Our 20 Favorite Books of 2021

2021 marked the release of new books by some of our most prominent authors—among them Richard Powers, Jonathan Franzen, Louise Erdrich, Amor Towles, Ann Patchett, Anthony Doerr, Colson Whitehead, and Maggie Shipstead, whose latest works made it onto our Top 20 List. Some of them, like Shipstead’s Great Circle, are epics in which the heroes and heroines’ adventures light up the reader’s imagination, while others go a bit more micro. For example, Whitehead’s Harlem Shuffle is a 1960s period piece in which a furniture dealer gets suckered into a caper; Erdrich’s The Sentence is a contemporary novel set in a Minneapolis bookstore exactly like the one the author owns.