The Telegraph Best Books of the Year 2021

About the The Telegraph Best Books of the Year

The Telegraph books desk's year-end list of the year's best books, chosen by its critics, one combined list a year. 2015 is the ranked 100 best books of 2015 (first run as Best 100 books for Christmas); 2016 is the ranked 50 best books for Christmas 2016; 2017-2024 are the ranked 50 best books of the year, except 2021, which ranked 75. 2025 is The greatest books of 2025, 139 unranked critics' picks in genre sections (history, fiction, crime, children's, poetry and more), folded into one list and stored without rank. Years before 2015 are left out: the Telegraph ran writers' and celebrity picks (2009), genre-by-genre Christmas roundups (2012), a literary editor's top 10 (2010) and running best-of-the-year-so-far pages (2014-2016), with no single critics' year-end list. Running so-far pages, summer reading lists, separate genre lists, gift guides and writers' picks are left out in every year. All pages were read through the Wayback Machine because telegraph.co.uk is paywalled and blocks direct fetches; 2019 comes from the AMP copy captured on publication day, as later full-page captures are cut off by the paywall. Where a line on the page names no author, the author comes from the same page's blurb or Telegraph Bookshop link. Where the page credits only an editor, the editor is the author, unless the title names the writer in full (the Plath and Murdoch letters, the Channon diaries, the Stevie Smith and Seamus Heaney poems).

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