• Everything I Have Is Yours

  A Marriage
  Eleanor Henderson
• The Extended Mind

  The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain
  Annie Murphy Paul
• The Family Roe

  An American Story
  Joshua Prager
• Festival Days
  Jo Ann Beard
• The Free World

  Art and Thought in the Cold War
  Louis Menand
• A Ghost in the Throat
  Doireann Ní Ghríofa
• How the Word Is Passed

  A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America
  Clint Smith
• How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America
  Kiese Laymon
• I Came As a Shadow
  John Thompson
• Invisible Child

  Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City
  Andrea Elliott
• JFK

  Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917-1956
  Fredrik Logevall
• Kindred

  Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art
  Rebecca Wragg Sykes
• Last Best Hope

  America in Crisis and Renewal
  George Packer
• Let Me Tell You What I Mean
  Joan Didion
• Let the Record Show

  A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993
  Sarah Schulman
• Life's Edge

  The Search for What It Means to Be Alive
  Carl Zimmer
• A Little Devil in America

  Notes in Praise of Black Performance
  Hanif Abdurraqib
• New York, New York, New York

  Four Decades of Success, Excess, and Transformation
  Thomas Dyja
• Now Beacon, Now Sea

  A Son's Memoir
  Christopher Sorrentino
• On Freedom

  Four Songs of Care and Constraint
  Maggie Nelson
• On Juneteenth
  Annette Gordon-Reed
• People Love Dead Jews

  Reports from a Haunted Present
  Dara Horn
• Punch Me Up to the Gods
  Brian Broome
• Putting It Together

  How Stephen Sondheim and I Created "Sunday in the Park with George"
  James Lapine
• Red Comet

  The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath
  Heather Clark
• Say It Loud!

  On Race, Law, History, and Culture
  Randall Kennedy
• The Secret to Superhuman Strength
  Alison Bechdel
• Seeing Ghosts
  Kat Chow
• Somebody's Daughter
  Ashley C. Ford
• Three Girls from Bronzeville

  A Uniquely American Memoir of Race, Fate, and Sisterhood
  Dawn Turner
• A Whole World

  Letters from James Merrill
  James Merrill
• Woke Racism

  How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America
  John McWhorter