We recently asked BookBrowse subscribers to tell us about the books they most enjoyed discussing with their book group in 2021.
This is what they told us:
Last week, we introduced you to BookBrowse's Top 20 Books of the Year, as chosen by our subscribers. Now, it's time to announce the award winners. The winners for Best Fiction, Best Nonfiction, Best Debut and Best Young Adult Novel are the books with the highest ratings from subscribers in their respective category.
For more than two decades, BookBrowse has published an annual list highlighting the best of year titles according to our subscribers, and what excellent taste they have!
Take a look below to see which books made our Top 20 list for 2021 (books are displayed in publication order).
2021 has proven to be another uncertain and unpredictable year. We hope that you have weathered it well. As you begin to gear up for next year, here is a list of books as a starting point for whatever need your book club is looking to fill, whether learning more about the world, diversion or simply a unique and memorable reading experience. To that end, we have selected a dozen works that we think will be great choices for your book group in 2022. All are already available in hardcover and ebook, and are newly released or soon to be released in paperback.
Our picks this year span debuts, works by established authors, and several different places and periods in history. They feature many people, particularly women and girls, who find themselves in a state of transition, out of place or belonging to multiple places. In A Million Things by Emily Spurr, 10-year-old Rae must fend for herself when her mother disappears. In the The Narrowboat Summer by Anne Youngson, two women who have come to crossroads in their lives take a journey together along the canals of England. In The Kindest Lie by Nancy Johnson, Ruth Tuttle finds she must go backwards before she can move forwards, unearthing a secret that she attempted to leave behind years earlier. Patricia Engel's Infinite Country follows a teenage girl, Talia, whose family is spread across continents, and Love and Fury by Samantha Silva pays tribute to a major early feminist who forged her own path in both life and work, Mary Wollstonecraft.
Last year, we asked book club members to share with us the books they had most enjoyed reading and discussing in all the years they have been in book groups. In addition to sharing their all-time favorite books overall, they also told us about their favorite mysteries and thrillers and favorite nonfiction titles. In addition, we asked them to tell us which books they had most enjoyed reading and discussing in 2019.
Now, I am pleased to bring you the results from our recent survey to reveal book club members' 2020 favorites.
By any standard, 2020 was an unusual year, with about a quarter of US book clubs not meeting at all once the pandemic started (according to our Book Clubs in Lockdown research report). Because those in groups that had only met for two to three months at the start of the year had a very limited number of titles to select a favorite from, and because they had not had a chance to discuss the more recently published books (which therefore put these titles at a disadvantage) we only asked respondents whose groups had met for the majority of 2020 to name their favorite titles.
This is what they told us:
