This year I read too many wonderful books to name all of them here, but some highlights were: Katie Kitamura’s intoxicating A Separation, which is such a wild and yet disciplined exploration of the idea of the traveler and of grief. Anuk Arudpragasam’s The Story of a Brief Marriage came out last year, but it is a book I hold close to me these days, a miracle of a novel, one of the most humane, visceral, gut-wrenching and precise stories I have ever read. Atticus Lish’s Preparation for the Next Life exploded in my head and I’m still reeling from the effects of living that journey. I absolutely loved Jenny Erpenbeck’s new one, Go, Went, Gone. She is one of my favorites, one of those rare writers who, I think, can write a narrative where you feel layers, not only the layers of a character’s life, but literally the layers of sky, the earth, soil and history and the future. Hernan Diaz’s In the Distance will haunt me forever, a narrative that continues to astound me, and I think a near perfect portrayal of aloneness and solitude and deep longing. Finally, I just finished a book coming out next year, Happiness, by the great Aminatta Forna. It is a novel that carries a tremendous sense of the world, where I looked up upon finishing and sensed a shift in what I thought I knew, what I wanted to know. What a gift. It was what I needed. Readers are in for a treat.
More from A Year in Reading 2017
Don’t miss: A Year in Reading 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005
