The Best Books to Read in 2021 

Throughout the year, we've been updating you on the best books our editors and writers have read. As we approach the end of the year, we're sharing our final verdicts, and offering some great reads for the slowed-down days and weeks ahead. Rather than a definitive “best of list,” this is simply what we've loved this year—and we hope that you do too. Happy reading!

Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters (January)

If I had the ability to momentarily wipe my memory, I'd use it to reread Detransition, Baby for the first time. In Torrey Peters' searing novelistic debut, a recently detransitioned man impregnates his cis female boss and asks his ex-girlfriend, a trans woman longing for motherhood, to help raise the baby; the plot's uniqueness is matched by Peters's distinctive and kinetic voice, and the two intermingle to form an unforgettable portrait of gender, humanity, and family.—Emma Specter

Nora by Nuala O’Connor (January)

In her fiction, Nuala O’Connor has often explored the private lives of historical figures; she did it in 2015’s Miss Emily, about Emily Dickinson, and in 2018’s Becoming Belle, about singer and dancer Belle Bilton. She takes the same approach in Nora, a long but lively portrait of James Joyce’s wife and muse, Nora Barnacle Joyce. His companion for 37 years (and the mother of both his children), Nora has long sat at the center of Joycian lore; she was the model for Ulysses’s Molly Bloom and, in her youthful trysts, inspired two characters in “The Dead.” With Nora, O’Connor leans into that context—as she does into Joyce’s famously filthy letters to his “wildflower of the hedges”—depicting a relationship as lousy with passion as it was with chaos. Joyce’s drinking and uselessness with money form a throughline, as do their constant moves between Italy, France, and Switzerland. (A poet as well as a novelist, O’Connor has a musical ear for language; Joyce and Nora never seem to lose their lilt.) Yes, literati like Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, Samuel Beckett, and Sylvia Beach make requisite appearances, but Nora is principally the story of a Galway girl and her “Jim,” eking out some semblance of an existence far from home. —Marley Marius

Aftershocks by Nadia Owusu

Nadia Owusu’s debut memoir, Aftershocks, has those residual tremors that follow an earthquake as its central metaphor, and the author had plenty of life-shaking events around which to orient her narrative. The daughter of an erudite Ghanaian U.N. official and an emotionally distant Armenian mother, Owusu grew up straddling cultures and following her impressive father. But the uneasiness in her life derived not from her fluid, third-culture upbringing but from the death of her father when Owusu was still a child; the abandonment of her mother; and a strained relationship with the stepmother who carried out the difficult process of raising her. There is something fairy tale–like about Owusu’s story, an orphan-like existence of struggle and survival, but there is no fairy godmother who rescues this heroine—just a growing sense of self-awareness to orient her in a troubling world. —Chloe Schama

Let Me Tell You What I Mean by Joan Didion (January)

Even Didion’s B-sides are hits. This slim volume of uncollected nonfiction—mostly short essays she wrote for The Saturday Evening Post in the late ’60s as well as a few longer pieces for The New York Times and The New Yorker—is full of small pleasures: Didion’s trademark anti-sentimentality, for one; her rhythmic prose; her ruthlessness (see her assessments of gambling addicts, hippies, Nancy Reagan); her wit. In the charming “Telling Stories” (written for New West in 1978) we also get self-effacement: a piece about why she never made the grade as a young short story writer...complete with rejection notices compiled by her agent. “Cosmopolitan: ‘too depressing.’” LOL. —Taylor Antrim

Milk Fed by Melissa Broder (February)

Off the success of her 2018 debut novel, The Pisces, author and Twitter sensation Melissa Broder has crafted a dizzily compelling story of love, lust, addiction, faith, maternal longing, and...frozen yogurt. In Milk Fed, a young Los Angeles agent’s assistant battles her obsession with weight loss while simultaneously trying to bury her attraction to the zaftig Orthodox Jewish woman who works at the local fro-yo shop. The stealthy passion between the two women is given room to shine on the page; Broder’s sex writing is, as always, first-rate, but perhaps even more striking is her ability to lay bare the frantic interior calculus of disordered eating alongside the hypnotic pull of spirituality. This isn’t a book to pick up casually, particularly if you’ve struggled with food issues, but it will linger with you long after you’ve finished the final page. —Emma Specter

My Year Abroad by Chang Rae Lee (February)

