With so many novels to choose from, it's not easy to find the best fiction of 2021, books that are really worth spending your time reading. To help, we've collected all our books recommendations relating to the best fiction of 2021 here.
We also have a list of the:
Part of our best books of 2021 series.
The Bone Ships
***Winner Best Fantasy Novel at the 2021 British Fantasy Awards***
The Bone Ships by RJ Barker is the first book in The Tide Child trilogy (the second book in the trilogy, Call of the Bone Ships, is also already out, as book prize awards tend to lag publication by a year or so).
“Ishiguro will be publishing his first new novel since winning the Nobel Prize for literature in 2017. Klara and the Sun is told through the eyes of a slightly out-of-date android (‘Artificial Friend’) as she secures her first owner. It’s a slim book, with big ambitions – asking questions about the ethics of artificial intelligence” Read more...
Cal Flyn, Journalist
“The psychological thriller that everyone is talking about this season.” Read more...
Cal Flyn, Journalist
“I am personally looking forward to Irish writer Megan Nolan’s debut, Acts of Desperation, about a brief, toxic relationship, its aftermath, and examining the self-negating impulse of a woman who needs to see herself reflected in the eyes of another person to feel herself to be real.” Read more...
Cal Flyn, Journalist
“Torrey Peter’s Detransition, Baby starts from a provocative premise – a co-parenting triangle formed by a trans woman, a former trans woman (now detransitioned and living again as a man), and his new girlfriend who has fallen unexpectedly pregnant. It tackles big issues (gender dysphoria, the challenges of living as a trans woman, non-traditional family units) with wit and flair; think Fleischmann is in Trouble, if Fleischmann is in Trouble were set in the New York LGBTQ community.” Read more...
Cal Flyn, Journalist
“Oyler is a fantastically acerbic critic, whose work I’ve admired for a while … It goes almost without saying that a lot of eyes will be on her own fiction debut – but indications are good.” Read more...
Cal Flyn, Journalist
Notable Novels of Spring 2021, recommended by Cal Flyn
Fiction fans can expect “an embarrassment of riches” in spring 2021, according to Cal Flyn, deputy editor of Five Books and author of the forthcoming Islands of Abandonment. From buzzed-about debuts to the latest novel from the Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro, we are spoilt for choice this season.
