new york times book review december 26 2021

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‘New York Times’ Reveals Its Best Books of 2021

BY Michael Schaub • Nov. 29, 2021

The New York Times Book Review unveiled its list of the 10 best books of the year , with titles by Honorée Fannone Jeffers, Patricia Lockwood, and Clint Smith among those making the cut.

Jeffers was honored for her debut novel, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois , which was a finalist for this year’s Kirkus Prize and longlisted for the National Book Award.

Lockwood made the list for her Booker Prize-finalist No One Is Talking About This , while Imbolo Mbue was honored for her novel How Beautiful We Were . The other two works of fiction selected by the Times were Intimacies by Katie Kitamura and the genre-defying When We Cease To Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut, translated by Adrian Nathan West. Kitamura’s novel made the National Book Award fiction longlist, while Labatut’s book was on the prize’s translated literature shortlist.

Smith’s How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America , also longlisted for the National Book Award,was one of the nonfiction books to make the Times list, along with Annette Gordon-Reed’s On Juneteenth .

Other nonfiction books on the list included Andrea Elliott’s Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival and Hope in an American City and Tove Ditlevsen’s memoir cycle,  The Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood; Youth; Dependency , translated by Tiina Nunnally and Michael Favala Goldman.

Rounding out the list was Heather Clark’s Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath . The biography, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award, was published in 2020; when asked on Twitter why it was named one of the Times’ notable books of 2021, Times Book Review editor Pamela Paul explained , “We used to make the cut after the Holiday issue and carry the titles over [to the] following year. Moving forward, it’s the full calendar year.”

Michael Schaub is a Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.

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484 episodes

The world's top authors and critics join host Gilbert Cruz and editors at The New York Times Book Review to talk about the week's top books, what we're reading and what's going on in the literary world. Listen to this podcast in New York Times Audio, our new iOS app for news subscribers. Download now at nytimes.com/audioapp

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This month marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of Stephen King’s first novel, “Carrie.” On this week’s episode, host Gilbert Cruz talks to the novelist Grady Hendrix, who read and re-read many of King’s books over several years for a writing project, as well as King superfan Damon Lindelof, the TV showrunner behind shows such as “Lost” and “The Leftovers.”

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Customer Reviews

3.3K Ratings

Still good but room for improvement

I still find smart and interesting discussions here but I miss news from the publishing world and especially miss hearing what people at the Books desk are reading,

What the Heck

After 15 years of listening religiously, especially after Pamela Paul took over, i can't even bother some weeks. Women buy the books and women do most of the reading, and yet it's a male-centric podcast now. And boring, by the way.

New format seems to get a lot of flack but I like it well enough 🤷‍♂️

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Celebrating the 125th Anniversary of The New York Times Book Review

This year marks the 125th anniversary of the Book Review, which Adolph S. Ochs established as a standalone supplement on Oct. 10, 1896. Read more in a note from Pamela Paul and Tina Jordan.

This year marks the 125th anniversary of The New York Times Book Review, which Adolph S. Ochs established as a standalone supplement on Oct. 10, 1896, shortly after he took over as publisher. The first issue, then called the Saturday Review of Books and Art, was eight pages long and featured news on the cover, including a story about Oscar Wilde’s travails in prison and another about the threat department stores posed to independent booksellers. We have been covering the world of books, authors and ideas ever since. Today, the Book Review remains the only freestanding newspaper book review in the country, a central component of The Times that distinguishes us from all our competitors and makes us the preeminent place for literary journalism in the country. That’s a lot to celebrate!

To mark this achievement, we are planning a year-long celebration that will culminate in a live October event, with a special print section commemorating the anniversary, and the publication of a book by Tina Jordan, deputy editor of the Book Review, that celebrates the Book Review’s storied history. Until then, you will find stories throughout the year highlighting archival gems combined with work from the most exciting literary authors working today. We begin with a piece that spotlights 25 great writers who have contributed to our pages , from H.G. Wells to Toni Morrison. In February we will look back at love stories over time and an essay by Parul Sehgal that examines and reassesses the critical legacy of The Times’s books coverage.

Each month, we’ll resurface some of the best, worst, funniest, strangest and most influential coverage from our pages in our digital report and on the back page of the Book Review. We’ll offer a dedicated segment to the anniversary in our weekly Book Review podcast (which is celebrating an anniversary of its own: 15 years in April, making it the longest-running podcast at The Times). You will see snippets of our past coverage highlighted on our social channels — Instagram, Twitter and Facebook — and in the Book Review newsletter every week. In other words, there will be a lot to read, but we couldn’t think of a better place for that particular activity than the Book Review.

As an editor’s note from 1897 points out, “Life is worth living because there are books.”

We look forward to celebrating the anniversary with all of you.

Pamela and Tina

Explore Further

Pamela paul to oversee daily and sunday book coverage, jennifer szalai named new nonfiction critic, nyt book review publishes first art-themed issue.