My Year Abroad is an extraordinary book, acrobatic on the level of the sentence, symphonic across 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, where 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 exurban town deemed Stagno, where the protagonist (the appropriately named, rudderless Tiller) has shacked up with a 30-something woman and her savant kid, both of whom are hunkering down because they’re quite probably part of the witness protection program. For all the self-proclaimed ordinariness of its protagonist, My Year Abroad is a wild ride—a caper, a romance, a bildungsroman, and something of a satire of how to get filthy rich in rising Asia. This isn’t a book that skates through its many disparate-seeming scenes, but rather unites them in the heartfelt adventure of its protagonist, who begins his year “abroad” as a foreign land to himself and arrives at something like belonging by the end of his story. —Chloe Schama

Gay Bar by Jeremy Atherton Lin (February)

There’s a particular pain to reading Gay Bar—a complex work in which author Jeremy Atherton Lin sets out to chronicle the gay clubs and bars of his youth in order to tell the story of LGBTQ+ spaces more broadly—during a pandemic, when queer nightspots are shuttering with no hope of government assistance. For that reason, though, Gay Bar is an essential read in 2021, especially for those who might be unfamiliar with the cultural and historical significance of the “gay bar.” Hopefully, appropriately mourning the queer spaces we’ve lost to gentrification, police violence, the AIDS crisis, and the simple passage of time can serve as a ritual to honor the significance of those spots. —Emma Specter

Tom Stoppard: A Life by Hermione Lee (February)

When Tom Stoppard’s latest play, Leopoldstadt, opened in the West End of London in February, just weeks before the pandemic shuttered theaters, Stoppard told an interviewer that the show—his 23rd full-length work over a six-decade-plus career—was likely his last. 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. The 83-year-old author of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Travesties, The Real Thing, and Arcadia (and an Oscar winner for Shakespeare in Love), to name just a few of his groundbreaking works, is almost without argument the greatest English-language playwright of the past 50 years, perhaps only rivaled for both quantity and quality by his fellow Brit, David Hare.

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. His marriage to author Miriam Stoppard, whom he had started seeing when he was still married to his first wife, was ended by his affair with actress Felicity Kendal, which was followed by a 10-year relationship with actress Sinead Cusack, which began during a rocky point in her marriage to Jeremy Irons. (In 2014, Stoppard married Sabrina Guinness, of the famed Guinness family and onetime girlfriend of the young Prince Charles, and today they live together in bucolic Dorset.) One notable feat: Stoppard seems to have stayed on good terms with all of his previous romantic partners, The saga of Tomás Straüssler, born in 1937, in Zlín, Czechoslovakia, a wartime refugee who later went on to be the celebrated playwright Tom Stoppard, is a story of almost novelistic proportions. In Tom Stoppard: A Life, we have an author up to the task of telling it. —Stuart Emmrich

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro (March)

While the announcement of a new book by Kazuo Ishiguro would be greeted with feverish anticipation under normal circumstances, his latest novel comes with an added weight of expectation, as it is his first since being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2017. The beauty of Klara and the Sun is how neatly it dovetails with his 2005 dystopian masterpiece, Never Let Me Go, exploring similar questions of love and sacrifice through the lens of sci-fi. Set in the near future, the titular Klara is a solar-powered Artificial Friend, purchased from a department store by a lonely teenager named Josie; her reliance on the sun becomes an allegory for their relationship, with a subtle environmental subtext woven in as well. To explain too much of the plot would be to deny the strange, eerie pleasure of watching it unfold, but it’s a world that feels richly imagined and meticulously constructed, even while its mysteries continue to reveal themselves. Klara and the Sun once again marks Ishiguro as a master of the ache of missed opportunities and lost connections, as he unpicks the tangled web of how we forge relationships with others and how we deny them too. —Liam Hess

The Fourth Child by Jessica Winter (March)

Jessica Winter’s The Fourth Child begins with an epitaph from Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child, a work of domestic horror in which a supernaturally unlovable fifth child disturbs the happy equilibrium of a complacent family. The difficulties of the fourth child that are introduced in The Fourth Child are neither supernatural nor entirely unlovable, but this child does disrupt the balance of the family into which she’s adopted, causing the mother, Jane, who has removed her new daughter from a bleak and somewhat murky existence in a Eastern European orphanage, to question the dimensions of her supposedly altruistic act. (Her family is faster to query Jane’s motivations.) Jane is a do-gooder, a devout Catholic and accidental anti-abortion activist raising her three biological children and one unruly orphan adoptee in upstate New York in the early ’90s. As those specific markers imply, this is a work of precise social realism, in which the intricate tableau of detail offers a backdrop for larger questions about morality, family, and obligation. —Chloe Schama

