Best Books of 2021: Critics’ Choice

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Roula Khalaf FT EDITOR

Here is one of the books that I couldn’t let go, even though I already knew the details of the story. Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe is the chilling tale of the Sackler Dynasty’s dramatic rise in the arts world even as the addicting painkiller OxyContin from family business Purdue Pharma built a trail of death and destruction. . An elegantly written investigative tale, Empire of Pain is a portrayal of greed, corruption, and the laundering of reputation.

Frederick StudemannFT LITERARY EDITOR

Considered the last Stalinist outpost in Europe – a title Belarus can now dispute – very little was known about life in communist Albania under Enver Hoxha. This strange world and its legacy are now brought to life in amazing ways in Lea Ypi’s Free. From protective double talk around the kitchen table to the uncertain and unfulfilled promises of post-communism, Ypi offers a moving and compelling memoir about growing up in turbulent times, as well as a frank questioning of what really means to be “free”.

After promising myself a break from pandemic literature, I found myself seized by Ludmila Ulitskaya’s Just The Plague. Written in the 1980s but published only this year, it’s a fictional version of the true, but suppressed, story of a plague epidemic at the end of Stalin’s terror that at times seems a little too familiar.

I don’t think I’m the only person to have been captivated by Claire Keegan’s novel Small Things Like These. With a skillful and powerful economy, it takes us back to 1980s Ireland and a small town where big secrets are hidden – and where the silences are often more brutal than anything said. I also enjoyed The Magician by Colm Tóibín. Confronting Thomas Mann is no easy task, but Tóibín’s fictional account of the inner life of the great German novelist is masterful.

And, finally, Christian Kracht’s Eurotrash, a sardonic adventure into dark family secrets and story told against the backdrop of terminal illness and pill-taking, turned out to be surprisingly enjoyable – if not funny – read. An appropriate, middle-aged book ending to its scathing debut in the 1990s, Faserland, which spit the bland German wealth.

Alec RussellFT WEEKEND EDITOR

I faced a dilemma on my selection and ended up with a first equal. Since I am having lunch with one of the authors, I will keep his book a secret and name the other. Sentient, by Jackie Higgins, immerses you in the life and spirit of the Peacock Mantis Shrimp, Frightfish, Gray Owl and other remarkable species. It’s spellbinding – and surely has one of the covers of the year. More than any other book, it made me think of the world differently this year.

Simon SchamaFT LIFE AND ARTS CHRONICLE

If I nominate a book that I haven’t quite finished (because after all it’s over 900 pages), take my word for it anyway. The Books of Jacob by Nobel Laureate Olga Tokarczuk is a haunting epic, one of the great literary achievements of the decade: a poetic and overflowing recreation of the world of a false Jewish messiah in 18th-century Poland, but also beyond priests and priests mystically drawn. wandering aristocrats. Loaded with sensual immediacy, it’s the kind of hypnotic novel that you don’t read until you dwell on it, and which then, as if by magic, comes to live in you.

Rana ForooharFT GLOBAL BUSINESS CHRONOMETER

Our Country Friends by Gary Shteyngart is America’s best post-pandemic fiction to date. It takes place in a country house on the Hudson where a group of characters who poignantly and often hilariously embody certain social archetypes of our moment come together to await Covid-19. It has, to me, surpassed Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections as a novel that combines general issues with storytelling that turns pages. Poignant, thoughtful and emotionally wise.

Gillian Tett PRESIDENT OF THE EDITORIAL BOARD OF FT AND EDITOR IN THE UNITED STATES

Academic economists and other serious thinkers sometimes laugh at Adam Grant as just pop psychology. No wonder: he has a jovial, cheerful style that is easy to digest. But his central message in his book Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know – namely that from a post-pandemic perspective, we need to be prepared to reexamine our biases, imagine new ways of solving problems, and listen. , with empathy for alternative points of view – is extraordinarily timely. If only policymakers could do it.

