NYT Notable Books 2021 - Fiction & Poetry


Showing 1 - 20 of 49  There are a total of 49 valid entries on the list.
Book cover for "Appleseed"
Star rating for Appleseed
Average Rating:
5 stars
Description:
"In the vein of Neal Stephenson and Jeff VanderMeer, an epic speculative novel from Young Lions Fiction Award-finalist Matt Bell, a breakout book that explores climate change, manifest destiny, humanity's unchecked exploitation of natural resources, and the small but powerful magic contained within every single apple"--
Book cover for "Beautiful world, where are you"
Star rating for Beautiful world, where are you
Average Rating:
3.6 stars
Description:
"A new novel by Sally Rooney, the bestselling author of Normal People and Conversations with Friends"-- "Alice, a novelist, meets Felix, who works in a warehouse, and asks him if he'd like to travel to Rome with her. In Dublin, her best friend, Eileen, is getting over a break-up, and slips back into flirting with Simon, a man she has known since childhood. Alice, Felix, Eileen, and Simon are still young--but life is catching up with them. They desire...
Book cover for "Bewilderment"
Star rating for Bewilderment
Average Rating:
3.7 stars
Description:
"A heartrending new novel from the Pulitzer Prize-winning and #1 New York Times best-selling author of The Overstory. "Richard Powers, whose novels combine the wonders of science with the marvels of art, astonishes us in different ways with each new book." -Heller McAlpin, NPR Books. The astrobiologist Theo Byrne searches for life throughout the cosmos while single-handedly raising his unusual nine-year-old, Robin, following the death of his wife....
Book cover for "The book of mother"
Star rating for The book of mother
Description:
Beautiful and charismatic, Catherine, a.k.a. "Maman," smokes too much, drives too fast, laughs too hard, and loves too extravagantly. During a joyful and chaotic childhood in Paris, her daughter Violaine wouldn't have it any other way. But when Maman is hospitalized after a third divorce and a breakdown, everything changes. As the story of Catherine's own traumatic childhood and adolescence unfolds, the pieces come together to form an indelible portrait...
Book cover for "Build your house around my body"
Star rating for Build your house around my body
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
"In 1986, the teenage daughter of a wealthy family gets lost in an abandoned rubber plantation while fleeing her angry father and is forever changed by the experience. In 2009, pressed into a dangerous scheme by a former lover, a woman captures a rare two-headed cobra. And in 2011, a young, unhappy American living in Saigon with her sort-of boyfriend, disappears without a trace. Over the course of the novel, the fates of these three women will lock...
Book cover for "Burnt sugar"
Star rating for Burnt sugar
Description:
"In her youth, Tara was wild. She abandoned her loveless marriage to join an ashram, endured a brief stint as a beggar (mostly to spite her affluent parents), and spent years chasing after a dishevelled, homeless 'artist' - all with her young child in tow. Now she is forgetting things, and her grown-up daughter is faced with the task of caring for a woman who never cared for her. This is a love story and a story about betrayal. But not between lovers...
Book cover for "A calling for Charlie Barnes"
Star rating for A calling for Charlie Barnes
Description:
Someone is telling the story of the life of Charlie Barnes, and it doesn't appear to be going well. Too often divorced, discontent with life's compromises and in a house he hates, this lifelong schemer and eternal romantic would like out of his present circumstances and into the American dream. But when the twin calamities of the Great Recession and a cancer scare come along to compound his troubles, his dreams dwindle further, and an infinite past...
Book cover for "Chronicles from the land of the happiest people on earth"
Star rating for Chronicles from the land of the happiest people on earth
Average Rating:
3 stars
Description:
"A towering figure in world literature gives us a tour de force, his first novel in nearly one-half century: a savagely satiric, gleefully irreverent, rollicking, fictional meditation on how power and greed can corrupt the soul of a nation. ("You don't see things the same way when you encounter a voice like that."-Toni Morrison) In an imaginary Nigeria, a cunning entrepreneur is selling body parts stolen from Dr. Menka's hospital for use in ritualistic...
Book cover for "Cloud cuckoo land"
Star rating for Cloud cuckoo land
Average Rating:
3.9 stars
Description:
"From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of perhaps the most bestselling and beloved literary fiction of our time comes a triumph of imagination and compassion, a soaring novel about children on the cusp of adulthood in a broken world, who find resilience, hope, and story. The heroes of Cloud Cuckoo Land are children trying to figure out the world around them, and to survive. In the besieged city of Constantinople in 1453, in a public library in Lakeport,...
