29 Books That Should Be On Your Radar: January 2021

Editor’s note: It’s hard to believe that January is nearly over, yet, here we are. We’re rapidly catching up on all the terrific fiction and nonfiction we didn’t get to in 2020 and starting to make a dent in our 2021 book pile. As always, we encourage you to do whatever you can to support your local bookstore, including purchasing audiobooks from our sponsor Libro.fm. Feel free to share what’s on your #TBR list by tweeting us @WritersBone or in the comments section below. Stay safe, keep reading!—Daniel Ford

Black Buck is one of those books that people are going to be talking about throughout 2021 and beyond. Trust us when we tell you that you’ll be hooked on this novel from the first page to the last. Through his main character Darren, an unassuming Starbucks manager with glowing potential when we first meet him, Mateo Askaripour hilariously and poignantly covers everything from corporate culture and race relations to ambition and family drama.

We have plenty of mysteries and thrillers to catch up on in January (already), but Ashley Audrain’s The Push may be at the top of our list. One of our favorite covers so far this year!

Mike Chen has a permanent home on #bookradar following his novel A Beginning at the End’s appearance on NovelClass Season 4. We Could Be Heroes could not be more designed for us if it tried.

Julie Carrick Dalton is a Boston-based author and journalist, so we can’t wait to talk to her about her debut Waiting for the Night Song. We’ll be hard pressed to find a better opening line in 2021: "Truth hides in fissures and hollows, in broken places and empty parts."

We’ve been fans of Lisa Gardner ever since NovelClass featured her novel Right Behind You way back in Season 1. Looking forward to spending some winter days curled up with her latest!

You know you’re in the presence of great literature as soon as you read the opening words of Robert Jones, Jr.’s The Prophets. The author refashions the slave narrative and makes room for, of all things, love. Samuel and Isaiah are unforgettable characters, as are all of the voices in the chorus that surrounds them. It’s not often authors like Marlon James compare you to the likes of James Baldwin and Toni Morrison, but Jones, Jr. very much earns that distinction and more.

Julia Claiborne Johnson’s much anticipated and much heralded second novel Better Luck Next Time reaffirmed why she’s one of our favorite authors. Let me regal you with some of the accolades this book has received. Better Luck Next Time was a Barnes & Noble Book Club Pick and the bookstore is selling special edition of the novel with added literary goodies. If that weren’t enough, the novel is one of Amazon’s Best Books of the Month for January 2021, a Indie Next List selection, and it received a Publisher's Weekly Starred Review. Not bad at all.

Talk about beautiful covers. We’ve been on a historical fiction kick lately, so Sadeqa Johnson’s Yellow Wife will head to the top of our reading list sooner rather than later.

Desmond Hall was recently featured on A Mighty Blaze, which means he automatically gets added to our #bookradar. Those are the rules. We have a feeling that this novel will gut-punch us like John Vercher’s Three-Fifths.

Even with advanced knowledge, we were unprepared for the sexiness and sharpness in Raven Leilani’s Luster. So many authors we talked to last year recommended this novel and it’s not hard to see why now that we’ve devoured it. A+ sentences throughout.

Deacon King Kong was one of our favorite books of 2020 and we couldn’t wait to catch up on James McBride’s catalog. The Good Lord Bird is nothing short of a masterpiece. It’s funny, visceral, thought-provoking, and heart-pounding.

We seen this book show up on more than a few lists we researched while putting this month’s #bookradar together. As eye-catching as the cover is, the premise, which features a young woman joining up with Hole in the Wall Gang, hooked us around its belt buckle. R.O. Kwon calling it “a masterpiece” certainly caught our attention as well.

This collection, whew, is something else. Just honest and visceral character work that will make the blood thrum in your veins with every paragraph and every line of dialogue.

NovelClass host Dave Pezza says we’re contractually obligated to include any book written by George Saunders. For further reading, we highly recommend Saunders’ recent interview in Esquire magazine.

As you may know, The Great Gatsby’s copyright expired this year, which means you’ll likely be seeing new editions of the book, as well as fiction delving into the world F. Scott Fitzgerald created in 1925. Our good literary friend Michael Farris Smith kicked off the literary fireworks with his novel Nick. You must listen to Smith read from the novel. Like right now. We advocate Smith reading portions of all novels in that setting from now until the end of time.

There’s nothing we don’t love about Rachel Lynn Solomon’s The Ex Talk. There’s a microphone on the cover for crying out loud! The novel also features local radio stations, podcast references galore, a lovable dog, a snappy writing style, and a fun love story. We truly can’t ask for anything more.

At its core, Shuggie Bain is about the relationship between Shuggie, a poor young lad discovering his true self in 1980s Glasgow, Scotland, and his alcoholic mother. However, the supporting characters and world Stuart builds around these two elevate this novel to another level. Shuggie Bain is evocative prose that makes the books 450 pages fly by. These characters will break your heart more than a few times, but how true to life is that? You’ll miss them when you put the book down, we can assure you.

Gabriel Valjan is such a wonderful advocate for his fellow authors that it seems like a crime that this is his first appearance on #bookradar. It will certainly not be the last. We had so much fun spending time with his overwhelmed PI Shane Clearly. Shane not only has to navigate a bunch of cases, all with mercurial, shadowy clients, but also 1970s Boston in all its grimy glory. Here’s hoping Valjan has plenty more trouble for Cleary to get into.

Author’s Corner

Lisa Kass, author of A Ritchie Boy and founder of Gramercy Books, stopped by the podcast recently and gave us wonderful reading recommendations, so you should add them all to your reading list and buy them from your local bookstore, Bookshop.org, Indiebound, or Libro.fm.

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