The Top Trending Books of 2021

If it feels like Taylor Jenkins Reid’s name is always on everybody’s lips, you’re not wrong. The author of Daisy Jones & The Six (filming began in September 2021 for the Amazon TV adaptation, starring Riley Keough in the titular role and Sam Claflin as brooding rocker Billy Dunne) published an irresistible new novel in June. The story centers on four famous siblings who throw an epic party to celebrate the end of the summer. But over the course of twenty-four hours, the family drama that ensues will change their lives forever.

When 22-year-old Amanda Gorman stepped up to the mic on January 20 and dazzled millions of viewers with her words, she made history as America’s youngest inaugural poet. Her electrifying poem, “The Hill We Climb,” is published here in its entirety and includes an enduring foreword by Oprah Winfrey. The slim volume can be returned to again and again for inspiration, hope, and affirmation.

This magnificent novel from the Nobel laureate and author of Never Let Me Go was named to the New York Times 100 Most Notable Books of 2021. Indeed, the story of Klara, an Artificial Friend, who keenly observes passersby from her perch in the store and hopes to be chosen by a customer, is incredibly unique and memorable. The book makes us think about the ways artificial intelligence will permeate our lives and is also a timely meditation on love and loneliness.

This 1998 book popped this year, thanks, in part, to entrepreneur Tyra Myrick, who, in an August interview with Business Insider, credits the book for helping her earn a seven-figure salary. (We’re sure her gig with Drake helped, too.) In it, Robert Greene and Joost Elffers distill three thousand years of the history of power into 48 essential laws by drawing from the philosophies of Machiavelli and Sun Tzu, and also from the lives of figures like Henry Kissinger and P.T. Barnum. Amoral, cunning, ruthless, and instructive, this is the definitive manual for anyone interested in gaining, observing, or defending against ultimate control.

When Reese Witherspoon chose this title as her July book club pick, fans of Where the Crawdads Sing flocked to it. The novel is focused on a love triangle between Elle, happily married to Peter, but who sleeps with her married best friend, Jonas, one night at her summer house on Cape Cod. The drama unfolds over 24 hours as Elle must make a life-changing decision that has been brewing for decades.

The geopolitical thriller envisions a naval clash between the U.S. and China in the South China Sea in 2034, which escalates quickly to nuclear war. In a New York Times opinion column in April 2021, Thomas Friedman recommends the book, saying he felt the scenarios detailed in the novel were ripped from real-life headlines. Sometimes it takes a brilliant work of fiction to illuminate the direst of warnings: 2034 is all too close at hand, and this cautionary tale presents the reader with a dark yet possible future that we must do all we can to avoid.

Chris Bohjahlian’s thriller, The Flight Attendant, was turned into a black comic HBO miniseries that we all devoured at the end of 2020. Here, the author takes a turn into historical suspense, and we meet a young Puritan woman—faithful, resourceful, but afraid of the demons that dog her soul—who plots her escape from a violent marriage in this riveting and propulsive novel.

Who could forget how 2021 started? On the 6th day of the new year, a mob of supporters of President Donald Trump attacked the United States Capitol building, seeking to overturn his defeat in the 2020 Presidential election. This book is the vital inside account of American democracy in its darkest hour, from the rise of autocracy unleashed by Trump to the January 6 insurrection, and a warning that those forces remain as potent as ever—from the congressman who led the first impeachment of Donald J. Trump.

Former President Barack Obama loved this new work by the author of The Martian, naming it to his 2021 summer reading list. In Project Hail Mary, a lone astronaut must save the earth from disaster in this cinematic thriller full of suspense, humor, and fascinating science as only Andy Weir could deliver. Plus, it’s also in development as a major motion picture starring Ryan Gosling, so we’ve got that to look forward to.