Book cover for "Crossroads"
Star rating for Crossroads
Average Rating:
5 stars
Description:
"It's December 23, 1971, and heavy weather is forecast for Chicago. Russ Hildebrandt, the associate pastor of a liberal suburban church, is on the brink of breaking free of a marriage he finds joyless -- unless his wife, Marion, who has her own secret life, beats him to it. Their eldest child, Clem, is coming home from college on fire with moral absolutism, having taken an action that will shatter his father. Clem's sister, Becky, long the social...
Book cover for "Detransition, baby"
Star rating for Detransition, baby
Average Rating:
3.8 stars
Description:
"[A novel] about three women--transgender and cisgender--whose lives collide after an unexpected pregnancy forces them to confront their deepest desires around gender, motherhood, and sex..."--
Book cover for "Ghosts of New York"
Star rating for Ghosts of New York
Description:
"Ghosts of New York interweaves four strands: a photographer newly returned to the neighborhood where she grew up, after years spent living overseas; a foundling raised on 14th Street; a graduate student, his romantic partner, and his best friend, entangled in a set of relationships with repercussions, both personal and political, that extend for decades and travel around the world; and a shopkeeper suffering from first love late in life. Mixing prophecy,...
Book cover for "Harlem shuffle"
Star rating for Harlem shuffle
Average Rating:
3.7 stars
Description:
"Ray Carney was only slightly bent when it came to being crooked..." To his customers and neighbors on 125th street, Carney is an upstanding salesman of reasonably-priced furniture, making a life for himself and his family. He and his wife Elizabeth are expecting their second child, and if her parents on Striver's Row don't approve of him or their cramped apartment across from the subway tracks, it's still home. Few people know he descends from a...
Book cover for "How beautiful we were"
Star rating for How beautiful we were
Author:
Average Rating:
4.3 stars
Description:
"'We should have known the end was near.' So begins Imbolo Mbue's exquisite and devastating novel How Beautiful We Were. Set in the fictional African village of Kosawa, it tells the story of a people living in fear amidst environmental degradation wrought by a large and powerful American oil company. Pipeline spills have rendered farmlands infertile. Children are dying from drinking toxic water. Promises of clean up and financial reparations to the...
Book cover for "Intimacies"
Star rating for Intimacies
Description:
Seeking a fresh start an interpreter takes a position at the International Court at The Hague and is drawn into numerous personal dramas, including her lover’s ongoing entanglement in his marriage and her friend witnessing a random act of violence.
Book cover for "Kink"
Star rating for Kink
Description:
Exploring love and desire, BDSM, and interests across the sexual spectrum with a bold new vision, this groundbreaking anthology includes works by such renowned fiction writers as Callum Angus, Roxane Gay, Chris Kraus and Larissa Pham.
Book cover for "Klara and the sun"
Star rating for Klara and the sun
Average Rating:
3.9 stars
Description:
"From her place in the store that sells artificial friends, Klara--an artificial friend with outstanding observational qualities--watches carefully the behavior of those who come in to browse, and of those who pass in the street outside. She remains hopeful a customer will soon choose her, but when the possibility emerges that her circumstances may change forever, Klara is warned not to invest too much in the promises of humans. In this luminous tale,...
Book cover for "Libertie"
Star rating for Libertie
Average Rating:
2 stars
Description:
"Coming of age as a free-born Black girl in Reconstruction-era Brooklyn, Libertie Sampson is all too aware that her mother, a physician, has a vision for their future together: Libertie will go to medical school and practice alongside her. But Libertie feels stifled by her mother's choices and is constantly reminded that, unlike her mother, Libertie has skin that is too dark. When a young man from Haiti proposes to Libertie and promises she will be...
Book cover for "A lie someone told you about yourself"
Star rating for A lie someone told you about yourself
Description:
A family grapples with the decision to terminate a pregnancy after receiving catastrophic test results and must deal with questions that reverberate down the years.
Book cover for "Light perpetual"
Star rating for Light perpetual
Description:
A novel set in 1944 London imagines the lives of five children who perished during a bombing at a local store, tracing their everyday dramas as they live through the extraordinary, unimaginable changes of twentieth-century London.