Year-End Lists

New Statesman: Best Books of 2021

Non-fiction

• The Aristocracy of Talent

  How Meritocracy Made the Modern World
  Adrian Wooldridge
• Being You

  A New Science of Consciousness
  Anil Seth
• Burning Man

  The Trials of D. H. Lawrence
  Frances Wilson
• Geopolitics for the End Time

  From the Pandemic to the Climate Crisis
  Bruno Maçães
• Real Estate

  A Living Autobiography
  Deborah Levy
• Silent Earth

  Averting the Insect Apocalypse
  Dave Goulson
• Shutdown

  How Covid Shook the World's Economy
  Adam Tooze
• One of Them

  An Eton College Memoir
  Okwonga Musa
• Postliberal Politics

  The Coming Era of Renewal
  Adrian Pabst
• Orwell's Roses
  Rebecca Solnit

Fiction

• Intimacies
  Katie Kitamura
• No One Is Talking About This
  Patricia Lockwood
• little scratch
  Rebecca Watson
• A Lonely Man
  Chris Power
• The Netanyahus

  An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family
  Joshua Cohen
• Klara and the Sun
  Kazuo Ishiguro
• My Phantoms
  Gwendoline Riley
• Open Water
  Caleb Azumah Nelson
• Treacle Walker
  Alan Garner
• Sterling Karat Gold
  Isabel Waidner