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Locus Online

The Magazine of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Field

The New York Times Best Books of 2021

They also listed 100 Notable Books of 2020 , including the following titles of genre interest:

• Appleseed , Matt Bell (Custom House)
• Bewilderment , Richard Powers (Norton)
• Build Your House Around My Body , Violet Kupersmith (Random House)
• A Calling for Charlie Barnes , Joshua Ferris (Little, Brown)
• Chronicles From the Land of the Happiest People on Earth , Wole Soyinka (Pantheon)
• Cloud Cuckoo Land , Anthony Doerr (Scribner)
• Detransition, Baby , Torrey Peters (One World)
• Harlem Shuffle , Colson Whitehead (Doubleday)
• How Beautiful We Were , Imbolo Mbue (Random House)
• Klara and the Sun , Kazuo Ishiguro (Knopf)
• Light Perpetual , Francis Spufford (Scribner)
• The Lincoln Highway , Amor Towles (Viking)
• The Love Songs of W.E.B Du Bois , Honorée Fanonne Jeffers (HarperCollins)
• The Magician , Colm Tóibín (Scribner)
• The Morning Star , Karl Ove Knausgaard (Penguin)
• My Year Abroad , Chang-rae Lee (Riverhead)
• One Last Stop , Casey McQuiston (St. Martin’s Griffin)
• Our Country Friends , Gary Shteyngart (Random House)
• The Sentence , Louise Erdrich (Harper)
• Something New Under the Sun , Alexandra Kleeman (Hogarth)
• Strange Beasts of China , Yan Ge (Melville House)
• The Sun Collective , Charles Baxter (Pantheon)
• Velvet Was the Night , Silvia Moreno-Garcia (Del Rey)
• What Strange Paradise , Omar El Akkad (Knopf)

For more information, see The New York Times  website .

©Locus Magazine. Copyrighted material may not be republished without permission of LSFF.

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The Best Books We Read in 2021

By The New Yorker

“ De Gaulle ,” by Julian Jackson

New Yorker writers reflect on the year’s highs and lows.

This superb biography of the former French leader brilliantly explores how he managed to dominate his country’s political life for decades. Jackson’s account of De Gaulle’s youth and conservative milieu only enhances one’s respect for De Gaulle’s stand, in 1940, against the Vichy government, and his account of De Gaulle’s war years in London makes clear why Churchill and Roosevelt found him almost impossible to deal with. The second half of the book—which deals with De Gaulle’s return to power during the conflict in Algeria, and his somewhat autocratic presidency—is even more compelling; together the two halves form as good an argument as one can make for believing that a single individual can alter the course of history. But Jackson, with sublime prose and a sure grasp of the politics and personalities of the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Republics, never allows that argument to overshadow De Gaulle’s extremely difficult and domineering personality, and why it never entirely fit the democracy he helped rescue and then presided over. —Isaac Chotiner

“ Segu: A Novel ,” by Maryse Condé

In a year that began with an attempted coup, it was good to remember that zealotry and factionalism have menaced every society—and often make for excellent storytelling, too. Maryse Condé’s 1984 novel “Segu” opens in the ruthlessly competitive capital of the eighteenth-century Bambara Empire, in present-day Mali, where the ruling mansa uneasily monitors the rise of Islam and the mysterious arrival of white explorers. Griots sing the exploits of a noble family, the Traores, whose sons are destined to suffer every consequence of modernity’s upheavals. Condé, who was born in Guadeloupe but spent years in West Africa, is the great novelist of the Afro-Atlantic world, and “Segu,” her masterpiece, is the mother of diaspora epics. The novel follows the Traores as they are scattered across the globe, from Moroccan universities to Brazilian sugarcane fields, pulled every which way by their ambitions, lusts, and religious yearnings. Condé excels at evoking the tensions of a world in flux, whether it’s the ambivalence of a man torn between his family gods and Islam’s cosmopolitanism or the cynicism of a wealthy mixed woman who sells slaves on the coast of Senegal. Despite its magisterial scope, “Segu” is also warm and gossipy, and completely devoid of the sentimental attachment to heritage that turns too many family sagas into ancestral stations of the cross. Condé has a wicked sense of humor that doesn’t play favorites, especially with her mostly male protagonists, whose naïve adventurism and absent-minded cruelty (especially toward women) profoundly shape the history that eludes their grasp. —Julian Lucas

“ Upper Bohemia: A Memoir ,” by Hayden Herrera

I came upon this recent memoir while browsing the shelves at the Brooklyn Public Library, and was immediately drawn in by its cover: a black-and-white photograph of two young girls, perched out the back window of a sports car, whose ruffled blouses and blond hair suggested a kind of patrician free-spiritedness. Herrera is known for her biographies of artists such as Frida Kahlo and Arshile Gorky, but in “Upper Bohemia” she turns to the story of her own family, a high-Wasp clan as privileged as it was screwed up. During the nineteen-forties and fifties, Herrera and her older sister Blair were shunted, willy-nilly, between their divorced parents, both of whom were possessed of great looks, flighty temperaments, and intense narcissism. Her mother and father—each married five times—often disregarded the girls, treating them as considerably less significant than their own artistic or sexual fulfillment, whose pursuit took them through urbane, artsy circles in Cape Cod and New York, Mexico City and Cambridge. Herrera tells a fascinating cultural history of a particular milieu, but what is most affecting is her ability to channel, in sensate detail, the life of a lonely child trying to make sense of the world around her. Her tone carries a measure of detachment, but I often found it immensely moving. “Blair and I had not spent much time with our mother since the fall of 1948 when, after putting us on a train to go to boarding school in Vermont, she drove to Mexico to get a divorce,” she writes. “Whenever our mother did turn up, she brought presents from Mexico, animals made of clay or embroidered blouses for Blair and me. She always made everything sound wonderful. She was like sunshine. Blair and I moved toward her like two Icaruses, but we never touched her golden rays.” This is a beautiful book. —Naomi Fry

