Year-End Lists
A hand-curated, browsable index
of notable year-end lists.
Movies
TV Shows
Music
Books
Poetry
Podcasts
Highlights
Guardian: The 50 Best Albums of 2025
The Wire: Top 50 Albums of 2025
New Yorker: Richard Brody: The Best Films of 2025
more...
2021 Books
Shelf Awareness: Best Books of 2021
30 November 2021
Shelf Awareness
:
Best Books of 2021
[see also
2023
•
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