Reading List · Lisanne Swart
Best Books of 1997
1997 was a remarkable year for books. Harry Potter arrived without fanfare — five hundred hardbacks, three hundred of them straight to libraries — and changed everything. Don DeLillo published what many consider his masterpiece. Arundhati Roy won the Booker Prize with her first novel. And quietly, in Vancouver, a German-born spiritual teacher named Eckhart Tolle brought out a first book that almost nobody bought, and that has since sold around sixteen million copies. This is a list of the books from that year that still matter: the ones worth reading now, regardless of when they were published.
By Lisanne Swart · 10 books · Fiction & Non-fiction · All first published in 1997
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Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
A boy who does not know he is a wizard receives a letter on his eleventh birthday and is taken to a school hidden from the ordinary world. The first novel in what became the best-selling series in publishing history was turned down by several publishers, most of whom thought it too long, before Bloomsbury took it on. It appeared on 26 June 1997 in a first printing of five hundred hardbacks, three hundred of which went straight to libraries, and it won the Nestlé Smarties Book Prize gold award that year.
Whatever you think of the later books, or of Rowling herself, the first novel is genuinely good. It has the economy and momentum of the best children’s literature, and the world it builds — detailed, consistent, with its own internal logic — is one of the few fictional universes that readers of all ages have been able to inhabit completely. It belongs on this list because no other book published in 1997 changed as much.
Cold Mountain
A wounded Confederate soldier walks home across the Blue Ridge Mountains to the woman he loves. Charles Frazier’s debut novel won the National Book Award for Fiction and spent about sixty-one weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. At number one it spent roughly eighteen weeks, in four separate runs rather than one unbroken stretch — the sixty-one weeks that get quoted are weeks on the list, not weeks at the top of it. Time magazine placed it third on its fiction list for 1997, behind Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon and Don DeLillo’s Underworld.
This is a novel about exhaustion — the exhaustion of war, of distance, of the gap between the person who left and the person who returns. Frazier writes the American landscape with the same attention Cormac McCarthy brings to it, and the love story at the centre is earned rather than assumed. It is the kind of debut that makes you wonder what the writer did with the rest of their life.
The God of Small Things
Twin siblings in Kerala, India, grow up in the shadow of a tragedy that nobody will name and everybody helped to cause. Arundhati Roy’s debut novel won the Booker Prize; her publisher puts it at more than six million copies in forty languages. It was twenty years before she published a second novel: The Ministry of Utmost Happiness came out in June 2017.
Roy writes with the density and precision of a poet — every sentence feels considered, every image carries weight. The novel’s structure circles the central event rather than driving toward it, which makes the arrival more devastating. It is also a political novel about caste and love and the things that happen when the wrong people love each other. One of the great debuts in English literature.
American Pastoral
Seymour Levov, known to everyone as the Swede — a golden boy, a high school athlete, a successful businessman — watches his life collapse when his daughter bombs a post office in protest against the Vietnam War. Houghton Mifflin published it on 12 May 1997 and Roth won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction with it the following year. It is widely considered his finest work.
Roth is asking what happens to the American dream when reality arrives. The Swede is a man who did everything right and still lost everything, and Roth’s portrait of him — sympathetic, merciless, deeply American — is one of the most sustained pieces of novelistic intelligence of the late twentieth century. It is not an easy read, but it is a rewarding one.
Underworld
Beginning with Bobby Thomson’s 1951 home run — “the shot heard round the world” — DeLillo’s eleventh novel spans five decades of American life, tracing the hidden connections between waste, nuclear anxiety, Cold War paranoia, and the texture of everyday existence. Scribner published it on 3 October 1997, forty-six years to the day after that home run. It is 827 pages long and reads like a dream you cannot quite shake.
DeLillo is the novelist of American dread, and this is his most ambitious attempt to map it. Time placed it second on its fiction list for 1997. It is not a novel you read for plot — it is a novel you read for the experience of being inside a mind that notices everything and connects things that should not be connected. Demanding but unforgettable.
Memoirs of a Geisha
Chiyo, a poor girl from a fishing village, is sold to an okiya in Kyoto and trained to become a geisha. Golden’s debut novel is narrated as a memoir — first-person, retrospective, steeped in the rituals and aesthetics of a world that no longer exists. Knopf published it on 27 September 1997 and it spent two years on the New York Times bestseller list.
