Pakistani British writer Kamila Shamsie is an adept chronicler of how politics impact families in both England and Pakistan. In 2013, she was recognized as one of Granta‘s “20 best young British writers,” and her most recent novel, Home Fire, won the 2018 Women’s Prize for Fiction. Her eighth book, Best of Friends, delves into how relationships formed in childhood affect our adult selves, and speculates about whether even the most cherished friendships could have an expiration date.
It’s 1988 in Karachi, Pakistan, and teenagers Zahra and Maryam have been best friends since elementary school. Zahra is the studious daughter of a schoolteacher and a cricket commentator, and she dreams of a world beyond Karachi. Maryam is the privileged child of a wealthy family that splits its time between England and Pakistan, and she hopes to inherit her family’s lucrative leather-goods business.
Adolescence brings changing bodies and a new interest in boys. The girls’ growing sense of freedom is compounded by the election of Benazir Bhutto, whose unexpected win brings hope for a more equitable future for all Pakistanis. But when a ride home from a party with their friend Hammad goes horribly wrong, Maryam and Zahra face the limits of their freedom—as well as the ways their differing upbringings shape their reactions to trauma.
Decades later, both friends have found considerable success in London, where Zahra is a famous lawyer turned political advocate for refugees, and Maryam is a venture capitalist funding the development of facial-recognition software. They are still close, yet certain subjects remain off-limits. When Hammad comes to London, the two women argue over how to handle the situation, and their conflicting approaches put their lifelong friendship at risk.
Shamsie excels at balancing the personal and the political, and she artfully reconstructs the tense political environment of 1980s Pakistan and the rise of the surveillance state in 2019 London to provide ample opportunities for Maryam and Zahra to find themselves on opposite sides of such issues as privacy, privilege and refugee rights. For any reader who finds themselves at odds with an old friend, Best of Friends rings true in its honest, unvarnished portrayal of friendship strained by politics and ideology.
Kamila Shamsie's eighth novel speculates about whether even the most cherished friendships could have an expiration date.
With his debut novel, TV writer and producer Rasheed Newson (“Bel-Air,” “Narcos”) breathes life into an important pocket of LGBTQ+ history: the political revolution that occurred in 1980s New York City.
My Government Means to Kill Me follows Trey, a young gay Black man who escapes his suffocating “bougie” life in Indianapolis to find personal freedom in New York City. At first blush, Trey seems like another naive dreamer who will learn all his lessons the hard way, but it’s soon clear that he’s complex and adaptable, and his first-person perspective strikes a perfect mix of witty and vulnerable. He’s running as fast and far as he can from the tragedy of his home life, including his brother’s death and his family’s cruel rejection of his sexuality. He’s well aware of the responsibility of taking control of his own destiny, and he earns his stripes, figuring out how to survive while making friends and enemies along the way.
Newson’s prose is engaging and entertaining, and he captures the dynamics of found families through supporting characters such as Angie, a ferocious and bighearted lesbian who runs a home for AIDS patients, and Gregory, Trey’s troubled friend and potential lover with whom readers will undoubtedly form a love-hate relationship. Their world is a heart-wrenching tableau that offers no easy answers or easy feelings, reflecting the harsh reality of life during the AIDS crisis and the continuing fight for civil rights.
The most notable aspect of My Government Means to Kill Me is the presence of historical figures at key points in the story. Newson weaves important civil rights and LGBTQ+ activists such as Dorothy Cotton and Larry Kramer into the narrative to bolster Trey’s development. As Trey becomes a founding member of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), readers get a glimpse into the rich and boisterous political environment of the ’80s. Newsom balances these moments of representation and recognition with appearances from more nefarious figures like “racist slumlord” Fred Trump, who tries to evict Trey and his friends from their home.
Newson capitalizes on the many powers of historical fiction while ensuring that Trey’s story never becomes stuffy or predictable. My Government Means to Kill Me is proof that writers can revere and play with history at the same time.
Offering a glimpse into the rich and boisterous political environment of the 1980s, My Government Means to Kill Me is proof that writers can revere and play with history at the same time.
When considering the history of what is now known as Texas, California, Arizona and New Mexico, there is a saying among Mexican Americans: “We didn’t cross the border; the border crossed us.” It’s a reminder that claims to territory and citizenship rights predate the current boundary between Mexico and the U.S. It’s a rallying cry to tell the true history of American lands and the people who originally belonged on them. With the rise of Indigenous voices in the mainstream, that history is finally beginning to be recognized for its complexity and vitality, its literary power and potential.
