The year’s notable fiction, poetry and nonfiction, selected by the editors of The New York Times Book Review. This list represents books reviewed since Dec. 4, 2016, when we published our previous Notables list.
Fiction & Poetry
AMERICAN WAR. By Omar El Akkad. (Knopf, $26.95.) This haunting debut novel imagines the events that lead up to and follow the Second American Civil War at the turn of the 22nd century.
ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE. By Elizabeth Strout. (Random House, $27.)This audacious novel is about small-town characters struggling to make sense of past family traumas.
AUTUMN. By Ali Smith. (Pantheon, $24.95.) Smith’s ingenious novel is about the friendship between a 101-year-old man and a 32-year-old woman in Britain after the Brexit vote.
BAD DREAMS AND OTHER STORIES. By Tessa Hadley. (Harper/HarperCollins, $26.99.) Hadley serves up the bitter along with the delicious in these 10 stories.
BEAUTIFUL ANIMALS. By Lawrence Osborne. (Hogarth, $25.) On a Greek island, two wealthy young women encounter a handsome Syrian refugee, whom they endeavor to help, with disastrous results.
THE BOOK OF JOAN. By Lidia Yuknavitch. (Harper/HarperCollins, $26.99.) In this brilliant novel, Earth, circa 2049, has been devastated by global warming and war.
A BOY IN WINTER. By Rachel Seiffert. (Pantheon, $25.95.) Seiffert’s intricate novel probes the bonds and betrayals in a Ukrainian town as it succumbs to Hitler.
THE CHANGELING. By Victor LaValle. (Spiegel & Grau, $28.) LaValle’s novel, about Apollo Kagwa, a used-book dealer, blends social criticism with horror, while remaining steadfastly literary.
CHRISTMAS DAYS: 12 Stories and 12 Feasts for 12 Days. By Jeanette Winterson. (Grove, $24.) A gift book from the British novelist, containing otherworldly and wickedly funny stories.
DANCE OF THE JAKARANDA. By Peter Kimani. (Akashic, paper, $15.95.) This funny, perceptive and ambitious work of historical fiction by a Kenyan poet and novelist explores his country’s colonial past.
THE DARK FLOOD RISES. By Margaret Drabble. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) This masterly novel follows its 70-something heroine on a road trip through England.
THE DINNER PARTY: And Other Stories. By Joshua Ferris. (Little, Brown, $26.) Anxiety, self-consciousness and humiliation are the default inner states of the characters in these 11 stories.
THE ESSEX SERPENT. By Sarah Perry. (Custom House/Morrow, $26.99.) This novel’s densely woven plot involves an independent-minded widow and the possible haunting presence of a giant serpent.
EXIT WEST. By Mohsin Hamid. (Riverhead, $26.) The new novel by the author of “The Reluctant Fundamentalist” and “How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia” mixes global unrest with a bit of the fantastic.
FAST. By Jorie Graham. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $25.99.) Graham created these poems against a backdrop of personal and political trauma — her parents are dying, she is undergoing cancer treatment, the nation is mired in war and ecological crisis.
FIVE-CARAT SOUL. By James McBride. (Riverhead, $27.) In his delightful first story collection, the author of the National Book Award-winning novel “The Good Lord Bird” continues to explore race, masculinity, music and history.
FOREST DARK. By Nicole Krauss. (Harper/HarperCollins, $27.99.)Tracing the lives of two Americans in Israel, this restless novel explores the mysteries of disconnection and the divided self.
4 3 2 1. By Paul Auster. (Holt, $32.50.) Auster’s book is an epic bildungsroman that presents the reader with four versions of the formative years of a Jewish boy born in Newark in 1947.
FRESH COMPLAINT: Stories. By Jeffrey Eugenides. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.) Eugenides’s expert debut collection of short stories is his first book since “The Marriage Plot” in 2011.
FUTURE HOME OF THE LIVING GOD. By Louise Erdrich.(HarperCollins, $28.99.) What if human beings are neither inevitable nor ultimate? That’s the premise of Erdrich’s fascinating new novel.
GIVING GODHEAD. By Dylan Krieger. (Delete, paper, $17.99.)Seamlessly mixing the religious with the obscene, Krieger’s poetry is inventive and powerful.
HISTORY OF WOLVES. By Emily Fridlund. (Atlantic Monthly, $25.) A slow-motion tragedy unfolds in Minnesota’s north woods in Fridlund’s disturbing debut.
