Year-End Lists

Shelf Awareness: Best Books of 2017

[see also 2023 • 2018]

Fiction

• A Horse Walks into a Bar
  David Grossman
• Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows
  Balli Kaur Jaswal
• Exit West
  Mohsin Hamid
• Nine Folds Make a Paper Swan
  Ruth Gilligan
• Since I Laid My Burden Down
  Brontez Purnell
• So Much Blue
  Percival Everett
• Sour Heart
  Jenny Zhang
• South Pole Station
  Ashley Shelby
• Stay with Me
  Ayobami Adebayo
• The Bear and the Nightingale
  Katherine Arden
• The Girl in Green
  Derek B. Miller
• The Marsh King’s Daughter
  Karen Dionne
• The Year of the Comet
  Sergei Lebedev
• What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky
  Lesley Nneka Arimah
• White Tears
  Hari Kunzru

Nonfiction

• A Really Big Lunch

  Meditations on Food and Life from the Roving Gourmand
  Jim Harrison
• Ants Among Elephants

  An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India
  Sujatha Gidla
• Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet

  Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene
  Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Nils Bubandt, Elaine Gan, Heather Anne Swanson
• Cuz

  The Life and Times of Michael A.
  Danielle S. Allen
• Ghost of the Innocent Man

  A True Story of Trial and Redemption
  Benjamin Rachlin
• Give a Girl a Knife
  Amy Thielen
• Hunger

  A Memoir of (My) Body
  Roxane Gay
• Insomniac City

  New York, Oliver Sacks, and Me
  Bill Hayes
• Killers of the Flower Moon

  The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI
  David Grann
• No One Cares About Crazy People

  The Chaos and Heartbreak of Mental Health in America
  Ron Powers
• Priestdaddy
  Patricia Lockwood
• The Best We Could Do

  An Illustrated Memoir
  Thi Bui
• The Lost City of the Monkey God

  A True Story
  Douglas Preston
• Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race
  Reni Eddo-Lodge
• You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me
  Sherman Alexie