The dispute around this book is not the one it is usually remembered for. It was not really a quarrel about whether an American man could write it, or about whether the detail was right: Mineko Iwasaki, the geisha Golden interviewed, sued him and his publisher in 2001 for breach of contract and defamation, because she had been promised anonymity and then found herself named in the acknowledgements. It was settled out of court in 2003. What nobody disputes is that Memoirs of a Geisha is a compelling piece of storytelling. Golden creates a world of enormous visual richness and populates it with a narrator whose intelligence and restraint feel genuine. It is the kind of novel that disappears you — you look up and hours have passed.
Guns, Germs, and Steel
Why did some civilizations come to dominate others? Diamond’s answer, which won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 1998, has nothing to do with race or intelligence and everything to do with geography, biology, and the accidents of where certain plants and animals happened to evolve. One of the most widely read works of popular science of the last thirty years.
Diamond poses a genuinely important question and answers it with rigour and clarity. The thesis — that Eurasian dominance was a function of environmental luck, not human superiority — is both convincing and, in the context of when it was published, politically necessary. Some of the later chapters have been challenged by subsequent research, but the central argument remains standing.
Rich Dad Poor Dad
Kiyosaki contrasts his own father — educated, hardworking, financially struggling — with the father of his best friend, a man who dropped out of school and became one of the wealthiest people in Hawaii. The book’s central argument: schools teach you to work for money, but they do not teach you to make money work for you. Kiyosaki published it himself in 1997, through his own company, in a first printing of a thousand copies. Warner Books only picked it up in 2000, after it had already reached the New York Times list on its own.
The specific financial advice in this book is contested, and Kiyosaki has his critics. But the book’s framing — the distinction between assets and liabilities, the idea that financial literacy is a form of education the system does not provide — shifted how a generation of readers thought about money. For better or worse, it is one of the most influential personal finance books ever published.
The Four Agreements
Based on ancient Toltec wisdom, Ruiz distils a code of personal conduct into four principles: be impeccable with your word, don’t take anything personally, don’t make assumptions, always do your best. Short, direct, and widely read — his own site gives fifty-two languages worldwide and more than fifteen million copies in the United States alone.
The Four Agreements is not a complicated book, and it does not try to be. Its value is in its clarity and its insistence that most of the suffering we carry is self-imposed — the result of agreements we made about who we are and what the world thinks of us. Read it quickly, return to it slowly. The second agreement alone is worth the price of admission.
The Power of Now
Tolle’s first book began as a self-published title in Canada, largely ignored on release. It took years — and a recommendation in Oprah Winfrey’s O magazine in 2000 — to reach the audience it now has. New World Library had reissued it in 1999, and that is the edition that reached the New York Times list. The argument is simple: most human suffering is caused by living in the past or future rather than the present moment. The practice of presence is both the teaching and the cure.
The Power of Now is one of those books that either does nothing for you or changes everything. The ideas are not new — they draw heavily on Zen Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta — but Tolle’s voice is unusually direct and calm, and the book has an immediacy that more academic treatments of the same ideas lack. If you have ever found yourself trapped in anxious thinking you could not stop, this is the book for it.
Not sure where to start?
If you want the one I would call the great debut of the year
→ Read The God of Small Things. Every sentence is considered, and the structure circles the central event instead of driving at it, which is what makes the arrival land as hard as it does.
If you want the book of 1997 that changed the most
→ Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, and it is a better book than its own fame suggests.
If you want to be absorbed and lose an afternoon
→ Cold Mountain or Memoirs of a Geisha. Both are the kind of novel you look up from and find that hours have gone.
If you want to work for it
→ Underworld or American Pastoral. Neither is an easy read. Both are worth the effort, and Underworld is 827 pages, so know what you are agreeing to.
If you want non-fiction
→ Guns, Germs, and Steel for the big argument, and The Power of Now if you have ever been stuck in anxious thinking you could not stop.
Books first published in 1997
Sixteen more books whose first publication genuinely falls in 1997, for when you want breadth rather than a recommendation.
Mason & Dixon
Time’s novel of the year
Thomas Pynchon · Henry Holt, 30 April
Time put it first on its fiction list for 1997, ahead of Underworld and Cold Mountain. First printing two hundred thousand.
Enduring Love
Ian McEwan · Jonathan Cape
It opens with a ballooning accident and turns into a novel about being loved by the wrong person.
