Reading List · Lisanne Swart
Best Books of 2021
2021 was the year the world was still processing what had happened to it. The books that mattered were the ones that took that seriously. One of them — a book about why we love the way we do, and where our patterns actually come from — is on my bookshelf and has stayed there. The others are the books I keep returning to from that year: a Booker Prize winner about a broken promise and four decades of complicity in South Africa, an American literary event about twin sisters who built entirely different identities from the same starting point, a history of humanity that dismantled everything the standard story had taught us, and a novel about climate grief that did what the statistics cannot. Eight books. All worth your time.
By Lisanne Swart · 8 books · Fiction · Nonfiction · Memoir · Published 2021
What Happened to You? Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing
Bruce Perry is a trauma neuroscientist who has spent decades working with children who experienced extreme violence and neglect. Oprah Winfrey is a person who experienced those things herself. Their dialogue reframes the central question of mental health and relationships from “what is wrong with you?” to “what happened to you?” — a shift that sounds simple and is in practice transformative. Perry explains the neuroscience of how early childhood experiences shape the developing brain; Oprah’s personal testimony makes those mechanisms human and legible. The book became one of the bestselling nonfiction titles of 2021 and has continued to shape conversations about attachment, trauma, and relationships well beyond its publication year.
This is on my bookshelf and I return to it because it is the most practically useful book I know for understanding your own patterns — why you want what you want, why you respond the way you do, why certain relationships feel familiar in ways that are not entirely comfortable. The central reframe — from self-criticism to curiosity about what formed you — is one of the most important shifts available to anyone trying to understand themselves or the people they are close to. It also appears on my Books About Love list, because understanding what happened to you is the beginning of building love more consciously.
The Promise
The Promise won the Booker Prize 2021 on Galgut’s third shortlisting. It covers four funerals in a South African white family across four decades: at the first, a dying matriarch extracts a promise from her husband that Salome — the family’s Black servant — will be given the house she lives in. The promise is made and not kept. The novel tracks what happens to the family across post-apartheid South Africa as the years pass and the promise recedes, is occasionally remembered, and is never fulfilled. Galgut writes in a shifting, restless voice that moves between perspectives and registers without warning, mirroring the moral restlessness of his subject. The result is one of the finest Booker winners of the decade.
The Promise is on this list because it does what the best South African fiction does: it holds the personal and the political inside each other without letting either simplify the other. A broken promise to a Black servant, passed down through a white family across forty years of a changed country, turns out to be the most precise possible lens for what complicity looks like in practice — not dramatic, not chosen, but accumulated through inertia and convenience and the particular cowardice of people who know what is right and cannot bring themselves to do it. One of the most structurally accomplished novels of recent years.
The Vanishing Half
Twin sisters from a small, light-skinned Black community in Louisiana take completely different paths: one stays and raises a dark-skinned daughter; the other passes as white in another city and builds an entirely different life. Bennett follows both sisters and their daughters across decades, making the question of identity — what it is, what it is performed to be, what it costs to maintain a performance across a lifetime — into a multigenerational family saga that is simultaneously intimate and structurally ambitious. Published in 2020, it was the most read and most recommended American literary novel throughout 2021.
The Vanishing Half earned its readership because it found a structure that made its subject feel completely fresh. Bennett is writing about choice — the specific choices available to a person based on how the world reads them, and what those choices cost across decades. The novel works on the same territory as the best family secrets fiction: what a family hides from itself, and what it costs everyone downstream. One of the essential American novels of the decade.
→ More on fiction about identity and what families conceal: my family secrets list
Beautiful World, Where Are You
Sally Rooney’s third novel follows two women — Alice, a novelist who has become famous faster than she knows what to do with, and Eileen, a literary magazine editor in Dublin — and the men in their lives, through a series of long, digressive emails and close third-person narrative. Where Normal People was about desire and class in early adulthood, Beautiful World, Where Are You asks the question that comes after: what do you do with your life once you have what you thought you wanted, and it still does not feel like enough? Rooney uses the email format to think aloud about meaning, beauty, historical catastrophe, and the relationship between personal happiness and collective suffering. The novel divided critics more than anything she had written before, which is usually a sign of genuine ambition.
