Kobo’s picks for the best books of 2021
The best eBooks and audiobooks of 2021, as chosen by Kobo’s bookselling team.
Find even more of the best books of 2021 HERE
In 2021 authors we enjoyed books from authors like Omar El Akkad and Taylor Jenkins Reid who just a few years ago burst onto the scene with their incredible debut novels. And we loved audiobook adventures with Malcolm Gladwell and Seth Rogen. Plus several series that grabbed us recently were continued, like Talia Hibbert’s The Brown Sisters and Jennifer L. Armentrout’s Blood and Ash … and so much more!
In the third book of this blockbuster series, our heroine Poppy faces an impossible choice between forsaking her birthright or ascending the throne to become the Queen of Flesh and Fire. There’s no easy way out and betrayal lurks around every corner.
Multi-talented actor, writer, comedian, podcaster Casey Wilson narrates this collection of hilarious and thought-provoking essays.
Taylor Jenkins Reid’s debut novel about a fiction rock band, Daisy Jones & the Six, was one of the splashiest debuts of the last decade. In Malibu Rising she shows no sign of a sophomore slump, with its web of relationships and intrigue among members of a family whose mansion has just burned to the ground.
While there are plenty of audiobooks by comedians that have more going on than their text-based counterparts (Amy Poehler’s and Tina Fey’s Bossypants come to mind) Seth Rogen takes it to the next level with Yearbook. With more than 80 guest voices, including the author’s parents, comic actors Nick Kroll, Dan Aykroyd, and Jason Segel, and so many more, Rogen redefines the term “full cast” when it comes to audiobook narration.
Silvia Moreno-Garcia has published several novels across a variety of genres in the past couple of years. Set against 1970s Mexico City, Velvet Was the Night is her foray into noir detective fiction in which a lonely goon and an absent-minded secretary track down a woman who’s gone missing under mysterious circumstances.
Ashley Ford grew up knowing her father was incarcerated, but she didn’t know what he’d done to be there — until one day her grandmother told her, forever shattering her world. Ford’s writing is brilliant, and her audiobook performance brings you even deeper inside this unforgettable story.
When Nella, the only Black girl at a publishing house discovers that the new hire is also Black, it seems like great news and an end to a certain kind of loneliness. But then the threatening notes start appearing on Nella’s desk…
In the summer of 2020 on his podcast Revisionist History, Malcolm Gladwell spent several episodes on General Curtis LeMay and the firebombing of Tokyo in WWII. After 3 hours on the subject, it turned out he’d only just gotten started, so he set out to write a whole book on the subject-only these days the author of The Tipping Point and has developed such a love of audio as a medium that the book he wrote was an audiobook, complete with tapes of LeMay and his colleagues expressing their views about how best to bring Japan to its knees and end the war.
Nnedi Okorafor is a master of the science fiction novella, and in Remote Control she tells a story with a mythological feel about Sankofa, a young girl who kills with the barest effort as she walks from town to town in search of an object that fell from the sky.
At the elite Niveus Private Academy, Devon and Chiamaka face an anonymous villain obsessed with ruining their futures. This is a thrilling take on the dark academia genre by debut author Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé.
This horror novel set in Toronto’s gay village neighbourhood mirrors headlines from recent history, but spins off in supernatural directions. If Stephen King were a young LGBTQ+ novelist, this is the kind of book he might write.
The third book in Talia Hibbert’s delightful Brown Sisters rom-com series, featuring the least reliable and hottest mess of the sisters, has us wishing for an even larger Brown family.
This rom-com was Tiana’s staff pick earlier this year: “I loved this book because it was just so full of joy. It’s the type of book that it’s better to know very little about before you start it, but once you start it you’ll understand why it’s so great. It’s got romance, it’s got humour, and it’s a refreshing and unique story.”
Narrated by Klara, an “Artificial Friend,” Ishiguro’s latest novel made us think about what we really need, and what we give to others when we love.
Omar El Akkad’s American War felt like a science fiction novel set just a couple of decades in the future. His new book What Strange Paradise feels timeless like a story happening in the ever-present now-but we haven’t been listening. The novel won Canada’s prestigious Giller Prize.
We’ve got even more picks for the best of 2021 HERE
Originally published at https://www.kobo.com on December 1, 2021.
