55 of the Most Anticipated Books of 2021 – Oprah Mag

In a literary landscape rich with diaspora memoirs, Owusu’s painful yet radiant story rises to the forefront. The daughter of an Armenian-American mother who abandoned her and a heroic Ghanaian father who died when she was thirteen, Nadia drifted across continents in a trek that she renders here with poetic, indelible prose.

Publish Date: January 12

This wildly inventive, thoroughly modern retelling of the story of Cinderella—and what happens after she marries Prince Charming and comes to feel he is not really so charming after all—is creepy in all the right ways. Genre-bending and darkly comic, Grushin’s fourth novel is a weird and wonderful triumph.

Publish Date: January 12

Despite being told by a doctor that destransitioning would probably prevent him from having children, Ames gets his coworker pregnant. Wary of traditional, nuclear-family fatherhood, he puts forth a modest proposal: they could raise the child with Ames’s ex-girlfriend, a trans woman named Reese who’s yearning to be a mother. Fleishman is in Trouble meets Transparent in this eye-opening, gender-bending exploration of parenthood.

Publish Date: January 12

The subtitle to this exhilarating and erudite work of non-fiction by the Booker Prize-winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo and Tenth of December is: “In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading and Life.” In it, one of the greatest short story writers of our time draws on his own love of Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy and Gogol—and on his joy in teaching them to his MFA students at Syracuse University. The result is a worship song to writers and readers. As Saunders observes: “There’s a vast underground network for goodness at work in this world—a web of people who’ve put reading at the center of their lives because they know from experience that reading makes them more expansive, generous people…”

Publish Date: January 12

The lauded author of Night Boat to Tangier dazzles in an exquisite new collection set amidst the crags and fields of rural Ireland. The struggles of the working classes, second chances in love, miracles arriving on cue: all are fiercely imagined here, leaping off the page.  

Publish Date: January 12

A moody and melodic memoir—much like the great actor himself—in which a young, working-class Dubliner first pursued the Catholic priesthood, but found his way to theater and Hollywood stardom. An Irish This Boy’s Life with walk-ons by Laurence Olivier, Gianni Versace, and the father who haunts Byrne still.

Publish Date: January 12

By the NYT columnist and author of the memoir Fire Shut Up In My Bones comes a “Black power manifesto” prompted in part by the violence against Black people in 2020. What Blow proposes is an audacious move to consolidate political clout, by, among other things, urging his fellow “children of the South” to “come home.” “Seize it. Migrate. Move.”

Publish Date: January 26

The iconic actress who has shattered many glass ceilings in her nine-plus decades chronicles and celebrates a groundbreaking career in this fascinating autobiography. From single teen mother to model and actress—and, yes, her marriage to Miles Davis—Tyson’s book illustrates how she again and again refused to let obstacles get in her way. This grand tale of her immense talent and desire to live out loud will resonate with anyone who has a dream. Don’t miss our feature on the book’s cover.  

Publish Date: January 26

Didion’s remarkable, five decades-long career as a journalist, essayist, novelist, and screen writer has earned her a prominent place in the American literary canon, and the twelve early pieces collected here underscore her singularity. Her musings—whether contemplating “pretty” Nancy Reagan living out her “middle-class American woman’s daydream circa 1948” or the power of Ernest Hemingway’s pen—are all unmistakably Didionesque. There will never be another quite like her.

Publish Date: January 26

An acclaimed journalist brilliantly evokes the Jim Crow South of 1899, when a freed slave joined forces with a former Confederate in pursuit of justice. Praised by Colson Whitehead and Gilbert King, this lavish, stellar work of narrative nonfiction forces a reckoning with the grim aftermath of a civil war that still rages in hearts and minds today. 

Publish Date: January 26

The Oscar-nominated actor and screenwriter’s fifth book stars a 32-year-old thespian whose imploding private life—namely, his failed marriage—is besieged by tabloids. His possible path to personal and professional redemption: performing on Broadway in Henry IV. Hawke’s novel portrays the perils and pratfalls of celebrity, collapsing the pedestal on which we place the famous faces that grace our screen.