“ Long Live the Post Horn! ,” by Vigdis Hjorth, translated by Charlotte Barslund

Vigdis Hjorth’s “Long Live the Post Horn!”—a swift, darkly funny novel about existential despair, collective commitment, and the Norwegian postal service—buoyed me during this strange, roiling year. Ellinor, the novel’s narrator, is a thirty-five-year-old public-relations consultant whose projects and relationships are characterized by a bleak, steady detachment. When her colleague Dag leaves town, Ellinor grudgingly inherits one of his clients: Postkom, the Norwegian Post and Communications Union, which wants to fight an E.U. directive that would usher in competition from the private sector. For Ellinor, the project begins creakily; gradually, she gets swept up. What results is a personal awakening of sorts—a newfound desire to live, connect, and communicate—and a genuinely gripping treatment of bureaucratic tedium. “Long Live the Post Horn!” is rich with political and philosophical inquiries, and gentle with their delivery. They arrive in the form of dissociative diary entries, awkward Christmas gift exchanges, and the world’s loneliest description of a sex toy (“he had bought the most popular model online, the one with the highest ratings”). There’s also a long yarn told by a postal worker, which makes for a wonderful, near-mythic embedded narrative. “What exactly did ‘real’ mean?” Ellinor wonders, experiencing a crisis of authenticity while desperately trying to produce P.R. copy for the Real Thing, an American restaurant chain. “Was the man behind the Real Thing himself the real thing, I wondered? I googled him; he looked like every other capitalist.” Expansive and mundane—this novel was, for me, sheer joy. —Anna Wiener

“ Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History ,” by Lea Ypi

Some people feel free to imagine their lives unbounded by history. Lea Ypi did not have that luxury. Born in 1979 in Albania, then one of the most sealed-off countries in the Communist bloc, she had little reason to question her love for Stalin until the day, in 1990, that she went to hug his statue and found that protesters had decapitated it. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, the edifice of Albanian socialism collapsed, too. Even more disorienting was the fact that Ypi’s parents turned out never to have believed in it—they’d just talked a good line to prevent their dissident, bourgeois backgrounds from tainting her prospects. Ypi’s new book, “Free,” out in the U.K. and to be published stateside in January, is a tart and tender childhood memoir. But it’s also a work of social criticism, and a meditation on how to live with purpose in a world where history, far from having ended, seems energized by disinformation. Ypi, a political theorist at the London School of Economics, is interested in how categories of thought—“proletariat,” for instance—were replaced by reductive rallying cries like “freedom.” “When freedom finally arrived, it was like a dish served frozen,” she writes. “We chewed little, swallowed fast and remained hungry.” Her parents became leaders in the new democratic opposition but lost their savings to a shady investment scheme, and when the country devolved into civil war, in 1997, her formidable mother had to leave for Italy, where she worked cleaning houses. When Ypi studied abroad, her leftist friends didn’t want to hear about her experience: their socialism would be done right, and Albania’s was best forgotten. But Ypi is not in the business of forgetting—neither the repression of the system she grew up in nor the harshness of capitalism. Her book is a quick read, but, like Marx’s spectre haunting Europe, it stays with you. —Margaret Talbot

“ Harrow: A Novel ,” by Joy Williams

I have already written at length about the wonder of Joy Williams’s most recent novel , “Harrow.” But I feel compelled to re-state my case. The book is set in a world that climate change has transformed into a grave, and it’s dense with wild oddity, mystical intelligence, and with a keenness and beauty that start at the sentence level but sink down to the book’s core. “Harrow” tracks a teen-ager named Khristen across the desert, where she eventually meets up with a sort of “terrorist hospice” of retirees determined to avenge the earth. Her companion, Jeffrey, is either a ten-year-old with an alcoholic mother or the Judge of the Underworld. Williams, the real Judge of the Underworld, moonlights here as a theologist, animal-rights activist, mad oracle, social historian, and philosopher of language. Her comic set pieces—e.g., a birthday party in which the hastily provisioned cake depicts a replica, in icing, of Goya’s “Saturn Devouring His Son”—unlock tears, and her elegies wrest out laughter, if only because it’s absurd to find such pleasure in a study of devastation. When the book was over, I missed the awful, cleansing darkness of its eyes upon me. —Katy Waldman

