Year-End Lists

Shelf Awareness: Best Books of 2021

[see also 2025 • 2024 • 2023 • 2022 • 2020 • 2019 • 2018 • 2017 • 2016 • 2015]

Fiction

• Bewilderment
  Richard Powers
• Detransition, Baby
  Torrey Peters
• Harlem Shuffle
  Colson Whitehead
• Hell of a Book
  Jason Mott
• One Two Three
  Laurie Frankel
• Peaces
  Helen Oyeyemi
• Project Hail Mary
  Andy Weir
• Razorblade Tears
  S.A. Cosby
• What Strange Paradise
  Omar El Akkad
• The Wrong End of the Telescope
  Rabih Alameddine

Nonfiction

• Black Food

  Stories, Art, and Recipes from Across the African Diaspora
  Bryant Terry (editor)
• The Everybody Ensemble

  Donkeys, Essays, and Other Pandemoniums
  Amy Leach
• How the Word Is Passed

  A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America
  Clint Smith
• Image Control

  Art, Fascism, and the Right to Resist
  Patrick Nathan
• Learning in Public

  Lessons for a Racially Divided America from My Daughter's School
  Courtney E. Martin
• Northern Light

  Power, Land, and the Memory of Water
  Kazim Ali
• Paradise

  One Town's Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire
  Lizzie Johnson
• Punch Me Up to the Gods
  Brian Broome
• The Secret to Superhuman Strength
  Alison Bechdel
• Three Simple Lines

  A Writer’s Pilgrimage into the Heart and Homeland of Haiku
  Natalie Goldberg