Readers seized upon this remarkable novel about J. P. Morgan’s personal librarian, Belle da Costa Greene, the Black American woman who was forced to hide her true identity and pass as white in order to leave a lasting legacy that enriched our nation—convincing J.P.’s son, Jack, to bequeath his collection of antique manuscripts, books, and artwork to New York City, making it available to the public. Co-written by authors Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray, the fact that this novel is based upon a real woman and drenched in literary history made bookish readers gobble it down.

Romance was up 50% over last year, and fans of the genre were excited by Christine Feehan’s passionate paranormal romance about two Carpathians who find hope in the bond that ties their souls together in this, the 34th book in the bestselling Carpathian Series.

Needed a happy ending this year? You weren’t alone. Emily Henry’s rom-com was the perfect antidote to an otherwise tough year. Main characters Poppy and Alex have nothing in common, but ever since a fateful car trip home from college, they have been the best of friends. Every summer, they have taken one glorious week of vacation together. Until two years ago, when they ruined everything and haven’t spoken since. Poppy decides to convince her best friend to take one more vacation together—lay everything on the table, make it all right. Miraculously, he agrees. Now she has a week to fix everything.

Shari Lapena is the queen of domestic thrillers and readers can’t stop talking about her latest, in which Fred and Sheila Merton are brutally murdered after a fraught Easter dinner with their three adult kids. Who, of course, are devastated. Or are they? They each stand to inherit millions. They were never a happy family, but perhaps one of the siblings is more disturbed than anyone knew. In this family, everyone is keeping secrets—even the dead.

Any time The Girl on the Train author, Paula Hawkins, publishes a new thriller, it’s going to make waves. When a young man is found gruesomely murdered in a London houseboat, it triggers questions about three women who knew him. Three women with separate connections to the victim. Three women who are—for different reasons—simmering with resentment. Who are, whether they know it or not, burning to right the wrongs done to them. When it comes to revenge, even good people might be capable of terrible deeds.

Amor Towles, the bestselling author of A Gentleman in Moscow and Rules of Civility, has done it again. His latest novel was named a TODAY Show Read with Jenna Book Club Pick and topped Amazon’s Best Books of the Year list. The propulsive novel, set in 1950s America, spans just ten days and is told from multiple points of view. We meet 18-year-old Emmett Watson, who, upon returning from serving his sentence on a juvenile work farm, has plans to pick up his eight-year-old brother, Billy, and head to California for a new start. But the two boys who secretly stow away in the warden’s car, have other ideas for Emmett and Billy.

Readers were gripped by this tense, page-turning psychological drama about the making and breaking of a family. Centering on a woman whose experience of motherhood is nothing at all what she hoped for—and everything she feared, The Push will challenge everything you think you know about motherhood, about what we owe our children, and what it feels like when women are not believed.

Harlem Shuffle, a dazzling novel from the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author Colson Whitehead, is a gloriously entertaining novel of heists, shakedowns, and rip-offs set in 1960s Harlem. It’s a family saga masquerading as a crime novel, a hilarious morality play, a social novel about race and power, and ultimately a love letter to Harlem. But mostly, it’s a joy to read.

Why is democracy so threatened in America and around the world? And what can we do about it? Former White House aide, co-host of Pod Save the World, author of The World as It Is, and close confidant to President Barack Obama, Ben Rhodes, travels the globe in a deeply personal, beautifully observed quest for answers, eventually realizing how much America’s fingerprints are on a world we helped to shape, through our post–Cold War embrace of unbridled capitalism and our post-9/11 nationalism and militarism; our mania for technology and social media; and the racism that fueled the backlash to America’s first Black president.

One of the best parts of 2021 (IMHO) has been getting to rendezvous with Elizabeth Strout’s beloved character, Lucy Barton, in another novel. In Oh William!, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author explores the mysteries of marriage and the secrets we keep, as a former couple reckons with where they’ve come from—and what they’ve left behind.

