Best books of 2021: Critics’ picks

Roula Khalaf

EDITOR OF THE FT

Here’s one of the books I couldn’t put down, even though I already knew the details of the story. Patrick Radden Keefe’s Empire of Pain is the chilling history of the Sackler dynasty’s spectacular rise in the arts world even as the family firm Purdue Pharma’s addictive painkiller OxyContin built a trail of death and destruction. An elegantly written investigative narrative, Empire of Pain is a portrait of greed, corruption and reputation laundering.

Frederick Studemann

FT LITERARY EDITOR

Branded Europe’s last Stalinist outpost — a title Belarus may now dispute — precious little was known about life in communist Albania under Enver Hoxha. That strange world and its legacy is now stunningly brought to life in Lea Ypi’s Free. From protective doublespeak round the kitchen table to the uncertain, and unfulfilled promises of post-communism, Ypi offers a moving and compelling memoir of growing up in turbulent times, as well as a frank questioning of what it really means to be “free”.

Having promised myself a break from pandemic literature I found myself gripped by Ludmila Ulitskaya’s Just The Plague. Written in the 1980s but only published this year, it’s a fictional take on the true, yet suppressed, story of an outbreak of plague at the end of Stalin’s Terror that at times feels a bit too familiar.

I don’t think that I’m the only person to have been captivated by Claire Keegan’s novella Small Things Like These. With deft, powerful economy it takes us back to 1980s Ireland and a small town where big secrets are withheld — and where silences are often more brutal than anything said. I also enjoyed Colm Tóibín’s The Magician. Taking on Thomas Mann is no easy task, but Tóibín’s fictional account of the inner life of the great German novelist is masterful.

And, finally, Christian Kracht’s Eurotrash, a sardonic venture into dark family secrets and history told against a backdrop of terminal illness and pill-popping proved a surprisingly enjoyable — even funny — read. A fitting, middle-aged book-end to his scathing 1990s debut Faserland, which skewered bland German affluence.

Alec Russell

FT WEEKEND EDITOR

I faced a dilemma over my selection and ended with a first equal. Given that I am to have Lunch with one of the authors, I will keep her book under wraps and name the other. Sentient, by Jackie Higgins, takes you into the life and mind of the peacock mantis shrimp, the spook fish, the grey owl and other remarkable species. It is spellbinding — and has surely one of the covers of the year. More than any other book, it has made me think differently about the world this year.

Simon Schama

FT LIFE & ARTS COLUMNIST

If I nominate a book I haven’t quite finished (because after all it runs to more than 900 pages), take my word for it, all the same. Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob is a spellbinding epic, one of the great literary achievements of the decade: a poetically brimful recreation of the world of a Jewish false messiah in 18th century Poland, but beyond as well to mystically drawn priests and errant aristocrats. Charged with sensuous immediacy it’s the kind of hypnotic novel you not so much read as dwell in, and which then, magically, comes to dwell in you.

Rana Foroohar

FT GLOBAL BUSINESS COLUMNIST

Gary Shteyngart’s Our Country Friends is the best work of American post-pandemic fiction so far. It’s set in a country house up the Hudson where a bunch of characters that movingly and often hilariously embody certain social archetypes of our moment come together to wait out Covid-19. It has, for me, surpassed Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections as a novel that marries big-picture issues with page-turning narrative. Poignant, thoughtful and emotionally wise.

Gillian Tett

CHAIR OF FT EDITORIAL BOARD AND US EDITOR-AT-LARGE

Academic economists and other serious thinkers sometimes deride Adam Grant as mere pop-psychology. No wonder: he has a breezy, cheery style that is easy to digest. But his core message in his book Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know — namely that in a post-pandemic lens we need to be willing to re-examine our prejudices, imagine new ways of solving problems and listen, with empathy to alternative points of view — is extraordinarily timely. If only policymakers would do this.

Enuma Okoro

FT LIFE & ARTS COLUMNIST

My book of the year is actually one that has been out for a while but is a very timely read in a global season of unexpected disruptions, and necessary reflections. Psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz’s The Examined Life, which I picked up by chance in the Tate Britain bookshop a few months ago, is a series of mini-essays about his sessions with different clients, each offering insightful and poignant vignettes about the human condition. The stories slip open a window into how the unconscious can simultaneously work to protect us from acknowledging our deep pains and keep us from getting to the bottom of the troubling disruptions that manifest in our lives. I read a chapter a morning over the course of a couple of months and found by the end that it had quietly changed the way I considered aspects of my own life and relationships.

