Best books written by women in 2017
Five that are exceptionally rewarding
Adapted from a story by The Washington Post’s Book World Editors.
The Washington Post’s annual survey of the best books includes these five must-reads of the year.
Vladimir Putin has inspired a number of books seeking to explain his remarkable rise — and his remarkable hold on power. Few accounts are as ambitious, insightful and unsparing as Gessen’s “The Future Is History.” This is a sweeping intellectual history of Russia over the past four decades, told through a Tolstoyan gallery of characters. It makes a convincing if depressing case that Homo Sovieticus, the unique species created a century ago with the Bolshevik Revolution, did not die out along with the Soviet Union. What makes the book so worthwhile are its keen observations about Russia from the point of view of those experiencing its heavy-handed state. Gessen’s provocative conclusion that Putin’s Russia is just as much a totalitarian society as Stalin’s Soviet Union or Hitler’s Germany may not convince all readers. But you don’t need to agree with this assessment to find her book a sad, compelling indictment of the country where she was born, a country so traumatized by its monstrous past that it seems intent on repeating it.
Review: Putin’s Russia, guided by its totalitarian past, has no future
In her memoir of 15 years of covering jihadists, journalist Mekhennet sets out to answer a perennial question: Why do they hate us? As a Muslim woman and brave, resourceful reporter who speaks English, German, French and Arabic, Mekhennet seems well-suited to the task. She explains the nature of reporting on jihad in her role as a Washington Post national security correspondent, the time spent waiting for sources to call back, puzzling over whom to trust. On several occasions, she gets anonymous tips about imminent danger to her life and whether militants or hostile governments intend to kidnap, torture or rape her. Her portrayals of al-Qaeda and Islamic State fighters and sympathizers in countries around the world make her memoir a work of significant merit. But what of her original question? In her telling, the root of hate is not Islam; it’s not U.S. politics or foreign policy, nor is it American racism or Islamophobia. The answer is elusive and troublingly mysterious.
Review: A Muslim woman reporting on violent extremism at great personal risk
Excitement about this dystopian novel has been arcing across the Atlantic since it won the Women’s Prize for Fiction earlier this year in England. Alderman’s premise is simple, her execution endlessly inventive: Teenage girls everywhere suddenly discover that their bodies can produce a deadly electrical charge. The capacity of women to shock and awe quickly disrupts the structure of civilization. The narrative moves from an American girl’s bedroom to a British gang’s hangout, to a European forest and beyond, tracing the way this new power surges through families and governments, singeing male pride, inflaming chauvinism and burning the patriarchy to a crisp. This surprising and provocative story deconstructs not just the obvious expressions of sexism but also the internal ribs of power that we have tolerated, honored and romanticized for centuries. Alderman’s story sparks with such electric satire that you should read it wearing insulated gloves.
From the outside, nothing about this plot seems noteworthy: Irish Catholics settle in Boston; they drink too much; they struggle with the church; they gather for a loved one’s wake. That sounds as fresh as a pint of last week’s Guinness, which makes this quiet masterpiece all the more impressive. In a style that never commits a flutter of extravagance, Sullivan draws us into the lives of the Raffertys and, in the rare miracle of fiction, makes us care about them as if they were our own family. In the present, the story takes place over just a few days — the period between when 50-year-old Patrick Rafferty loses control of his car and when he’s laid out at his funeral. But within those hours, Sullivan spins the captivating history of Patrick’s mother and her sister, reaching all the way back to a little Irish village in the late 1950s.
Review: J. Courtney Sullivan’s ‘Saints for All Occasions’ is this year’s best book about family
“Sing, Unburied, Sing” is built around an arduous car trip when a black woman and her children drive to a state penitentiary to pick up their white father. The narration passes back and forth between the convict’s 13-year-old son and his drug-addled mother, Leonie. Ward draws us deep into the bile of a woman who sometimes dislikes her children and often resents their claims on her. But Leonie’s failings, which she knows are numerous, have been aggravated by addiction, grief and a racist culture that offers her no opportunity and little justice. These are people “pulling all the weight of history.” Ward, one of the most powerfully poetic writers in the country, represents those necrotic claims with a pair of restless ghosts, the unburied singers of the title, who speak to Leonie and her son. The plight of this one family is tied to intersecting crimes that stretch over decades.
Review: Jesmyn Ward’s powerful new novel, ‘Sing, Unburied, Sing’