This is the Rooney novel for readers who loved the intelligence of Normal People but wanted the characters to be asking larger questions. The correspondence between Alice and Eileen gives Rooney space to do something rare in contemporary literary fiction: to let her characters think seriously about the world, about art, about what it means to live a good life in a moment of ongoing historical crisis. It is her most personal and most philosophically serious book. Not everyone finds the register comfortable. That is exactly the right response to it.
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
David Graeber — the anthropologist and anarchist thinker who died suddenly in 2020 — spent the last decade of his life working on this book with archaeologist David Wengrow. The Dawn of Everything is a direct challenge to the standard narrative of human history: the story that runs from hunter-gatherers through agriculture through civilisation through inequality, as though inequality were the inevitable endpoint of human development. Drawing on recent archaeological discoveries, Graeber and Wengrow argue that this narrative is both empirically wrong and politically convenient — that human societies have been far more varied, experimental, and self-consciously organised than the standard story allows, and that the current state of things is considerably less inevitable than it is usually presented as being.
The Dawn of Everything is one of the most genuinely liberating nonfiction books of recent years — a book that expands your sense of what is possible by expanding the evidence of what has actually existed. Graeber died before it was published, which makes it both a legacy and a provocation. It is also a deeply enjoyable read: long and richly detailed but written with energy and wit, and the kind of book that changes the questions you bring to everything you read afterwards.
Bewilderment
Richard Powers won the Pulitzer Prize for The Overstory in 2019 — a novel about trees and the people who fight to protect them. Bewilderment is shorter and more intimate: a widowed astrobiologist and his neurodivergent nine-year-old son Robin, set in a near future in which the natural world is visibly collapsing. The father searches for a way to help his son without medicating him; the novel searches for a way to make the ecological emergency feel personal rather than abstract. Bewilderment was shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2021 and is, in some ways, the most emotionally direct thing Powers has written.
Powers is the novelist who has done most to make the climate emergency legible as a moral and emotional experience rather than a political abstraction. Bewilderment works because the grief at its centre is specific — a father, a son, a particular relationship — rather than general. The scale is smaller than The Overstory, the argument is sharper, and the father-son relationship is one of the most beautifully rendered in recent American fiction. If you have not read Powers before, this is the clearest entry point.
The Premonition: A Pandemic Story
Michael Lewis — the author of The Big Short, Moneyball, and Liar’s Poker — wrote The Premonition in real time, during the pandemic, about the people who saw it coming years earlier and were systematically ignored. It is a book about the specific failure mode of large institutions: how the people with the clearest understanding of a threat are routinely excluded from the decision-making structures that could act on that understanding. Lewis writes in his characteristic style — propulsive, character-driven, making complex systems legible through vivid individuals — and the result makes the pandemic’s mismanagement feel less like tragedy and more like a preventable, structural failure.
The Premonition is on this list because it answered, in 2021, the question that 2021 most needed answered: how did this happen? Lewis’s answer is structural rather than political — about the specific ways that organisations filter out the information they most need — and it is one that extends well beyond the pandemic. The individuals he profiles are extraordinary, and their frustration at being right and unheard is one of the most recognisable experiences in any large institution. The book is also, characteristically, impossible to put down.
The Practice: Shipping Creative Work
Seth Godin’s argument in The Practice is direct and uncomfortable: creativity is not a gift, and waiting for inspiration is a way of avoiding the work. What separates people who make things from people who want to make things is not talent but practice — the daily commitment to shipping work whether or not it feels ready, whether or not it feels good, whether or not it performs as expected. The book is structured as a series of short chapters, each making one precise point, and it builds into one of the most honest accounts available of what sustained creative work actually requires. It was widely read and recommended throughout 2021 as people reconsidered what they were doing with their time.