Love Like That By Emma Duffy Comparone (March)

At the top of the list of books that have sucked me in without me really knowing why is Emma Duffy Comparone’s debut collection of sharp short stories. The stories in this reminded me of early Mary Karr, with subtly female obligations—of caregiving, career, the ever-present need to cater to the male ego—woven through each tale as sometimes sinister forces, and then picked apart with Comparone’s edgy wit. Her protagonists are jagged, hard-edged women and girls, but they are also, in their unique and quirky way, quite lovable. —Chloe Shama

Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York by Alexander Nemerov (March )

Neither conventional biography nor arm’s-length critical appraisal, Alexander Nemerov’s Fierce Poise shines a light on Helen Frankenthaler’s early artistic breakthrough by blending both forms. Eleven specific and crucial days—from May 19, 1950, to January 26, 1960—are given an almost novelistic treatment to imbue revealing moments in the painter’s life and work with color, shading, feeling, mood, and historical and social settings. If the book occasionally wanders into a kind of assumed verisimilitude, with an omniscient narrator rendering scenes with a level of detail that seemingly belies available historical and biographical facts—well, think of it as the price of admission to a thrillingly alive account of a woman unapologetically pursuing her own vision in an era and a milieu largely defined by men. —Corey Seymour

The Beauty of Living Twice by Sharon Stone (March)

Sharon Stone’s memoir opens with her waking up at the hospital after experiencing a brain hemorrhage that nearly killed her in 2001. Having emerged as the quintessential sex symbol of ’90s Hollywood thanks to roles in hits like Casino and Basic Instinct, the actor’s flourishing career was stopped dead in its tracks by the health scare. Stone has spoken in broad strokes about the “nine-day brain bleed” and its aftereffects on her career, but never with as much candor as she does in The Beauty of Living Twice. Trim and elegantly written with her wicked sense of humor on full display, the memoir is catnip for fans who have never managed to crack the exterior of the elusive star. The behind-the-scenes anecdotes from her four-decade career are predictably fabulous, as are her general musings on relationships, sex, love, and religion. But it’s the personal revelations detailing the actor’s journey to rebuild her life after waking up in that hospital bed that will leave readers with a renewed appreciation for Stone and her tenacity. —Keaton Bell

The Hard Crowd: Essays 2000-2020 by Rachel Kushner (April)

Kushner, the author of three acclaimed novels, including 2018’s dazzling prison-set The Mars Room, turns her fierce intellect to nonfiction in this essay collection. Her interests—vintage cars and motorcycles, the art world, the late Denis Johnson (whose work is clearly an influence here), tough underground scenes of all kinds—won’t surprise readers of her fiction, but there’s a rigorous specificity to the essays that draws you in. The unmissable lead essay, “Girl on a Motorcycle,” is a thrilling road-racing adventure set in Baja California, and “Not With the Band” (originally published in Vogue) offers insight into Kushner’s misspent youth, bartending at San Francisco rock venues. The Hard Crowd is wild, wide-ranging, and unsparingly intelligent throughout. —Taylor Antrim

Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner (April)

Indie rock fans may know Michelle Zauner as the face of the solo musical act Japanese Breakfast, but her debut memoir, Crying in H Mart—which chronicles Zauner’s struggle to retain her Korean identity in the wake of her mother’s death—is sure to establish her as a singular literary talent. The book’s descriptions of jjigae, tteokbokki, and other Korean delicacies stand out as tokens of the deep, all-encompassing love between Zauner and her mother, a love that is charted in vivid descriptions of her mother after death; in a time when people around the world are reckoning with untold loss due to COVID-19, Zauner’s frankness around death feels like an unexpected yet deeply necessary gift. —Emma Specter

The Last Thing He Told Me by Laura Dave (May)

Was The Last Thing He Told Me engineered to become a prestige drama? Probably not, but reading it you do get the sense that it's the kind of book to get a producer’s gears turning: mysterious disappearance; lively, somewhat lonesome heroine; sulky stepdaughter along for the ride. The book is set mostly in northern California, where the protagonist, a furniture-maker-slash-artist called Hannah, has made a home with her husband, Owen, and his stepdaughter Bailey. The public implosion of Owen’s company leads to his disappearance and ignites Hannah’s quest to try to figure out what’s happened—not just where he’s gone, but why he’s left behind a rather large duffel bag full of cash and, as it turns out, a very light imprint on the world before she met him. The Last Thing He Told me goes down like the limited series it will almost certainly become—Julia Roberts has signed on to a production engineered by Hello Sunshine—light and bright, despite its seemingly seedy undertones. - Chloe Schama

