Maureen Corrigan

Fresh Air book critic Maureen Corrigan says 2021 was a spectacular year for literary fiction. As such, her annual Best Books list is exclusively composed of novels and short story collections.

Kevin Birmingham's deeply researched biography details the radical political fervor that almost destroyed Dostoevsky's life — and the real-life murder that inspired Crime and Punishment.

Set in a haunted Minneapolis bookshop over the course of one very momentous year, The Sentence is an ambitious novel, featuring a sinister ghost, a country in tumult and Erdrich's own shifting style.

The title novella of Jocelyn Nicole Johnson's debut is set in the near future in Charlottesville, Va., where descendants of Sally Hemings' take shelter from a racist mob in Thomas Jefferson's manor.

Co-written by Hillary Rodham Clinton and Louise Penny, State of Terror centers on a female secretary of state as she races against time to out-maneuver international terrorists and homegrown traitors.

Doerr's follow-up to his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel All The Light We Cannot See follows five young people, each living in dangerous times across the span of eight centuries.

R.C. Sherriff's recently reissued 1931 novel, which follows a British family on their two-week holiday, is a reflection on how time changes shape in periods like a vacation — or even a pandemic.

Beautiful World, Where Are You is a cerebral novel that traces the relationships between four characters, and shifts between themes of sex, friendship and life's dark uncertainty.

The eight short stories in Yoon Choi's extraordinary collection splinter out in unexpected ways, shifting focus from a single life to decades of complex family history.

Many of this year's mystery and suspense novels explore literary appropriation — characters in positions of privilege laying their sticky mitts on stories that don't belong to them.

You don't have to be Catholic to connect with Claire Luchette's vivid story of a lonely young woman yearning for community — and also for everything she gave up to be part of that community.

Anthony Veasna So's posthumously published short story collection offers a smart, compassionate take on the push-pull of growing up first-generation Cambodian American.

Messy and floundering in late midlife, Dana Spiotta's heroine is roiling — along with the rest of the country — amid the 2016 election and the rise of the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements.

Now newly reissued, Gloria Naylor's 1982 novel-in-stories painted a group portrait of seven Black women living on a dingy street in an unnamed city, and the systematic racism they faced.

In 1944 an attack on a London Woolworths killed 168 people. In his new novel, Francis Spufford explores what "might have been" for five young casualties of war.

Scott Borchert's cultural history of the New Deal initiative known as the Federal Writers' Program teems with colorful characters, scenic byways and telling anecdotes.

Chris Power's brooding literary novel A Lonely Man and Jean Hanff Korelitz's nightmare of a thriller The Plot explore the dangerous consequences of sticky fingers in the literary world.

Adichie writes she "came undone" when she learned of her dad's death. Her new book is a charged account of his passing — and also a narrative of mourning in the time of pandemic.

Early Morning Riser, by Katherine Heiny and Secrets of Happiness, by Joan Silber, ruminate on love and family — particularly the family that's thrust upon you when you fall in love.

An older woman living on a remote farm turns to an emotional-support hen for company. Sacha Naspini's newly translated novella is a slim volume, packed with unexpected secrets and epiphanies.