The Best Books to Read in 2021

Although we are just halfway through the year 2021, our editors and contributors have been quite busy. Here’s your selected list of the greatest new novels released this year so far. These Are The Best Books To Read In 2021.


1. Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters Book

Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters | Goodreads best books

Fiction about trans women written by trans women is, at least in mainstream publishing, pretty rare. Torrey Peters’ debut novel is about three women (two trans, one cis). Entangled in complicated relationships arrived with a lot of attention and high hopes. It delivered. This radiant and provocative story follows Reese, a trans woman who falls into a self-destructive spiral when her long-term girlfriend. Amy decides to detransition and live as Ames; Ames, who quickly realizes life as a man isn’t much easier; and Katrina, Ames’ boss and hookup who gets pregnant with his baby. As the trio negotiates their desires and expectations, Peters delivers astute observations about gender, sex, family, and womanhood.

2. White Feminism: From the Suffragettes to Influencers and Who They Leave Behind by Koa Beck Book

White Feminism | Book by Koa Beck | Official Publisher Page | Simon &  Schuster

White Feminism is a biting retort to traditional feminism, which has long been associated with a white face. From Seneca Falls to the National Organization of Women to the recently canceled The Wing, Koa Beck. Casts a gimlet eye over the history of organized gendered rights. And offers a sharp historical analysis of how mainstream feminism was designed by and for the privileged. It’s not a benign indifference.

it’s devious, purposefully excluding women of color and problems crucial to them from the movement since the suffragettes’ days. And posing a threat to those women with a commodified and frequently racist system that can appear as repressive as; patriarchy itself. Even if it looks like feminist progress has been made in recent years. It is a topic that is still incredibly relevant-after all, 53% of white women voted for Donald Trump in 2016. Beck’s book, on the other hand, is a call to action that looks forward to how we can, and must, course correct, destroying feminism that wasn’t created for us and constructing a new; more inclusive movement.

3. Nora by Nuala O’Connor Book

Nora: A Love Story of Nora and James Joyce by Nuala O'Connor

Nuala O’Connor’s literature frequently delves into the private lives of historical characters, and she did so in Miss Emily, about Emily Dickinson, in 2015, and Becoming Belle, about the singer and dancer Belle Bilton, in 2018. Nora, a long but lively depiction of James Joyce’s wife and inspiration, Nora Barnacle Joyce, follows the same method.

Nora has long been the center of Joycian lore; she was the basis for Ulysses’ Molly Bloom and inspired two characters in “The Dead” in her early trysts. Nora has been his companion for 37 years (and the mother of both his children). Nora, like Joyce’s famously filthy letters to his “wildflower of the hedges,” leans into that environment, describing a relationship as lacking in passion as it was in turmoil. Joyce’s drinking and monetary ineptitude run through the book, as do their many trips to Italy, France, and Switzerland. (O’Connor, a poet as well as a novelist, has a melodic ear for language; Joyce and Nora’s lilt never seems to fade.) Yes, literary figures like Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, Samuel Beckett, and Sylvia Beach make cameo appearances, but Nora is mostly about a Galway girl and her “Jim” eking out a living far from home.

4. Aftershocks by Nadia Owusu Book

Aftershocks, Nadia Owusu’s debut memoir, is named after the leftover tremors that occur after an earthquake, and the author has plenty of life-shaking events to base her story on. Owusu grew up straddling cultures and following her outstanding father, the daughter of an intelligent Ghanaian U.N. official and an emotionally distant Armenian mother. But the unease in her life stemmed from the death of her father when she was still a kid, the desertion of her mother, and a troubled relationship with the stepmother who was responsible for her upbringing. Owusu’s story has a fairy tale feel to it, with her orphaned existence of struggle and survival, but there is no fairy godmother to save her—just a growing sense of self-awareness to help her navigate a perplexing world.

5. Milk Fed by Melissa Broder Book

Milk Fed by Melissa Broder

Melissa Broder, author, and Twitter star has produced a dizzyingly captivating story of love, desire, addiction, religion, maternal longing, and…frozen yogurt, following the success of her 2018 debut novel, The Pisces. In Milk Fed, a young Los Angeles agent’s assistant battles her weight-loss fixation while also attempting to hide her attraction to the svelte Orthodox Jewish lady who works at the nearby fro-yo store. Broder’s erotic writing is always top-notch, but perhaps even more impressive is her ability to put bare the frenzied mental calculus of compulsive eating amid the mesmerizing draw of spirituality. This isn’t a book to pick up on the spur of the moment, especially if you’ve struggled with eating issues, but it will stay with you long after you’ve finished reading it.