Quarantine
Whitbread Novel
Jim Crace · Viking
Whitbread Novel of the Year and Booker-shortlisted. Forty days in the Judaean desert.
Into Thin Air
Time’s non-fiction book of the year
Jon Krakauer · Villard
His own account of the 1996 Everest disaster, written the year after it. Time put it first on its non-fiction list for 1997.
The Perfect Storm
Debut
Sebastian Junger · W.W. Norton, 17 May
His first book, and the one that made a genre out of the non-fiction disaster narrative.
Jack Maggs
Peter Carey · UQP and Faber, 1997
Great Expectations turned inside out, from the convict’s side. The American edition came in 1998, which is why American lists sometimes date it wrong.
The Untouchable
John Banville · 1997
A novel built on Anthony Blunt: art historian, spy, and a man explaining himself.
Grace Notes
Booker shortlist
Bernard MacLaverty · Jonathan Cape
A composer, a new baby, and the Northern Irish family she left.
The Underground Man
Debut · Booker shortlist
Mick Jackson · Faber
His first novel, about a duke digging tunnels under his estate.
The Ventriloquist’s Tale
Whitbread First Novel
Pauline Melville · Bloomsbury
Her first novel — though not her first book: the stories in Shape-shifter came in 1990.
Europa
Booker shortlist
Tim Parks · Secker & Warburg
A coachful of English lecturers drives to Strasbourg to complain to the European Parliament.
The Essence of the Thing
Booker shortlist
Madeleine St John · Fourth Estate
A woman is left by her partner in the first chapter. The rest is the aftermath.
Tales from Ovid
Whitbread Book of the Year
Ted Hughes · Faber and Faber
Passages from the Metamorphoses retold, and the book that took the overall Whitbread for 1997.
Great Apes
Will Self · Bloomsbury, 15 May
A painter wakes up as a chimpanzee in a world of chimpanzees, and everyone thinks he is mad for believing he is human.
Timequake
Kurt Vonnegut · G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 22 September
His last novel, and half of it is about failing to write it.
The Partner
Best seller
John Grisham · Doubleday
The best-selling adult novel in America that year. Cold Mountain came second.
First books published in 1997
Seven writers who arrived in 1997 — and the difference between a first book and a first novel, which is where most lists go wrong.
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
J.K. Rowling
Her first book, published in a first printing of 500 hardbacks of which three hundred went to libraries. It won the Nestlé Smarties Book Prize gold award the same year.
Cold Mountain
Charles Frazier
His first book, and it won the National Book Award for Fiction.
The God of Small Things
Arundhati Roy
Her first novel, and it won the Booker Prize. She had written screenplays before it, but no books.
The Power of Now
Eckhart Tolle
His first book, published by a small press in Vancouver and largely ignored. The edition that sold was the New World Library reissue of 1999.
The Underground Man
Mick Jackson
His first novel, and it went straight onto the Booker shortlist.
The Perfect Storm
Sebastian Junger
His first book. He had been working as a freelance journalist.
The Ventriloquist’s Tale
Pauline Melville
Her first novel, and it won the Whitbread First Novel Award — but not her first book. That was Shape-shifter, a collection of stories, in 1990. This is the distinction most lists get wrong.
