The Notable and Award-Winning Books of 2021

National Book Award Winner | Kirkus prize Finalist

A renowned historian who traces the life of a single object handed down through three generations of Black women to craft an extraordinary testament to people who are left out of the archives. All That She Carried honors the creativity and fierce resourcefulness of people who preserved family ties even when official systems refused to do so, and it serves as a visionary illustration of how to reconstruct and recount their stories today.

National Book Award Winner | Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction Winner | Carnegie Medal Longlist | Joyce Carol Oates Prize Longlist | Aspen Words Literary Prize Longlist

This is an astounding work of fiction from bestselling author Jason Mott. Always deeply honest and at times electrically funny, Hell of a Book goes to the heart of racism, police violence, and the hidden costs exacted upon Black Americans, and America as a whole.

National Book Award Finalist | The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize Longlist | Crook’s Corner Book Prize Shortlist | Prix Médicis Etrange Finalist

A singular and stunning debut novel about the forbidden union between two enslaved young men on a Deep South plantation, the refuge they find in each other, and a betrayal that threatens their existence. The Prophets fearlessly reveals the pain and suffering of inheritance, but is also shot through with hope, beauty, and truth, portraying the enormous, heroic power of love.

Phi Beta Kappa Award for Science Winner

Scientist Sarah Stewart Johnson tells the story of how she and other researchers have scoured Mars for signs of life, transforming the planet from a distant point of light into a world of its own. Empathetic and evocative, The Sirens of Mars offers an unlikely natural history of a place where no human has ever set foot, while providing a vivid portrait of our quest to defy our isolation in the cosmos.

Scotiabank Giller Prize Winner | Aspen Words Literary Prize Longlist

From the widely acclaimed, best-selling author of American War, a new novel—beautifully written, unrelentingly dramatic, and profoundly moving—that looks at the global refugee crisis through the eyes of a child.

Dayton Literary Peace Prize Runner-Up

The Road from Raqqa brings us into the lives of two brothers bound by their love for each other and for the war-ravaged city they call home. It’s a book that captures all the desperation, tenacity, and hope that comes with the revelation that we can find home in one another when the lands of our forefathers fail us.

Kirkus Prize for Fiction Winner

Legendary writer Joy Williams takes us into an uncertain landscape after an environmental apocalypse, a world in which only the man-made has value, but some still wish to salvage the authentic. Rivetingly strange and beautiful, Harlow is an intertwined tale of paradise lost and the reasons to try and recover something of it.

FT/McKinsey Business Book of the Year Longlist

Deeply reported and endlessly gripping, this is a dazzling, blow-by-blow chronicle of the most consequential scientific breakthrough of our time. It’s a story of courage, genius, and heroism. It’s also a tale of heated rivalries, unbridled ambitions, crippling insecurities, and unexpected drama. A Shot to Save the World is the story of how science saved the world.

National Book Award Finalist | Gordon Burn Prize Winner | Carnegie Medal Finalist

Hanif Abdurraqib has written a profound and lasting reflection on how Black performance is inextricably woven into the fabric of American culture. With care and generosity, he explains the poignancy of performances big and small, each one feeling intensely familiar and vital, both timeless and desperately urgent.

McIlvanney Prize for Best Crime Novel of the Year Winner

Hyde is a stunning gothic reimagining of the Jekyll and Hyde story in which Captain Edward Hyde, chief detective of Victorian Edinburgh, investigates a gruesome murder that may unmask his own darkest secret.

National Book Award Finalist | Carnegie Medal Finalist

Matrix gathers currents of violence, sensuality, and religious ecstasy in a mesmerizing portrait of consuming passion, aberrant faith, and a woman that history moves both through and around. Lauren Groff’s new novel, her first since Fates and Furies, is a defiant and timely exploration of the raw power of female creativity in a corrupted world.

GRAMMY Winner for Best Spoken Word Album

Blowout is a call to stop subsidizing the wealthiest businesses on earth, to fight for transparency, and to check the influence of the world’s most destructive industry and its enablers. The stakes have never been higher. As Rachel Maddow writes, “Democracy either wins this one or disappears.”

National Book Award Longlist | Carnegie Medal Longlist

One of today’s most insightful and influential thinkers offers a powerful exploration of inequality and the lesson that generations of Americans have failed to learn: Racism has a cost for everyone—not just for people of color. The Sum of Us is not only a brilliant analysis of how we arrived here but also a heartfelt message, delivered with startling empathy, from a black woman to a multiracial America.

Stowe Prize Winner | Goddard Riverside Stephan Russo Book Prize for Social Justice Shortlist

Named one of the best books of the year by Time, The Washington Post, and the Chicago Tribune, Begin Again is one of the great books on James Baldwin and a powerful reckoning with America’s ongoing failure to confront the lies it tells itself about race.

Booker Prize Longlist | Carnegie Medal Longlist

A transfixing novel about two unforgettable characters seeking to free themselves—one from the expectations of women in early twentieth-century Punjab, and the other from the weight of life in the contemporary Indian diaspora. This tale is at once sweeping and intimate, lush and propulsive, it is a stunning achievement from a contemporary master.

Pulitzer Prize Finalist | National Book Critics Circle Award Winner

Minor Feelings is a ruthlessly honest, emotionally charged, and utterly original exploration of Asian American consciousness. With sly humor and a poet’s searching mind, Cathy Park Hong uses her own story as a portal into a deeper examination of racial consciousness.

Carnegie Medal Longlist | Crook’s Corner Book Prize Shortlist

Listed on President Obama’s Summer 2021 Reading List and named one of the “Fifteen Books to Watch for” by The New York Times, Things We Lost to the Water is a captivating novel about an immigrant Vietnamese family who settles in New Orleans and struggles to remain connected to one another as their lives are inextricably reshaped.

Edgar Award for Young Adult Fiction Winner

The other orphans say Margot is lucky. Lucky to survive the horrible accident that killed her family. Lucky to have her own room because she wakes up screaming every night. And lucky to be chosen by a prestigious family to live at their remote country estate. Margot’s bad dreams may have stopped when she came to live with the Suttons—but the real nightmare has just begun.

National Book Award Longlist | Carnegie Medal Longlist

In this long-suppressed story of the notorious Tulsa race massacre, discover the lost history of how the massacre was covered up and of the courageous individuals who fought to keep the story alive. Most important, it recounts the ongoing archaeological saga and the search for the unmarked graves of the victims of the massacre, and of the fight to win restitution for the survivors and their families.