6. My Year Abroad by Chang Rae Lee Book

My Year Abroad by Chang-rae Lee

My Year Abroad is an extraordinary book, acrobatic at the sentence level and symphonic in its many movements—and this is a book that moves: from the quaint, manicured town of Dunbar (hard not to read as a Princeton stand-in, as the author taught at the university for many years); to buzzing Shenzhen; to a Chinese bazillionaire’s compound, governed by a particularly barbaric modern feudalism; back to a landlocked American. My Year Abroad is a wild journey, a caper, a romance, a bildungsroman, and a satire of how to get filthy rich in growing Asia, despite its protagonist’s self-proclaimed ordinariness. This isn’t a book that skims over its many seemingly unconnected situations; rather, it weaves them together in the heartfelt adventure of its protagonist, who begins his year “abroad” as a strange continent to himself and ends up feeling like he belongs.

7. We Run the Tides by Vendela Vida Book

We Run the Tides by Vendela Vida

The attractive and confident Maria Fabiola is Eulabee’s best friend in eighth grade. They have a falling out, as preteen girls do, until one day she isn’t. Maria and the group of middle students she ringleaders both shun Eulabee. They haven’t spoken in months. The police then arrive at Eulabee’s home, claiming Maria is missing. We Run the Tides is a coming-of-age narrative, a mystery, and a cultural reflection on San Francisco in the 1980s (with nods to mayor Dianne Feinstein and The Breakfast Club). And, perhaps more importantly, even if we think we know someone, we rarely do.

8. Tom Stoppard: A Life by Hermione Lee Book

If Leopoldstadt, a deeply personal piece that was hailed as a revelation by the critics who saw it during its truncated run, is indeed Stoppard`s last play, we now have Tom Stoppard: A Life, Hermione Lee`s magisterial biography, to remind us what we will have lost and what a legacy Stoppard will leave behind. In her authorized biography, Lee, who has previously written about Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, and Penelope Fitzgerald, shows a keen understanding of Stoppard`s work, making long-ago productions come to vivid life on the page, and writes empathetically, but with unsentimental clarity, about Stoppard`s sometimes complicated personal life.

9. But You’re Still So Young: How Thirtysomethings Are Redefining Adulthood by Kayleen Schaefer Book

But You're Still So Young: How Thirtysomethings Are Redefining Adulthood by Kayleen  Schaefer

In his 1971 novel Rabbit Redux, John Updike dared to write, “What you haven’t done by 30 you’re not likely to do”. Mocking the idea of moving out of one’s twenties and into the decade when everything is meant to miraculously fall into place. Faced with a gig economy and mountains of college debt, 30-somethings are finding the brass rings of maturity more difficult to grip than flying sticks of butter half a century later.

Add to it an epidemic that, paralyzes people and, at worst, has killed millions upon millions. As Kayleen Schaefer points out in her work debunking milestone myths, But You’re So Young, upward mobility has been a pipe dream for years. Living with one’s parents, for example, became the most popular living arrangement for Americans aged 18 to 34 in 2014.

Schaefer combines social science, psychology, original reporting, and personal tales into a work of nonfiction that is as concise and delightful as a soft-serve ice cream cone, as she does in her 2018 study at female friendship, Text Me When You Get Home. She interviewed her subjects before and during the coronavirus outbreak, and the commonalities in their experiences emerge as time goes on. All of the 30-somethings she followed, from the stay-at-home dad and a pair of Los Angeles stand-up comedians to the workaholic founder of a New York-based firm, are plagued by crippling uncertainty. You’re Still So Young is a delicate criticism of a failing system with a comforting message: Nobody has it all figured out.\

10. Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro Book

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

While the release of a new book by Kazuo Ishiguro would normally elicit a frenzy of excitement, his current novel has an extra burden of expectation because it is his first since winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2017. The beauty of Klara and the Sun is how well it fits in with his dystopian masterwork, Never Let Me Go, from 2005, which explores similar themes of love and sacrifice through the prism of science fiction.

Set soon, the titular Klara is a solar-powered Artificial Friend that a lonely girl called Josie buys from a department store; her reliance on the sun becomes an allegory for their relationship, with a subtle environmental undercurrent woven in as well. To give too much away about the plot would be to take away from the peculiar, unsettling joy of seeing it unfold, but it’s a universe that feels richly created and beautifully made, even as its mysteries continue to unfurl. Klara and the Sun reaffirm Ishiguro’s mastery of the anguish of wasted opportunities and lost connections, as he unravels the intricate web of how we form and deny relationships with others.

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