[Year in Review 2021] Here are the top 10 books we read and recommended this year

“One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.” – Carl Sagan

It has never been more important to able to do that than in this time – amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Books have the power to transport us to new worlds and different times, and they didn’t disappoint us this year.

With the phrase “much-anticipated” becoming the war cry of publishers, 2021 saw a spate of marquee names and newbie writers releasing their newest offerings.

We loved a few, and a few more than the others, and realised that these books – novels that upended old thoughts and traditions, and were by authors who jumped out of the box – were what kept us going.

Here’s our pick of the top 10 books of 2021:

The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

“Lydia don’t look like none of us. Doesn’t. Daddy’s got brown eyes, but he looks like a white man. Mama’s dark like chocolate and little and pretty. She makes her hair straight with a hot comb and blue grease. I’m dark, too, but not like Mama. I got red in my skin underneath the brown like my granny. Coco’s eyes and skin match, like caramel candy.”

American poet Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’ debut novel is an epic, spanning multiple generations of an African-American family.

Dramatic and beautifully written, this is a story of contending with identity, heritage, and ancestry, and traces a family’s journey from the time before the American civil war and slavery, the civil rights movement, to the present. The 800-page novel is, at heart, an account of class, colourism, and intergenerational trauma, and the story of a Black woman coming of age in the 1980s and 1990s.

Reprieve, James Han Mattson

It’s April 27, 1997, and four contestants have managed to make it to the final cell of the Quigley House, a full-contact haunted escape room in Lincoln, Nebraska. If this quartet can endure all the horrors the house holds and come out alive without shouting the safe word, “reprieve”, they stand to win a massive cash prize—something that’s only been done once in the house’s long history. But, before they can, a man breaks into the cell and kills one of the contestants.

This is a novel that’s particularly relevant to our times as it deals with otherness, loneliness, identity, racism, and hate politics.

Through trial transcripts, evidence, and layered narratives, it puts the focus on our “obsession with fear as entertainment”.

Detransition, Baby, Torrey Peters

Before Detransition, Baby, Torrey Peters self-published novellas about flawed trans women, and found a readership.

In her debut novel, she explores the ideas of parenthood, grief, and family when the lives of three women—transgender and cisgender—collide “after an unexpected pregnancy forces them to confront their deepest desires”.

Reese is a 30-something trans woman who desperately wants a child. Her life turns when her ex, Ames, who recently detransitioned, learns that his new lover is pregnant with his baby and Ames gives Reese an opportunity she’s been waiting for: motherhood. Can the three of them raise the baby together?

Peters navigates “the most dangerous taboos around gender, sex, and relationships” in her novel, longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction.

Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro

This stunning new novel—the author’s first since winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017—is a tale telling of our times. It follows humanoid robot Klara, an “Artificial Friend” who suns herself in the display window of a store as she waits to be purchased.

When she’s chosen to be the companion of Josie, an ailing teenage girl, she puts her exceptional observational qualities to the test. Klara is unwilling to invest too much in the promises of humans, but that doesn’t stem the growing bond between her and her human, whose terminal illness may shift the dynamic forever.

Longlisted for the Booker Prize, Ishiguro’s narrative puts forth unsettling questions—on humanity, technology, morality, and purpose—and offers a view into a future that may not be so far away.

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Beautiful World, Where Are You, by Sally Rooney

“We are standing in the last lighted room before the darkness,” emails Alice, given that “there is no chance for the planet, and no chance for us.” Eileen may agree, but she finds peace in the ordinary. “Maybe we are just born to love and worry about the people we know,” she replies.

In Rooney’s first outing since she became a global literary phenomenon, she juxtaposes the separate love stories of two best friends—about to hit the dreaded 3-0—through their long emails as they worry that “human civilisation is facing collapse, beauty is dead, art is commodified” and that life is passing them by.

Can they actually believe in a beautiful world? Through her characters, she gently analyses friendship, sex, emotions, politics, and coming of age.

