When do you know it has been a good year for reading? When you have too many books to fit into your annual review!
Favourite Fiction
As usual my annual review isn’t just about books published in 2021 but books I read in this particular year. First up is Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart. This alcohol soaked look at Glasgow in the 1980s was not only one of my favorite fiction reads but THE Book Club book of the year for me.
It is 1981. Glasgow is dying and good families must grift to survive. Agnes Bain has always expected more from life. She dreams of greater things: a house with its own front door and a life bought and paid for outright (like her perfect, but false, teeth). But Agnes is abandoned by her philandering husband, and soon she and her three children find themselves trapped in a decimated mining town. As she descends deeper into drink, the children try their best to save her, yet one by one they must abandon her to save themselves. It is her son Shuggie who holds out hope the longest.
Shuggie is different. Fastidious and fussy, he shares his mother’s sense of snobbish propriety. The miners’ children pick on him and adults condemn him as no’ right. But Shuggie believes that if he tries his hardest, he can be normal like the other boys and help his mother escape this hopeless place.
Swan Song by Kelleigh Greenberg-Jephcott is a re-imagining of Truman Capote’s later years and quite possibly my favorite read of the year.
They told him everything.
He told everyone else.
Over countless martini-soaked Manhattan lunches, they shared their deepest secrets and greatest fears. On exclusive yachts sailing the Mediterranean, on private jets streaming towards Jamaica, on Yucatán beaches in secluded bays, they gossiped about sex, power, money, love and fame. They never imagined he would betray them so absolutely.
In the autumn of 1975, after two decades of intimate friendships, Truman Capote detonated a literary grenade, forever rupturing the elite circle he’d worked so hard to infiltrate. Why did he do it, knowing what he stood to lose? Was it to punish them? To make them pay for their manners, money and celebrated names? Or did he simply refuse to believe that they could ever stop loving him? Whatever the motive, one thing remains indisputable: nine years after achieving wild success with In Cold Blood, Capote committed an act of professional and social suicide with his most lethal of weapons . . . Words.
It’s a toss up between Swan Song and Three Hours by Rosamund Lupton for my favorite read of the year. It couldn’t happen in Somerset. Right?
In rural Somerset in the middle of a blizzard, the unthinkable happens: a school is under siege.
Pupils and teachers barricade themselves into classrooms, the library, the theater. The headmaster lies wounded in the library, unable to help his trapped students and staff. Outside, a police psychiatrist must identify the gunmen, while parents gather desperate for news.
In three intense hours, all must find the courage to stand up to evil and save the people they love.
Favourite Crime
Mr Mercedes by Stephen King is without one of the best crime books I have read in years. If you like crime you have to read it.
The stolen Mercedes emerges from the pre-dawn fog and plows through a crowd of men and women on line for a job fair in a distressed American city. Then the lone driver backs up, charges again, and speeds off, leaving eight dead and more wounded. The case goes unsolved and ex-cop Bill Hodges is out of hope when he gets a letter from a man who loved the feel of death under the Mercedes’s wheels…
Brady Hartsfield wants that rush again, but this time he’s going big, with an attack that would take down thousands–unless Hodges and two new unusual allies he picks up along the way can throw a wrench in Hartsfield’s diabolical plans.
I couldn’t let 2021 go by without mentioning BOTH Richard Osman books. The Thursday Murder Club series is fab and I totally loved both books for their warmth and humor. Most recommended in 2021.
- The Thursday Murder Club
- The Man Who Died Twice
We Begin At The End by Chris Whitaker features my favorite character of the year – Duchess Day Radley
Thirty years ago, Vincent King became a killer.
Now, he’s been released from prison and is back in his hometown of Cape Haven, California. Not everyone is pleased to see him. Like Star Radley, his ex-girlfriend, and sister of the girl he killed.
Duchess Radley, Star’s thirteen-year-old daughter, is part-carer, part-protector to her younger brother, Robin – and to her deeply troubled mother. But in trying to protect Star, Duchess inadvertently sets off a chain of events that will have tragic consequences not only for her family, but also the whole town.
Murder, revenge, retribution.
How far can we run from the past, when the past seems doomed to repeat itself?
Favourite Teen/Middle Grade
Concrete Rose by Angie Thomas is a prequal to T.H.U.G and it’s just as powerful.
With his King Lord dad in prison and his mom working two jobs, seventeen-year-old Maverick Carter helps the only way he knows how: slinging drugs. Life’s not perfect, but he’s got everything under control. Until he finds out he’s a father…
Suddenly it’s not so easy to deal drugs and finish school with a baby dependent on him for everything. So when he’s offered the chance to go straight, he takes it. But when King Lord blood runs through your veins, you don’t get to just walk away.
And special mention to
It was a strong year for middle grade/teen reading and special mention (without making this post EVEN longer) must go to Peril In Paris, A Good Girl’s Guide To Murder, The Polar Bear Explorers’ Club and Murder Most Unladylike. All are book number 1s in a series and no doubt you will be seeing the sequels popping up on the blog in 2022.
So what has been your favorite read of 2021? Any of the above?