Publish Date: February 2 

This gripping first novel by a former London bookseller who currently works as a lawyer is at first a novel of psychological suspense—and escape. Protagonist Lexi, known to the public as Girl A, has fled her parents’ “House of Horrors,” and also managed to free her four siblings. After their mother dies in prison, the orphaned clan returns to the home they left behind, where they work to come to terms with the devastation of their childhood. For fans of Emma Donoghue and Gillian Flynn.

Publish Date: February 2

The haves and have-nots clash in Jones’s searing debut. In affluent Baxter Beach, the gentry of Barbados maneuver around their servants with velvet gloves and steel nerves, exposing fault lines of resentment, love as ephemeral as a tropical breeze. 

Publish Date: February 2

Maybe you’ve read Chen’s New Yorker story “Lulu” about a Chinese woman who becomes an activist and causes all sorts of trouble for herself and her family. Maybe you’ve read Chen’s rivetingly idiosyncratic story that appeared here on OprahMag.com, “Hotline Girl,” about an office worker being stalked by her ex. If not, we highly recommend it. And afterwards, you can get ready for her first book of short fiction, brimming with tales of men and women in modern China desperately seeking a sense of reinvention.

Publish Date: February 2

Yes, it’s more than 600 pages long, with as many footnotes as a scholarly tome, but this is a protean biography of an entertainment legend who lived life on a grand scale. (He drove a Rolls Royce! He was friends with Stephen Sondheim and Jacqueline Kennedy! He directed The Graduate!) It’s fascinating for its exploration of a great artist’s inner workings, as well as for its chronicling of an industry’s evolution.

Publish Date: February 2

The stories in Moniz’s debut collection—many of which shine a multihued light on Black girlhood in Florida—are to not only be read but felt. Like Danielle Evans and Lauren Groff, Moniz is unafraid to expose the darkened corners of the Sunshine State, and of female desire. Read an excerpt from the collection here. 

Publish Date: February 2

Dickens meets globalism in this new work from one of our most celebrated writers. From a bourgeois university town to Hawaiian beaches to Malaysian karaoke bars, Lee brilliantly maps the odyssey of an aimless young American and a middle-aged Chinese entrepreneur, testing an unlikely friendship that leads both men to the brink. 

Publish Date: February 2

From the author of the National Book Award-nominated novel Where the Dead Sit Talking comes the tale of a Cherokee family still dealing with the emotional fallout of a fifteen-year-old tragedy as they prepare for their annual bonfire. Echoes of Tommy Orange’s There There and Louise Erdrich’s Round House resound in this clear-eyed epic by one of our favorite Native American authors.

Publish Date: February 2

Set in a pre-tech boom San Francisco that feels moody, foreboding, and magical, this enigmatic tale of adolescent friendship, a disappearance, and coming-of-age is smart, sly, and as knowing about the mind and heart of a teenage girl as an Elena Ferrante novel.

Publish Date: February 2

In there any way we can re-engineer the looming catastrophe of climate change? The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sixth Extinction probes for solutions in our acidic oceans, polluted atmosphere, and shrinking wildernesses: “The new effort begins with a planet remade and spirals back on itself . . . First you reverse a river. Then you electrify it.” 

Publish Date: February 9

This heart-pounding, can’t-take-your-eyes-off-it debut novel is set in the rolling hills of Virginia horse country, where aspiring equestrian Roan trains for the Olympics, coached by her father. From the opening scene, in which the fifteen-year-old self-treats her own UTI, we wonder: who is it who is abusing Roan, and how long has it gone on?

Publish Date: February 16

In 2014, an all-female Kurdish militia took on ISIS—across Northern Syria, fighting alongside U.S. forces. Their aim: to make women’s equality a reality. This momentous work of reporting by the author of The Dressmaker of Khair Khana is a profile in courage.

Publish Date: February 16

Jennifer Egan once infamously composed an entire short story using Twitter’s 170-character limit as a kind of formal experiment. With her first novel, Priestdaddy author and poet Patricia Lockwood has taken the experience of being Extremely Online—the surreality of bite-sized serotonin bursts and frustrating flashes of hot-take fury—and novelized it. But the book, about a woman whose pithy social media post goes viral, is about the impossibility of the internet being able to contain the wonders of real life.

Publish Date: February 16

The award-winning Colombian-American author of Vida delivers a knockout of a novel—her fourth—which we predict will be viewed as one of 2021’s best. “The girls locked Sister Susana into their room with the same key she used against them each night,” Engel writes of protagonist Talia’s attempted escape from a juvenile detention center in Bogota. From there Talia’s journey takes us inside her parents’ dreams of a new life in the United States, and through the fractured prism of regret and indecision that splits them apart.

Publish Date: February 23

In a sumptuous sequel to The Sympathizer, Nguyen’s eponymous protagonist and his confrère Bon plunge into the drug-dealing netherworld of decadent Parisian elites and Vietnamese ex-patriates. The Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist captures, with grace and restraint, the foibles of two young men caught in a duel between East and West. 

Publish Date: March 2

Aging, faith, marriage, self-forgiveness, sobriety, graciousness in the face of airline delays—these are the subjects of the bestselling author of Bird by Bird and Operating Instructions‘s latest guide to navigating the “third third” of one’s life, with all its “mess and redemption.” If you too need to “roll your eyes a little more softly” at yourself, read on.

Publish Date: March 2

In this vibrant new novel by a grand man of American letters, a dying documentary filmmaker agrees to a final career-capping interview, unearthing the moral choices he made when he fled to Canada to avoid the Vietnam draft. Banks’ crystalline storytelling is both one man’s deathbed quest to grasp his own life and a pure pleasure to read. 

Publish Date: March 2

From the Nobel laureate and master of the hyperreal comes a gorgeously written novel that poses a question as old as Greek myths: what does it mean to be human? Klara, an Artificial Friend, smiles and nods to customers in Manager’s store while tracking each day by the sun’s arc. When a mother and daughter adopt Klara, a Pandora’s box of repressed emotion springs open, fleshing out Ishiguro’s themes of resilience and vulnerability in our mad, mad, mad, mad world.

Publish Date: March 2

When his childhood friend is paroled from prison after a 30 year sentence, Walk, the sheriff of the coastal California town where he grew up, must confront a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma: what happened all those years ago and why? He’s aided in his quest by Duchess, a savvy 13-year-old with the moxie of Harriet the Spy and fearlessness of Scout Finch. Whitaker’s ravishing, pulse-raising suspense illuminates how we fall prey to our own fierce desires for connection. 

Publish Date: March 2

The second novel by the author of Behold the Dreamers, which was an Oprah’s Book Club selection, takes readers inside an African village whose very existence is being threatened by the machinations of an American oil company.  It’s a David and Goliath story for our times, a riveting tale of how people coming together to make change can topple even the fiercest, best-financed foe.

Publish Date: March 9

An arresting intercontinental family saga, Grattan’s first novel is about a woman who sees her chance to flee her humdrum life in upstate New York when she inherits her parents’ old mansion in East Germany after the Berlin Wall has fallen. She relocates with her two teenagers in tow, and this peculiar trio, like their new home, undergoes a series of deeply profound transformations. 

Publish Date: March 9

By the acclaimed author of Interesting Women and Sarah Phillips comes a mesmerizing novel of a Black woman professor—Shay—whose rich Italian husband builds her a spectacular vacation house in Madagascar, where the family settles each summer. The lush natural habitat and privileged ex-pat existence contrast starkly with the island’s poverty and traditions, and Lee makes magic of this to deliver a singularly intriguing and mysterious saga that casts an enduring spell.

Publish Date: March 23

Stone’s memoir opens with a scene in a hospital bed, where the iconic actress is battling a brain bleed. That near-death experience and its aftermath is a jumping off point, an opportunity to reflect on the jagged, unlikely path that led her from a small town in Pennsylvania to becoming one of America’s hottest stars. But this is not your typical Hollywood autobiography. Brutally honest, restless and questing, Stone bravely grapples with her own imperfections with courage and candor.

