Best Books of 2021

What Happened to You?

Oprah Winfrey & Bruce D. Perry · 27 April 2021 · Flatiron Books

Bruce D. Perry is a psychiatrist and neuroscientist, a senior fellow of the ChildTrauma Academy in Houston, who has spent his career with children who lived through violence and neglect. Oprah Winfrey brings her own childhood to the conversation. Together they reframe the central question of mental health and relationships from “What’s wrong with you?” to “What happened to you?” — a shift that sounds simple and is, in practice, transformative. Perry explains how early experience shapes the developing brain; Winfrey’s testimony makes those mechanisms human. It reached number one on the New York Times nonfiction list in May 2021.

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.

→ Read my full thoughts on What Happened to You

On my list of the best books for stress relief →

The Promise

Damon Galgut · 2021 · Chatto & Windus · Booker Prize, 2021

At the first of four funerals in the white Swart family, the dying Rachel extracts a promise from her husband: Salome, the Black woman who has worked for them for years, will be given the house she lives in. The promise is made and not kept. The novel follows the family through the decades of a changing South Africa as the promise recedes, is occasionally remembered and is always deferred. Galgut writes in a restless voice that moves between characters without warning. It won the Booker Prize on 3 November 2021, on his third shortlisting, after The Good Doctor in 2003 and In a Strange Room in 2010; he was the third South African to win, after Nadine Gordimer and J. M. Coetzee.

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, passed down through a white family across 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.

Crying in H Mart

Michelle Zauner · 20 April 2021 · Knopf

Michelle Zauner is the singer and guitarist of the band Japanese Breakfast. Her mother, Chongmi, died of pancreatic cancer on 18 October 2014, and this memoir — which grew out of an essay of the same name that The New Yorker published in August 2018 — is about that loss, about growing up Korean American, and about the food that held them together. It was her first book, reached number one on the New York Times list and spent fifty-five weeks on its combined nonfiction list.

A book about grief that works through the senses rather than around them: the smell of a particular stew, the aisles of a Korean supermarket. It is the most tender book on this list, and the one I would give to anyone who has lost a parent and cannot yet talk about it.

Beautiful World, Where Are You

Sally Rooney · 7 September 2021 · Faber & Faber

Alice is a novelist who has become famous faster than she knows what to do with; her best friend Eileen is an editorial assistant at a literary magazine in Dublin. Rooney’s third novel follows them and the men in their lives in narrative chapters that alternate with long emails between the two women. Where Normal People was about desire and class in early adulthood, this 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? Faber & Faber and Farrar, Straus and Giroux published it on the same day, and it won the Goodreads Choice Award for fiction that year.

This is the Rooney novel for readers who loved the intelligence of Normal People but wanted the characters to ask larger questions. The emails give her room to let them think seriously about art, beauty and what it means to live a good life in a moment of ongoing crisis. Not everyone finds the register comfortable. That is exactly the right response to it.

The Dawn of Everything

David Graeber & David Wengrow · 19 October 2021 · Allen Lane

The anthropologist David Graeber died in Venice on 2 September 2020, before this book, written with the archaeologist David Wengrow of University College London, could be published. The Dawn of Everything is a direct challenge to the standard story of human history — hunter-gatherers, then agriculture, then cities, then inequality, as though inequality were the inevitable endpoint. Drawing on recent archaeology, Graeber and Wengrow argue that human societies have been far more varied, experimental and self-consciously organised than that story allows. It entered the New York Times list at number two, was a finalist for the Orwell Prize for Political Writing and has been translated into more than thirty languages.

One of the most liberating nonfiction books of recent years — a book that expands your sense of what is possible by expanding the evidence of what has existed. It is long and richly detailed but written with energy and wit, and it changes the questions you bring to everything you read afterwards.

Bewilderment

Richard Powers · 21 September 2021 · W. W. Norton

Theo Byrne, a widowed astrobiologist, is raising his nine-year-old son Robin, and rather than medicate him he agrees to an experimental neurofeedback therapy. Powers, whose The Overstory won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2019, makes the book shorter and more intimate than that one: a father, a son, and a natural world visibly coming apart around them. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2021 and chosen for Oprah’s Book Club.

Powers has done more than any other novelist to make the climate emergency legible as an emotional experience rather than a political abstraction. Bewilderment works because the grief at its centre is specific. If you have not read Powers before, this is the clearest way in.

The Premonition

Michael Lewis · 4 May 2021 · W. W. Norton

Michael Lewis, the author of The Big Short and Moneyball, follows the California public-health officer Charity Dean and a group of seven doctors who called themselves the Wolverines as they tried to get the United States to respond early to COVID-19. It is a book about a specific failure: how the people with the clearest understanding of a threat are routinely kept away from the decisions that could act on it. NPR called it “a sweeping indictment of the CDC”.

It answered, in 2021, the question the year most needed answered: how did this happen? Lewis’s answer is about how organisations filter out the information they most need, and it reaches well beyond the pandemic. It is also, characteristically, impossible to put down.

Empire of Pain

Patrick Radden Keefe · 13 April 2021 · Doubleday · Baillie Gifford Prize, 2021

Keefe traces three generations of the Sackler family and Purdue Pharma’s part in the opioid crisis, from Valium to OxyContin. The book grew out of his 2017 New Yorker article “The Family That Built an Empire of Pain” and runs to 560 pages of narrative journalism. It won the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction on 16 November 2021 and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

If you read Bad Blood and want the same sustained quality of investigative storytelling, this is the book. Keefe writes about money, power and the stories families tell themselves with a precision that is almost surgical. One of the best works of narrative nonfiction of the decade.