100 BEST BOOKS of 2021
TOP FIVE LOCAL TITLES FOR 2021
1 AROHA, by Hinemoa Elder (Penguin Books NZ)
2 SUPERGOOD, by Chelsea Winter (Random House New Zealand Ltd)
3 THE GRINNY GRANNY DONKEY, by Craig Smith & Katz Cowley (Scholastic New Zealand)
4 BELLA: My life in food, by Annabel Langbein (Allen & Unwin)
5 LOST AND FOUND, by Toni Street (Allen & Unwin)
TOP FIVE TITLES OVERALL FOR 2021
1 THE MISSING SISTER, by Lucinda Riley (Macmillan)
2 DOG MAN 10: Mothering heights, by Dav Pilkey (Scholastic US)
3 AROHA, by Hinemoa Elder (Penguin Books NZ)
4 THE SEVEN SISTERS, by Lucinda Riley (Pan Books)
5 SUPERGOOD, by Chelsea Winter (Random House)
FICTION
ANIMAL by Lisa Taddeo (Bloomsbury) In which the author of the acclaimed, bestselling non-fiction book Three Women turns to dark fiction, about a “depraved” woman on a quest for bloody revenge.
AT NIGHT ALL BLOOD IS BLACK by David Diop tr Anna Moschovakis (Pushkin Press) The winner of this year’s International Booker Prize, about a Senegalese soldier in the World War I trenches, is a small, beautiful and frightening novel written in dazzling prose.
THE AUTHOR'S CUT by Owen Marshall (Vintage) Twenty stories selected from 40 years of writing, showing our people from the mild to the murderous. No other New Zealander does them better.
BEAUTIFUL WORLD, WHERE ARE YOU? by Sally Rooney (Faber) More, in the third novel from the Irish literary sensation, about the lives and loves of a group of intellectually unsatisfied young Dubliners. Alice and Eileen, best friends on the cusp of 30, discuss the fraying world, art, relationships and the high price of fame. The Booker awaits.
BEFORE YOU KNEW MY NAME by Jacqueline Bublitz (Sphere) A gripping, genre-hopping literary page-turner, the extraordinary debut of the New Plymouth-based author connects a murdered teen in New York and a Melbourne woman trying to find out who this young woman was.
BEWILDERMENT by Richard Powers (William Heinemann) The 13th and Booker-shortlisted work of the much-garlanded American novelist is a more intimate work than previous novels, but no less powerful, centring on a grieving, widowed astrobiologist father and his sensitive, angry young son.
CLOUD CUCKOO LAND by Anthony Doerr (Fourth Estate) An exuberant, genre-spanning quiet epic of interlocking stories involving a book within a book, the siege of Constantinople, a Korean War veteran and a young girl on board a spaceship leaving a ruined Earth.
Given that much of this pacy, affecting, unsentimental novel about love and mental illness pretty much happened to the a roman a clef or a lightly fictionalised memoir? It matters not one jot.