HOME FIRE. By Kamila Shamsie. (Riverhead, $26.) A bold retelling of Sophocles’ “Antigone” that follows the lives of three British siblings of Pakistani descent.
HOMESICK FOR ANOTHER WORLD. By Ottessa Moshfegh. (Penguin Press, $26.) The insightful stories in this dark debut collection are about “loneliness, desire, hope and self-awareness.”
A HORSE WALKS INTO A BAR. By David Grossman. Translated by Jessica Cohen. (Knopf, $29.95.) Grossman’s magnificently funny, sucker-punch-tragic novel about a tormented stand-up comedian combines comic dexterity with Portnoyish detail.
THE IDIOT. By Elif Batuman. (Penguin Press, $27.) An innocent, language-intoxicated teenager, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, arrives at Harvard in the ’90s to pursue love and (especially) literature in Batuman’s hefty, gorgeous digressive slab of a novel.
ILL WILL. By Dan Chaon. (Ballantine, $28.) Chaon’s dark, disturbing literary thriller encompasses drug addiction, accusations of satanic abuse and a self-deluding Midwestern psychologist.
A KIND OF FREEDOM. By Margaret Wilkerson Sexton. (Counterpoint, $26.) This assured first novel shines an unflinching, compassionate light on three generations of a black family in New Orleans.
LESS. By Andrew Sean Greer. (Lee Boudreaux/Little, Brown, $26.) On the eve of his 50th birthday and a former lover’s wedding, a mediocre novelist takes refuge in literary invitations that enable him to travel around the world.
LINCOLN IN THE BARDO. By George Saunders. (Random House, $28.) In this Man Booker Prize-winning first novel by a master of the short story, Abraham Lincoln visits the grave of his son Willie in 1862, and is surrounded by ghosts in purgatory.
MANHATTAN BEACH. By Jennifer Egan. (Scribner, $28.) Egan’s engaging novel tells overlapping stories, but is most fundamentally about a young woman who works at the Brooklyn Naval Yard during World War II.
MRS. OSMOND. By John Banville. (Knopf, $27.95.) Banville’s sequel to Henry James’s “Portrait of a Lady” follows Isabel Archer back to Rome and the possible end of her marriage.
MY ABSOLUTE DARLING. By Gabriel Tallent. (Riverhead, $27.) The heroine of this debut novel is Turtle, a 14-year-old who grows up feral in the forests and hills of Northern California.
NEW PEOPLE. By Danzy Senna. (Riverhead, $26.) Senna’s sinister and charming novel, about a married couple who are both biracial, riffs on themes she’s made her own — about what happens when races and cultures mingle in the home, and under the skin.
THE NINTH HOUR. By Alice McDermott. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) In McDermott’s novel, the cause of a young Irish widow and her daughter is taken up by the nuns of a Brooklyn convent.
PACHINKO. By Min Jin Lee. (Grand Central, $27.) This stunning novel chronicling four generations of an ethnic Korean family in Japan is about outsiders and much more.
THE POWER. By Naomi Alderman. (Little, Brown, $26.) In this fierce and unsettling novel, the ability to generate a dangerous electrical force from their bodies lets women take control, resulting in a vast, systemic upheaval of gender dynamics across the globe.
THE REFUGEES. By Viet Thanh Nguyen. (Grove, $25.) This superb collection of stories concerns men and women displaced from wartime Saigon and (mostly) settled in California.
SELECTION DAY. By Aravind Adiga. (Scribner, $26.) Adiga’s third novel (he won the Booker Prize in 2008 for “The White Tiger”) is a sharp look at modern India. It revolves around two teenage brothers groomed by their father to be cricket stars.
A SEPARATION. By Katie Kitamura. (Riverhead, $25.) Deceptions pile on deceptions in this coolly unsettling postmodern mystery, in which a British woman travels to a Greek fishing village to search for her estranged husband, who has disappeared.
SING, UNBURIED, SING. By Jesmyn Ward. (Scribner, $26.) Ward’s novel, which won the National Book Award, combines aspects of the American road novel and the ghost story with an exploration of the long aftershocks of a hurricane.
SIX FOUR. By Hideo Yokoyama. Translated by Jonathan Lloyd-Davies. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $28.) A former criminal investigator, now working in police media relations, faces angry reporters, the nagging 14-year-old case of a kidnapped girl, and his own teenage daughter’s disappearance.