“ A Mad Love: An Introduction to Opera ,” by Vivien Schweitzer

My late grandfather spent most of his weekends holed up in his study—a sunken room, adorned with a ratty Chesterfield sofa and posters from various international chess championships—listening to opera. As a child, I found this practice impenetrable. I didn’t understand the languages blaring out of his record player, and I wasn’t old enough to grasp the rhapsodic emotion inherent in the form. Opera is about Big Feelings; it radiates youth, yet it remains a passion that most people age into. (Perhaps that has something to do with the cost of a Met ticket.) Then the pandemic hit, and suddenly all I wanted to do was listen to Maria Callas, whose unhinged arias clicked into place as the soundtrack for my anxious, pacing mind. My grandfather was no longer around to discuss my fixation, but, fortunately, I found Vivien Schweitzer’s 2018 book, “A Mad Love,” which is a sparkling cultural history of opera’s greatest composers and their obsessive brains. Beginning with Monteverdi and barrelling through to Philip Glass, the book is about the blood and sweat that goes into writing an opera (an often lunatic effort, it seems), and about the feverish attachment fans have to the resulting work. I found myself tearing through it in the bathtub, delighted not just to inhale the gossipy backstories of the “Ring” cycle and “La Traviata” but to join the society of opera nuts of which my grandfather was a card-carrying member. I finally understood what he was listening for on those Sunday afternoons: anguish, joy, love, betrayal. —Rachel Syme

“ Not One Day ,” by Anne Garréta, translated by Emma Ramadan

It is a peculiar feeling, reading a book that seems to have been written for you but wasn’t. The friend who recommended the Oulipian writer Anne Garréta’s “Not One Day” must have known that I would find this merger of intimacy and anonymity irresistible. While recovering from an accident that has left her body immobile, the book’s narrator, a nomadic literature professor, decides that she will write about the women she has desired. Each woman will be identified by a letter of the alphabet; to each letter, she will devote five hours a day for precisely one month. She knows that narrating desire requires discipline—and she finds that desire always, always exceeds it. Letters are skipped and jumbled, so that the table of contents reads, “B, X, E, K, L, D, H, N, Y, C, I, Z.” The narrator takes a long break from the project and, when she comes back to it, one of the stories she writes is fiction. Slowly, the categories that keep desire and its creation of “our little selves” in check—self and other, past and present, man and woman, heterosexual and homosexual, solipsistic alienation and shared passion—get wonderfully and terrifyingly muddled. Instead of a confession written in the familiar “alphabet of desire,” we glimpse the making of a whole new language. I could smother the book with adoration—it is aching and maddening, intelligent and wildly sexy. But it would be simpler to say that reading it is like meeting someone new and feeling the world come undone. Here is a book that insists that the desire for fiction, for its mimicry and its mirage, is indistinguishable from the desire for another person. —Merve Emre

“ Tom Stoppard: A Life ,” by Hermione Lee

For a time this year, Lee’s newest biography just seemed to be around , and during a couple weeks when I was ostensibly reading other things, I found myself opening it in odd moments—over breakfast, waiting for the pasta pot to boil—until I realized that I’d worked my way through the whole thing. The biography is nearly nine hundred pages, so my experience of it as a side pleasure, a lark, is a testament to Lee’s craft. Much of Stoppard’s history is widely known: his passage from peripatetic refugee youth to Bristol newspaperman and radio-drama hack, and then, with “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” to fame and fortune as a witty playwright. What Lee adds is detail, particularly around interesting career turns, plus a big serving of her own admiration. (Not entirely to its credit, I think, this is the sort of biography that everyone dreams of having written about them; our protagonist is always brilliant, invariably a delight. Stoppard, on reading it, was apparently moved to clarify that he was “not as nice as people think.”) What Stoppard contributes is an air of whimsy on the ride up his great tower of success. There is pleasant cohesion to his body of work, with its blend of bookish intellection and breezy verbal humor. Off the page, it becomes clear, he pairs casual social climbing with the cheery pursuit of material ease, often courtesy of Hollywood. He has maintained a stream of scriptwriting work, on projects such as the Indiana Jones franchise, and his constant efforts to boondoggle more luxury out of what’s offered him—his budget must be increased to accommodate a high-end hotel suite, he tells a studio, “because I prefer not to sleep and work in the same room”—are among the smaller charms of this book. Lee’s biography is ultimately such a pleasure, though, because it is a writer’s book: full of respect for the thrill of the craft, able to keep the progress of the life and the work aloft in the right balance. To read it is to be excited about the act of literature all over again. —Nathan Heller

