Welcome to The Times and The Sunday Times list of the best books of the year. Our expert critics have put in the hours reading thousands of books published in 2021 to recommend their favourite reads: from fiction to history, biography to crime, thrillers to children’s books, gardening and more.
Here are our favourite books in each category. Follow the links to read the complete lists of the best books in each of the 21 categories.
Kazuo Ishiguro’s first novel since winning the Nobel prize for literature imagines the interior world of a benign robot. This futuristic fable pulls off the clever trick of making a reader fall in love with a robot while warning against the encroaching impact of Big Tech on the individual