After a guest appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience, in August of 2021, Human Rights activist Yeonmi Park’s 2015 memoir was rediscovered by readers. In Order to Live shines a light not just into the darkest corners of life in North Korea, describing the deprivation and deception she endured and which millions of North Korean people continue to endure to this day, but also onto her own most painful and difficult memories. Park’s testimony is heartbreaking and unimaginable, but never without hope. This is the human spirit at its most indomitable.

Andrea Barton’s psychological thriller about a backpacking trip with deadly consequences was chosen as the Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick for August. On Instagram, @reesesbookclub describes it better than I ever could: “As a rule of thumb, coverups are good for the beach, but horrible if we’re talking about a dead backpacker on your hotel room floor. As you might have guessed, our latest pick is less floral sarong, and more girl friendship gone terribly wrong.”

When Richard Osman published The Man Who Died Twice, his second book in the Thursday Murder series in September of 2021, the first book, which pubbed in 2020, also reached the bestseller list. In a peaceful retirement village, four unlikely friends meet weekly in the Jigsaw Room to discuss unsolved crimes; together they call themselves the Thursday Murder Club. When a local developer is found dead with a mysterious photograph left next to the body, the Thursday Murder Club suddenly find themselves in the middle of their first live case. As the bodies begin to pile up, can our unorthodox but brilliant gang catch the killer, before it’s too late? And stay tuned: the series will be turned into a major motion picture from Steven Spielberg at Amblin Entertainment.

Danielle Steel is prolific, often publishing multiple novels a year. In The Butler, two very different people—Argentinian-born Joachim von Hartmann, a butler, and American Olivia White—from two different worlds collide in Paris and lean on one another against all odds as they make startling discoveries about their own lives.

John Grisham takes you to a different kind of court in his first basketball novel. Samuel “Sooley” Sooleymon is a raw, young talent with big hoop dreams—and even bigger challenges off the court. Gripping and moving, Sooley showcases John Grisham’s unparalleled storytelling powers in a whole new light. This is Grisham at the top of his game—no pun intended.

Fans of World War II-set historical fiction will love this novel. Based on the author’s own family letters, Send for Me is an achingly beautiful work of historical fiction that moves between Germany on the eve of World War II and present-day Wisconsin, unspooling a thread of love, longing, and the powerful bonds of family.

Told in alternating perspectives that deftly interweave past and present, Hanna Halperin’s stunning novel, Something Wild, is a magnetic, unflinching portrait of the bond between sisters, the intoxicating desires of adolescence, the ways trauma and domestic violence reverberate over generations, and how it might be possible to overcome the past.

In 2021, political leader and voting rights activist Stacey Abrams not only mobilized voters to get out for primary elections, was named to TIME‘s list of 100 Most Influential People of 2021, and donated $1.3M from The Fair Fight Political Action Committee to relieve 108,000 people of medical debt, but she also published a gripping crime thriller set within the halls of the U.S. Supreme Court—where a young law clerk finds herself embroiled in a shocking mystery plotted by one of the most preeminent judges in America.

From the indie rockstar of Japanese Breakfast fame comes an unflinching, powerful memoir about growing up Korean American, losing her mother, and forging her own identity. Lyrical and honest, Zauner’s voice is as radiantly alive on the page as it is onstage. Rich with intimate anecdotes that will resonate widely, Crying in H Mart is an exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, and is a book to cherish, share, and reread.

A study published in 2020 revealed that those who consumed “horror entertainment” were actually more psychologically resilient during the pandemic. All the more reason to pick up C. J. Box’s latest, about Wyoming game warden, Joe Pickett, who must accompany a Silicon Valley CEO on a hunting trip—but soon learns that he himself may be the hunted.

In this book, which was discussed widely on Reddit this year, Heying and Weinstein draw on decades of their work teaching in college classrooms and explor­ing Earth’s most biodiverse ecosystems to confront today’s pressing social ills—from widespread sleep deprivation and dangerous diets to damaging parenting styles and back­ward education practices. Asking the questions many mod­ern people are afraid to ask, A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century outlines a science-based worldview that will empower readers to live a better, wiser life.