“ Novel 11, Book 18 ,” by Dag Solstad, translated by Sverre Lyngstad

I first encountered “Novel 11, Book 18,” by the great Norwegian novelist Dag Solstad, on a bright, warm day, on a walk with some friends who were visiting from out of town. Buzzed on the weather and the handsome paperback cover—deep green on cream—and, above all, on the nearness of my friends, I bought it. It was almost funny, then, to discover how relentlessly bleak the book is. Published in 1992, but released in the United States this year, by New Directions, with an English translation by Sverre Lyngstad, it tells the story of Bjørn Hansen, a mild-mannered civil servant who has left his wife and son in pursuit of his lover, Turid Lammers. The change of life means a change of locale: Hansen leaves Oslo and settles in Kongsberg, a small, airless town where he soon joins an amateur theatre troupe, of which Turid is widely considered the most talented performer and a kind of spiritual leader. In probably the best and darkest bit of situational comedy that I read all year, Hansen tries to persuade the troupe—usually a vehicle for light musicals—to put on a production of Henrik Ibsen’s play “The Wild Duck.” He wins out, but the show is a terrible flop—and, worse in Hansen’s eyes, Turid gives a cynical, crowd-pleasing performance that inoculates her, and only her, from the more general disapproval of the audience. The relationship is soon over. Solstad tells the story in deceptively simple sentences that repeat themselves in a fugal fashion, gathering new and ever sadder aspects of meaning as they recur. Hansen, wading through the disappointing wash of his life—he’s having the worst midlife crisis imaginable—eventually cooks up a scheme of revenge that’s so sad and absurd it’s almost slapstick. The book’s generic title implies that tiny tragedies like Hansen’s are happening everywhere, all the time, as a simple cost of being alive. For Solstad, what feels like a reprieve—sun and intimacy, the company of friends—is just another step on a tightrope that stretches across the void. Maybe save this one for summer. —Vinson Cunningham

“ Patch Work: A Life Amongst Clothes ,” by Claire Wilcox

Among the books that most surprised and most moved me this year was “Patch Work: A Life Amongst Clothes,” a memoir by Claire Wilcox. Wilcox is senior curator of fashion at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, and she writes about clothing with an intoxicating specificity: century-old gowns are made from “narrow lengths of the finest Japanese silk, hand-stitched together and then pleated into rills like the delicate underside of a field mushroom.” But this fragmentary, dreamlike book is not about fashion as it is often understood. There is no industry gossip, no analysis of trends. Rather, Wilcox uses her encounters with objects—the bags of lace in the museum’s collection, the pair of purple velvet trousers she borrowed from a charismatic friend—to explore themes of love and loss, birth and bereavement, family and tribe. The book, which is as skillful and oblique in its structure as the precious gowns she describes, is stitched together with loving care from narrative scraps and images, ultimately revealing how materiality and memory operate on one another, so that the sensation of holding a button in her fingers brings Wilcox back to her earliest memory of fastening her mother’s cardigan: “buttoning and unbuttoning her all the way up, and then all the way down again.” —Rebecca Mead

“ Sabbath’s Theater ,” by Philip Roth

Over the course of the pandemic, the actor John Turturro and I have been adapting Roth’s novel for the stage, so I’ve read the book probably twenty times now. I have been astonished again and again. It’s never the adulterous urinating or alte kaker underwear-sniffing that shock me. It’s Roth’s singular capacity for conjuring death—its promises, its terrors, its reliability, and the relentless ache that it leaves behind. There are times when Roth approaches the subject with a cosmic lightheartedness: “Exactly how present are you, Ma? Are you only here or are you everywhere?” Mickey Sabbath, the aging, insatiable puppeteer, asks his dead mother’s ghost. “Do you know only what you knew when you were living, or do you now know everything, or is ‘knowing’ no longer an issue?” When it pertains to Drenka, Sabbath’s Croatian mistress—his “sidekicker,” as she puts it—death is tinged with so much yearning that it’s almost too much to bear, for both Sabbath and the reader (this one, anyway). “Got used to the oxygen prong in her nose. Got used to the drainage bag pinned to the bed,” Sabbath thinks, recalling the last of many nights he spent at her hospital bedside. “Cancer too widespread for surgery. I’d got used to that, too.” For all of Sabbath’s lubricious opportunism, Drenka is his one love. “We can live with widespread and we can live with tears; night after night, we can live with all of it, as long as it doesn’t stop.” But it does, of course. It always stops. Though not, in this book, for Sabbath, Roth’s most unrepentantly diabolical hero, despite his relentless flirtation with suicide: “He could not fucking die. How could he leave? How could he go? Everything he hated was here.” —Ariel Levy

“ Warmth ,” by Daniel Sherrell

In “Warmth,” the writer and organizer Daniel Sherrell’s bracing début memoir , he refers to climate change as “the Problem”—the horrifying, galvanizing fact that should cause all sentient people to lose sleep, to shout themselves hoarse, to reorient their lives in fundamental ways. And yet, apart from a small minority, most people seem content to listen to the string ensemble on the deck of the Titanic, shushing anyone who tries to interrupt the music. To be clear, this is my harsh indictment, not Sherrell’s. For an unabashed climate alarmist, he is mostly compassionate to the quietists, in part because, like all Americans, he used to be one. Sherrell was born in 1990. His father, an oceanographer, took long research trips to the polar ice caps. Of all people, the Sherrells understood what an emergency climate change was—and yet their household was a normal one, in the sense that the Problem didn’t come up much. “Even when all the evidence was there before us,” Sherrell writes, “it was difficult to name.” The book is marketed as a climate-grief memoir, and it certainly is that, but what came through for me, even more clearly than the grief, was a kind of existential irony: not only are we apparently unable to solve the Problem, we can’t even seem to find an honest way to talk about it. Most Americans claim to believe the science; the science says that, unless we make drastic changes, the future will be cataclysmic; and yet, Sherrell observes, “it still sounded uncouth, even a little ridiculous, to spell this all out in conversation.” This is the way the world ends: not with a bang, and not even with much of a whimper. “Warmth,” written in the form of a letter to a child that Sherrell may or may not conceive, is not a thesis-y sort of book. But, if it has a central claim, it’s that the activist chestnut “Don’t mourn, organize!” is a facile mantra, a false choice. Why not both? —Andrew Marantz