Second Place by Rachel Cusk (May)

A friend once described a Cusk novel—2014’s Outline—as a glass of Sancerre: very dry, very cold, totally perfect. To (perilously) extend this metaphor let’s call Cusk’s new novel Second Place a weird wonderful glass of orange wine, unfiltered, even funky. It takes place on the tidal coastline of England, where a woman (a novelist of “little books”) invites a once prominent painter to come and stay with her and her husband in their guest house (the “second place” of the title). She does this out of an inchoate need to invite disorder and chaos into her life—and perhaps kick off a love affair? No dice. The painter, called L, a wonderfully narcissistic and entitled creation, arrives with a young mistress and proceeds to wreak havoc on everyone’s life (the narrator’s grown daughter and her boyfriend are in residence as well). If the above sounds like a comedy, it’s not: the stakes in Cusk’s slim, erudite novel are too high. Second Place is about how to survive the perils of middle age, how to find both security and freedom in equal measure, and how human longing shades, all too easily, into self-destruction. —Taylor Antrim

House of Sticks by Ly Tran (June)

House of Sticks is a book that will assault and warm your heart at the same time—a classic immigrant tale, told from the perspective of a Vietnamese child who settled with her family in New York City in the early ‘90s with little to no knowledge about life in America. But even without the resources that many take for granted, Tran’s family was able to eke out a living, first by setting up a kind of family-run sweatshop in their cramped apartment and eventually by buying a nail salon. As a sort of follow up to the devastating expose on nail salon workers published by the New York Times in 2015, House of Sticks can at times read like a more three-dimensional portrait of the life of one of these aestheticians. (Tran worked alongside her mother and father in the salon.) But it is also much more: a coming of age story, A New York hustle, a battle with a father who not only maintains an ironclad sense of filial duty, but also, fueled by his paranoia, exercises irrational control over things like vision correction. (In another elegant examination of absence, the book recounts what a fundamental challenge it is to move through the world without basic ability to see.)—Chloe Schama

The Other Black Girl by Zakiya Dalila Harris

The racism of the publishing industry gets a long-overdue interrogation in this brilliant debut, in which Zakiya Dalila Harris expertly captures the mise-en-scene of a young Black woman's discomfiture at no longer being the "only one" at the lily-white publishing company at which she works. The novel takes some bold stylistic risks that pay off beautifully, leaving the reader longing for more of Harris's words and unique view on the world.—Emma Specter

With Teeth by Kristin Arnett (June)

Kristen Arnett’s debut Mostly Dead Things established her as an expert in all things related to the macabre—particularly when they’re queer-inflected and set in central Florida—and her latest effort, With Teeth, is a more-than-worthy successor. The novel revolves around Sammie, a dissatisfied suburban mother longing for more while questioning her commitment to her wife and son, and takes the reader on a winding journey through all the grief, love, fear and occasional rage that accompanies family-making. There’s never been a parenting novel quite like this before, though it seems more than likely to spawn a sub-genre. —E.S.

Intimacies by Katie Kitamura (July)

Katie Kitamura established herself as a master of cool disquiet with her 2017 breakout, A Separation, a taut and cosmopolitan near-mystery about a young woman moving across the globe in search of her soon-to-be ex-husband, who has gone missing. Her fourth novel, Intimacies, is wholly set in the rainy municipality of The Hague, but its spirit is no less unmoored. The unnamed narrator is living in a city that does not feel like home, filling a temporary job as a translator in a war-crimes court and staying in the emptied apartment of a lover who may or may not be reconciling with his wife. There’s more than a tinge of danger to the story, with war crimes and street violence playing a small part in the narrative, while messages encoded in Dutch art and libraries curated by interior designers enliven the book’s intense interiority. Kitamura writes with forceful, direct prose that makes for a bracing read and leaves the reader mesmerized. As the narrator understands, “The appearance of simplicity is not the same thing as simplicity itself.” —Lauren Mechling

Wayward by Dana Spiotta (July)