Publish Date: March 30

In this powerful follow-up to 2017’s Abandon Me, the fierce essayist dispels the myths that young women grow up hearing about their bodies and their selves, most especially and insidiously the myth that we are not masters of our own physical and emotional domains. This is a book you’ll wish you had in your youth, but one you’ll be glad to have now.

Publish Date: March 30

The Whiting Award-winning author of We Love You, Charlie Freeman and an indispensable cultural critic (she was recently named Substack’s Senior Fellow for her incisive newsletter) returns with a sweeping new story based, in part, on Susan Smith McKinney Steward, the first Black woman to become a doctor in New York State. Set in Reconstruction-era Brooklyn, Greenridge’s fictionalized tale follows the doctor’s young daughter—the titular Libertie—as she grapples with what freedom really means for Black women.

Publish Date: March 30

This much-buzzed-about debut novel has endorsements by writers such as Roxane Gay. It’s a meditation on motherhood, displacement, and cultural identity as protagonist Jeanette journeys to Cuba to reckon with her family’s legacy. From a 19th century Cuban cigar factory to a detention center in Mexico, this stunningly accomplished first novel is both epic and intimate.

Publish Date: March 30 

Recently named one of Forbes’s 30 Under 30, Jerkins, a bestselling nonfiction writer, applies her scrupulous prose and storytelling prowess to the realm of historical fiction in her debut novel, which centers on a mother and daughter yearning for (re)connection and the powerful family who’s responsible for keeping them apart.

Publish Date: April 6 

The acclaimed author of Nights at the Fiestas returns with a gorgeously written, Franzen-caliber tale of one Latinx family’s via dolorosa. It’s Holy Week in Las Penas, New Mexico, and the village maverick, Amadeo, is rehearsing to play Jesus in the village’s passion play when his pregnant sixteen-year-old daughter shows up on his doorstep. Is an emotional resurrection in the cards?  

Publish Date: April 6

The vivacious and tender second novel by the bestselling author of The Nest is an absorbing, wise, and tender tale of a marriage in mid-life and the secrets that threaten to upend the relationship between Flora and her husband, as well as with her best friend, Margot. Sprinkled throughout: scenes from pre-pandemic, Manhattan in which the theater, Central Park, dinner parties all play a starring role.

Publish Date: April 6

“This troubadour life,” writes the two-time Grammy-winning songwriter and vocalist, “is only for the fiercest hearts, only for those vessels that can be broken to smithereens and still keep beating out the rhythm for a new song.” And this tender, fierce, intimate memoir is testament that Jones has lived a life as brave, idiosyncratic, and rich as her music—with love, heartbreak, addiction, and magic, sprinkled throughout. Not to mention the fact that Annie Leibovitz has dubbed her “the sexiest person I have ever photographed next to Mick Jagger.”

Publish Date: April 6

This radiant, vibrant coming-of-age by a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and co-writer of the Tony Award-winning In The Heights is an ode to the power of language and a love letter to the author’s sprawling Puerto Rican family. As we read scenes set in the crumbling Philadelphia barrio in which she grew up, we begin to see that in that family she found her muse and her artist’s voice. And gradually, her story becomes ours, too.

Publish Date: April 6

A gay couple embarked on a fantastical Orient Express, a mongoose with attitude, a mysterious woman disposed to prophetic pronouncements: welcome back to the magical, maddening milieu of Oyeyemi’s singular fiction, in which trapdoors spring open and revelations emerge like Russian nesting dolls. 

Publish Date: April 6

“Magisterial” and “definitive” are adjectives often tossed around to describe voluminous biographies, but they don’t do justice to Blake Bailey’s years-in-the-making opus. Drawing extensively on archives and interviews, Bailey meticulously conjures the career of one of America’s literary titans, the devils and angels that shaped his work. 

Publish Date: April 6

As he prepares to write his memoir, an elderly WASP man mulls the burdens of his youth spent at a now-defunct all-boys’ prep school. A literary national treasure returns with a textured, gripping tale that peels back layers of antisemitism, with echoes of both A Separate Peace and the fiction of Isaac Bashevis Singer. 