“ Brothers and Keepers ,” by John Edgar Wideman

John Edgar Wideman was teaching at the University of Wyoming in the mid-seventies when, one day, his brother, Robert, showed up in town unannounced. Wideman had a young family and a steady job as a writer and an academic. Robert was on a more tumultuous path; he was on the run after a botched robbery back home, in Pittsburgh, had ended with one of his accomplices shooting a man, who later died from his injuries. Published in 1984, “Brothers and Keepers” is Wideman’s attempt to reckon with their diverging lives, and with the bond that they will never relinquish. He sifts through episodes from their childhood, searching for overlooked turning points. No single genre can tell such a complex story. Sometimes, the book is about the deprivations of the criminal-justice system, as Wideman describes in granular detail his visits to the prison where Robert serves a life term. (Robert would pursue education himself in prison, and, in 2019, his sentence was commuted.) At other times, the book feels surreal and fantastical, as Wideman entertains the possibility that their lives might have taken them elsewhere. And there are moments of austerity and dread, as he contemplates the ethics of turning his brother into a character. I often find that memoirs flatten the degree to which “the personal is political” is an idea rife with contradictions. What makes “Brothers and Keepers” so absorbing is that Wideman feels love but not sympathy—not for his brother, and certainly not for himself. —Hua Hsu

2021 in Review

• Richard Brody on the best movies .
• Doreen St. Félix on essential TV shows .
• Ian Crouch on the funniest jokes .
• Amanda Petrusich on the best music .
• Alex Ross on notable performances and recordings .
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Book News & Features

Tiktok is driving book sales. here are some titles #booktok recommends.

Jim Zarroli

People are buying a lot more books these days, in part because the pandemic has trapped everyone indoors with little to do. But among younger readers, another factor is driving sales up: The social-media site TikTok, where users post short videos they create themselves. Michele Abercrombie/NPR hide caption

People are buying a lot more books these days, in part because the pandemic has trapped everyone indoors with little to do. But among younger readers, another factor is driving sales up: The social-media site TikTok, where users post short videos they create themselves.

Colleen Hoover was thrilled when her novel It Ends With Us suddenly shot to the top of The New York Times bestseller list late last year – and also a little bewildered. The book had come out four years before.

"You know at first, I didn't really know what was going on and even my publishers were like, why are we seeing an uptick in sales?" she recalls.

Hoover soon discovered that young readers were talking about her book on TiktTok, using the hashtag #BookTok , and Hoover had become a BookTok sensation.

People are buying a lot more books these days, in part because the pandemic has trapped everyone indoors with little to do. But among younger readers, another factor is driving sales up: The social media site TikTok, where users post short videos they create themselves.

It's hard to quantify how big BookTok is, because TikTok doesn't release a lot of analytics. But publishers say it has become a major force, especially in the market for young adult and contemporary romance books.

Scroll through BookTok and you'll find countless videos of readers talking about their favorite reads.

@bookishmelody Hoping for a good book month so I can add more to the list!!! #booktok #booktoker #bookish #bookclub #bookworm #bookrecommendations #books #bookstan ♬ Calming and healing Lofi Hiphop(899982) - Oren

BookTok fans are mostly young women and they are ardent readers.

@laurens1ibrary I will never stop trying to convince people to read this book #booktok #books #bookrecommendations #bookworm #bookclub #yabooks #fantasy ♬ Downton Abbey - Brooklyn Duo

They prefer books that are passionate and emotional — and they like a good cry.

@bs.bookshelf popular booktok book review:) #booktok #bookworm #yabooktok #yabook #reading #bookrecommendations #fyp #foryoupage #bookreview ♬ original sound - speblack

Not surprisingly, book publishers are more than a little excited about BookTok.

Word of mouth has always had a big effect on what books people read, and BookTok can turbocharge that process.

"It just warms my heart as a book publisher. Because that's what we always strive for, is that word of mouth. And we know that that's what takes a book from one level to the stratosphere," says Libby McGuire, who heads Simon and Schuster's Atria division.

BookTok comes along at a time when the pandemic has closed off many of the traditional ways of reaching readers, such as book signings, says Nellie Kurtzman, a vice president at HarperCollins, which published another surprise TikTok bestseller, They Both Die At The End , by Adam Silvera.

