January 2021 Highlights

NOVELS

1. A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt/Sceptre, 2021) / Peter Ho Davies
2. The Last Thing to Burn (Hodder & Stoughton, 2021) / Will Dean

3. Ten Days (Granta Books, 2021) / Austin Duffy

4. Luckenbooth (William Heinemann, 2021) / Jenni Fagan

5. The Living Sea of Waking Dreams (Chatto & Windus, 2021) / Richard Flanagan
6. The Octopus Man (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2021) / Jasper Gibson

7. The Charmed Wife (Putnam, 2021) / Olga Grushin

8. The Center of Everything (Counterpoint, 2021) / Jamie Harrison

9. Consent (Atlantic Books/Alfred A. Knopf, 2021) / Annabel Lyon

10. Summerwater (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2021) / Sarah Moss

11. The City of Tears (Mantle, 2021) / Kate Mosse 

12. Outlawed (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2021) / Anna North

13. Life Sentences (Jonathan Cape, 2021) / Billy O’Callaghan

14. The Death of Francis Bacon (Faber & Faber, 2021) / Max Porter

15. The Shape of Darkness (Raven Books, 2021) / Laura Purcell

16. Asylum Road (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021) / Olivia Sudjic

17. The Fortunate Ones (Algonquin Books, 2021) / Ed Tarkington
18. Portrait in Peril: A Victorian Mystery (Crooked Lane Books, 2021) / Laura Joh Rowland
19. Adults (The Borough Press, 2021) / Emma Jane Unsworth

FIRST NOVELS

1. Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 (trans. from the Korean by Jamie Chang) (Scribner UK, 2021) / Cho Nam-Joo

2. Girl A (HarperCollins, 2021) / Abigail Dean

3. Burnt Sugar (The Overlook Press, 2021) / Avni Doshi

4. Mrs Death Misses Death (Canongate, 2021) / Salena Godden

5. Cathedral (Europa Editions, 2021) / Ben Hopkins

6. The Prophets (Riverrun/G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2021 / Robert Jones, Jr

7. My Brilliant Life (trans. from the Korean by Chi-Young Kim) (Forge, 2021) / Ae-Ran Kim

8. Luster (Picador, 2021) / Raven Leilani

9. The Drunkard (trans. from the Chinese by Charlotte Chun-lam Yiu) (ed. Nick Hordern) (The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2021) / Liu Yichang

10. A Burning (Scribner UK, 2021) / Megha Majumdar

11. A Crooked Tree (Faber & Faber/Harper, 2021) / Una Mannion

12. The Last Migration (Chatto & Windus, 2021) / Charlotte McConaghy

13. Words to Shape My Name (New Island Books, 2021) / Laura McKenna

14. The Art of Falling (John Murray/Random House, 2021) / Danielle McLaughlin

15. Fifty-five Pillars, Red Walls (trans. from the Hindi by Daisy Rockwell) (Speaking Tiger, 2021) / Usha Priyamvada

16. Bride of the Sea (Tin House Books, 2021) / Eman Quotah

17. Memorial (Atlantic Books, 2021) / Bryan Washington

18. The Inland Sea (Catapult, 2021) / Madeleine Watts

19. We Are All Birds of Uganda (Merky Books, 2021) / Hafsa Zayyan

STORIES

1. That Old Country Music (Doubleday, 2021) / Kevin Barry
2. The Dangers of Smoking in Bed (trans. from the Spanish by Megan McDowell) (Hogarth Press, 2021) / Marina Enríquez

3. Under a Dark Angel’s Eye: The Selected Stories of Patricia Highsmith (with an introduction by Carmen Maria Machado) (Virago, 2021) / Patricia Highsmith

4. Life Among the Terranauts (Little, Brown, 2021) / Caitlin Horrocks
5. Like Fado and Other Stories (Salt, 2021) / Graham Mort
6. Cardiff, by the Sea: Four Novellas (Head of Zeus, 2021) / Joyce Carol Oates

POETRY

1. Floaters (W.W. Norton, 2021) / Martín Espada

2. Hiddensee (Picador, 2021) / Annie Freud

3. Living Weapon (Faber & Faber, 2021) / Rowan Ricardo Phillips

NONFICTION

1. Homo Irrealis: Essays (Macmillan USA, 2021) / André Aciman
2. Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires: The Life of Patricia Highsmith (Bloomsbury Caravel, 2021) / Richard Bradford

3. Tales from the Life of Bruce Wannell: Adventurer, Linguist, Orientalist (Sickle Moon/Eland Publishing, 2020) / Barnaby Rogerson & Rose Baring (eds.)

4. Walking with Ghosts: A Memoir (Grove Press, 2021) / Gabriel Byrne

5. The Tale of the Horse: A History of India on Horseback (Picador India, 2021) / Yashaswini Chandra

6. Dostoevsky in Love: An Intimate Life (Bloomsbury Continuum, 2021) / Alex Christofi

7. Let Me Tell You What I Mean (Alfred A. Knopf, 2021) / Joan Didion

8. The Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood; Youth; Dependency (trans. from the Danish by Tiina Nunnally & Michael Favala Goldman) (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2021) / Tove Ditlevsen

9. Himalaya: A Human History (W.W. Norton, 2021) / Ed Douglas
10. Unsolaced: Along the Way to All That Is (Pantheon, 2021) / Gretel Ehrlich

11. Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape (William Collins, 2021) / Cal Flyn

12. A Short History of Russia: From the Pagans to Putin (Ebury Press, 2021) / Mark Galeotti

13. The Gardens of Mars: Madagascar, An Island Story (Apollo, 2021) / John Gimlette
14. Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Today (Chatto & Windus, 2021) / Eddie S. Glaude Jr

15. ¡Populista!: The Rise of Latin America’s 21st-Century Strongman (Apollo/Head of Zeus, 2021) / Will Grant

16. The Unquiet Englishman: A Life of Graham Greene (W.W. Norton, 2021) / Richard Greene

17. The Volga: A History of Russia’s Greatest River (Yale University Press, 2021) / Janet M. Hartley

18. Blood and Iron: The Rise and Fall of the German Empire 1871-1918 (The History Press, 2021) / Katja Hoyer

19. China 1949: Year of Revolution (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021) / Graham Hutchings

20. India and the Silk Roads: The History of a Trading World (Hurst, 2021) / Jagjeet Lally

21. Thinking Again: A Diary (Liveright, 2021) / Jan Morris

22. Thin Places (Canongate, 2021) / Kerri ní Dochartaigh

23. The Doctors Blackwell: How Two Pioneering Sisters Brought Medicine to Women and Women to Medicine (W.W. Norton, 2021) / Janice P. Nimura

24. Nora: A Love Story of Nora and James Joyce (Harper Perennial, 2021) / Nuala O’Connor

25. Aftershocks: A Memoir (Simon & Schuster, 2021) / Nadia Owusu

26. Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain (Viking, 2021) / Sathnam Sanghera

27. A Swim in a Pond in the Rain (In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life) (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021) / George Saunders

28. Work: A Deep History, from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots (Penguin Press, 2021) / James Suzman

29. Francis Bacon: Revelations (William Collins, 2021) / Mark Stevens & Annalyn Swan

30. Wollstonecraft: Philosophy, Passion, and Politics (Princeton University Press, 2021) / Sylvana Tomaselli

31. Midnight’s Borders: A People’s History of Modern India (Context, 2021) / Suchitra Vijayan

32. Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World (Harper/William Collins, 2021) / Simon Winchester