Obama shares favourite reads of 2021 including Franzen and Whitehead

Former US President Barack Obama has released a 13-strong list of his favourite books of the year, spanning memoir, fiction and non-fiction, including Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen (Fourth Estate), These Precious Days by Ann Patchett (Bloomsbury) and Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead (Doubleday).

He

: "Art always sustains and nourishes the soul. But for me, music and storytelling felt especially urgent during this pandemic year."

Other picks included Matrix by Lauren Groff (Hutchinson Heinemann), How the Word is Passed by Clint Smith (Little, Brown), The Final Revival of Opal & Nev by Dawnie Walton (Quercus), The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles (Hutchinson Heinemann) and Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City by Andrea Elliott (Hutchinson Heinemann).

Anthony Doerr's Cloud Cuckoo Land (Fourth Estate) was also selected alongside Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner (Picador), Aftershocks by Nadia Owusu (Hodder & Stoughton), The Love Songs of W.E.B Du Bois by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers (Fourth Estate) and Beautiful Country by Qian Julie Wang (Viking).

A few of the books, such as Jeffers' title, have not yet been released in the UK.

The former US president also included a list of books he recommended this summer, including International Booker Prize-winner At Night All Blood is Black by David Diop (Pushkin Press), and Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun (Faber).