STAY WITH ME. By Ayobami Adebayo. (Knopf, $25.95.) This debut novel is a portrait of a marriage in Nigeria beginning in the politically tumultous 1980s.
THE STONE SKY: The Broken Earth: Book Three. By N.K. Jemisin. (Orbit, paper, $16.99.) Jemisin won a Hugo Award for each of the first two novels in her Broken Earth trilogy. In the extraordinary conclusion, a mother and daughter do geologic battle for the fate of the earth.
TIES. By Domenico Starnone. Translated by Jhumpa Lahiri. (Europa, paper, $16.) The husband of the woman who has been identified as Elena Ferrante offers a powerful novel about a fraying marriage.
TRANSIT. By Rachel Cusk. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) In the second novel of a planned trilogy, Cusk continues the story of Faye, a writer and teacher who is recently divorced and semi-broke.
WAKING LIONS. By Ayelet Gundar-Goshen. Translated by Sondra Silverston. (Little, Brown, $26.) An Israeli doctor in the Negev accidentally hits an Eritrean immigrant, then drives off. The consequences are explored with insight and a thriller’s twists and turns.
WHEREAS. By Layli Long Soldier. (Graywolf, paper, $16.) Long Soldier, a member of the Oglala Sioux tribe, troubles our consideration of the language we use to carry our personal and national narratives in this moving debut poetry collection.
WHITE TEARS. By Hari Kunzru. (Knopf, $26.95.) This complex ghost story about racial privilege, cultural appropriation and the blues is written with Kunzru’s customary eloquence and skill.
WHO IS RICH? By Matthew Klam. Illustrated by John Cuneo. (Random House, $27.) The protagonist of this novel, a middle-aged illustrator, is a conflicted adulterer. Klam agilely balances an existentially tragic story line with morbid humor and self-assured prose.
Nonfiction
AGE OF ANGER: A History of the Present. By Pankaj Mishra. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.) Mishra argues that broad swaths of the globe are reliving the traumas and violent dislocations that accompanied Europe’s transition to modernity in the 18th and 19th centuries.
AMERICAN FIRE: Love, Arson, and Life in a Vanishing Land. By Monica Hesse. (Liveright, $26.95.) Hesse tells the story of 67 fires set in Virginia during a five-month arson spree, beginning in 2012, and the mystery of why a local auto mechanic was behind them.
ANIMALS STRIKE CURIOUS POSES: Essays. By Elena Passarello. (Sarabande, $19.95.)Passarello presents biographies of famous animals, from an ancient mummified mammoth to Mr. Ed and Cecil the Lion.
THE BLOOD OF EMMETT TILL. By Timothy B. Tyson. (Simon & Schuster, $27.) Tyson’s absorbing retelling of the events leading up to the horrific lynching in 1955 includes an admission from Till’s accuser that some of her testimony was false.
BORN A CRIME: Stories From a South African Childhood. By Trevor Noah. (Spiegel & Grau, $28.) The host of “The Daily Show” writes about growing up in South Africa under apartheid, and about the country’s rocky transition into the post-apartheid era in the 1990s.
BUNK: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News. By Kevin Young. (Graywolf, $30.) Young’s enthralling and essential history is both exhaustive and unapologetically subjective — not to mention timely. Again and again, he plumbs the undercurrents of a hoax to discover the fearfulness and racism that often lurk inside.
CHURCHILL AND ORWELL: The Fight for Freedom. By Thomas E. Ricks. (Penguin Press, $28.) This enjoyable dual biography draws out the common causes of these 20th-century giants: two independent thinkers and opponents of totalitarianism whose influence remains pervasive today.
THE COLLECTED ESSAYS OF ELIZABETH HARDWICK. Selected and with an introduction by Darryl Pinckney. (New York Review Books, $19.95.) The landmark American critic surveys everything from the 1968 Democratic convention to the literature of New York City.
A COLONY IN A NATION. By Chris Hayes. (Norton, $26.95.) Hayes paints a portrait of two “distinct regimes” in America — one for whites, which he calls the Nation; the other for blacks, which he calls the Colony.
THE COLOR OF LAW: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. By Richard Rothstein. (Liveright, $27.95.) Going back to the late 19th century, the author uncovers a policy of de jure segregation in virtually every presidential administration.
THE CRISIS OF THE MIDDLE-CLASS CONSTITUTION: Why Economic Inequality Threatens Our Republic. By Ganesh Sitaraman. (Knopf, $28.) Sitaraman argues that the Constitution is premised on the existence of a thriving middle class, and that the current explosion of inequality will destroy it.