Nightbitch, Rachel Yoder

One day, the mother was a mother but then, one night, she was quite suddenly something else...Yoder’s scintillating debut novel is a “Kafka-esque parable about the mundanity and monstrosity of early motherhood”.

An artist puts her career on hold to become a stay-at-home parent to her toddler, and finds herself struggling. Known only as “the mother," she finds herself lonely, exhausted, and losing her mind. The husband, meanwhile, is mostly away on weekly business trips. Soon, her mind and body change: sharper canines, new patches of hair, novel appetites, and different instincts.

The novel is a kaleidoscopic look at numerous themes - the multifarious structures of power, the loss of self that accompanies motherhood, the inferno of female rage, and contemporary ideas and ideals of motherhood. The mother’s surreal transformation into Nightbitch will “make you want to howl in laughter and recognition”.

Falling, TJ Newman

A former book seller turned flight attendant turns author with Falling. Written in the midst of gruelling red-eye trips, this high-octane thriller unfolds over the course of one transcontinental flight.

It's a routine flight from Los Angeles to New York, with 143 passengers on board. But barely 30 minutes before take-off, the pilot's family is kidnapped by a terrorist organisation. He's now faced with a do-or-die dilemma: crash the plane to save his loved ones, or deliver his 130 passengers safely and let his family die.

The pilot and his resourceful crew now race against time to do the impossible even as an impulsive FBI agent stationed on the ground goes rogue to save lives.

The author’s years of experience with planes and the people that routinely board them win this nail-biter huge points for authenticity. But one thing’s clear: this should never be an inflight movie!

Great Circle, Maggie Shipstead

The author of prize-winning debut novel Seating Arrangements has written an exhilarating feminist epic, an “ode to independence, persistence, and aviation”.

Beginning in 1914 and reaching almost 600 pages, this story revolves around two lead characters: Marian Graves, a thrill-seeking female aviator who disappears over Antarctica, and Hadley Baxter, the ambitious actress who’s set to play Marian in a biopic a century later.

The two women’s fates - and their craving for self-determination in vastly different geographies and times – come together to create an epic and emotional tale.

This is a “mellifluously intertwined meditation on how women chart their own courses, in the sky and on the ground”.

No One Is Talking About This, Patricia Lockwood

In a time when most of life is spent online, this protagonist seems familiar. Like the author, she’s celebrated for her social media posts, and travels the world to meet fans and speak about “the new communication, the new slipstream of information”.

It takes a family tragedy to reawaken her to the world beyond her screen. Two texts from her mother - "Something has gone wrong," and "How soon can you get here?" – reveal that the internet can’t contain the wonders and horrors of real life.

Real life and its stakes collide with the absurd antics of “the portal”, and the woman must accept that the world is full of goodness, empathy, and justice – and all that stand against these qualities.

Full of memes and texts, this novel is fragmentary, incisive, and lyrical, and is best defined as a “modern meditation on love, language, and human connection”.

Cloud Cuckoo Land, Anthony Doerr

The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of All the Light We Cannot See says his latest novel is “really five novels-in-one, each braided around the others”, with each of the five protagonists connected through time by a sixth novel – “an ancient text by Antonius Diogenes (that I invented) about a shepherd’s comical journey to a utopian city in the sky”.

The five characters span nearly six centuries, going from a library in an ancient city to a futuristic interstellar ship.

Dedicated to “the librarians then, now, and in the years to come”, this paean invites you to travel to dramatic and immersive worlds, and explore a tapestry of times and places that reflect our vast interconnectedness.

In a post on his website, Doerr hopes that the book reminds readers of “our myriad interconnections: with our ancestors, with our neighbours, with other species, with all the kids yet to be born”.

Looking for more great reads?

Try The Man Who Lived Underground, by Richard Wright, written in the 40s by the iconic author of Native Son and unpublished since then; Crossroads, by Jonathan Franzen, which maps the lives of a suburban family “mired in the quicksand of desire and deceit”; Mrs March, Virginia Feito’s debut novel that focuses on a husband’s gaslighting and its effects on his increasingly unbalanced wife; and Intimacies, by Katie Kitamura, a tense story about a woman caught between many truths.