Today’s Top Ten Tuesday topic at That Artsy Reader girl asks about the new-to-me authors I read last year that I liked best. I read a lot of favorite authors and series last year, but there were still some great new additions to my reading repertoire:

1. Amor Towles: To say I kept forgetting A Gentleman in Moscow was fiction is a compliment of highest order. I look forward to checking out his debut novel, Rules of Civility, next.
2. Elizabeth Acevedo: I started two of her books — her poetry collection, Beastgirl and Other Origin Myths and her debut verse novel, The Poet X, which won the National Book Award for young people and which I nominated for the Cybils poetry category — last year that I haven’t yet finished, but that is more an indication of where my head is than of her writing. It will be embarrassing when she wins the Cybil and I haven’t finished reading the book I nominated, so I plan to check that off my list soon.
3. Kevin Kwan: I didn’t have any interest in reading Crazy Rich Asians when it (or its sequels came out), but the movie trailer and then the film itself piqued my interest. His riff on Jane Austen was well executed and lots of fun and I look forward to reading more of his work.
4. Michelle Obama: I was already a fan of our former First Lady, but her Becoming has been a wonderful listen. I haven’t finished reading it, but will soon.
5. Ashley Blake Herring wrote the adorable middle grade novel Ivy Aberdeen’s Letter to the World, which uses the combined forces of an Emily Dickinson poem and a tornado to great effect in a novel about first crushes and sexual orientation.
6. Karina Yan Glaser: Her middle-grade debut, The Vanderbeekers of 141st Street, offered a glimpse into a working-class biracial family of seven who are about to be displaced from their Harlem home at the holidays. Reminiscent of and as timeless as the Melendys and the Penderwicks, but wholly modern. I look forward to revisiting the family in Yan Glaser’s sequel.
7. Jennifer Mathieu: Her YA novel, Moxie, is an enjoyable look at teen girls, zines, and feminism set in a small Texas town that shuts down for Friday night football games and reveres the boys who play it. She penned a #MeToo antidote to toxic masculinity for the next generation.
8. Jons Mellgren: In his unique heart-breaking and heart-healing picture book, Elsa and the Night, this Swedish author-artist shares the story of a badger named Elsa, who doesn’t sleep anymore in the wake of the death of her friend and who captures the Night, who she finds hiding under her table, in a cookie jar. Without Night coming at the end of each day, though, the rest of the world no longer works quite right. But the Night and Elsa can maybe help each other out.
9. David Grann: My fellow Conn College Camel has penned a fascinating and depressing expose of a forgotten period of American history. Killers of the Flower Moon looks at a tribe of fabulously wealthy Osage Indians, who were denied the right to look after their own finances by a racist U.S. government and then murdered one-by-one for their money and oil rights.
10. Andrew Shaffer: Hope Never Dies is a laugh-out-loud buddy flick of a book starring Joe Biden and Barack Obama as our crime-solving heroes. He gets the voices right and takes neither his protagonists nor his text too seriously, serving up precisely the book you want to read. Others agree and he has a sequel due out later this year.

How about you? Who were your favorite newly discovered writers last year?