New York Times 10 Best Books Of 2017 Include Works By Naomi Alderman, Ron Chernow
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By Talya Zax November 30, 2017
Naomi Alderman’s novel “The Power” and Ron Chernow’s biography of Ulysses S. Grant, “Grant,” are among The New York Times’s 10 Best Books of 2017.
Alderman’s “The Power” won this year’s Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction. The Times books editors wrote that the novel was “a riveting story, told in fittingly electric language, that explores how power corrupts everyone: those new to it and those resisting its loss.”
Chernow’s “Grant,” his first book since his 2010 biography “Washington: A Life,” won accolades from the editors for its careful detail and perhaps unanticipated contemporary relevance; “at a time of economic inequality reflecting the 19th century’s Gilded Age and a renewed threat from white-supremacy groups, Chernow reminds us that Grant’s courageous example is more valuable than ever,” they wrote.
Patricia Lockwood’s memoir “Priestdaddy,” James Forman Jr.’s “Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America,” Jesmyn Ward’s “Sing, Unburied, Sing,” Min Jin Lee’s “Pachinko,” Mohsin Hamid’s “Exit West,” Ali Smith’s “Autumn,” Richard O. Prum’s “The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin’s Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World — and Us” and Caroline Fraser’s “Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder” also made the list.
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