1997 in books, in short
- Nobel Prize
- Dario Fo, announced on 9 October 1997, “who emulates the jesters of the Middle Ages in scourging authority and upholding the dignity of the downtrodden”. See every Nobel winner
- Booker Prize
- The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy — a 1997 book, and her first. The shortlist: Quarantine (Jim Crace), The Underground Man (Mick Jackson), Grace Notes (Bernard MacLaverty), Europa (Tim Parks) and The Essence of the Thing (Madeleine St John)
- Pulitzer, fiction
- Martin Dressler, Steven Millhauser — awarded in 1997 for a book published in 1996. American Pastoral won the one awarded in 1998. See every Pulitzer winner since 1980
- Pulitzer, nonfiction
- Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond, took General Nonfiction — also awarded in 1998, for a book of 1997
- National Book Award
- Cold Mountain, Charles Frazier, for fiction, and American Sphinx, Joseph J. Ellis, for nonfiction — both books of that same year
- Orange Prize
- Fugitive Pieces, Anne Michaels — a book first published in Canada in 1996
- Whitbread
- Tales from Ovid, Ted Hughes, took the overall Book of the Year. The categories went to Quarantine (novel), The Ventriloquist’s Tale (first novel), Victor Hugo by Graham Robb (biography) and Aquila by Andrew Norriss (children’s)
- Prix Goncourt
- La Bataille, Patrick Rambaud, published by Grasset on 27 August 1997. It took the Grand Prix du Roman de l’Académie française the same year
- Best seller
- The Partner by John Grisham topped the Publishers Weekly list of adult novels in America, with Cold Mountain second. The nonfiction list was headed by Angela’s Ashes, a book from 1996
- And one building
- The new British Library at St Pancras opened to readers on 24 November 1997
The prize year is not the publication year, and on this page it slips in both directions. Two of the 1997 prizes went to books of an earlier year: the Pulitzer for Fiction, awarded in 1997 to a 1996 book, and the Orange Prize, awarded in 1997 to a Canadian book of 1996. And the two Pulitzers won by books on this list — American Pastoral and Guns, Germs, and Steel — were awarded in 1998, a year after publication. The Booker, the Whitbread, the Goncourt and both National Book Awards did go to books of their own year. That gap is the single most common reason a list of “1997 books” built from prize records is wrong.
Frequently asked questions about the best books of 1997
What is the most famous book published in 1997?
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, published by Bloomsbury on 26 June 1997 in a first printing of 500 hardbacks. It launched what became the best-selling series in publishing history. Other landmark titles of that year: Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier, which won the National Book Award for Fiction; The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, which won the Booker Prize; American Pastoral by Philip Roth and Underworld by Don DeLillo.
What won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1997?
Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer by Steven Millhauser — and that is a book from 1996, not 1997. This is the trap in the question. The Pulitzer runs a year behind: the prize handed out in 1997 was for a book published the year before. American Pastoral, the 1997 novel people usually have in mind when they ask this, won the Pulitzer awarded in 1998. So did Guns, Germs, and Steel, in General Nonfiction.
What won the Booker Prize in 1997?
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, her first novel. The shortlist also held Quarantine (Jim Crace), The Underground Man (Mick Jackson), Grace Notes (Bernard MacLaverty), Europa (Tim Parks) and The Essence of the Thing (Madeleine St John). Roy published a second novel twenty years later, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, in June 2017 — the claim that she never wrote another one is everywhere, and it has been out of date since 2017.
Was The Power of Now published in 1997?
Yes. Namaste Publishing brought it out in Vancouver in 1997 and almost nobody noticed. New World Library reissued it in 1999, and that is the edition that sold. Oprah Winfrey listed it as recommended reading in O, her magazine, in 2000, which is not the same thing as a Book Club selection — the Tolle book she chose for the Book Club was A New Earth, in 2008. The book has since sold around sixteen million copies.
What non-fiction books from 1997 are still worth reading?
Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and still gives you the clearest version of its argument. Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer and The Perfect Storm by Sebastian Junger both came out that year and both hold up completely. The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle became one of the most read spiritual books of the following thirty years. And Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki, whatever you make of the advice, changed how a great many people thought about money.
How is this list put together, and why these ten?
It is a personal list. These are ten books first published in 1997 that I would actually press on someone, not the output of a ranking or a rating. Five of them won a major prize and five did not, which is roughly how it goes. If you want breadth instead of a recommendation, there is a longer list of books first published in 1997 higher up this page, and a table of which prize went where.
Who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1997?
Dario Fo, the Italian playwright and performer, announced on 9 October 1997, “who emulates the jesters of the Middle Ages in scourging authority and upholding the dignity of the downtrodden”. He wrote and performed his own work, which made him an unusual choice and a contested one.
Did Cold Mountain really spend sixty-one weeks at number one?
No, and the source of that claim is the publisher. Cold Mountain spent about sixty-one weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. At number one it spent roughly eighteen weeks, and not in one run: it held the top place from late August to early October 1997, again in November, again in December, and again in January 1998, with Clive Cussler, Danielle Steel and others in between. Grove Atlantic, Charles Frazier’s own site and the National Book Foundation all print the sixty-one-weeks-at-the-top version. It is still a remarkable run for a first novel.
Which writers published their first book in 1997?