Agile intelligence combines with an almost ruthless lack of sentimentality in the novels of Dana Spiotta, from 2001’s Lightning Field to 2016’s Innocents and Others. These are gloriously cool books, deftly assembled, brimming with mood—and full of outcasts and misfits who can’t quite assimilate to modern culture. For fans of Spiotta, her fifth novel, Wayward, is something new: a strikingly human and affecting story of a woman in her fifties going through what you might call, in a more ordinary book, a midlife crisis. In Wayward, Sam’s flight out of conventional suburban housewifery is turned over with a kind of forensic (and mordantly hilarious) scrutiny. In the opening pages she leaves her husband and buys a very specific tumbledown house in the decrepit heart of downtown Syracuse, New York. She then plunges into various obsessions: quasi-feminist Facebook groups, nightwalking, stand up comedy, weightlifting. Through it all Sam both yearns for her teenage daughter, Ally—who is furious at her mother for leaving the family—and refuses to fit any expectations of what a good mother should be. Wayward is a hymn to iconoclasm, a piercing novel about what we lose and gain by when we step out of life’s deepest worn grooves. — Taylor Antrim

Agatha of Little Neon by Claire Luchette (August)

In Claire Luchette’s remarkable debut, Agatha, a nun, is transplanted, along with her pious sisters, to a halfway house in the “tuckered-out town” of Woonsocket, Rhode Island, where they are entrusted with the wellbeing of a lonesome cast of characters who want little to do with them. What follows is a coming-of-age story of sorts in which Agatha, attracted to the order for its promise of belonging, begins to learn that true comfort lies in greater knowledge of oneself. Written in a bracing, acerbic, and darkly comic tenor, the book is a surprisingly buoyant and fast-paced read, a modern and sly spin on the meaning of devotion. —Chloe Schama

Ghosts by Dolly Alderton (August)

The action in Ghosts, an astonishingly assured debut from the journalist Dolly Alderton, takes place after Nina George Dean turns 32. She’s a food writer with a London flat that she adores (not least because she owns it), a second book mere moments from going to press, two well-meaning parents in the suburbs, and a wide circle of close friends, including an ex with whom she’s stayed unproblematically close. When Nina meets the doting and superhero-handsome Max through a dating app—the culture surrounding which Alderton renders in all its mortifying (and hilarious) inanity—she can’t believe her luck. But her house of cards soon starts to cave in: her dad’s health takes a turn; she feels estranged from her oldest friend; the proposal for her next book isn’t really coming together; her downstairs neighbor is a nightmare; and after several blissful months, she’s getting radio silence from Max. True to its title, Ghosts teems with them—the shades of past loves and old selves, especially—besides interrogating the Internet-era phenomenon of being “ghosted,” and resorting to stalking a man’s LinkedIn profile for signs of life. Deftly observed and deeply funny, Ghosts considers where we find, and how we hold onto love with what might well be described as haunting precision. —Marley Marius

Afterparties by Anthony Veasna So (August)

Following a six-figure bidding war for his debut short story collection last year, the 28-year-old Anthony Veasna So passed away unexpectedly in December. That collection, however, more than lives up to the initial hype. A series of vignettes documenting the lives and loves of Cambodian-American families in California’s Central Valley with warmth, generosity, and irreverent humor, Afterparties showcases So’s dazzling prose, which ricochets between meditations on food and family, an eclectic array of pop culture references, and the weightier implications of the intergenerational trauma passed down by those who fled the Khmer Rouge genocide in the 1970s. (The afterparties of the title are, with So’s typically dark wit, a coded reference to the bittersweet nature of passing on the traditions of the home country within the Cambodian diaspora.) So’s observations on queer life today are particularly incisive. In one instance, a charming love story blossoms between a righteous tech entrepreneur and a world-weary young teacher obsessed with Moby Dick, with the couple finding a strange poetry in the rhythms and routines of casual sex. These movingly intimate windows into the immigrant experience leave a powerful imprint, even if the experience of reading So’s work is tinged with the sadness of knowing that he clearly had so much left to say. —L.H.

Everything I Have Is Yours: A Marriage by Eleanor Henderson (August)

Marriage memoirs are like confessions—the more honest the better. And Eleanor Henderson’s mesmerizing chronicle of her two-decade marriage is ruthless. The love story is there: Eleanor falls hard for Aaron in a record shop in Florida in 1997. She is 17. He is a 25-year-old straight-edge dreamboat, “teeth as white as his T-shirt. Around his neck, a string of wooden Krishna beads was wound three times, tight as a choker.” She brings him to Vermont with her for college and then to graduate school in Virginia (marrying him along the way). Eleanor is a novelist, ambitious, upwardly mobile. Aaron is none of those things. He’s moody, wounded, seemingly unemployable, and given to secrets. Henderson’s headlong narrative (she writes as if she’s conducting an exorcism) pulls their dynamic into painful focus. She builds a life—a career, a house, two boys—he tears it all apart with his mood swings, his addictions, mysterious ailments: rashes, sores on his skin, aches that keep him awake all night. A medical mystery develops—does he have Morgellons disease? Schizophrenia? Some other psychiatric condition? Does alcohol help? Does marijuana? Most chillingly: does the specter of hard drugs, glimpsed but never fully seen, hang over the marriage? Leave him, the reader thinks. But life, of course, is not so simple, and rarely has codependency been chronicled with such precision, such poignancy. Everything I Have Is Yours is a kind of tragedy but it’s an astonishingly humane one too. —Taylor Antrim