THE DAWN WATCH: Joseph Conrad in a Global World. By Maya Jasanoff. (Penguin Press, $30.) Conrad explored the frontiers of a globalized world at the turn of the last century. Jasanoff uses Conrad’s novels and his biography to tell the history of that moment, one that mirrors our own.
THE DEATH AND LIFE OF THE GREAT LAKES. By Dan Egan. (Norton, $27.95.) Climate change, population growth and invasive species are destabilizing the Great Lakes’ wobbly ecosystem, but Egan provides a taut and cautiously hopeful narrative.
DESTINED FOR WAR: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? By Graham Allison. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $28.) Allison offers erudite historical case studies that illuminate the pressure toward military confrontation when a rising power challenges a dominant one.
DEVIL’S BARGAIN: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency. By Joshua Green. (Penguin Press, $27.)Green’s book is a deeply reported and compulsively readable account of this fateful political partnership.
THE EVANGELICALS: The Struggle to Shape America. By Frances FitzGerald. (Simon & Schuster, $35.) FitzGerald’s fair-minded history focuses on the doctrinal and political issues that have concerned white conservative Protestants since they abandoned their traditional separation from the world and merged with the Republican Party.
THE EVOLUTION OF BEAUTY: How Darwin’s Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World — and Us. By Richard O. Prum. (Doubleday, $30.) A mild-mannered ornithologist and expert on the evolution of feathers makes an impassioned case for the importance of Darwin’s second theory as his most radical and feminist.
FASTING AND FEASTING: The Life of Visionary Food Writer Patience Gray. By Adam Federman. (Chelsea Green, $25.) Federman’s biography is the first of this cult food writer.
FLÂNEUSE: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London. By Lauren Elkin. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.)Elkin joins memoir and biographies of walking women like Woolf and Sand.
FRIENDS DIVIDED: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. By Gordon S. Wood. (Penguin Press, $35.) Wood traces the long, fraught ties between the second and third presidents, and sides almost reluctantly with Jefferson in their philosophical smack-down.
THE FUTURE IS HISTORY: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia. By Masha Gessen. (Riverhead, $28.) Gessen, a longtime critic of Vladimir Putin, tells the story of modern Russia through the eyes of seven individuals who found that politics was a force none of them could escape; winner of the National Book Award.
GENERATION REVOLUTION: On the Front Line Between Tradition and Change in the Middle East. By Rachel Aspden. (Other Press, $24.95.) What happened to Egypt’s revolution? This excellent social history argues that despite their politics, young Egyptians did not reject the conservative mores of family and religion.
THE GLASS UNIVERSE: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars. By Dava Sobel. (Viking, $30.) This book, about the women “computers” whose calculations helped shape observational astronomy, is a highly engaging group portrait.
GRANT. By Ron Chernow. (Penguin Press, $40.) Chernow gives us a Grant for our time, recounting not only the victories of the general but also the challenges of a president who fought against the K.K.K.
GREATER GOTHAM: A History of New York City From 1898 to 1919. By Mike Wallace. (Oxford, $45.) A vibrant, detailed chronicle of the 20 years that made New York City the place we know today.
THE GULF: The Making of an American Sea. By Jack E. Davis. (Liveright, $29.95.) Davis’s sweeping history of the Gulf of Mexico takes into account colorful nature, idiosyncratic human characters and economic development.
HAMLET GLOBE TO GLOBE: Two Years, 190,000 Miles, 197 Countries, One Play. By Dominic Dromgoole. (Grove, $27.) To celebrate the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth, London’s Globe Theater performed “Hamlet” all around the world. Dromgoole’s witty account offers insight about the play and its enduring appeal.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU: A Life. By Laura Dassow Walls. (University of Chicago, $35.) This new life of Thoreau, in time for his 200th birthday, paints a moving portrait of a brilliant, complex man.
THE HOUSE OF GOVERNMENT: A Saga of the Russian Revolution. By Yuri Slezkine. (Princeton University, $39.95.) This history describes the lives of Bolsheviks who were swallowed up by their own cause.
THE INVENTION OF ANGELA CARTER: A Biography. By Edmund Gordon. (Oxford University, $35.) This terrific book is the first full-length biography of Carter, whose novels were fantastical, feminist and sexy.
JANESVILLE: An American Story. By Amy Goldstein. (Simon & Schuster, $27.) Goldstein writes about the impact on the small Wisconsin factory city of the title when General Motors closes a plant there.
KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI. By David Grann. (Doubleday, $28.95.) In the 1920s, the Osage Indians had been driven onto land in Oklahoma that sat on top of immense oil deposits. The oil made the Osage rich, and then members of the nation started turning up murdered.
KRAZY: George Herriman, a Life in Black and White. By Michael Tisserand. (Harper/HarperCollins, $35.) Who was the man behind “Krazy Kat”? This fascinating biography and guide to the work of the cartoonist, who passed for white, tells the full story.
LENIN: The Man, the Dictator, and the Master of Terror. By Victor Sebestyen. (Pantheon, $35.) Sebestyen has managed to produce a first-rate thriller by detailing the cynicism and murderous ambition of the founder of the Soviet Union.
LETTERMAN: The Last Giant of Late Night. By Jason Zinoman. (Harper/HarperCollins, $28.99.) Zinoman’s lively book does impressive triple duty as an acute portrait of stardom, an insightful chronicle of three rambunctious decades of pop-culture evolution, and a very brainy fan’s notes.
LOCKING UP OUR OWN: Crime and Punishment in Black America. By James Forman Jr. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.) A masterly account of how a generation of black elected officials wrestled with crises of violence and drug use by unleashing the brutal power of the criminal justice system on their constituents.
LOOKING FOR “THE STRANGER”: Albert Camus and the Life of a Literary Classic. By Alice Kaplan. (University of Chicago, $26.)Impressive research illuminates the context and history of Camus’s classic novel.
THE LOST CITY OF THE MONKEY GOD: A True Story. By Douglas Preston. (Grand Central, $28.) The novelist joins a rugged expedition in search of pre-Columbian ruins in the Honduran rain forest.
NOMADLAND: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century. By Jessica Bruder. (Norton, $26.95.) For three years, Bruder traveled and worked alongside “workampers,” older people, casualties of the Great Recession, who drive around the United States looking for seasonal work.
NOTES ON A FOREIGN COUNTRY: An American Abroad in a Post-American World. By Suzy Hansen. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) Hansen, who moved to Istanbul after 9/11, grapples with her country’s violent role in the world.
PRAIRIE FIRES: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder.By Caroline Fraser. (Metropolitan/Holt, $35.) This thoroughly researched biography of the “Little House” author perceptively captures Wilder’s extraordinary life and legacy.
PRIESTDADDY: A Memoir. By Patricia Lockwood. (Riverhead, $27.)The poet’s memoir is fueled by a great character: her father, a rare married Catholic priest, a big bear of a man fond of guns, cream liqueurs and pork rinds.
THE SONGS WE KNOW BEST: John Ashbery’s Early Life. By Karin Roffman. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $30.) This first full-fledged biography of the poet is full of rich and fascinating detail.
TENEMENTS, TOWERS & TRASH: An Unconventional Illustrated History of New York City. By Julia Wertz. (Black Dog & Leventhal, $29.99.) Wertz has become a cult favorite for her graphic memoirs. Her new book is a departure, focusing on her great love, New York.
TO SIRI WITH LOVE: A Mother, Her Autistic Son, and the Kindness of Machines. By Judith Newman. (Harper/HarperCollins, $26.99.) Newman’s tender, boisterous memoir strips the usual zone of privacy to edge into the world her autistic son occupies.
THE UNDOING PROJECT: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds. By Michael Lewis. (Norton, $28.95.) Lewis profiles the enchanted collaboration between Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, whose groundbreaking work proved just how unreliable our intuition could be.
WE WERE EIGHT YEARS IN POWER: An American Tragedy. By Ta-Nehisi Coates. (One World, $28.) A selection of Coates’s most influential pieces about race in America from The Atlantic, with subjects including Barack and Michelle Obama, Donald J. Trump, reparations and mass incarceration.
WHAT HAPPENED. By Hillary Rodham Clinton. (Simon & Schuster, $30.) Clinton tells the story of what it was like to run for president of the United States as the first female nominee of a major party.
WORLD WITHOUT MIND: The Existential Threat of Big Tech. By Franklin Foer. (Penguin Press, $27.) Foer dons the heavy mantle of cyber-skeptic with this persuasive brief against the big four tech giants who he believes pose a threat to the individual and society.
YOU SAY TO BRICK: The Life of Louis Kahn. By Wendy Lesser. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $30.) This biography covers the best-known works of the architect Louis Kahn as well as his complicated personal life.
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