The Best Books of 2017

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Jennifer Egan’s highly anticipated follow-up to 2011’s Pulitzer Prize-winning A Visit from the Goon Squad casts itself back in time to World War II-era New York, where a Naval Yard diver named Anna Kerrigan is forced to re-examine her father’s life when she encounters a mysterious figure from his past.

Also by Jennifer Egan: A Visit from the Goon Squad, Look at Me, The Keep, Emerald City and Other Stories

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This romp through the world of food is a delight. It’s a lightning-fast read packed with fun, and it follows the exploits of Lois Clary, a software engineer who becomes embroiled in a sourdough situation when she begins baking and tending culture and then encounters a secret world in which food and technology collide.

Also by Robin Sloan: Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore

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While heretofore known for his short stories, this year celebrated writer George Saunders produced a debut novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, which, with moving, thrilling, and genre-bending prose, tells the story of Abraham Lincoln visiting his son Willy’s burial place. It’s historical, supernatural, form-transcending, daring, beautiful—and it took home the Man Booker Prize this year. 

Also by George Saunders: Tenth of December, Pastoralia, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline

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The Essex Serpent—a love story, historical tale, and luminous mystery—transports readers to nineteenth-century England, where a young woman named Cora Seaborne encounters the legend of a mythical serpent which is rumored to have returned to the coast bringing danger with it.

Also by Sarah Perry: After Me Comes the Flood

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Attica Locke crafts a page-turning thriller with Bluebird, Bluebird, a novel set in East Texas that follows Texas Ranger Darren Mathews as he grapples with the fallout from two murders and tries to navigate the smoldering racial tensions that exist in the community. 

Also by Attica Locke: Black Water Rising, The Cutting Season, Pleasantville

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It’s easy to love Less, Andrew Sean Greer’s funny, inspired novel about a man, Arthur Less, who accepts every professional invitation he can find in order to escape a wedding invitation that he can neither accept nor deny. The invitations take him all over the world and drop him into situations at turns profound and chaotic.

Also by Andrew Sean Greer: The Story of a Marriage, The Confessions of Max Tivoli, The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells

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This wonderful debut by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton explores three generations in the life of an African-American family living in New Orleans, beginning with World War II-era Evelyn and continuing through history by unfolding the of lives Evelyn’s daughter, Jackie and Jackie’s son, T.C., as well as the continuity of struggles that haunt them all.

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A love story set amid a turbulent landscape, Exit West follows the brave and uncertain journeys of Nadia and Saeed, who flee the the violence of their home by stepping through a door and entering a new world.

Also by Mohsin Hamid: The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Moth Smoke, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

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Min Jin Lee’s unforgettable new novel Pachinko follows one Korean family through four generations of life in 20th-century Japan, where a choice made by one young woman, Sunja, reverberates through the century and through the lives of her descendants.

Also by Min Jin Lee: Free Food for Millionaires

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Paul Lynch’s lyrical new novel is about Grace, a young girl in nineteenth-century Ireland who is thrust out of her family home and must begin a journey across the famine-ravaged landscape and deep into her own heart.

Also by Paul Lynch: Red Sky in Morning, The Black Snow

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Kamila Shamsie’s subject in Home Fire is loyalty, family, and the strains of both in the wake of grief. This moving and dramatic modern retelling of Sophocles’ Antigone haunts, thrills, compels readers to keep the pages turning until the very last scene.

Also by Kamila Shamsie: Burnt Shadows, Broken Verses

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Paul Yoon’s engrossing stories are at turns sharp and delicate; they’re beautifully observed tales set across the world, from New York to Russia to Shanghai, following people who are entangled, struggling in the past while trying to navigate the present.

Also by Paul Yoon: Snow Hunters, Once the Shore: Stories

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Jesmyn Ward’s latest novel is already a National Book Award winner. It’s a stunning Southern epic that tells the story of thirteen-year-old Jojo and his family who embark on a road trip through Mississippi, a journey through the landscape, history, and legacies that demand to be faced.

Also by Jesmyn Ward: Salvage the Bones, Men We Reaped, Where the Line Bleeds

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In her astonishing debut collection, Lesley Nneka Arimah builds worlds that are at once familiar and strange. Each story, whether it’s about a changing climate and mathematical magic or the desperate wish for a child, unsettles and challenges, compelling readers to look at the world more closely.

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Little Fires Everywhere, Celeste Ng’s wonderful second novel, begins with a blazing fire in Shaker Heights, Ohio, and unfurls into a story about families and their secrets, the ways they challenge each other and the ways in which their frictions spill out into the wider world.

Also by Celeste Ng: Everything I Never Told You

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Life after loss is at the heart of this moving debut novel by Zinzi Clemmons. It follows the journey of Thandi, a young woman who, after losing her mother, attempts to reconcile her experience of life, love, and motherhood with a world forever changed by a significant absence.  

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This book is the second in a planned trilogy that began with Outline. It follows Faye, a writer who has moved to London with her two sons, and tells her story with honesty and intelligence while tackling some of life’s most difficult questions.

Also by Rachel Cusk: Outline, The Country Life, Arlington Park

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Louise Erdrich’s latest novel is a dystopian thriller of the highest order. Earth, biology, and evolution begin to run backwards, stoking panic and creating intense challenges for the central character, a young woman named Cedar Hawk Songmaker, who tries to survive in this dangerous new landscape.

Also by Louise Erdrich: LaRose, The Round House, The Plague of Doves

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In the first of her quartet examining the seasons, Ali Smith turns her pen to Autumn and tells a genre-spanning story about the state of the earth, the human search for meaning, and the ways in which the world’s great thinkers understood this time of the year and the seasonal passings of their lives.

Also by Ali Smith: How to be Both, Public Library and Other Stories, Artful, Hotel World

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These are short stories that readers won’t soon forget. Vaulting from laugh-out-loud hilarity to acute sensitivity, Ottessa Moshfegh’s voice is an experience. It brings to life stories—the sharp, the tender, and the extraordinary—that grab hold and won’t let go.

Also by Ottessa Moshfegh: Eileen, McGlue

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How completely can you reinvent yourself in America? Salman Rushdie’s latest novel asks that question as well as questions about family, loyalty, and identity in this dense-but-sparkling, page-turning story of one Nero Golden and his three children who flee a mysterious past and set themselves up in a golden palace of opulent reinvention in New York City in January 2008.

Also by Salman Rushdie: Midnight’s Children, The Satanic Verses, Shame, Shalimar the Clown

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The short stories collected in James McBride’s Five-Carat Soul are, at turns, funny and fierce, poignant and utterly unexpected. No matter where McBride takes you, you’ll learn something about the world—and something about yourself.

Also by James McBride: The Good Lord Bird, Song Yet Sung, Miracle at St. Anna

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Ayobami Adebayo’s unforgettable debut is a story about love, family, and sacrifice set in Nigeria that follows the lives of a young couple, Yejide and Akin, whose relationship is shaken when outside forces intervene.