Oscar Hokeah’s debut, Calling for a Blanket Dance, tells the story of Ever Geimausaddle through generations of his family. Before the novel even begins, Hokeah provides readers with a family tree, preparing them for the importance of blood ties in the story ahead. Each chapter belongs to a different leaf on the tree, and from these many perspectives, we see Ever grow from an infant into a man, eventually raising his own kids in the strange double bind of Indigeneity. After all, when your heritage and ancestry are the reasons for your oppression, to whom can you turn in order to survive, but to family?
As Ever comes into his full self, we see the impact that his family members have on each other, shaping the ways they live and love. In the opening scene, for example, Ever’s mother, Turtle, takes Ever’s father, Everardo, and their 6-month-old son across Texas and into Mexico in an attempt to rescue her husband from his addiction to alcohol and remind him of his heritage. From the love languages of food and manual labor, to the easy manner in which Everardo tells lies, this scene is the foundation for Ever’s life and his later abilities to parent his own children.
Hokeah’s prose is punchy and descriptive, filled with Native American phrases and words that come naturally to the characters. This blending of languages is still uncommon in contemporary fiction, but the current Indigenous literary and cultural renaissance promises that more and more voices will grow this singularity into a rich multitude. With television shows like “Reservation Dogs” and “Rutherford Falls” attracting critical and popular attention, it seems that this resurgence is only getting started.
But of course, renaissance and resurgence are the wrong words to use here. Hokeah, who is of Mexican heritage as well as a citizen of the Cherokee Nation and the Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma, shows that this tradition has been here the whole time, evolving and surviving. It’s the lines in the sand—what we call borders—that are new. Why should we act like these lines are valid and the people are not? Calling for a Blanket Dance proves that the people are more real than anything.
When your heritage and ancestry are the reasons for your oppression, to whom can you turn in order to survive, but to family? Oscar Hokeah’s exceptional debut novel follows a Native American man’s life through the many leaves of his family tree.
Perhaps it’s too soon to say which books we’ll look back on in 50 years as the ones that defined a generation, but Sarah Thankam Mathews’ debut, a close-to-perfect coming-of-age romp, is surely a contender. Bitingly funny and sweetly earnest, it’s one of those rare novels that feels just like life, its characters so specific in their desires and experiences that you’re sure you’ve met them—or maybe you’re about to. Yet Mathews also captures some unnamable, essential thing about being a 20-something struggling through work and love and late-stage capitalism in the United States in the mid-2000s. In the manner of books that stay with you forever, All This Could Be Different is a singular story that extends beyond itself.
At 22, Sneha graduates from college into a tanked economy. She immigrated to the U.S. as a teenager, but her parents have since returned to India, leaving Sneha alone. She lands an entry-level job at a consulting firm in Milwaukee and starts fresh in a new city, where she encounters financial successes and catastrophes, makes friends and falls into a heady romance. She relates these experiences in an unforgettable narrative voice: dryly funny, self-analytical, a little sarcastic and full of heart.
Though Sneha is preoccupied with her girlfriend for much of the book, this is actually a story about friendship. Sneha’s new friend Tig, a slightly older Black genderfluid lesbian, tells her that friendship takes a lot of work, and over the course of the novel, we get to see Sneha and Tig do that work. It’s breathtaking to witness this slow and painful process. Over dinners and phone calls and meltdowns, long drives and impromptu parties, Sneha, whose past traumas have made her unwilling to trust others, who longs for love even as she shies away from it, learns what true intimacy requires: to see and be seen.
Lives are made up of so many ordinary moments, so many conflicting emotions, so many messes—some world-shattering, some mundane. It’s all here in this funny, vibrant, heartbreaking book: the ache of new love and the pleasures of good food, what it’s like having money and what it’s like losing it, microaggressions and casual racism and radical politics. There are drunken mistakes, childhood wounds, good sex, bad sex, the American dream, queer love, an explotitive economy and the bite of Midwestern winters. And of course, the pressures and expectations of being a first-generation Asian American immigrant.
Through it all, there’s the steady pulse of friendship and the quiet work of building a family—all the beautiful details that unfold along one woman’s journey to wholeness and home.
