Top Ten Tuesday was created by The Broke and the Bookish in June of 2010 and has been hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl since January 2018. Head over to her page to find categories for future weeks and participate!

“Authors I Discovered in 2021” is such an interesting category for me to explore because I truly don’t know what authors I discovered for the first time last year. I was super excited to browse through my 2021 Reads list and refamiliarize myself with smaller authors. It turned out not all of these authors were even small- I discovered big names in 2021 that I didn’t even realize I was missing out on! That made participating in this tag even more important, because I wouldn’t want you all to be making the same mistakes that I am. It turns out that of the 40 books I read last year, over 30 of the were by authors I’d never read before, so it was quite difficult to narrow down. As a result, I only chose fiction authors to make my process easier. Here’s the list, in no particular order:

Lucy Foley

I read The Guest List and absolutely fell in love. She’s been writing since 2015 so she has a fairly huge backlog of books that I cannot wait to start reading. If they’re anything like Guest List, I’ll fly through them in a day and then rave about them on this blog until you all get annoyed at me.

Torey Peters

Detransition, Baby was Peter’s debut novel, although she has published a couple of novellas. This was one of the most beautifully written books I’ve ever read so I’m looking forward to whatever she publishes next.

Elizabeth Gilbert

Apparently Gilbert wrote Eat Pray Love which I had NO IDEA until writing this list, but she still gets to be added because I’ve never read Eat Pray Love nor do I ever intend to.

Bernardine Evaristo

Evaristo wrote Girl, Woman, Other, which is the book that I read and loved. It was basically a series of short stories about interconnected characters, and I loved it. Evaristo is yet another beautifully talented writer of characters and descriptions and I want to read more of what she has written.

Jason Reynolds

Long Way Down was a poetry novel, something that I absolutely love. I listened to the audiobook and it really resonated with me. His writing was painful but honest and still Young Adult audience oriented.

Madeline Miller

Apparently Miller writes a ton of Greek god themed books, but Circe was the first one I’d heard of. I thought it was amazing and it drew me back into a world that I thought I grew out of after Percy Jackson.

Kiley Reid

Such a Fun Age is Reid’s debut novel, so it’s understandable that I hadn’t heard about her before. Her book was simultaneously fun and serious, and that’s a quality I so admire in authors. Being able to approach real life subjects such as racism while still making the book enjoyable for a reader is very difficult to achieve, and I think Reid navigated this flawlessly. I came out of the book feeling like I had learned something (this book wasn’t preachy, I mean that I learned as a white woman relating to black women) while still having read a 5 star worthy fiction book.

Gail Honeyman

I fell in love with this book. Eleanor Oliphant was so completely endeared to me that I would both read a sequel, and anything else that Honeyman writes. This was her debut novel, and she wrote it while working full time (which is pretty common for debut novels but still something to be excited about as a human being working full time right now!) and she pulled off writing a complex character with incredible mastery.

Meg Wolitzer

This is my lowest rated book on the list, but it’s here because I appreciate the time period that Wolitzer wrote about. It was a true coming of age novel where the “coming” was in young adulthood rather than in high school. As someone in this stage of life, I appreciated it even if it wasn’t the most interesting book I’ve ever read. I have “The Interestings”, one of Wolitzer’s other books, on my TBR.

Matt Haig

Haig has written a ton of books, and I admire the way he wrote about depression both in Midnight Library, and on his personal Twitter. He’s earned my respect, and I want to read more of his books for sure.

That’s it for this Top 10 Tuesday! If you’ve participated, let me know so I can go check it out, and if not, let me know some of your favorite authors that you just discovered last year in the comments!

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