Six of them. J.K. Rowling, Charles Frazier, Arundhati Roy, Eckhart Tolle, Mick Jackson and Sebastian Junger all published their first book in 1997 — Roy had written screenplays before hers, but no books. And Pauline Melville published her first novel that year, The Ventriloquist’s Tale, which won the Whitbread First Novel Award — but it was not her first book. A collection of stories, Shape-shifter, came in 1990. First book and first novel are not the same thing, and that is where most lists of debuts go wrong.
What else was published in 1997?
Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon, which Time put first on its fiction list for the year. Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love, Will Self’s Great Apes, Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs, John Banville’s The Untouchable, Kurt Vonnegut’s last novel Timequake, and Ted Hughes’s Tales from Ovid, which took the overall Whitbread. The full list is higher up this page, with the month for each one I could date.
Footnotes
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone 3 facts
Bloomsbury published it on 26 June 1997 in a first printing of five hundred hardbacks, three hundred of which went to libraries, and it won the 1997 Nestlé Smarties Book Prize gold award in the nine-to-eleven category.
The print run of five hundred is confirmed independently by Sotheby’s guide to identifying first editions.
A Guide to Identifying Harry Potter First Editions — Sotheby’s
This page said the manuscript was rejected by twelve publishers. That number is everywhere and it is sourced nowhere: not to Bloomsbury, not to Rowling, and Wikipedia gives no figure at all — only that several publishers turned it down, most of them thinking it too long. Every source I could find for “twelve” was a blog or an aggregator, so the number is gone and the sourced part has stayed.correction
Cold Mountain 5 facts
It won the 1997 National Book Award for Fiction and it is Charles Frazier’s first book.
It did not spend sixty-one consecutive weeks at the top of the New York Times list. It was on the list about sixty-one weeks; at number one it was there roughly eighteen weeks in four separate runs — 31 August to 5 October 1997, 2 to 23 November, 7 to 28 December, and 4 to 25 January 1998 — with Clive Cussler’s Flood Tide and Danielle Steel’s The Ghost holding the top place in between, and Toni Morrison’s Paradise taking it from 1 February 1998, by which time the last of the four runs had ended. Hawes lists the weekly number ones, so it establishes the eighteen weeks and the four runs; the sixty-one weeks is the publisher’s own figure for time on the list.correction
New York Times number-one fiction by date — Hawes Publications
The same run, week by week, from the other direction.
List of The New York Times number-one books of 1997 — Wikipedia
The sixty-one-weeks-at-the-top version is not something this page invented. Grove Atlantic, the publisher, prints it; so does Charles Frazier’s own site; so does the National Book Foundation. When the publisher and the author’s own site carry the error, it travels.
Time did not rank it the best book of 1997. Time ran two lists that year. Its fiction list put Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon first, Don DeLillo’s Underworld second and Cold Mountain third, followed by American Pastoral and The God of Small Things; four of those five are among the ten on this page and the fifth, Mason & Dixon, is in the list below them. Time’s non-fiction list of that year was headed by Into Thin Air, which is also on this page.correction
The God of Small Things 3 facts
It won the Booker Prize 1997 and was Arundhati Roy’s first novel; the shortlist is as listed on this page.
Her publisher gives the figure as more than six million copies in forty languages. This page said more than eight million, which I could not source anywhere.correction
She has published a second novel: The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, June 2017, twenty years after the first. This page said she had not, in the book entry and again in the FAQ. Both are corrected.correction
American Pastoral 3 facts
Houghton Mifflin published it on 12 May 1997 and it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction awarded in 1998.
The Pulitzer awarded in 1997 went to Martin Dressler by Steven Millhauser, published in 1996. This page’s FAQ asked what won the Pulitzer in 1997 and answered with the 1998 prize; the question now gets the answer it actually has.correction
The publication date and publisher.
Underworld 3 facts
Scribner published it on 3 October 1997 at 827 pages, and the prologue turns on Bobby Thomson’s home run of 3 October 1951 — forty-six years to the day earlier.
Time placed it second on its fiction list for 1997.
It is called his eleventh novel here, and that rests on a convention rather than on a publisher’s count: Amazons, published in 1980 under the name Cleo Birdwell, is widely attributed to DeLillo but has never been acknowledged by him or his publishers, and it is conventionally left out. Count it and Underworld is the twelfth.
Memoirs of a Geisha 3 facts
Knopf published it on 27 September 1997 and it is Arthur Golden’s first novel.
