Bookseller Top 5 of 2021 - Part 1

Happy Day After Thanksgiving! To celebrate the beginning of the holidays, starting today we're going to publish a blog post each day until the end of November with our booksellers' top 5 picks for the best books of the year.

What's that all about, you ask? Well - each year all of the booksellers at Boswell choose their Top 5 favorite books of the year. For some, it's a breeze. For others, it's an arduous task - there is ranking, there are personal bracket systems, and there is even, occasionally, coin flipping.

Here's our best of the best - our tip top picks for 2021.

First up, Aleah:

Raven Leilani's Luster is a Top Book of the Year pick from like, a gazillion publications. It's also won the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, the Kirkus Prize, the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. Yeesh! Edie is stumbling her way through her twenties - sharing a subpar apartment in Bushwick, clocking in and out of her admin job, making a series of inappropriate sexual choices. She is also haltingly, fitfully giving heat and air to the art that simmers inside her. And then she meets Eric, a digital archivist with a family in New Jersey, including an autopsist wife who has agreed to an open marriage - with rules.

Dolly Alderton's Ghosts is per the publisher, a smart, sexy, laugh-out-loud romantic comedy about ex-boyfriends, imperfect parents, friends with kids, and a man who disappears the moment he says "I love you." Nina Dean is not especially bothered that she's single. She owns her own apartment, she's about to publish her second book, she has a great relationship with her ex-boyfriend, and enough friends to keep her social calendar full and her hangovers plentiful. And when she downloads a dating app, she does the seemingly impossible: She meets a great guy on her first date. But when Max ghosts her, Nina is forced to deal with everything she's been trying so hard to ignore: her father's Alzheimer's is getting worse, and so is her mother's denial of it; her editor hates her new book idea; and her best friend from childhood is icing her out.

Mona Awad's All's Well has prose that Margaret Atwood has described as "no punches pulled, no hilarities dodged…genius," Mona Awad has concocted her most potent, subversive novel yet. All’s Well is a "fabulous novel" (Mary Karr) about a woman at her breaking point and a formidable, piercingly funny indictment of our collective refusal to witness and believe female pain. Miranda Fitch’s life is a waking nightmare. The accident that ended her burgeoning acting career left her with excruciating chronic back pain, a failed marriage, and a deepening dependence on painkillers. And now, she’s on the verge of losing her job as a college theater director. Determined to put on Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well, the play that promised and cost her everything, she faces a mutinous cast hellbent on staging Macbeth instead. Miranda sees her chance at redemption slip through her fingers.That’s when she meets three strange benefactors who have an eerie knowledge of Miranda’s past and a tantalizing promise for her future: one where the show goes on, her rebellious students get what’s coming to them, and the invisible doubted pain that’s kept her from the spotlight is made known.

Michelle Ruiz Keil's Summer in the City of Roses is a book inspired by the Greek myth of Iphigenia and the Grimm fairy tale "Brother and Sister." Michelle Ruiz Keil's second novel follows two siblings torn apart and struggling to find each other in early 90s Portland. Told through a lens of magical realism and steeped in myth, this is a dazzling tale about the pain and beauty of growing up.

And Aleah's final pick is The Power by Naomi Alderman. Each new bookseller gets a chance to pick an older book for their top 5 in their first year. In The Power, the world is a recognizable place: there's a rich Nigerian boy who lounges around the family pool; a foster kid whose religious parents hide their true nature; an ambitious American politician; a tough London girl from a tricky family. But then a vital new force takes root and flourishes, causing their lives to converge with devastating effect. Teenage girls now have immense physical power: they can cause agonizing pain and even death. And, with this small twist of nature, the world drastically resets. The Power is speculative fiction at its most ambitious and provocative, at once taking us on a thrilling journey to an alternate reality, and exposing our own world in bold and surprising ways.

NEXT UP! From Amie (who only turned in two [great] top picks this year, so here they are):

Ruth Ozeki's The Book of Form and Emptiness is about a boy who hears the voices of objects all around him; a mother drowning in her possessions; and a Book that might hold the secret to saving them both. This brilliantly inventive new novel from the Booker Prize-finalist Ruth Ozeki is something that David Mitchell, the award-winning author of books like The Bone Clocks and Cloud Atlas, says, "If you’ve lost your way with fiction over the last year or two, let The Book of Form and Emptiness light your way home."

Amie's next pick is World Travel: An Irreverent Guide, the posthumous book by Anthony Bourdain,  with Laurie Woolever, the writer and editor who spent nearly a decade working with Bourdain and coauthored the cookbook Appetites with him. This is a guide to some of the world’s most fascinating places, as seen and experienced by writer, television host, and relentlessly curious traveler Bourdain. A life of experience is collected into an entertaining, practical, fun and frank travel guide that gives readers an introduction to some of his favorite places - in his own words. Featuring essential advice on how to get there, what to eat, where to stay and, in some cases, what to avoid, World Travel provides essential context that will help readers further appreciate the reasons why Bourdain found a place enchanting and memorable.