Ben Okri

NOVELIST AND POET

My book of the year has to be a novel that took 20 years and the recent lockdown to write. It is a satire, a murder mystery, a political novel, a work of sustained stylistic brio, and may be one of the few genuine literary surprises of 2021. Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth is the novel that Wole Soyinka has always wanted to write, a story that is a kind of a deliberate explosive aimed at Nigerian regimes of endemic corruption. It is also a novel of friendships and betrayals. Soyinka finally delivers his magnum opus on the state of his homeland.

Books of the Year 2021

All this week, FT writers and critics shared their favourites. Here are some of the highlights:

Monday: Business by Andrew Hill
Tuesday: Politics by Gideon Rachman
Wednesday: Economics by Martin Wolf
Thursday: Fiction by Laura Battle
Friday: History by Tony Barber
Saturday: Critics’ choice

Janan Ganesh

CHIEF US POLITICAL COMMENTATOR

As Watergate played out, conservatives were tasting a much larger defeat on the other coast. With Chinatown, Hollywood explored the inequities of American life. On TV, an unmarried working woman anchored The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Even protest music attained a new stature. If Ronald Brownstein doesn’t quite stand up the idea of 1974 as a sharp turn in art (a 1922, say) he does chart the liberal capture of it, and the rise of Los Angeles as the cradle of trends in Rock Me on the Water.

Sarah O’Connor

FT EMPLOYMENT COLUMNIST

Ed Balls, a big and hungry baby, enjoyed his first (pulverised) roast dinner at three weeks old. Thus began a life-long love affair with food, which the former politician chronicles in this very likeable “memoir in recipes”, Appetite. The writing is funny and tender and some of the recipes are great. I tried his sponge cake recently, which he makes with double-cream rather than butter, and it went down a storm.

Nilanjana Roy

FT COLUMNIST

I had few expectations when I came to Tove Ditlevsen’s The Copenhagen Trilogy — outside of Denmark, Ditlevsen’s towering reputation as a poet, fiction writer and memoirist is only just being acknowledged. But from the first page, she sent a shiver through me, with these three bright, hard chronicles of damage, self-absorption, addiction and the rapture of writing — Childhood, Youth and Dependency, first published between 1967 and 1971. Many years after her suicide in 1976 at the age of 58, her incredible genius is finally here in translation by Tiina Nunnally and Michael Favala Goldman for all the world to marvel and flinch at.

Anjana Ahuja

FT SCIENCE COMMENTATOR

By August this year — after 12 months that took in bereavement, our eldest leaving for college, writing nonstop about Covid-19, catching Covid and co-writing a book on Covid — I craved the inconsequential. Light relief came in the company of Elizabeth, Joyce, Ibrahim and Ron, the sharp pensioner sleuths who make up The Thursday Murder Club. Richard Osman’s Agatha Christie-meets-Chuckle Brothers bestseller is also an unpatronising love letter to the old, who see us more than we see them.

Fani Papageorgiou

FT LIFE & ARTS CONTRIBUTOR

For those of us who lived through 1980s political turmoil, indelible music and ghastly fashion, how do you remember Nancy Reagan? Ambassadorial, iron butterfly, a gossip, interfering presidential spouse? She overruled US state department officials in scheduling foreign visits based on horoscopes. Nancy may be remembered for glamorous frocks and wifely doting gaze but would Ronald Reagan have become governor of California or president without her? Washington Post columnist Karen Tumulty suggests not in The Triumph of Nancy Reagan.

Henry Mance

FT CHIEF FEATURE WRITER

As someone who steers clear of self-help books, I really benefited from Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks. Four thousand weeks is the lifespan of a 77-year-old; Burkeman uses the number to question how we allocate our time. I disagreed with some of his conclusions, but found the book so easy to read that I finished it in one sitting, without checking my phone in between. I’ll probably never organise my time so well again.

Tim Harford

FT Columnist

Cal Newport’s reputation rests on no-nonsense self-help books such as Deep Work and Digital Minimalism, but in A World Without Email he delves into the history of communications and management, arguing that knowledge work processes need a radical rethink, just as production lines transformed manufacturing in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Practical and fascinating.

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