The dispute was not about authorship or authenticity. Mineko Iwasaki, the geisha Golden interviewed, sued him and Knopf in April 2001 for breach of contract and defamation: she had been promised anonymity and was then named in the acknowledgements, and he spoke about her in interviews. It was settled out of court in 2003, on undisclosed terms. This page framed it as a debate about whether the book was authentic, which is a different and much vaguer thing.correction
‘Geisha’ Author and Publisher Sued — ABC News, 24 April 2001
The figure of two years on the New York Times list comes from the Associated Press report of the film’s Japanese premiere, linked here. The publisher’s own page gives no duration at all, so this is the best source I have for it.
Memoirs of a Geisha Premieres in Japan — Associated Press via Fox News
Guns, Germs, and Steel 2 facts
It won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction awarded in 1998, for a book published in 1997. This page said only “Pulitzer Prize-winning”, without the category or the year, and on a page about 1997 that reads as a 1997 prize. It was not one.correction
It also won the Rhône-Poulenc Prize for Science Books in 1998, making Jared Diamond the only author to have won that twice. The prize was renamed the Aventis Prize only from 2001, so in 1998 it was the Rhône-Poulenc — the two names are one prize, not two, which is a thing lists of its prizes regularly get wrong.
Rich Dad Poor Dad 4 facts
It was not published by Warner Books in 1997. Kiyosaki self-published it that year through his own company, Cashflow Technologies, in a first printing of a thousand copies. Warner Books acquired it in 2000, after it had reached the New York Times list on its own — the acquiring editor found it there in early 2000.correction
Rich Dad, Poor Dad: 25 Years of Financial Advice Books — Publishers Weekly
Cashflow Technologies and the thousand-copy first printing.
Robert Kiyosaki Is Even Richer 20 Years Later — Publishers Weekly
Two things this page does not claim and a reader may want, and this is the first. Whether the “rich dad” of the title ever existed has been questioned since at least 2002, when Slate reported the real-estate writer John T. Reed’s critique, which asks exactly that; Kiyosaki has not identified him, and no one else has either.
Why millions buy Rich Dad, Poor Dad’s nonsense — Slate, 20 June 2002
And the second. In 2012 Rich Global LLC, one of Kiyosaki’s companies, was ordered to pay 23.7 million dollars to The Learning Annex and filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy. Neither this nor the question above bears on whether the book is worth reading, which is why both are down here and not up there.
Chapter 7 Bankruptcy for “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” — American Bankruptcy Institute
The Four Agreements 1 fact
His own site gives fifty-two languages worldwide and more than fifteen million copies in the United States alone. This page said over ten million copies and forty-six languages; both were low. The site gives no publisher, so the Amber-Allen imprint on the line above comes from the book itself.correction
The Power of Now 4 facts
Namaste Publishing published it in Vancouver in 1997 and it is Eckhart Tolle’s first book. New World Library reissued it in 1999, and that edition is the one that reached the New York Times list. Around sixteen million copies as of 2025.
Oprah Winfrey listed it as recommended reading in O, The Oprah Magazine in 2000. It was never an Oprah’s Book Club selection; the Tolle book she chose for the Book Club was A New Earth, in 2008. This page said “a recommendation from Oprah Winfrey”, which was right — it now says which recommendation, because the Book Club version of the story is the one that circulates.
The intro to this page called him “a Canadian-German teacher”. He was born Ulrich Leonard Tölle in Lünen, Germany, on 16 February 1948, abandoned doctoral work at Cambridge in 1977 and has lived in Vancouver since 1995. He is a spiritual teacher, not an academic one. The intro now says German-born and living in Vancouver.correction
German-born, London and Cambridge, and Vancouver since 1995, from a second source.
1997 in books 21 facts
The Nobel Prize in Literature 1997 went to Dario Fo, announced on 9 October 1997, with the citation quoted on this page. The wording is reproduced exactly as the Swedish Academy sets it: lower case at the start, no full stop, Middle Ages capitalised.
Press release — The Nobel Prize in Literature 1997, NobelPrize.org
The Booker Prize 1997 and its shortlist, with the names spelled as the prize body spells them — Madeleine St John without a full stop after St.
The 1997 National Book Awards: Cold Mountain for fiction and American Sphinx by Joseph J. Ellis for nonfiction. On the year of American Sphinx the records disagree: the Knopf hardcover is catalogued as 1997, which is what this page follows, and Wikipedia’s article on the book says 1996.
