2017's Best Books By Women

By A Mystery Man Writer

Last updated 19 May 2024

The Cut picks its 13 favorite books by women in 2017, including works by Nicole Krauss, Patricia Lockwood, Sally Rooney and Jennifer Egan.
The American novel has yet to absorb fully the email revolution that transpired in the mid-1990s, but Elif Batuman’s autofiction about a Harvard freshman hung up on a rather dense older Hungarian mathematician (which one is the idiot?) captures the moment when teenagers first learned we could come close to beaming our thoughts into each other’s brains. The Idiot is an exquisitely droll tale of unrequited love and a stylistic tour de force. A student of Tolstoy, Gogol, and Babel, Batuman follows her Russian heroes into territory most contemporary novelists fear to tread — the chaotic zone where plots and meaning break down and the heroine has no one to talk to but herself.
Why would a teenager forced to marry an LRA child soldier choose to stay with him? How do young women living in Somalia use basketball to escape the violence surrounding them? New Yorker writer Alexis Okeowo’s moving book examines these questions and many more as she uses the stories of every day Africans to highlight the small but meaningful ways people across the continent are fighting extremism. — Jessica Roy, news editor
This book is similar to “Cat Person,” but the narrator is way more comfortable being an asshole. She faces basically the same issues as Margot: She’s a young woman who doesn’t know how to square her own interests and desires with what’s expected of her, and she deals with it by deliberately subverting expectations that she’ll be nice. She is very Cool. Total Cool Girl. Whereas Margot seems pretty average. — IG
Abandon Me’s publisher marketed this book as one for fans of Leslie Jamison and Maggie Nelson, which sounds like a great way to set readers up for disappointment – but remarkably, Melissa Febos’s narrative lives up to the comparison. This sensual, raw personal book examines love and closeness as forces that aren’t just exhilarating, but gross, maddening, and destructive. I don’t often mark up books that aren’t theoretical or political, but I found myself reaching for a pen to underline poignant phrases that made me forget to breathe while reading. “We are attracted to the people who can open our wounds,” she writes at one point; I suspect that’s why I picked up this book. — Amanda Arnold, weekend editor
The Cut picks its 13 favorite books by women in 2017, including works by Nicole Krauss, Patricia Lockwood, Sally Rooney and Jennifer Egan.