BookPage Best Books of the Year 2021

About the BookPage Best Books of the Year

BookPage's year-end best books lists, chosen by BookPage's editors. Read from bookpage.com's own list pages; 2011-2016 lists come from Wayback Machine snapshots of the old bookpage.com/content pages (each sourceUrl is the snapshot). Starts in 2011: no year-end editors' list was found in BookPage's archived December issues for 2006-2008, and none was found online for 2009-2010. 2011-2017 have one ranked overall list (category Best Books: top 50, top 25 in 2017); 2011-2016 also have BookPage's children's list in three sections (Picture Books, Middle Grade, Young Adult; BookPage's Teen heading is filed as Young Adult). From 2018 BookPage split the list by genre, and category is BookPage's own list name for that year (e.g. Mystery & Suspense, Science Fiction & Fantasy, later SFF & Horror). 2018 has only the Fiction, Nonfiction and Mystery & Suspense lists; no other 2018 or 2017 genre or children's lists were found. Top 10 is the overall list BookPage ran from 2022. Audiobook lists and BookPage's 2011 Readers' Choice poll are left out. Rank is kept where BookPage numbered the list (2011-2021). Year is the year in the list's name. Author is the first name in BookPage's byline (the writer; illustrators and narrators are dropped). Two 2025 cards print no byline; their authors are taken from the book (Xolo: Donna Barba Higuera; The Black Wolf: Louise Penny). The 2025 genre lists sit at BookPage's undated /best-books/<genre>/ URLs, which BookPage reuses each year; a Wayback snapshot will be needed once the 2026 lists replace them. Expected counts are the entries printed on each list page.

Organization: BookPage. Official site (opens in a new tab)