The Practice belongs on this list alongside The Creative Act and The War of Art: books that take the psychology of creative resistance seriously without mystifying it. Godin’s version is the most ruthlessly practical. He is not interested in the conditions of creativity or the nature of inspiration — he is interested in the daily decision to work, which is the only decision that actually matters. If you find yourself waiting to feel ready, this book names what you are doing and explains why it will not work.
→ More books that change how you work and think: my best self-improvement list
Where to begin with the best of 2021
If you want the book that most changed how people understood themselves and their relationships
→ What Happened to You? by Oprah Winfrey and Bruce Perry. On my bookshelf. The reframe from “what is wrong with you?” to “what happened to you?” is one of the most practically useful shifts I know.
If you want the Booker Prize winner — and one of the finest South African novels of recent decades
→ The Promise by Damon Galgut. Four funerals, four decades, a broken promise that nobody can bring themselves to keep. Formally extraordinary and morally precise.
If you want the American literary novel that became essential reading
→ The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett. Twin sisters, two completely different identities built from the same origin. One of the finest American novels of the decade.
If you want the nonfiction book that most expanded what feels possible
→ The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow. A challenge to the entire standard narrative of human history — and the evidence that the current state of things is far less inevitable than it is usually presented as being.
One book from this year is on my bookshelf: What Happened to You? by Oprah Winfrey and Bruce Perry. Read my full thoughts on it here →
Frequently asked questions about the best books of 2021
What were the best books of 2021?
The Booker Prize 2021 went to The Promise by Damon Galgut — four funerals across four decades of post-apartheid South Africa, built around a broken promise. The most widely read American literary novel of 2021 was The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett. In nonfiction, What Happened to You? by Oprah Winfrey and Bruce Perry was the most practically influential, and The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow was the most intellectually significant. Sally Rooney’s third novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You, was the most discussed literary event of the year in British and Irish fiction.
Who won the Booker Prize in 2021?
Damon Galgut won the Booker Prize 2021 for The Promise, on his third time on the Booker shortlist. The novel covers four funerals in a white South African family over four decades, structured around a broken promise to give a Black servant the house she lives in. Galgut’s shifting, restless narrative voice moves between perspectives without warning — a technique that mirrors his subject’s moral evasiveness. It is one of the finest Booker winners of the decade.
Is What Happened to You? worth reading?
Yes — and I say this as someone who has it on my bookshelf and returns to it regularly. The dialogue format between Oprah Winfrey and trauma neuroscientist Bruce Perry makes the science accessible without simplifying it. The central reframe — from asking what is wrong with you to asking what happened to you — is one of the most practically useful shifts I know for understanding your own patterns in relationships. It changed how I thought about attachment, about why I respond to certain situations the way I do, and about the people I am close to.
What is The Dawn of Everything about?
The Dawn of Everything challenges the standard narrative of human history — the story that runs inevitably from hunter-gatherers through agriculture to civilisation and inequality, as though the current state of things were the natural endpoint of human development. Drawing on recent archaeological discoveries, David Graeber and David Wengrow argue that human societies have been far more varied, experimental, and self-consciously organised than the standard story allows, and that inequality is not inevitable. It is long and richly detailed, written with energy and wit, and one of the most genuinely liberating nonfiction books of recent years.
How does Beautiful World, Where Are You compare to Normal People?
Beautiful World, Where Are You is a more intellectually ambitious novel than Normal People — it is less concerned with desire and class dynamics and more interested in the question of what makes a life feel meaningful. The email format gives Rooney room to think aloud about beauty, history, and collective suffering in ways Normal People did not attempt. It divided critics more sharply than anything she had written before, which is a reliable sign of genuine seriousness. If Normal People felt like the right temperature but you wanted more, this is the next step.
More from the shelf
From the bookshelf
“The only way you can love anybody is if you don't need them.” — Tara Westover, Educated
More hand-picked recommendations on my personal bookshelf — books from every year that stay with you long after the last page.