China is oft-written about in the headlines and discussed on cable news shows, but the country’s history is perhaps less well understood by the American people. China: The Novel brings to life the rich terrain of this vast and constantly evolving country. From Shanghai to Nanking to the Great Wall, Edward Rutherfurd chronicles the turbulent rise and fall of empires as the colonial West meets the opulent and complex East in a dramatic struggle between cultures and people. Extraordinarily researched and majestically told, Rutherfurd paints a thrilling portrait of one of the most singular and remarkable countries in the world.

Fans of Tana French are drawn to Under the Harrow and A Double Life author Flynn Berry’s writing. With Northern Spy, Berry crafts a riveting story of two sisters who become entangled with the IRA. Atmospheric and exquisitely written, Northern Spy is at once a heart-pounding story of the contemporary IRA and a moving portrait of sister- and motherhood, and of life in a deeply divided society.

A finalist for the 2021 National Book Award for Fiction, Matrix introduces readers to seventeen-year-old Marie de France, who is cast out of the royal court by Eleanor of Aquitaine, deemed too coarse and rough-hewn for marriage or courtly life, and sent to England to be the new prioress of an impoverished abbey, its nuns on the brink of starvation and beset by disease. Initially taken aback by the severity of her new life, Marie finds focus and love in collective life with her singular and mercurial sisters and is determined to chart a bold new course for the women she now leads and protects.

The winner of the 2021 National Book Award for Fiction and a TODAY Show Read with Jenna Book Club pick, Jason Mott has penned a genre-defying, deeply honest, and electrically funny novel that goes to the heart of racism, police violence, and the hidden costs exacted upon Black Americans, and America as a whole.

Bestselling author Lisa Scottoline offers a sweeping and shattering epic of historical fiction fueled by shocking true events, the tale of a love triangle between friends Elisabetta, Marco, and Sandro that unfolds in the heart of Rome…in the creeping shadow of fascism. Taking place over decades, Eternal is a tale of loyalty and loss, family and food, love and war–all set in one of the world’s most beautiful cities at its darkest moment.

To say the events of the past two years have been anxiety-inducing would be a serious understatement. We are living through one of the most anxious periods any of us can remember. Distilling more than 20 years of research and hands-on work with thousands of patients, including Olympic athletes and coaches, and leaders in government and business, Dr. Brewer has created a step-by-step plan clinically proven to break the cycle of worry and fear that drives anxiety and addictive habits.

TikTok went insane over Ali Hazelwood’s debut rom-com this year (60.5M views and counting for #thelovehypothesis!) When a fake relationship between scientists meets the irresistible force of attraction, it throws one woman’s carefully calculated theories on love into chaos. She’ll discover that the only thing more complicated than a hypothesis on love is putting your own heart under the microscope.

Less time spent in big crowds this year meant more time for introspection and self-reflection, and readers turned to Dr. Bessel van der Kolk’s 2014 book, The Body Keeps the Score, to address the lasting effects of trauma and traumatic stress. Dr. van der Kolk uses his own research and that of other leading specialists to show how trauma literally reshapes both body and brain, and explores innovative treatments. The Body Keeps the Score exposes the tremendous power of our relationships both to hurt and to heal—and offers new hope for reclaiming lives.

Named one of the Best Books of the Year by The Washington Post, economic and social policy expert Heather McGhee, one of the most insightful and influential thinkers of our time, 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. From the financial crisis of 2008 to rising student debt to collapsing public infrastructure, the root problem is racism in our politics and policymaking. McGhee offers a path for the future through what she calls the Solidarity Dividend: the benefits we gain when people come together across race to accomplish what we simply can’t do on our own.

