Best Books of 2017

Nonfiction · 

The Choice

Edith Eger · 2017

Edith Eger was sixteen and a promising ballet dancer in Hungary when she was sent to Auschwitz in 1944. She survived — partly, she believes, because Dr. Mengele asked her to dance for him, and she danced. She emigrated to the United States, trained as a clinical psychologist, and spent decades treating trauma survivors before she wrote this book at the age of ninety. The Choice is both her memoir and her argument: that we cannot choose what happens to us, but we can always choose how we respond, and that the prison we most need to escape is the one we build inside ourselves.

The Choice is the most practically useful book on this list. Frankl gives you the philosophy; Eger gives you the application — she shows, through her own life and through her patients’, what it actually looks like to choose freedom after the worst has happened. I recommend it to anyone working through something they cannot change.

→ Books like The Choice — what to read next

Fiction · Literary · Family

Pachinko

Min Jin Lee · 2017

Beginning in a small Korean fishing village in 1910 and ending in 1989 Japan, Pachinko follows four generations of a Korean family living as ethnic Koreans — Zainichi — in a country that will never fully accept them. The novel opens with a minister’s daughter, Sunja, who becomes pregnant by a married man and is saved by a kind pastor who agrees to marry her and take her to Osaka. What follows is a multigenerational saga of survival, shame, aspiration, and belonging that spans eight decades of Korean and Japanese history. It was a finalist for the National Book Award and has sold millions of copies worldwide, with a television adaptation following in 2022.

Pachinko works at the scale that only the best multigenerational novels reach: by the end you understand something about history that no history book could tell you — what it costs a family, across generations, to live permanently in the margins of a society that has decided you do not fully belong. Lee writes with enormous generosity towards all of her characters, including the ones who make the worst choices. That generosity is the novel’s great moral achievement.

Fiction · Literary · Migration

Exit West

Mohsin Hamid · 2017

Saeed and Nadia meet in an unnamed city that is beginning to fall apart around them. As the violence escalates, doors begin to appear — literal, magical doors that transport people from one place to another, bypassing borders, walls, and the machinery of controlled migration. Exit West is a love story about two people trying to stay together across displacements they did not choose, and it is also a fable about what the experience of being a refugee actually does to a relationship — how the person you become in flight is not quite the same person you were at home. It was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and named one of the best novels of the decade by multiple publications.

What Hamid does with the magical doors is remarkable: by refusing realism at the level of plot, he forces you into realism at the level of feeling. The experience of displacement becomes legible in a way that conventional realism rarely achieves. Exit West is also one of the most honest novels about a relationship I have read — about how love can be genuine and still not be enough to survive the conditions two people are placed in.

Fiction · National Book Award · American South

Sing, Unburied, Sing

Jesmyn Ward · 2017

Jojo is thirteen and lives in rural Mississippi with his grandparents and his drug-addicted mother, Leonie. When his white father is released from the state penitentiary at Parchman, Leonie takes the children on a road trip to collect him. The journey is also haunted — literally — by the ghost of a young Black man who died in Parchman decades before. Ward’s third novel is a road trip narrative, a ghost story, a family drama, and an account of how racial violence transmits itself across generations and refuses to stay in the past. It won the National Book Award in 2017 — Ward’s second, the first for Salvage the Bones in 2011 — and confirmed her as one of the essential American novelists.

The ghost at the centre of this novel is not decorative — it is the argument. Ward is writing about how history haunts the present, about the specific way that unacknowledged violence lives on in a landscape and in the people who inhabit it. She writes about grief and poverty and addiction with a tenderness that never tips into sentimentality. This is the American South rendered at its most brutal and its most beautiful simultaneously.

Fiction · Literary · Coming of Age

The Idiot

Elif Batuman · 2017

Selin is eighteen, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, and beginning her first year at Harvard in 1995. She studies linguistics, falls into an ambiguous epistolary entanglement with a Hungarian mathematics student named Ivan, and spends a summer teaching English in rural Hungary waiting for something — love, clarity, adulthood — that refuses to arrive on schedule. The Idiot is a novel about the gap between what language promises and what experience delivers, written in prose that is funny and melancholy in equal measure. It was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and introduced Batuman — already known as an essayist — to a much wider readership.

The Idiot is the best novel about the particular confusion of being intelligent and inarticulate at the same time — of having all the words and none of the knowledge. Batuman writes about boredom, longing, and intellectual embarrassment with a precision that is also very funny. It is a novel in which almost nothing happens and everything is felt. The sequel, Either/Or, appeared in 2022 and is equally good — but start here.

Fiction · Dystopia · Feminism

The Power

Naomi Alderman · 2017

Women develop the ability to generate electrical jolts from their bodies — enough to cause pain, unconsciousness, or death. Within a generation, the entire structure of global power has inverted: women are dominant, men are afraid, and the violence that was once directed at women is now directed at men. The Power tells this story through four characters across different parts of the world, framed as a novel-within-a-novel written by a man and edited by a woman five thousand years in the future. It won the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2017 and was named one of the best books of the year by publications on both sides of the Atlantic.

Alderman’s argument is not that women would be better rulers than men — it is that power corrupts the people who hold it, and that a world built around one group’s capacity for violence will produce the same atrocities regardless of which group that is. It is an uncomfortable book precisely because it refuses the comfortable conclusion. The formal conceit of the future historian is brilliant and deepens the book considerably on a second read.

Nonfiction · Memoir · Resilience

Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy

Sheryl Sandberg & Adam Grant · 2017

In 2015, Sheryl Sandberg’s husband Dave Goldberg died suddenly of a cardiac arrhythmia while they were on holiday in Mexico. He was forty-seven. Option B is the book Sandberg wrote about what happened next — about the specific, disorienting experience of loss when the person you lose is the one you would normally call when something terrible happens. Written with psychologist Adam Grant, the book moves between Sandberg’s personal account and Grant’s research on grief, resilience, and post-traumatic growth: the idea that people do not only survive catastrophe but can be changed by it in ways that are not only negative.

Option B is useful in the way that the best books on grief are useful: not because it resolves anything, but because it names things that are otherwise hard to put into words. The concept of kicking the elephant out of the room — of naming the loss openly rather than circling it — is one I have returned to. It belongs on any list of books about resilience, and it is a more honest account of grief than most memoirs of loss manage to be.

Nonfiction · Essays · Identity

Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body

Roxane Gay · 2017

At twelve, Roxane Gay was gang-raped by a group of boys, and in the aftermath she began to eat — deliberately, she writes, to build a body that would feel safe, that would take up space in a way she believed would protect her. Hunger is the memoir she wrote about that body, and about the experience of moving through the world in a body that does not conform to what the world considers acceptable. It is not, Gay insists from the beginning, a weight loss memoir — it is an account of what it costs to survive something, and of how the strategies that allow survival can also constrain the life that follows. It is one of the most honest books about a body that I have read.

What makes Hunger extraordinary is Gay’s refusal to offer resolution. She does not arrive at acceptance, does not lose the weight, does not transform her relationship to her body into something the reader can feel comfortable with. What she offers instead is honesty — about pain, about shame, about the complexity of a body that is simultaneously a site of trauma and a home. That refusal to perform recovery is itself a form of dignity.