Bitingly funny and sweetly earnest, Sarah Thankam Mathews’ debut is one of those rare novels that feels just like life.
Even in the dawning years of the 21st century, there are women and girls who would give up anything for a man. That man doesn’t have to be good. His needs and wants, no matter how fickle, would be prioritized over everything, including a woman’s happiness, safety and the well-being of her children, if she has any. This is the bruised and bruising world of Christine Kandic Torres’ debut novel, The Girls in Queens.
The story unfolds from 1996 to early 2007, beginning in an era in which egregious misogyny and slut shaming are rampant, and ending just after Tarana Burke launches the #MeToo movement. Of course, the protagonist, Brisma, and her best friend, Kelly, who live across the street from each other in Woodside, Queens, have no inkling of the changes to come. In 1996, the girls are 11 years old and lack political consciousness, though they know that puberty is making boys and even grown men notice them in ways they don’t particularly like. Neither girl is a wallflower, especially Kelly, who’s not above getting physical with a neighborhood ignoramus. But for the two friends, being harassed, belittled or ignored is just part of life. It’s like taking your life in your hands to cross Queens Boulevard, or rooting for the hapless Mets: Now and then, you have to cross the street, and cheering for the Yankees is never an option. So what can be done?
Handsome and suave Brian is one of Kelly and Brisma’s childhood friends. As they enter adolescence, he takes a liking to both girls, which causes them to fall out (but just as quickly fall back in; they’re sisters from different mothers). Then in 2006, Kelly and Brisma discover something about Brian that pushes their tolerance of male misbehavior to the limit. At first the women support him instinctively, until Brisma, a budding journalist, can’t any longer. This causes a rupture between her and Kelly that threatens to become permanent.
Kandic Torres’ way with her characters is superb. Kelly’s toughness hides an almost sickeningly intense fear and vulnerability, which few but Brisma see. Another neighbor, an Iraq War veteran that readers are initially wary of, becomes a voice of wisdom. Brisma’s mother, who first modeled female deference for her daughter, blesses Brisma’s ambitions to both write and leave their neighborhood behind. The Girls in Queens is a moving debut from a writer to watch.
Within the bruised and bruising world of Christine Kandic Torres’ The Girls in Queens, two girls find that being harassed, belittled or ignored is just part of life—until one of them can’t take it anymore.
Mecca Jamilah Sullivan allows the reader no time to pause or get situated within her debut novel, Big Girl; once you’re in, you’re in. It unfurls in one long stream of messy, painful, big Black girlhood, and this intense interiority gives the novel a breathless, almost unbearable momentum.
Though Sullivan writes every character, even minor ones, with seemingly effortless depth, Big Girl stays relentlessly focused on its protagonist, Malaya. The novel never zooms too far afield, never meanders into subplots or backstory, never leaves Malaya’s emotional interior for more than a moment. In the hands of a less talented writer, this closeness could slip into tedium. Sullivan turns it into something miraculous.
Malaya is a fat Black girl growing up in Harlem in the 1980s and ’90s. For her mother and grandmother, Malaya’s weight is her defining characteristic, a problem to be solved. She grows up swathed in her mother’s shame, learning to count calories, hide her desires, hate her body and strive toward thinness as the ultimate ideal. As she enters her teen years and her body becomes more unruly, it gets harder and harder for Malaya to locate herself in the cacophony of voices telling her how she should look, think and be. She finds some solace in the music of rap artists like Biggie Smalls and with her small group of Black friends. But it’s not until she faces her first catastrophic loss that she’s finally able to see—and love—herself on her own terms.
This is a painful book about body shaming, fatphobia, patriarchal violence, white beauty standards, familial trauma and the male gaze. It’s about how much work and courage it takes to live in the world as a Black girl, a fat girl, a woman, a human with a body that doesn’t do what bodies are “supposed” to do. No matter where Malaya is—her own kitchen; her preppy, mostly white high school; the streets of Harlem—her body is on display. She can’t escape the ways people see her and treat her, and Sullivan brilliantly captures this endless, exhausting trauma of being looked at but never seen.