Last Summer in the City by Gianfranco Calligarich (August)

First published in 1973, Gianfranco Calligarich’s Last Summer in the City seems to limn his own life: Like Calligarich, the novel’s protagonist, Leo Gazarra, leaves Milan for Rome and a writing job, and when that job disappears, spends his summer days at the beach and his nights drifting from party to party, woman to woman. If this sounds like a glittering, solipsistic idyll—well, sure, from the outside; but Leo’s perspective and Calligarich’s rendering turns la dolce vita into something more akin to Camus’s L’Etranger in a contemporary-ish urban setting. Out of print for years, this welcome new translation is elegiac and heart-rending. —Corey Seymour

Misfits by Michaela Coel (September)

Is there anything Michaela Coel can’t do? Not only has the 33-year-old writer, director, producer, and actor brought two brilliant shows to life (the hysterical Chewing Gum and searingly raw I May Destroy You), she’s now leaving her mark on the literary world with her debut nonfiction book, Misfits: A Personal Manifesto. Coel covers everything—growing up in London public housing, reckoning with trauma, adjusting to the demands of fame—with her signature wit and wisdom, making it clear that her narrative power transcends the small screen. Coel’s is a voice that jumps off the page, and it’s one we’re lucky to have applied to whichever story she chooses to tell. —Emma Specter

The Magician by Colm Tóibín (September)

It’s hard not to talk about Colm Tóibín’s latest novel, The Magician, in the loftiest of terms, as something staggering, or dazzling, or an achievement. Yet given the epic sweep of the book—which at once offers a haunting and heartrendingly intimate portrait of its protagonist, the German writer Thomas Mann, and a richly drawn sense of place as it travels through a politically turbulent early-20th-century Europe to America and back again—these accolades feel deserving. As in Tóibín’s 2004 novel, The Master (which charts the life of Henry James), the struggle that underpins Mann’s conflicted inner world is one of sexuality, with Tóibín conveying his unknowability even to those closest to him with a strange, elegiac beauty. Part of the charm of the novel is the forensic approach Tóibín takes to his subject, neither condemning him for the sometimes selfish decisions he makes and the distance he keeps from the people who love him nor defining a writer who is clearly a hero of his in purely hagiographic terms. (Indeed, at times the book reads almost like a biography with its eye for detail and considered pace.) The Magician is an immersive and intentionally meandering book but one that always rewards your patience, especially in a haunting final section that sees Mann look back at his life and all that he’s lost. If you’re willing to give yourself over to the vast and stunningly realized world that Tóibín conjures around Mann, you’ll find yourself savoring every page. —Liam Hess

I Wished by Dennis Cooper (September)

After a 10-year hiatus, the enfant terrible of gay fiction, Dennis Cooper, returns with I Wished, which may just be his most surreal, disturbing, vulnerable work yet (which is saying a lot). The book draws once again from the life of Cooper’s late friend George Miles—most famously memorialized in Cooper’s George Miles Cycle from the 1990s, which spanned five books and 11 years—with whom he had a brief sexual affair and who eventually died by suicide. But Cooper is firm that this is not a sixth installment but instead something more nebulous and open-ended. Exploring the darkest corners of desire and transgression with Cooper’s intoxicating balance of formal experimentation (the book is variously narrated by Nick Drake, Santa Claus, and John Wayne Gacy Jr.) and frank descriptions of sex that move between the savage and deeply tender, it’s a weird and occasionally wonderful tribute to his friend, as well as a powerful work of autofiction. —L.H.

