We watch Faye move through her days, speaking to friends, old lovers, real estate agents, salon employees, fellow writers, construction workers. Faye, the divorced writer who is the narrator of Cusk’s transfixing latest novel, is the same woman we met in the author’s previous novel, “Outline.” These two short books are part of a projected trilogy, and together they’re already an achievement: dense, aphoristic, philosophically acute novels that read like Iris Murdoch thrice-distilled. ‘TRANSIT’ By Rachel Cusk (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Adiga’s take on the world makes you consider what the apocalypse might sound like as reported by the BBC’s Hindi service. It’s a book about religion and its tribal cruelties, and it bears bad tidings. This is a cricket novel that maintains a running critique of the sport, and a moving novel about fathers and sons. He is not merely a confident storyteller but also a thinker, a skeptic, a wily entertainer and a thorn in the side of orthodoxy and cant. This is Adiga’s third novel, and it offers proof that his Man Booker Prize, for “The White Tiger” in 2008, was no fluke.

‘SELECTION DAY’ By Aravind Adiga (Scribner). This year, among other noteworthy books, Kakutani reviewed George Saunders’s “Lincoln in the Bardo,” Mohsin Hamid’s “Exit West,” Omar El Akkad’s “American War” and Ayobami Adebayo’s “Stay With Me.” - John Williams, Daily Books Editor and Staff Writer Dwight GarnerĮach of these books, in a hard year, was one I didn’t know I needed until it appeared. Kakutani began her role as a critic in 1983, and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998. Michiko Kakutani stepped down as our chief book critic in July. The year in books included a historic change at The Times. Janet Maslin, a former staff critic who remains a frequent contributor to The Times, also lists her favorites. Below, The New York Times’s three daily book critics - Dwight Garner, Jennifer Senior and Parul Sehgal - share their thoughts about their favorites among the books they reviewed this year, each list alphabetical by author. There were several worthy works of escapism, of course, but the literary world mostly reflected the gravity and tumult of the larger world. Novels about global interconnectedness, political violence and migration deeply reported nonfiction accounts of racial and economic strife in the United States stories both imagined and real about gender, desire and the role of beauty in the natural world. This was a year when books - like the rest of us - tried to keep up with the news, and did a pretty good job of it.

Ny times best books to read 2017