Big Girl is also full of moments of tenderness, joy and even hilarity, especially in the scenes between Malaya and her father, and in her relationship with her best friend, Shaniece. As Malaya slowly comes into her own, she learns to live loudly and take up space, to embrace her size, name her hungers and claim her desires. Sullivan’s novel is expansive and exuberant, loud and fierce, a celebratory, redemptive coming-of-age story.
In her fierce debut novel, Mecca Jamilah Sullivan captures the exhausting trauma of being looked at but never seen, and the courage it takes to live loudly and take up space.
In the Māori language, an auē is an anguished wail, a cry from the heart. Among the frustrations likeliest to cause such a lament are domestic violence and racism. New Zealand writer Becky Manawatu explores both of these painful forms of dominion in her impressive debut novel.
Manawatu gave herself a big challenge with Auē: Not only does her novel explore two fraught forms of subjection, but she also splits her narrative into three distinct perspectives. Two of them are Māori brothers, 17-year-old Taukiri and 8-year-old Ārama. Their father has died, and their mother has disappeared, so Taukiri drives Ārama to their Aunty Kat and Uncle Stu’s farm in Kaikōura, a coastal town on New Zealand’s South Island. “I’ll be back as soon as I can,” Taukiri assures his brother, yet he’s convinced Ārama will be better off without him.
As Manawatu skillfully shows, that’s not necessarily true. Ārama finds support from his Aunty Kat and neighbors Beth and Tom Aiken, but Uncle Stu is a brute, the type of ruffian to give his wife a black eye over his latest grievance, and who snatches a letter written by Taukiri and burns it before Ārama can read it.
Ārama is so distressed by his dislocation that he covers his body in bandages to calm himself. It would be of greater help for Taukiri to return, but in his brother’s absence, Ārama is comforted by memories they’ve shared and his ownership of a bone carving he and Taukiri fashioned from the carcass of a dead baby whale.
The book’s third storyline follows Jade and Toko, who, years earlier, meet at a beach party after Jade’s cousin Sav helps her to escape an abusive boyfriend. Jade, too, contends with domestic problems; her mother, Felicity, is loving but has “a craving for drugs.”
The tension in Auē sometimes flags, and some key details are withheld too long, but overall Manawatu does a nice job of gradually revealing secrets and the intricacies of the characters’ myriad tragedies. Auē exposes the racism some New Zealanders feel toward Māoris, but it’s ultimately a hopeful work with a message worth remembering: Cries from the heart can be painful, but sometimes they get answered.
Becky Manawatu's debut novel is ultimately a hopeful work with a message worth remembering: Cries from the heart can be painful, but sometimes they get answered.
In the tightknit community of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Poughkeepsie, New York, 23-year-old Arlo Dilly’s life is dictated by his ultraconversative uncle, Brother Birch, and an equally religious American Sign Language interpreter named Molly. Arlo is deafblind, and his sheltered upbringing and sensory limitations mean that his life has been highly controlled by those around him—until a 40-something interpreter named Cyril Brewster changes all of that quite unintentionally.
When Arlo decides to take a writing course at a local community college, Cyril accepts the job as his summer interpreter. Cyril isn’t an expert in the form of ASL that Arlo uses, referred to as Tactile or TSL, but he’s hoping to make some extra money and, concerned as he is about “beelining for homosexual obscurity,” escape Poughkeepsie for good. It isn’t long before Cyril begins to appreciate Arlo for who he is: a determined young man who is smart, funny and full of curiosity.
With Cyril as his champion, Arlo begins to ask questions about things as small as his bowl haircut and daily bologna sandwich, and as big as the truth about his boarding school sweetheart, S. At its heart, The Sign for Home is about a young man doing everything he can to be with the love of his life.
Chapters alternate between Arlo’s and Cyril’s narration. Passages that depict how Arlo experiences touch, smell and ASL are especially well done; his sections unfold in the second-person singular, so his lessons and revelations feel all the more intimate, revealing a layer of emotional intelligence and humor that would be lost if the story were told only from Cyril’s first-person perspective.
Debut novelist Blair Fell has worked as an ASL interpreter for more than 25 years, and also has been an actor, producer and director. The Sign for Home draws on all these experiences to tell a story that is tender, hilarious and decidedly uplifting.
The love story of Blair Fell’s deafblind hero is tender, hilarious and decidedly uplifting.
