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| Illustratio by Jonathan Wolstenhome |
The 10 Best Books of 2021
Editors at The Times Book Review choose the best fiction and nonfiction titles this year.
How Beautiful We Were
By Imbolo Mbue
Imbolo Mbue / 'With every inch, the challenge multiplies': me and my afro
Behold the Dreamers by Imbolo Mbue review / An impressive debut
Following her 2016 debut, “Behold the Dreamers,” Mbue’s sweeping and quietly devastating second novel begins in 1980 in the fictional African village of Kosawa, where representatives from an American oil company have come to meet with the locals, whose children are dying because of the environmental havoc (fallow fields, poisoned water) wreaked by its drilling and pipelines. This decades-spanning fable of power and corruption turns out to be something much less clear-cut than the familiar David-and-Goliath tale of a sociopathic corporation and the lives it steamrolls. Through the eyes of Kosawa’s citizens young and old, Mbue constructs a nuanced exploration of self-interest, of what it means to want in the age of capitalism and colonialism — these machines of malicious, insatiable wanting.
Random House. $28.
Intimacies
By Katie Kitamura
Katie Kitamura / ‘I still feel incapable of processing what’s happening’
Intimacies by Katie Kitamura review / Difficulties of interpretation
In Kitamura’s fourth novel, an unnamed court translator in The Hague is tasked with intimately vanishing into the voices and stories of war criminals whom she alone can communicate with; falling meanwhile into a tumultuous entanglement with a man whose marriage may or may not be over for good. Kitamura’s sleek and spare prose elegantly breaks grammatical convention, mirroring the book’s concern with the bleeding lines between intimacies — especially between the sincere and the coercive. Like her previous novel, “A Separation,” “Intimacies” scrutinizes the knowability of those around us, not as an end in itself but as a lens on grand social issues from gentrification to colonialism to feminism. The path a life cuts through the world, this book seems to say, has its greatest significance in the effect it has on others.
Riverhead Books. $26.
The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois
By Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
“The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois,” the first novel by Jeffers, a celebrated poet, is many things at once: a moving coming-of-age saga, an examination of race and an excavation of American history. It cuts back and forth between the tale of Ailey Pearl Garfield, a Black girl growing up at the end of the 20th century, and the “songs” of her ancestors, Native Americans and enslaved African Americans who lived through the formation of the United States. As their stories converge, “Love Songs” creates an unforgettable portrait of Black life that reveals how the past still reverberates today.
Harper/HarperCollins. $28.99.
No One Is Talking About This
By Patricia Lockwood
No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood review / Richly tragicomic debut novel
No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood review / Life in the Twittersphere
Patricia Lockwood / Priestdaddy: A Memoir / An Excerpt
Lockwood first found acclaim as a poet on the internet, with gloriously inventive and ribald verse — sexts elevated to virtuosity. In “Priestdaddy,” her indelible 2017 memoir about growing up in rectories across the Midwest presided over by her gun-loving, guitar-playing father, a Catholic priest, she called tweeting “an art form, like sculpture, or honking the national anthem under your armpit.” Here, in her first novel, she distills the pleasures and deprivations of life split between online and flesh-and-blood interactions, transfiguring the dissonance into art. The result is a book that reads like a prose poem, at once sublime, profane, intimate, philosophical, hilarious and, eventually, deeply moving.
Riverhead Books. $25.
When We Cease to Understand the World
By Benjamín Labatut. Translated by Adrian Nathan West.
When we cease to understand the world by Benjamin Labatut / Review
When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut review / The dark side of science
Labatut expertly stitches together the stories of the 20th century’s greatest thinkers to explore both the ecstasy and agony of scientific breakthroughs: their immense gains for society as well as their steep human costs. His journey to the outermost edges of knowledge — guided by the mathematician Alexander Grothendieck, the physicist Werner Heisenberg and the chemist Fritz Haber, among others — offers glimpses of a universe with limitless potential underlying the observable world, a “dark nucleus at the heart of things” that some of its witnesses decide is better left alone. This extraordinary hybrid of fiction and nonfiction also provokes the frisson of an extended true-or-false test: The further we read, the blurrier the line gets between fact and fabulism.
New York Review Books. Paper, $17.95.
The Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood; Youth; Dependency
By Tove Ditlevsen.
Translated by Tiina Nunnally and Michael Favala Goldman.
The Copenhagen Trilogy by Tove Ditlevsen / A masterpiece
Tove Ditlevsen’s Art of Estrangement
Childhood/Youth/Dependency review / Memoirs of art and addiction
Beyond the Cruel Facts of Her Life Are Truths That Cut Deep
Ditlevsen’s gorgeous memoirs, first published in Denmark in the 1960s and ’70s and collected here in a single volume, detail her hardscrabble upbringing, career path and merciless addictions: a powerful account of the struggle to reconcile art and life. She joined the working ranks at 14, became a renowned poet by her early 20s, and found herself, after two failed marriages, wedded to a psychopathic doctor and hopelessly dependent on opioids by her 30s. Yet for all the dramatic twists of her life, these books together project a stunning clarity, humor and candidness, casting light not just on the world’s harsh realities but on the inexplicable impulses of our secret selves.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $30.
How America Remembers— and Distorts — Its Slavery Past
'How The Word Is Passed' Teaches The Importance Of Reckoning With History
How the Word is Passed review / After Tulsa, other forgotten atrocities
By Clint Smith
Annette Gordon-Reed on Texas history and growing up there in the ’60s and ’70s
'On Juneteenth' Historian Examines The 'Hope' And 'Hostility' Toward Emancipation
Annette Gordon-Reed’s ‘On Juneteenth’ complicates notions of Black history
Liveright Publishing. $15.95.
Shifting the Focus From Sylvia Plath’s Tragic Death to Her Brilliant Life
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