Publish Date: April 13

Set in fir-scented Washington state, Tompkins’ atmospheric, propulsive tale puts the thrill into thriller as a grieving community grapples with two slain teenaged boys and the young pregnant girl who may hold the key to the their tragic fates. An American Tana French, Tompkins is a writer to watch.

Publish Date: April 13

Opal is an Afro-Punk performer whose radical politics, idiosyncratic garb, and musical style make her feel like an outcast in her hometown of Detroit, but she finds an outlet for her talents in New York City, where she pairs up with Nev at an open mic night. Walton’s fabulous debut novel is an utterly fresh take on finding one’s voice, on systemic racism and sexism, and on freedom of expression. That these heavy subjects don’t weigh down this hugely entertaining novel are testament to Walton’s deftness and skill.

Publish Date: April 20

Neuroscientist and renowned child trauma expert Perry teams up with Oprah Winfrey—an advocate and survivor of multiple childhood challenges herself—for a revelatory work of non-fiction that explores the legacy of trauma and marries the power of storytelling with science and clinical experience to help survivors overcome its effects. A powerful and invaluable book that will help victims and their loved ones shift the conversation from “What’s wrong with you?” to “What happened to you?”

Publish Date: April 27

The first novel in nearly a decade by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Interpreter of Maladies and The Namesake is set in an unnamed city much like Rome—or a dream-like, often lonely version of it. The story’s first-person narrator is a single woman in her mid-40s whose solitude infuses everything about her, even her conversations with her mother, lovers, and colleagues. Lahiri wrote the novel in Italian—a language she only recently learned—and translated it into English herself, another masterstroke in a still-young career already filled with them.

Publish Date: April 27 

The prize-winning author of Seating Arrangements pilots this soaring, cinematic historical novel about a female aviator at the turn of the twentieth century whose disappearance becomes the basis for a big Hollywood production a century later. 

Publish Date: May 4

A dispirited woman persuades a famous male artist to visit her coastal home, seeking to understand herself through the prism of his gaze. Cusk, a virtuoso of our interior lives and the author of the renowned Outline Trilogy, here spins a captivating, compulsively readable tale—part confession, part allegory—that unflinchingly peers into the crevices of relationships. “I don’t think I realized how many parts of life there were,” her narrator observes, “until each one of them began to release its capacity for badness.” 

Publish Date: May 4

The author of the award-winning Improvement once again takes her scalpel to the complex anatomy of family, dissecting, with stunning precision, one young New Yorker’s struggles with his father’s secret life, the toll of deceits that doom a marriage, and the pitfalls of his own sexuality. 

Publish Date: May 4

“When an actor is on a long-running television show, especially when the writing is superb as was the case with The Good Wife, the character becomes a second skin,” writes Julianna Margulies in her beguiling, interior memoir. “They grow as you grow, they change as you change. Being an actress gives me the luxury of discovering myself.” Here, the now 54-year-old Margulies traces the arc of her life and career with candor and a kind of wonder that her childhood amid divorced parents who at times lived on different continents would ultimately lead to enormous success as an Emmy-winning performer, as well as to loving relationships with her husband and son.

Publish Date: May 4

The novelist whose book You Should Have Known became the basis for the hit HBO series, The Undoing, returns with another propulsive tale of deceit and betrayal, this time, set in the world of book publishing. Will Jake—a just-about washed up fiction writer and low-level professor—get away with literary theft and rise to stardom? And who will play him on TV?

Publish Date: May 11

We knew real-life Georgia superhero Abrams loves herself a good romance novel, but writing a mystery with the Supreme Court as a backdrop? Her most recently discovered talent for spinning a thrilling tale has her drawing on her experience in politics and law. This intricate puzzle of a novel has its protagonist, Avery, coming into her own as she pieces together the conundrum of what her boss—a controversial Justice who’s fallen into a coma—had been investigating, and where it will lead her.

Publish Date: May 11