5 Best Novels Chosen by The Week Magazine

The weekly news magazine ‘The Week’ with British, American and Australian editions, has announced its five best novels of 2017.

First of the five is ‘Lincoln in the Bardo’ by George Saunders. It is his first novel and “seems like an act of grace,” said Alex Preston at the Financial Times.

A “strange and brilliant” mix of American history and allegorical surrealism, it grows out of a tale from history: that Abraham Lincoln was so stricken by the death of his 11-year-old son that he visited the boy’s corpse in a Washington cemetery for one last embrace. Saunders’ tale is primarily set in the afterlife, in a limbo inhabited by ghosts who are cracking jokes and reminiscing about life.

Coming second on the list is ‘Sing, Unburied, Sing’ by Jesmyn Ward. In the book, a young black woman brings along her two children when she makes a road trip through Mississippi to pick up her white husband from prison.

The journey does not go smoothly. The ride illuminates the love-hate tug between different races. ‘Sing, Unburied, Sing’ is Ward’s riskiest work yet, said Sarah Begley at Time.

‘Exit West’ by Pakistani novelist Mohsin Hamid is ranked third. The novel is about a young couple,  Saeed and Nadia, who live in an unnamed city undergoing civil war and finally have to flee, using a system of fictitious doors, which lead to different locations around the globe.

Next is ‘White Tears’ by Hari Kunzru. The novel begins as a satire about two young white guys, Seth and Carter, who bond in college over a love of early-20th-century African-American music before opening a recording studio in Brooklyn. But once the voice of a blues singer mysteriously winds up on a street recording made by Seth, “some really strange things happen,” said Anthony Domestico at The Boston Globe.

‘Manhattan Beach’ by Jennifer Egan is the fifth best novel of The Week.

Whatever storytelling mode she chooses, Egan “works a formidable kind of magic,” said Dwight Garner at The New York Times.

The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of ‘A Visit From the Goon Squad’ has now written “an old-fashioned page-turner,” a big, “immensely satisfying” World War II-era story that revolves around a young woman from Brooklyn who works as a welder in a wartime shipyard before becoming the navy’s first female diver.