Anne Michaels won the Orange Prize for Fiction 1997 with Fugitive Pieces, first published in Canada in 1996 — so that prize went to a book of an earlier year.
The Whitbread awards for 1997: Tales from Ovid took Book of the Year and the poetry category, Quarantine the novel, The Ventriloquist’s Tale the first novel, Victor Hugo by Graham Robb the biography and Aquila by Andrew Norriss the children’s award.
Patrick Rambaud won the Prix Goncourt 1997 with La Bataille, published by Grasset on 27 August 1997, which also took the Grand Prix du Roman de l’Académie française.
The Partner by John Grisham was the best-selling adult novel in America in 1997 and Cold Mountain was second; Angela’s Ashes headed the nonfiction list, and that is a book from September 1996.
Mason & Dixon was published by Henry Holt on 30 April 1997 in a first printing of two hundred thousand, and Time put it first on its fiction list for the year.
Enduring Love was published by Jonathan Cape in 1997.
Quarantine was published in 1997. The Whitbread record gives Viking as the publisher and the Booker library gives Picador; Viking is the original British hardback, which is what this page uses.
Into Thin Air was published by Villard in 1997, the year after the Everest season it describes, and Time placed it first on its non-fiction list for that year.
The Untouchable, John Banville’s 1997 novel, is built on the figure of Anthony Blunt, the art historian unmasked as a Soviet agent.
The Perfect Storm was published by W. W. Norton on 17 May 1997 and is Sebastian Junger’s first book.
Jack Maggs appeared in 1997 from University of Queensland Press in Australia and Faber in Britain; the American edition was Knopf in 1998, which is why American lists sometimes date it 1998.
Great Apes was published by Bloomsbury on 15 May 1997.
Timequake was published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons on 22 September 1997 and is Kurt Vonnegut’s last novel.
The Underground Man is Mick Jackson’s first novel, published by Faber in 1997 and Booker-shortlisted.
The Ventriloquist’s Tale is Pauline Melville’s first novel but not her first book: Shape-shifter, a collection of stories, came in 1990. It won the Whitbread First Novel Award for 1997.
Europa, Grace Notes and The Essence of the Thing are all 1997 books, from Secker & Warburg, Jonathan Cape and Fourth Estate. The Booker library dates several 1997 titles to 1 January, which is a placeholder rather than a date, so this page gives the year alone where that is all I have.
The new British Library building at St Pancras opened to readers on 24 November 1997.
The sentence quoted in the dark block at the foot of this page is Eckhart Tolle’s, from The Power of Now. I checked the wording against the text of the book rather than against a quotation site, which is why it is here: apart from the Nobel citation it is the only quoted sentence on this page, and quotations are where pages like this one usually go wrong. The link is to the edition details.
Last verified 24 September 2026. Everything marked “correction” above is a place where this page said something different before. The substantial ones: Cold Mountain spent about sixty-one weeks on the New York Times list and roughly eighteen non-consecutive weeks at the top of it, and Time ranked it third rather than first; Rich Dad Poor Dad was self-published in 1997 and only reached Warner Books in 2000; Arundhati Roy published a second novel in 2017; and the FAQ question about the 1997 Pulitzer was being answered with the 1998 prize. Where a source contradicts the version that circulates, the source wins — including where the source that circulates is the publisher’s own page. Anything I could not source to a named publisher, prize body, archive, library record, newspaper or reference work is not on this page. Where a Wikipedia article is the source, that is what the footnote says, and where it is wrong I have said so.
The notes on this page are all mine,
and the books are all theirs.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. See more on her personal bookshelf.
Where to go next
Pages on this site that pick up where 1997 leaves off.
By year
Best Books of 1998
The year after Harry Potter.
By year
Best Books of 1996
The year before everything changed.
Overview
Best Books by Year
Every year, the books that mattered.
Genre
Best Non-Fiction Books
The books that changed how I see the world.
Genre
Books on Spirituality
For when you need something beyond the everyday.
Genre
Best Fiction Books of All Time
The novels that stay with you longest.
From the bookshelf
“Realize deeply that the present moment is all you ever have.” — Eckhart Tolle
If this list resonated with you, you’ll find more books like these on my personal bookshelf — hand-picked for readers who want books that stay with them long after the last page.
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