For as long as the field of psychology has existed, one central debate continues to rage: Is human behavior a product of genetics or environment, nature or nurture? In her debut novel, The Orchard, Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry comes down squarely on the middle of the fence. Set during Russia’s volatile period of perestroika, the restructuring of the USSR in the 1980s, this coming-of-age tale tracks the emotional, political, intellectual and social growth of Anya Raneva and her small circle of friends.
Most of us who grew up in the United States during the Cold War had little insight into the lives of our Soviet peers, and it’s here that Gorcheva-Newberry does the reader a great service, offering a peek behind the Iron Curtain and its veil of propaganda. In a postscript to the novel, the author outlines the unsettling cavalcade of events to which her contemporaries were subject. “In a single decade, my generation lived under Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko, Gorbachev, and Yeltsin,” she writes. “We witnessed the collapse of the Soviet empire, the August Coup of 1991 and the October Coup of 1993. . . . We saw tanks rumble down the Moskva River quay and surround the [Russian] White House.”
If there is such a thing as clear-eyed sentimentality, The Orchard evokes it, with its warts-and-all recollections of youthful passions, when the road ahead seems like one endless string of possibilities. At one juncture, Anya and her best friend, Milka Putova, compose a letter to President Ronald Reagan, hoping to wrangle a state-sponsored invitation to the U.S. similar to the one Russian leader Yuri Andropov had recently extended to an American girl. Anya and Milka’s request is a long shot, but in their “Soviet universe, a life without an occasional miracle could be a bottomless pit. So we thought we could nudge our socialist fate a little and take a chance.”
But miracles, by definition, don’t happen all that often. And in the meantime, life goes on, and adolescence yields to adulthood—or, as we discover on a tragic occasion or two, doesn’t.
No one in Anya’s circle ultimately winds up where they thought or dreamed they’d be, which is a quintessentially Russian literary endgame. And as Anya reflects on her youth, she recognizes that both nature and nurture had their roles to play. “Russian people are fatalists; we believe that our future is preordained, irreversible,” she says. “But then, we also believe in miracles, one grand sweep of imagination. Perhaps it’s what allows us to survive and to endure. And maybe it isn’t that at all, maybe it’s our enormous pride, the aggrandized vanity, which we carry to the grave, and the rest is just weather, wind and rain, spurts of blinding snow.”
With her debut novel, Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry does the reader a great service, offering a peek behind the Iron Curtain and its veil of propaganda.
The history of world literature is filled with second novels that pale in comparison to their author’s stellar freshman achievement. How many debuts have had the spectacular success of Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain? More than 500,000 copies sold and the 2020 Booker Prize is not a bad way to start a literary career.
Readers will be happy to learn that Stuart’s follow-up, Young Mungo, is even stronger than his first book. This tale of two gay Glasgow teenagers caught amid various forms of prejudice in the early 1990s is a marvelous feat of storytelling, a mix of tender emotion and grisly violence that finds humanity in even the most fraught circumstances.
You know you’re in for a tough upbringing when your alcoholic mother names you after a patron saint known for having “started a fire from nothing, or . . . something,” as 15-year-old Mungo explains. But Mungo has bigger problems than his name, which Stuart describes in heartbreaking detail. Mungo’s alcoholic mother, 34-year-old Mo-Maw, often disappears on wild drinking sprees. When under the influence, she’s a harsher version of herself, transforming into a “heartless, shambling scarecrow” that Mungo, his brother Hamish and sister Jodie have nicknamed “Tattie-bogle.”
Hamish is a gang leader who leads fights against working-class Catholic youths, and he forces Mungo to join the Protestant cause and take to the streets with him. “I need to sort you out,” Hamish tells him. But Mungo doesn’t need sorting out. He needs more time with James Jamieson, a Catholic boy with whom he has fallen in love and who tends to birds in his beloved dovecote.
Scenes between Mungo and James are the most beautiful in the book. They stand in contrast to the moments that are among the most brutal: To toughen up Mungo, Mo-Maw sends him on a fishing trip with two thugs of questionable repute. That trip, like so much else in the book, doesn’t go the way Mungo, or his mother, ever anticipated.
Some plot elements in Young Mungo may disturb, but all are sensitively rendered, and the simplicity of Stuart’s writing makes them all the more powerful. One of the myths of St. Mungo is that he once brought a dead robin back to life. No such restoration occurs in young Mungo’s hardscrabble life, but as Stuart shows, hope often lies where you least expect it.
