The best (and worst) novels of 2021 so far telegraph.co.uk - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from telegraph.co.uk Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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.
Francis Spufford’s novel Light Perpetual is a miraculous achievement
5/5
What if five victims of the V2 attack on a London Woolworths had survived? This vivid book follows their lives – and a changing Britain
30 January 2021 • 10:00am Instantly deprived of a future : a 1944 V2 rocket killed scores of people in a south London Woolworths
Credit: Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS/Corbis/Getty
Towards the end of Light Perpetual, Jo, one of the five main characters, looks back on her life as she nears 70 and realises how much of it has depended (as lives so often do) on pure chance. Had she not happened to be in certain places at certain times, it would all have been different.