"There were a lot of book festivals where fans would gather and just celebrate reading and now not being able to do that, at least they're able to do that virtually," Kurtzman notes.

Publishers have even started reaching out to the most influential BookTok video creators, sending them free books or even paying them to recommend titles.

Chloe Gong, whose debut novel, These Violent Delights , was a bestseller last year, has a big TikTok following and often produces videos about her work and her life.

@thechloegong ✨Immortal Longings✨summer 2023✨ ##booktok ##nafantasy ##newadult ##authorsoftiktok ##genzauthors ##publishing ##bookclub ##bookstan ##bookworm ##bookrecs ##books ♬ original sound - Angie Cox

But she doubts these videos increase her sales much.

"A lot of the reason why book sales are moving so fast is not because of the authors themselves. It's because the readers are so passionate," Gong says.

McGuire agrees. The magic that turns books into hits on BookTok is something that can really only happen from the ground up, she says.

"I don't think you can manufacture it, I think it's happening organically, and that's great."

What is #BookTok reading?

We were liars by e. lockhart.

A tale of secrets and lies in a super-wealthy family that summers on an island off Martha's Vineyard. A best-seller when first published in 2014, it went on to Goodreads Choice Award for Best Young Adult Fiction and is a perennial BookTok favorite.

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid

An aging movie star (think Elizabeth Taylor or Ava Gardner) recounts her career, scandals and all, for a magazine writer. Published in 2017, it's spent much of 2021 on the New York Times bestseller list, thanks to BookTok.

They Both Die At The End by Adam Silvera

Two strangers are told they're going to die before the day is out and decide to spend their last few hours together. Perhaps the quintessential BookTok success story. Published in 2017, it saw a sudden surge in sales in 2020 and has spent much of this year on the bestsellers list.

These Violent Delights By Chloe Gong

Gong was barely out of college when she struck gold with her debut novel. It's a Romeo-and-Juliet tale set in 1920's Shanghai during a gang war, and it became an instant New York Times bestseller. It's also helped turn the author into a BookTok favorite.

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

An imaginative retelling of The Iliad from the point of view of one of its minor characters, it won the Women's Prize for Fiction (formerly known as the Orange Prize for Fiction). Thanks to BookTok, it's also spent much of the year on the bestsellers list, which is not bad for a book that came out a decade ago.

It Ends With Us by Colleen Hoover

A young woman whose childhood was blighted by domestic abuse struggles to stop the cycle of violence in her own life. Originally published in 2016, it suddenly shot back onto the New York Times bestseller list last year, where it remains. This book and Hoover's later novel Verity have made her a bonafide BookTok sensation.

The Love Hypothesis By Ali Hazelwood

Love and romance in a university laboratory. It came out just this past fall, and was an instant bestseller, as well as a BookTok hit.

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Bill Goldstein recommends a novel about a friendship that spans decades and a murder mystery novel that takes the main character back to her high school.

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May 9, 2024

Current Issue

Table of Contents

October 21, 2021

Are the Kids All Right?

by Jonathan Franzen

They Ask Me

The more fraught the better, the storyteller.

Speak, Silence: In Search of W.G. Sebald

by Carole Angier

‘Who Designs Your Race?’

Estamos Bien: La Trienal 20/21

an exhibition at El Museo del Barrio, New York City, March 13–September 26, 2021

The CCP’s Culture of Fear

Hollywood’s master builder.

Paul R. Williams: Classic Hollywood Style

by Karen E. Hudson, with photography by Benny Chan and a foreword by Michael S. Smith

Paul R. Williams

by Marc Appleton, Stephen Gee, and Bret Parsons

Regarding Paul R. Williams: A Photographer’s View

by Janna Ireland

Hollywood’s Architect: The Paul R. Williams Story

a documentary film directed by Royal Kennedy Rodgers and Kathy McCampbell Vance

The Human Costs of AI

Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence

by Kate Crawford

We, the Robots?: Regulating Artificial Intelligence and the Limits of the Law

by Simon Chesterman

Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation

by Kevin Roose

The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can’t Think the Way We Do

by Erik J. Larson

A Mind in Pain

The Anatomy of Melancholy

by Robert Burton, edited by Angus Gowland

The Empire of Depression: A New History

by Jonathan Sadowsky

How to Be Depressed

by George Scialabba

Napoleon’s Greatest Trophy

Plunder: Napoleon’s Theft of Veronese’s Feast

by Cynthia Saltzman

What Does the Microbiome Do?