Douglas Stuart’s follow-up to Shuggie Bain is a marvelous feat of storytelling, a mix of tender emotion and grisly violence.
There’s a saying you might have heard: Writing about music is like dancing about architecture. Fortunately, two authors—one veteran, the other new to fiction—have ignored this warning and written novels about classical music, and we readers are luckier for it.
The Great Passion by James Runcie, author of the acclaimed Grantchester Mysteries, is a beautiful coming-of-age novel set in 18th-century Germany. In 1726, 13-year-old Stefan Silbermann is mourning the death of his mother. His father makes arrangements for Stefan to attend a music school in Leipzig, an especially useful education for a boy whose family’s business is building and repairing church organs. At school, lonely Stefan is tormented by the other students, finding solace only in singing and in the presence of the demanding but empathic choir director, Johann Sebastian Bach.
Stefan’s heavenly singing voice and sensitivity endear him to Bach, who enlists Stefan as a soloist in many of his cantatas. But Stefan remains deeply unhappy, and when he runs away from the dorms, Bach invites him to live at the Bach family home. There, Stefan basks in the warmth of domestic life, assisting Bach’s children with chores and working as a copyist for the great composer.
When another tragedy strikes, this time in Bach’s family, Stefan is a firsthand witness to the way grief can be a catalyst for musical genius, watching and then performing in the work that will become one of Bach’s most celebrated compositions, “The Passion According to St Matthew.” Stefan’s exposure to Bach’s creativity, family and devotion to God is the restorative balm that the young man needs in order to move forward with his life.
On the other end of the spectrum is Brendan Slocumb’s debut novel, The Violin Conspiracy, a fast-paced thriller about a young Black violinist and his search for a priceless instrument, set against the backdrop of systemic racism within the world of contemporary classical music.
Ray McMillian has a dream of becoming a concert violinist, and nothing will stand in his way: not his unsupportive mother and uncles, his disinterested teachers or the industry’s inherent racial bias. When Ray’s beloved grandmother gifts him with her grandfather’s violin, it brings him a step closer to his dream, and when the instrument is revealed to be an extremely rare and valuable Stradivarius, his star really begins to rise.
Ray is on the verge of attending the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow when the prized instrument is stolen and held for ransom. Suspects range from members of Ray’s own family, eager to claim the insurance money, to his musical rivals in Europe. Even the descendants of the family who once enslaved Ray’s great-great-grandfather are claiming the instrument belongs to them. As Ray travels the globe, not sure whom he can trust, music remains the only constant in his life, supporting him no matter the situation.
Despite their differences in literary styles, locations and eras, these novels are connected by more than just their musical themes. Resilience is a powerful presence in both stories, whether in the face of personal pain and grief or against the constant pressures of embedded prejudices. Music is the conduit through which two young men learn to overcome loss and fight against insurmountable odds, offering not only a reason to live but also a way to thrive.
Classical music is a powerful force in new novels from James Runcie and Brendan Slocumb, inspiring their heroes and illuminating the way forward.
Kai Harris’ debut novel is a stirring story of a transformative summer for a Black girl growing up in 1990s Michigan.
What the Fireflies Knew drops us directly into the mind of 10-year-old Kenyatta, known as KB, who has discovered her father’s dead body in the garage of their home on a “dead-end street” in Detroit. Soon after, KB’s mother leaves her and her older sister, Nia, at their grandfather’s house on a “green and noiseless” street in Lansing, Michigan. Their mother offers no explanation of where she is going or when she will be back.
KB tries hard to relate to Nia and understand why she is so angry and distant. KB also attempts to parse her family’s secrets—where her mother is and why she left, why people whisper about her daddy, and why her grandfather and mother don’t get along. Amid these questions, KB shares moments of tenderness and closeness with her stoic grandfather, who does his best to warn KB about predatory boys and the capriciousness of the white kids who live across the street.
KB is at once intuitive and naive, vulnerable and strong. Her voice captures the wonder of youth and the heartache of growing up. As the summer progresses, her presence glows and grows, like the fireflies she catches with her grandfather, like her understanding of the world around her.
Harris, a Michigan native who currently teaches creative writing at Santa Clara University in California, depicts the events of KB’s summer in an inspiring manner, ruminating on the nuances of racism, relationships and sexual development with quiet, mesmerizing restraint. Throughout these complicated and emotionally charged issues, What the Fireflies Knew celebrates the fortitude of its young protagonist. This elegant and eloquent novel is perfect for readers who loved Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.