Legendary espionage novelist John le Carré died in December of 2020. In his last completed novel, he turns his focus to the world that occupied his writing for the past sixty years—the secret world itself. Silverview is the mesmerizing story of an encounter between innocence and experience and between public duty and private morals. In his inimitable voice, John le Carré seeks to answer the question of what we truly owe to the people we love.

Iraq War veteran and National Book Award-winning author (for his short story collection, Redeployment in 2014), Phil Klay often focuses his writing on modern warfare and the individual lives that go on long after the drones have left the skies. In Missionaries, he examines the globalization of violence through the interlocking stories of four characters and the conflicts that define their lives. Drawing on six years of research in America and Colombia into the effects of the modern way of war on regular people, Klay has written a novel of extraordinary suspense infused with geopolitical sophistication and storytelling instincts that are second to none.

Anyone wishing that season 4 of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is released before the year is up can bide their time with this riotous novel. Elyssa Friedland’s latest, which topped Bustle, PopSugar, and TheSkimm’s lists of Best Beach Reads, takes place at a family reunion for the ages when two clans convene for the summer at their beloved getaway in the Catskills. (Picture the Kellerman Resort from Dirty Dancing and you’ve got it.)

Everyone knows how hard it can be to maintain a healthy diet—especially amid the stressors of the last two years. But what if some of the decisions we make about what to eat are beyond our control? Is it possible that food is addictive, like drugs or alcohol? And to what extent does the food industry know, or care, about these vulnerabilities? Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Michael Moss delivers a gripping exposé of how the processed food industry exploits our evolutionary instincts, the emotions we associate with food, and legal loopholes in their pursuit of profit over public health.

Intelligence is usually seen as the ability to think and learn, but in a rapidly changing world, there’s another set of cognitive skills that might matter more: the ability to rethink and unlearn. Too many of us listen to opinions that make us feel good, instead of ideas that make us think hard, resulting in our beliefs getting brittle long before our bones. Adam Grant, the bestselling author of Give and Take and Originals, examines the critical art of rethinking: learning to question your opinions and open other people’s minds. It’s an invitation to let go of views that are no longer serving us well and prize mental flexibility over foolish consistency. If knowledge is power, knowing what we don’t know is wisdom.

If you’re one of the millions of people who enjoyed the relaxation of marijuana laws in the U.S. this year and turned to cannabis to relax or curb anxiety, perhaps you don’t need this book. But if you’re still of the mind that psychoactive plants are drugs, and drugs are bad, pick this book up to rethink and unlearn (ahem, see above). Michael Pollan proffers a radical challenge to how we think about drugs, and an exploration into the powerful human attraction to psychoactive plants—and the equally powerful taboos. Why, for example, is making tea from the leaves of a tea plant acceptable, but making tea from a seed head of an opium poppy a federal crime? In this unique blend of history, science, and memoir, as well as participatory journalism, Pollan shines a fresh light on a subject that is all too often treated reductively.

Haven’t traveled internationally yet? That’s okay. This riveting noir, from the bestselling author of Mexican Gothic, will set you in 1970s Mexico City and entangle you in the lives of Maite, a daydreaming secretary, Elvis, a lonesome enforcer, and the mystery of a missing woman—Leonora, a beautiful art student—they’re both desperate to find. Velvet Was the Night is an edgy, simmering historical novel for lovers of smoky noirs and anti-heroes.

In 2021, we couldn’t stop talking about Detransition, Baby. The novel shot to the top of the New York Times bestseller list and was optioned for television by production company Anonymous Content; the producers behind True Detective, Schitt’s Creek, and Mr. Robot. The novel focuses on the lives of three women—transgender and cisgender—which collide after an unexpected pregnancy forces them to confront their deepest desires. Torrey Peters fearlessly navigates the most dangerous taboos around gender, sex, family, and relationships, gifting us a thrillingly original, witty, and deeply moving novel, which expands the representation of transgender and non-binary stories on our bookshelves and in Hollywood.