The Best New Books to Read in 2021 (So Far)

Girls with Bright Futures by Tracy Dobmeier and Wendy Katzman is a sharp, irresistibly fun fictional look at college admissions. Three moms—a frantic PTA type, a renowned tech exec, and her down-to-earth assistant— will stop at nothing to ensure the success of their daughters, who attend an elite Seattle private school. You’ll quickly align yourself with one side while relishing the downfall of the other. There’s lots of fodder for talks about how insanely far parents will go to get those coveted acceptance letters.

Emma is a well-respected doctor who loves her work and her doting detective husband. But when their young son is diagnosed with cancer, an expensive treatment is their only hope. Out of desperation, Emma turns to selling opioids to pay for it. Do No Harm by Christina McDonald is an intense, emotional page-turner that’s impossible not to devour in one sitting.

Can you accurately describe both sides of a penny? In Remember, acclaimed neuroscientist Lisa Genova, the best-selling author of Still Alice, explains why so many of us can’t—and why that doesn’t mean we’re losing our minds. This fascinating exploration of how memory works reveals why those blips are totally normal. It’s capital-r Reassuring for anyone who’s ever walked into a room without remembering why.

In The Fourth Child by Jessica Winter, Jane becomes pregnant in high school, gets married, and is raising three children by the time most of her friends are finishing college. Years later, she falls in with a pro-life group and adopts a child just as her teenage daughter is coming of age. What happens next forces Jane—and readers—to ask big questions about how firmly held principles can affect a family.

The Kindest Lie by Nancy Johnson tells the story of Ruth, an Ivy League– educated Black engineer living in Chicago in 2008, just after the Obama inauguration. Her husband’s eagerness to start a family leads her back to her Indiana hometown to confront her past. In the beleaguered factory town, she forges a friendship with a white middle schooler. As racial rifts deepen, Johnson makes powerful points about our connections and communities.

Elizabeth Passarella is a Southerner and evangelical Christian raising three kids on New York City’s famously liberal Upper West Side. In Good Apple, she details, with often hilarious transparency, what it’s like to bear seemingly contradictory labels, and how her relationship with religion has shaped her identity—and influenced her rebellion.

Alexi Pappas has a no-limits approach to life that’s led her to the Ivy League, an Olympic running career, and starring roles in movies she herself created (even though she was, of course, told to choose between being an athlete and being an artist). In Bravey, her movingly honest memoir, she shares how her most difficult moments—her mother’s death by suicide, her post-Olympic depression—fueled her remarkable drive. The result is an engaging portrayal of resilience, proving challenges limit you only if you let them.

The heavy emotion on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is breathlessly conveyed in City of a Thousand Gates. Novelist Rebecca Sacks deftly zooms in on the perspectives of a broad cast of characters, like a new father with an American wife, and a college student illegally entering Israeli territory for work. She reveals with startling intimacy what it’s like to live in the center of one of the world’s most divisive conflicts.

This Close to Okay by Leesa Cross-Smith opens with divorced therapist Tallie Clark driving home from work. She notices a man standing on the edge of a bridge, coaxes him back, then persuades him to have a cup of coffee with her. What happens next makes for a poignant page-turner about perseverance and two broken people who, like all of us at one time or another, just need someone to tell them everything’s going to be all right.

Kristin Hannah’s latest, set in the Dust Bowl during the Great Depression, centers on a Texas mother forced to decide whether to leave her family’s farm, destroyed by drought, for better opportunity out west. The Four Winds is a sweeping epic about an American struggling to keep her family afloat. It feels eerily timely as it highlights the ways women rally during a national crisis.

In this powerful novel about a Deep South plantation, enslaved Isaiah and Samuel share a private, abiding love that’s a refuge from the daily brutality they endure—and that has consequences for everyone around them. The Prophets by Robert Jones Jr. is an original, heartbreaking testament to love, and to the supremacy of good over evil.

The only relic from Andy’s troubled childhood is her friend Peter. The two occasionally meet for drinks in London, where they carefully avoid discussing one particular summer: On an abandoned manor decades earlier, they played a game that ended in tragedy. But then Peter disappears, and Andy is forced to untangle what she’s tried so hard to forget. Before the Ruins by Victoria Gosling is a lush and layered thriller that mystery lovers will savor.

In the early 1900s, the Barclays, a white family with a cadre of Black servants, are desperate for cash. They begin selling their cook’s delicious rib sauce and slapping a humiliating caricature of their groundskeeper on the label (without compensating either long-time employee). Through its searing portrayal of exploitation, The Rib King by Ladee Hubbard conveys a modern message about how African American stereotypes are used for profit.

After giving birth to her first child, Blythe Connor vows to be the doting mother she never had. But when she finds it difficult to connect with baby Violet, she’s alarmed, frustrated, and increasingly convinced there’s something dangerously wrong with the girl. The Push by Ashley Audrain is a chilling page-turner that asks provocative questions about nature versus nurture and what makes a good mother.

Laura Preston ignores her sister’s warning and travels to Bangkok to reunite with their brother, who went missing 40 years earlier when they lived in the city for their father’s mysterious job. As the story unfurls, shocking family secrets are slowly revealed. What Could Be Saved by Liese O’Halloran Schwarz is a rich, complex novel that shifts between present-day Washington, D.C., and 1970s Thailand—just the kind of book you want to sink into on a winter day.