Kai Harris’ young heroine’s presence glows and grows, like the fireflies she catches with her grandfather, like her understanding of the world around her.
We begin each new reading year with high hopes, and sometimes, when we’re very lucky, we find our expectations rewarded. So it was with 2021.
It must be said that a lot of these books are really, really long. Apparently this was the year for total commitment, for taking a plunge and allowing ourselves to be swallowed up.
Also, it should come as no surprise that books-within-books frequently appear on this list. For all our attempts at objectivity within our roles as critics, we just can’t help but love a book that loves books. Amor Towles, Ruth Ozeki, Jason Mott, Maggie Shipstead and Anthony Doerr all tapped into the most comforting yet complex parts of our book-loving selves.
But most of the books on this list hit home in ways we never could’ve prepared for, even when we had the highest expectations, such as in Will McPhail’s graphic novel, which made us laugh till we cried, and Colson Whitehead’s heist novel, which no one could’ve expected would be such a gorgeous ode to sofas.
And at the top of our list, a book that accomplishes what feels like the impossible: Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’ epic debut novel, which challenges our relationship to the land beneath us in a way we’ve never experienced but long hoped for.
Read on for our 20 best works of literary fiction from 2021.
To those disinclined to question the role that economic exploitation plays in supporting our modern lifestyle, reading this novel may prove an unsettling experience.
In his collection of short stories set in the ag-industrial maw of central California, Jaime Cortez artfully captures the daily lives of his characters in the freeze-frame flash of a master at work.
Francis Spufford’s graceful novel reminds us that tragedy deprives the world of not only noble people but also scoundrels, both of whom are part of the fabric of history.
Jonathan Franzen is one of our best chroniclers of suburban family life, and his incisive new novel, the first in a planned trilogy, is by turns funny and terrifying.
With hints of Jami Attenberg’s sense of mishpucha and spiced with Jennifer Weiner’s chutzpah, Melissa Broder’s novel is graphic, tender and poetic, a delicious rom-com that turns serious.
Robert Jones Jr.’s first novel accomplishes the exceptional literary feat of being at once an intimate, poetic love story and a sweeping, excruciating portrait of life on a Mississippi plantation.
“There are few things more beautiful to an author’s eye . . . than a well-read copy of one of his books,” says a character in Amor Towles’ novel. Undoubtedly, the pages of this cross-country saga are destined to be turned—and occasionally tattered—by numerous gratified readers.
Devastating, hilarious and touching, Torrey Peters’ acutely intelligent first novel explores womanhood, parenthood and all the possibilities that lie therein.
What does it mean to listen? What can you hear if you pay close attention, especially in a moment of grief? Ruth Ozeki explores these questions in her novel, a meditation on objects, compassion and everyday beauty.
Lauren Groff aims to create a sense of wonder and awe in her novels, and in her boldly original fourth novel, set in a small convent in 12th-century England, the awe-filled moments are too many to count.
A surrealist feast of imagination that’s brimming with very real horrors, frustrations and sorrows, Jason Mott’s fourth novel is an achievement of American fiction that rises to meet this particular moment with charm, wisdom and truth.
Like Dante leading us through the levels of hell, Colson Whitehead exposes the layers of rottenness in New York City with characters who follow an ethical code that may be strange to those of us who aren’t crooks or cynics.
In her exhilarating third novel, Maggie Shipstead offers a marvelous pastiche of adventure and emotion as she explores what it means (and what it takes) to live an unusual life.
From slavery to freedom, discrimination to justice, tradition to unorthodoxy, celebrated poet Honorée Fanonne Jeffers weaves an epic ancestral story that encompasses not only a young Black woman’s family heritage but also that of the American land where their history unfolded.
Most of the books on this list hit home in ways we never could’ve prepared for, even when we had the highest expectations. Read on for the 20 best literary fiction titles of 2021.
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Maria Ressa’s book is a political history of the Philippines and an intimate memoir, but it’s also a warning to democracies everywhere: Authoritarianism is a threat to us all.
Sean Adams has dialed down the dystopian quotient from his first satirical novel, The Heap, but that element is still very much present in The Thing in the Snow.
