Year-End Lists

Christian Science Monitor: 30 Best Books of 2017

[see also 2018]

Fiction

• Dark at the Crossing
  Elliot Ackerman
• Lincoln in the Bardo
  George Saunders
• The Hate U Give
  Angie Thomas
• Strange the Dreamer
  Laini Taylor
• The Golden Legend
  Nadeem Aslam
• The Leavers
  Lisa Ko
• Salt Houses
  Hala Alyan
• The Purple Swamp Hen and Other Stories
  Penelope Lively
• Anything Is Possible
  Elizabeth Strout
• The Essex Serpent
  Sarah Perry
• The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
  Arundhati Roy
• Glass Houses
  Louise Penny
• Sing, Unburied, Sing
  Jesmyn Ward

Nonfiction

• The New Odyssey

  The Story of the Twenty-First Century Refugee Crisis
  Patrick Kingsley
• The Souls of China

  The Return of Religion After Mao
  Ian Johnson
• Thunder in the Mountains

  Chief Joseph, Oliver Otis Howard, and the Nez Perce War
  Daniel J. Sharfstein
• I Was Told to Come Alone

  My Journey Behind the Lines of Jihad
  Souad Mekhennet
• Hue 1968

  A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam
  Mark Bowden
• Sea Power

  The History and Geopolitics of the World’s Oceans
  James Stavridis
• Be Free or Die

  The Amazing Story of Robert Smalls’ Escape from Slavery to Union Hero
  Cate Lineberry
• Reading with Patrick

  A Teacher, a Student, and a Life-Changing Friendship
  Michelle Kuo
• Henry David Thoreau

  A Life
  Laura Dassow Walls
• An Odyssey

  A Father, a Son, and an Epic
  Daniel Mendelsohn
• The Future Is History

  How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia
  Masha Gessen
• Code Girls

  The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II
  Liza Mundy
• The Gourmands’ Way

  Six Americans in Paris and the Birth of a New Gastronomy
  Justin Spring
• Stanton

  Lincoln’s War Secretary
  Walter Stahr
• Grant
  Ron Chernow
• Lenin

  The Man, the Dictator, and the Master of Terror
  Victor Sebestyen
• Calder: The Conquest of Time: The Early Years: 1898-1940
  Jed Perl