And the last entry for the day comes from me, Chris, your Boswellians blog-runner and (hopefully) favorite bookstore marketing dude:

My tip-top, #1 most incredible, beloved book pick of the year is the story collection Afterparties, by Anthony Veasna So. This is another posthumous book, sadly - So passed away suddenly just before its publication. Happily, though, the book leaves behind for him an incredible literary legacy. It was also just named one of The New York Times 100 Best Books of the year. Here's my staff rec: BELIEVE THE HYPE. In fact, call Afterparties the Goodbye, Columbus of Californian Cambodian-American life. So’s book is a glittering example of what the best story collections do - welcome you fully into a world and render it with diamond cut detail and deep well empathy. Sharply funny, dirty, unsparing, and full of longing, hopes, and American dreams of all kinds - dashed, wildly overachieved, hung onto by a thread, abandoned, and just discovered.

My next pick is a Pittsburgh book. I'm always glad to get a Pittsburgher in the mix, as I went to grad school at Pitt and have a big love for the Steel City. The book is Punch Me Up to the Gods by Brian Broome. My rec: Generous, fearless, funny, and gentle, Broome chronicles his own story to understand how and where he (along with so many other Black outsiders) doesn’t fit in America. His sentences are pure style, a joy to read, and he slips between as many voices as he has existences: Black, gay, poor, masculine, abused, uncool, scared, addicted, ashamed, angry, proud, and full of joy. And on and on. Yes, that’s a lot of signifiers, but only because this is an awful lot of book. Where do you live when every space you inhabit is an intersection of tensions? How does a man who’s spent his life being choked finally learn to breathe? Broome interrogates the world with the rigor and tenacity of the greats, and Punch Me Up to the Gods is everything a great memoir should be. 

I got the chance to interview Brian for the shop - here's the video of that virtual event.

My third pick is Catch the Rabbit, a novel by Lana Bastašić, another author I had the pleasure of chatting with - check out that virtual event here. And check out my review of the book right here: Amazing, heart-wrenching, wondrous. A years-spanning story of an intense friendship and how history (you know, wars and stuff) weighs on people's bonds. More than a decade ago, Sara left Bosnia, never to return. Now, drawn back by a long-lost childhood friend, she’s on a road trip through the Western Balkans, her own past, and a landscape scarred by social and political violence. Bastašić wrestles questions of obligation and understanding into one woman’s deeply personal reckoning. What do we owe the people who’ve shaped us, who taught us how to feel alive? What we know (and un-know) of our friends, our histories, and ourselves? It’s a story of how a person can misunderstand her friend and herself and then be completely wrecked and rebuilt as she grows to a new understanding of her world. Prepare to be split in two. WOW!

How about one more book by an author I got to chat with virtually (video here) this year? Okay! Next on my list is Our Country Friends, the new novel by literary funnyman Gary Shteyngart. Here's my brief, but too the point summary of this one: Extraordinary. I love every word Shteyngart’s ever written, and this is his best novel by an upstate country mile. I said I never wanted to read a 2020 pandemic novel, but I was wrong. I needed to read one - this one. And seriously, let me double down on that last sentiment here for the blog. I know we're all really, really, really tired of talking about COVID, for better or worse, but it's quite refreshing and indeed even sort of soothing to have a writer as good as Shteyngart take our current collective woes and turn them into such an indelible piece of art. You won't regret this vacation-on-the-page from.

My last pick is one from an author I've been meaning to read for a couple of books now but just this year finally got to. I try to read at least one book every year by another Lee (one of the top 5 most widely-used surnames in the world) and this year I finally made it to the J's (first names) with Jonathan Lee's new novel, The Great Mistake. I am very glad I did. In fact, Lee is going to be one of the few authors who is so good I go back and read his other books - High Dive is near the top of my to-read stack now. My review of this fantastic novel: Wow. If you want a classic, capital N, The Novel kind of book, you couldn’t do much better than The Great Mistake. As a stylist, Lee is top shelf; he so obviously delights in the English language, and each of his sentences is a masterclass in wonder, humor, and precision - even the shapes and sounds of his lines are full of surprises. You want more than style? You got it. Lee tracks the life of Andrew Haswell Green (the mostly forgotten Father of Greater New York) through the 19th century, creating a remarkably full measure of the man’s life, public and private. In doing so, the book offers a window into the life of America’s greatest city as it came into its modern form. Honestly, the best comparison I can think of is that this is the novel Charles Dickens might write if he’d recently crawled out of the grave.

And, full disclosure? It was I who made a choice with a coin flip this year. What was the other book in competition? I'll never tell. Unless you come to the store and ask me, in which case I'll probably just blurt it out without even thinking about it. See you at the shop!

More top 5 picks coming tomorrow!