Harrow by Joy Williams (September)

Joy Williams’s fiction—both otherworldly and sharply realist, equally strange and transfixing—inspires fierce loyalty among those who discover it. And there are more and more of us following the overdue publication of The Visiting Privilege: New and Collected Stories in 2015. Here was the 500-page definitive collection of Williams’s best short stories, written over a five-decade career, that together conjured a looking-glass America of misfits and outcasts, of life lived at the margins and at psychological extremes. Her new disturbingly strange novel, Harrow, offers a starkly fascinating vision of ecological apocalypse. This is Williams’s first since 2000’s The Quick and the Dead and is another coming-of-age story—though Harrow is more fractured and darker than that (magnificent) novel. Teenage Khristen sets off across a dystopian American landscape after her boarding school shuts down—and encounters cultish lunacy among a community of survivalists on the shores of a toxic lake. —Taylor Antrim

A Calling for Charlie Barnes by Joshua Ferris (September)

For those who fell in love with Joshua Ferris’s debut, Then We Came to the End (I did), A Calling for Charlie Barnes feels like  a return to the comic-existential themes of that first book: What is work, and why do we do it? Rather than an office, the setting here is Charlie Barnes’s basement, where he’s been camped out for several years trying to get his long-floundering money-management business to take off (a fitting transformation of the office architecture after a year-plus of WFH). Except the runway for his floundering business has been so long that it seems like he may forever occupy this state of perpetual taxi. But then some news: Charlie is dying of cancer—or at least he thinks it’s likely that he is—and he begins to ponder just how he’s spent the minutes and years and decades of his life. What follows is a quasi-stream-of-consciousness romp through his love affairs and misadventures. —C.S.

On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint by Maggie Nelson (September)

With her distinctive blend of personal history and critical theory, Maggie Nelson’s books—from the haunting collage of poetry and prose charting her aunt’s 1969 murder that spanned Jane: A Murder and The Red Parts, to her genre-defying meditation on queer family, The Argonauts (2015)—have always elided easy definition. It comes as a surprise, then, to see her latest book laid out in four clear parts as she turns her gaze to one of the most ineluctable—and politically charged—subjects in America today: freedom. In typically offbeat style, however, the very first line announces in all caps: “STOP HERE IF YOU WANT TO TALK ABOUT FREEDOM.” What Nelson is after is finding a new way of talking about freedom, examining it through the lenses of what art, sex, drugs, and the climate mean in relation to that word right now, and moving between first-person anecdotes and intense critical examination with the utmost readability. Nelson’s approach is one that ultimately seeks liberation and transcendence—whether sexual, narcotic, or purely biological—even as she delves into some of the deepest, darkest corners of the human psyche. —L.H.

Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen (October)

Jonathan Franzen’s pleasure bomb of a novel Crossroads takes place in New Prospect, an Illinois suburb that could be a Norman Rockwell backdrop were it not for the rumblings of the women’s liberation movement and the war in Vietnam. It’s 1971 and the Hildebrandt family lives in a drafty house that the local church provided to patriarch Russ, a God-fearing and self-loathing associate minister who has not only fallen for a pixie-like widow but blames his desires on his wife, Marion. They have four children: young Judson; Becky, the golden-girl cheerleader who isn’t half as boring as she might seem; college-age Clem, tormented by guilt over the inequitable draft and his lust for a worldly older student; and Perry, whose extraordinary mental wiring leads to the manic episode that is one of the book’s many tours de force. The most operatic and astonishing portion might belong to Marion, whose dutiful Christmas cookie baking and ghostwriting of her husband’s sermons are insufficient outlets for her pain and brilliance. Unbeknownst to anyone in her family, she visits her “paid friend,” a therapist who discreetly works out of a dentist’s office. This book relies on novella-length backstories that are as beguiling and alive as the scenes set in the novel’s present, but Marion’s moment in the spotlight is a standout, a masterpiece in the tradition of Nathanael West and the American grotesque. New prospects are what keep the narrative so engrossing, each section expanding on and deepening the poignancy of what has come before. Fifty years after the novel’s setting, America’s primary story is one of social unrest, but it’s personal unrest that commands Franzen’s fascination and unassailable talent. Tiny moments—a glance in the mirror, a bus-seating slight—explode into entertaining vignettes stuffed with the secrets and sins that keep us all truly unknowable from the people to whom we consider ourselves closest. As he has in his previous five novels, Franzen marries the sympathetic and damning, the serious and the comic, faith and folly. Good writers can sustain nuance. Few can take human contradiction and make it half as entertaining and intimate as Franzen does. The 500-plus pages fly by and cohere into a magnificent portrait of an American family on the brink of implosion. The first in a planned trilogy, Crossroads is Act I of what’s bound to be an American classic. —Lauren Mechling

Orwell’s Roses by Rebecca Solnit (October)

