Best Books of 1997

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone

J.K. Rowling · 1997 · Bloomsbury

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 rejected by twelve publishers before Bloomsbury accepted it with a print run of 500 copies.

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

Charles Frazier · 1997 · Atlantic Monthly Press

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 and spent 61 consecutive weeks at the top of the New York Times bestseller list. Time magazine ranked it the best book of the year.

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

Arundhati Roy · 1997 · IndiaInk / HarperCollins

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 and has sold more than eight million copies. She has not published another novel since.

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

Philip Roth · 1997 · Houghton Mifflin

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. Roth won the Pulitzer Prize for this novel, 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

Don DeLillo · 1997 · Scribner

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. 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 1997 best-of list. 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

Arthur Golden · 1997 · Knopf

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. It spent two years on the New York Times bestseller list.

Whatever the controversies around its authorship and authenticity, 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

Jared Diamond · 1997 · W.W. Norton

Why did some civilizations come to dominate others? Diamond’s Pulitzer Prize-winning answer 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

Robert Kiyosaki · 1997 · Warner Books

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.

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

Don Miguel Ruiz · 1997 · Amber-Allen Publishing

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 — it has sold over ten million copies and been translated into 46 languages.

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

Eckhart Tolle · 1997 · Namaste Publishing

Tolle’s first book began as a self-published title in Canada, largely ignored on release. It took years — and a recommendation from Oprah Winfrey — to reach the audience it now has. 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.

Read my full review →