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The best (and worst) novels of 2021 so far In this regularly updated guide, our critics review the best of the year's fiction – and suggest a few books to avoid Eight of the best: this year's top novels The Start-Up Wife by Tahmima Anam ★★★☆☆ Tahmima Anam is best known as the award-winning writer of three novels (A Golden Age, The Good Muslim and The Bones of Grace), and less well-known as the executive director of a music technology startup called ROLI. An experience no doubt plumbed for her latest book, The Startup Wife, a tech industry-set reverse romcom in which a young Bangl...

Maggie O’Farrell on reading to ‘fill your soul’ Amy Sutherland © MURDO MACLEODAll Novelist Maggie O'Farrell. In her award-winning, best-selling novel, “Hamnet,” Maggie O’Farrell imagines life in 16th-century England when the Black Plague claims the life of an 11-year-old boy who happens to be the only son of a budding playwright. The Irish-born author grew up in Wales and Scotland, where she now lives in Edinburgh with her family. Her previous book was the memoir, “I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death.” “Hamnet,” her eighth novel, is out in pap...

The ‘triumphant’ new novel from Jon McGregor

Review by Neil Mackay “WORDS, words, words, they’re all we have to go on,” Tom Stoppard wrote – half in melancholy, half in delight – in his play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Language, Stoppard tells us in his tragicomic take on the lives of two minor characters in Hamlet, is what defines us poor human creatures – it’s all that separates us from the beasts. Jon McGregor must have been listening. His new novel, Lean Fall Stand, may ostensibly tell of a terrible accident that befalls a team of Antarctic explorers and its cruel aftermath, but in truth this taut, ele...

Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth by Wole Soyinka (Bloomsbury) The Nobel laureate’s first novel in almost 50 years promises “murder, mayhem and no shortage of drama” in contemporary Nigeria. The Thursday Murder Club 2 by Richard Osman (Viking) Last year the Pointless co-host’s cosy crime debut set in a retirement home broke sales records; here comes the sequel. Waters of Salvation by Richard Coles (W&N) A new crime series from everyone’s favourite vicar begins as a proposal to refurbish a village church ends in murder; Canon Daniel Clement must investigate. O...