Throughout the Trump administration, the term Orwellian was invoked with enough frequency to become all but meaningless. Now, almost a year after Trump’s ouster, comes a brand-new piece of nonfiction from celebrated author and journalist Rebecca Solnit that reconsiders George Orwell’s legacy once and for all. In Orwell’s Roses, Solnit examines Orwell’s lifelong fascination with gardening from all possible directions, tracking his life from his English childhood to his time fighting in the Spanish Civil War and his adult fixation with authoritarianism. And, while she’s at it, she follows the gardening motif to several surprising conclusions, including dictator Josef Stalin’s obsession with lemon growing and novelist Jamaica Kinkaid’s critique of colonialism as it applies to the flower garden. The task that Solnit has set for herself in this book is mighty, but she’s more than up to it as a writer and a thinker; nobody who reads it will ever think of Nineteen Eighty-Four in quite the same way. —E.S.

I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness by Claire Vaye Watkins (October)

Claire Vaye Watkins’s first novel, Gold Fame Citrus, was a portrait of the American West. But framed as a postapocalyptic fever dream and published around the same time as several other novels dealing with end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it themes (Edan Lepucki’s California, Emily St. John Mandel’s Station 11), its landscape seemed more like a backdrop than a character in its own right. It’s different in her latest, I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness, where the brutal, arid, electric terrain of remote California and Nevada crackles across almost every page. The story is narrated by a writer, Claire (several names and details map onto Watkins’s own life), who has returned home to Nevada for some light book promotion and semi-heavy drug use with college friends who have remained in the state. The trip is an escape from her marriage and her baby and crashes into long vignettes and characters from her past—a hippy father who procured nubile teens for Charles Manson before he thought better of the whole project and an artist mother who makes magic in the desert before succumbing to the plague of opioids that has decimated so much of the country. The book is trippy and beautiful, slippery and seductive—a unique psycho-geography of a region that is integral to the American vision and yet seems to have too few literary chroniclers. —C.S.

Silverview by John Le Carré (October)

What a gift to have a posthumous novel by John le Carré, a writer who gave us a world of intricate spycraft, government mendacity and corrupt capitalist overlords that was as unromantic as it was immersive and transporting. Silverview is le Carré’s 26th novel and it is a familiar tune played in a minor key, a slight but elegant story of western collapse, of a spy service (MI6) struggling to justify itself, and intent on stamping out those who would question its dubious victories. The 33-year-old Julian Lawndsley is a familiar protagonist in late le Carré, a well-meaning if slightly limited man of slender means who in this case has chucked in a life of finance to open a bookshop in a small English town. The early scenes are taut and graceful at once—a le Carré hallmark: Edward Avon, a retired grandee who seems to be Polish swans into the bookshop and recruits Julian to make something more of his small business, a Republic of Literature he suggests, a gathering place for book lovers in the community. Of course, Avon is not what he seems and this slim novel patiently spins out his backstory, as an agent of MI6 who has not been as loyal as the service would like. Silverview’s twists and turns will surprise no le Carré devotee, but it is an enjoyable coda to a unforgettable career. —T.A.

These Precious Days: Essays by Ann Patchett (November)

“How other people live is pretty much all I think about,” Patchett writes in the exquisite title essay of her new collection, These Precious Days, which became a minor sensation when it was published by Harper’s magazine in January. “Curiosity is the rock upon which fiction is built.” It’s something that holds true across Patchett’s powerful but unassuming body of work, which is difficult to sum up tidily—mostly because what Patchett writes about is just that: her boundless interest in the lives of everyday people. In her fiction, they could be people with fraying familial bonds, people high on the revelatory joy of a new friendship, or people who find themselves in wildly unlikely situations, as in her award-winning 2001 novel, Bel Canto. But in These Precious Days, her first nonfiction work in eight years, Patchett turns the lens back not just on herself but on the relationships she’s forged throughout her career as a writer too, in essays that vary in length but seamlessly balance Patchett’s piercing emotional and intellectual insights with a welcoming charm. Still, the justified centerpiece of the collection is the title essay, which charts her unlikely friendship with Tom Hanks’s assistant Sooki Raphael during quarantine, after Hanks recorded the audiobook for Patchett’s previous novel, The Dutch House (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize). Enchanted by Raphael’s outlook on life and her abilities as a painter, Patchett documents their journey together in the most intimate of terms as Raphael deals with a terminal cancer diagnosis. It’s an unforgettable portrait of love, loss, and the wonders of friendship that will leave you both devastated and dazzled. —L.H.