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 Bangladeshi-American woman creates a social media network that gets out of control.
Bookcase: Reviews include The Anthill by Julianne Pachico and Everybody by Olivia Laing droitwichstandard.co.uk - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from droitwichstandard.co.uk Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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, elegant masterpiece explores the agony and ecstasy of what it means to be a human being, and the dreadful limitations of language when it comes to explaining the human condition. It’s not a dark book, though – the harrowing story is leavened by a sense of the exquisite joy which comes from struggling and sometimes almost succeeding in putting the right words to matters of the heart and soul. W