Year-End Lists

The Los Angeles Times: 36 Best Books of 2017

[see also 2025 • 2024]

Fiction

• The Power
  Naomi Alderman
• Ill Will
  Dan Chaon
• Shadowbahn
  Steve Erickson
• So Much Blue
  Percival Everett
• Exit West
  Mohsin Hamid
• A Legacy of Spies
  John le Carré
• Ka

  Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr
  John Crowley
• Dinner at the Center of the Earth
  Nathan Englander
• The Leavers
  Lisa Ko
• Her Body and Other Parties
  Carmen Maria Machado
• The Burning Girl
  Claire Messud
• A Book of American Martyrs
  Joyce Carol Oates
• Songy Of Paradise
  Gary Panter
• Mrs. Fletcher
  Tom Perrotta
• Wonder Valley
  Ivy Pochoda
• Lincoln in the Bardo
  George Saunders
• Home Fire
  Kamila Shamsie
• Borne
  Jeff VanderMeer
• Sing, Unburied, Sing
  Jesmyn Ward

Nonfiction

• Coach Wooden and Me

  Our 50-Year Friendship On and Off the Court
  Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
• You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me
  Sherman Alexie
• Wrestling With His Angel

  The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln Vol. II, 1849-1856
  Sidney Blumenthal
• What Happened
  Hillary Rodham Clinton
• We Were Eight Years in Power

  An American Tragedy
  Ta-Nehisi Coates
• World Without Mind

  The Existential Threat of Big Tech
  Franklin Foer
• The Great Quake

  How the Biggest Earthquake in North America Changed Our Understanding of the Planet
  Henry Fountain
• High Noon

  The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of an American Classic
  Glenn Frankel
• Shirley Jackson

  A Rather Haunted Life
  Ruth Franklin
• Hunger

  A Memoir of (My) Body
  Roxane Gay
• The Future Is History

  How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia
  Masha Gessen
• Killers of the Flower Moon

  The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI
  David Grann
• Calder: The Conquest of Time: The Early Years: 1898-1940
  Jed Perl
• Jonathan Swift

  The Reluctant Rebel
  John Stubbs
• The Blood of Emmett Till
  Timothy B. Tyson
• Bunk

  The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News
  Kevin Young
• Why Poetry
  Matthew Zapruder