Enuma OkoroFT LIFE AND ARTS CHRONICLE

My Book of the Year is actually a book that has been out for a while, but is a very timely read in a global season of unexpected disruption and needed reflections. The Examined Life by psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz, which I accidentally bought from the Tate Britain bookstore a few months ago, is a series of mini-essays on his sessions with different clients, each offering insightful and poignant vignettes about the condition. human. The stories open a window into how the subconscious can simultaneously work to keep us from recognizing our deep pains and keep us from getting to the bottom of the disturbing disturbances that are manifesting in our lives. I read one chapter a morning over the course of a few months and found out by the end that it had quietly changed the way I viewed aspects of my own life and relationships.

Ben Okri NEWIST AND POET

My Book of the Year has to be a novel that took 20 years and the recent lockdown to write. It’s a satire, a murder mystery, a political novel, a work of sustained stylistic brilliance, and may be one of the few true literary surprises of 2021. Chronicles of the Land of the Happiest People on Earth is the novel that Wole Soyinka wrote. always wanted to write, a story that is sort of a deliberate explosive aimed at Nigerian regimes of endemic corruption. It is also a novel of friendships and betrayals. Soyinka finally delivers his magnum opus on the state of his homeland.

Books of the year 2021 Janan Ganesh

As Watergate unfolded, the Tories tasted a much bigger defeat on the other coast. With Chinatown, Hollywood explored the inequalities of American life. On television, a single worker presented The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Even protest music has reached new heights. While Ronald Brownstein doesn’t quite support the idea of ​​1974 as a turning point in art (a 1922, say), he describes its liberal capture and the rise of Los Angeles as the birthplace of Rock Me trends on the Water.

Sarah O’ConnorFT JOB TIMELINE

Hungry fat baby Ed Balls enjoyed his first roast (sprayed) dinner at the age of three weeks. Then begins a long love story with food, which the former politician recounts in this very nice “memory in recipes”, Appetite. The writing is funny and tender, and some of the recipes are great. I tried his sponge cake recently, which he made with double cream instead of butter, and it was a blast.

Nilanjana RoyFT CHRONOLOGY

I had low expectations when I arrived at Tove Ditlevsen’s The Copenhagen Trilogy – outside of Denmark Ditlevsen’s imposing reputation as a poet, fiction writer and memorialist has only just been recognized. But from the first page, it made me shiver, with these three brilliant and harsh chronicles of damage, self-centeredness, addiction and rapture to write – Childhood, Youth and Addiction, first published between 1967 and 1971. Many years after his suicide in 1976 at the age of 58, his incredible genius is finally here translated by Tiina Nunnally and Michael Favala Goldman to make the whole world marvel and step back.

Anjana Ahuja

In August of this year – after 12 months of mourning, our oldest leaving for college, writing nonstop on Covid-19, catching Covid and co-writing a book on Covid – I wanted the insignificant. A slight relief came in the company of Elizabeth, Joyce, Ibrahim and Ron, the retired sleuths who make up the Thursday Murder Club. Richard Osman’s bestseller Agatha Christie-meets-Chuckle Brothers is also a ruthless love letter to the elderly, who see us more than we see them.

Fani PapageorgiouFT CONTRIBUTOR OF LIFE AND ARTS

For those of us who lived through the political turmoil of the 1980s, indelible music, and ghastly fashion, how do you remember Nancy Reagan? Ambassador, iron butterfly, gossip, unwelcome presidential wife? She set aside US State Department officials in planning overseas visits based on horoscopes. Nancy may be remembered for her glamorous dresses and stunning gaze, but would Ronald Reagan have become Governor of California or President without her? Washington Post columnist Karen Tumulty suggests not to do so in The Triumph of Nancy Reagan.

Henry ManceFT LONG-TERM EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

As someone who shuns self-help books, I have truly benefited from Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks. Four thousand weeks is the lifespan of a 77-year-old man; Burkeman uses the number to ask how we allocate our time. I disagreed with some of his conclusions, but found the book so easy to read that I finished it in one sitting, without checking my phone in between. I will probably never organize my time so well again.

Tim Hartford FT Columnist

Cal Newport’s reputation is built on pragmatic self-help books like Deep Work and Digital Minimalism, but in A World Without Email he delves into the history of communications and management, claiming that work processes Knowledge must be radically rethought, just like the manufacturing production lines transformed at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries. Convenient and fascinating.

Tell us what you think

What are your favorites from this list – and which books have we missed? Tell us in the comments below

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