Gut Feelings: The Microbiome and Our Health

by Alessio Fasano and Susie Flaherty

In the Fire

A Daughter of Isis: The Early Life of Nawal El Saadawi, In Her Own Words

translated from the Arabic by Sherif Hetata

Walking Through Fire: The Later Years of Nawal El Saadawi, In Her Own Words

The Hidden Face of Eve: Women in the Arab World

translated from the Arabic by Sherif Hetata and with a foreword by Ronak Husni

Woman at Point Zero

translated from the Arabic by Sherif Hetata and with a foreword by Miriam Cooke

Memoirs from the Women’s Prison

translated from the Arabic by Marilyn Booth

The Fall of the Imam

A Poet’s-Eye View

Yi Sang: Selected Works

edited by Don Mee Choi and translated from the Korean by Jack Jung, Don Mee Choi, and Joyelle McSweeney, and from the Japanese by Sawako Nakayasu

Nature’s Evolving Tastes

A Most Interesting Problem: What Darwin’s Descent of Man Got Right and Wrong About Human Evolution

edited by Jeremy DeSilva

The Origins of the World: The Invention of Nature in the 19th Century

an exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, May 19–July 18, 2021

The Natural History of Edward Lear: New Edition

by Robert McCracken Peck, with a foreword by David Attenborough

‘All One’s Capacities’

Collected Stories

by Shirley Hazzard, edited by Brigitta Olubas and with a foreword by Zoë Heller

The Transit of Venus

by Shirley Hazzard, with an introduction by Lauren Groff

The Poet and the Publisher: The Case of Alexander Pope, Esq., of Twickenham Versus Edmund Curll, Bookseller in Grub Street

by Pat Rogers

Anything Can Happen

by Ariel Dorfman

by Salman Rushdie

‘The Lucky Ones’

In the East: How My Father and a Quarter Million Polish Jews Survived the Holocaust

by Mikhal Dekel

Survival on the Margins: Polish Jewish Refugees in the Wartime Soviet Union

by Eliyana R. Adler

Journey into the Land of the Zeks and Back: A Memoir of the Gulag

by Julius Margolin, translated from the Russian by Stefani Hoffman, with a foreword by Timothy Snyder and an introduction by Katherine R. Jolluck

What Is the N.E.D.’s Mission?

Country house equality, issue details.

On the cover: Yvette Mayorga, Sweet Water, After Lenardi, Giovanni Battista, sugar sculpture 16th century , 2018 (© Yvette Mayorga).

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When a Family’s Dysfunction Mirrors a Nation’s

“Crooked Seeds,” by Karen Jennings, is set in a drought-stricken South Africa where its fraught history is ever-present.

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Wadzanai Mhute is a former books editor at Oprah Daily. Her work has appeared in People magazine, The Guardian and Essence, among others.

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CROOKED SEEDS , by Karen Jennings

When Nelson Mandela was released from Victor Verster Prison in 1990, after 27 years of incarceration, there was hope in the air. He and his wife, Winnie, raised clenched fists in triumph as they emerged from the prison gates, surrounded by supporters of different races. His release heralded a South Africa on the verge of transformation. The promise of a new rainbow nation drove masses in 1994 to the first inclusive general elections, but 30 years on, South Africa is floundering with power cuts , a tanking economy and xenophobia .

Karen Jennings’s compelling, meditative novel “Crooked Seeds” is set in Cape Town in the near future, when an extended drought has worsened already bleak living conditions for many South Africans. Deidre van Deventer must navigate her new life after the government reclaimed her family home to secure aquifers beneath her neighborhood. Her father is long dead, and her mother is struggling with mental illness at a care center across the street.

Deidre herself is struggling to survive; she moves through her crisis-stricken world on crutches, having lost a leg years ago. Indifferent to the plight of those around her, Deidre is a perpetual victim, lamenting her situation and taking advantage of everyone. In one scene, she cuts the line of people waiting at a truck for their daily allotment of water:

A dull sunrise held back beyond the streetlamps and she crutched ­toward it, into the road, ignoring the cone markers so that cars had to stop for her, three in a row. She kept her eyes on the water truck, did not acknowledge the cars, did not look at the queue.

After she receives her water ahead of the hordes, the rest of her day involves begging for help, cigarettes and drinks from her neighbors. In Deidre’s mind, her whiteness and disability entitle her to demand what she thinks is her due, and it is no coincidence that those she abuses are people of color.

Deidre’s life takes an abrupt turn when the police summon her to her family home, now a rubble-filled excavation site. Human bones have been found here, she is told. Might she know anything about them? We soon learn that Deidre’s brother, Ross, was believed to have belonged to a pro-apartheid group that sought to disrupt the 1994 elections by blowing up voting centers. He disappeared after one of his bombs exploded at their home, costing Deidre her leg.

Initially, this plot and its aftermath seem to be the center of the novel, but Jennings cleverly uses it as a device to reveal the dysfunction of a family and of a nation. The storytelling is strongest when the narrative introduces bits of Deidre’s past, so that we can piece together a clearer, if not complete, story, which includes the revelation of a daughter, tucked away in England.

In the background, a mountain burns, reshaping the landscape and destroying lives. The country’s fraught history is ever-present and the sins of the past revisit Deirdre as she tries to suppress the truth, even from herself. There is no redemption arc here, though there is some resolution when Deidre finally seeks answers from her ailing mother. Intergenerational trauma presents itself in socioeconomic inequality and in abuse passed from parent to child to neighbors, across races and cultures. But there is still hope in the burning, the novel proposes, and it begins with confronting the past so new growth can emerge.

CROOKED SEEDS | By Karen Jennings | Hogarth | 219 pp. | $28

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