The 20 Best Books of 2021
Editor’s Note: Find all of The Atlantic’s “Best of 2021” coverage here.
Much of 2021 has been filled with a dull sense of déjà vu as the coronavirus pandemic has continued to shrink social worlds and batter morale. Many of the books our writers and editors were drawn to investigated failure, grief, apocalypse—resonant themes at a time of constant rupture and regression. Others helped jolt readers out of routines, and stretched the imagination. The works below span fiction, poetry, memoir, and reportage, but they share a keen sense of the world as it is and as it could be.
Assembly, by Natasha Brown
“Dissolve yourself into the melting-pot,” says the narrator of Assembly. “And then flow out, pour into the mould. Bend your bones until they splinter and crack and you fit. Force yourself into their form.” Natasha Brown’s debut novel is propelled by elegant, elliptical, violent lines like that. Its story, on the surface, is sparse. The narrator, a Black woman living in London whose name is never revealed, goes to work (the job is a financially lucrative and spiritually vampiric role in banking). She goes to a party (thrown by the parents of her wealthy, white boyfriend, on their ancient estate). She goes to the doctor. There is a pointed plot twist I won’t spoil, but what makes Assembly singular, in the end, is less its story than the manner of its storytelling. The narrator’s assessments of her life, rendered primarily in the first person, are studies of evocative contrasts. She reveals, and she withholds. She observes, and she watches herself being observed. She documents the casual cruelties that shape her daily life—and she defies them. — Megan Garber
Always Crashing in the Same Car: On Art, Crisis, and Los Angeles, California, by Matthew Specktor
Matthew Specktor’s sad and entrancing book takes as its topic failure, “a pattern of mind,” he writes, that is also, “when we are close to it, delicious.” A child of Hollywood—his mother was an unhappy screenwriter, his father a high-powered agent—he focuses his attention on its denizens, exploring artists meaningful to him “whose careers carry an aura of what might … have been.” Specktor is a sharp cultural critic, but he also writes with the sweet conviction of someone who still has heroes, and he opts to
