As we approach the end of 2019, lists of the best books of the year are beginning to proliferate. Yet these books are often popular enough that there is still a waitlist for our copies. So why not take this chance to catch up on some of the best books of 2017 and 2018 while you wait for your turn to this year's big titles? This list comprises the New York Times Book Review's Best Books of 2018 and Best Books of 2017 lists, and all of these titles are currently available either in Andover or through our consortium. Happy reading!
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Small fry
by Lisa Brennan-Jobs A frank, smart, and captivating memoir by the daughter of Apple founder Steve Jobs. When she was young, Lisa's father was a mythical figure who was rarely present in her life. As she grew older, her father took an interest in her, ushering her into a new world of mansions, vacations, and private schools. His attention was thrilling, but he could also be cold, critical and unpredictable. When her relationship with her mother grew strained in high school, Lisa decided to move in with her father, hoping he'd become the parent she'd always wanted him to be. Small Fry is Lisa Brennan-Jobs's poignant story of a childhood spent between two imperfect but extraordinary homes. |
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Washington Black
by Esi Edugyan Unexpectedly chosen to be a family manservant, an 11-year-old Barbados sugar-plantation slave is initiated into a world of technology and dignity before a devastating betrayal propels him throughout the world in search of his true self. |
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How to change your mind : what the new science of psychedelics teaches us about consciousness, dying, addiction, depression, and transcendence
by Michael Pollan The best-selling author of The Omnivore's Dilemma presents a groundbreaking investigation into the medical and scientific revolution currently taking place in the field of psychedelic drugs, drawing on a range of experiences to trace the criminalization of such substances as LSD and psychedelic mushrooms and how they may offer treatment options for difficult health challenges. |
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There there
by Tommy Orange This novel—which grapples with the complex history of Native Americans, with an inheritance of profound spirituality, and with a plague of addiction, abuse, and suicide—follows twelve characters, each of whom has private reasons for traveling to the Big Oakland Powwow. |
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Frederick Douglass : prophet of freedom
by David W. Blight Blight offers a definitive, dramatic biography of the most important African-American of the nineteenth century: Frederick Douglass, the escaped slave who became the greatest orator of his day and one of the leading abolitionists and writers of the era. Blight has drawn on new information held in a private collection that few other historians have consulted, as well as recently-discovered issues of Douglass's newspapers to craft the first major biography of Douglass in a quarter century. |
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The perfect nanny : a novel
by Leila Slimani The U.S. release of an award-winning best-seller from Morocco follows the relationship between a working French-Moroccan couple and their too-good-to-be-true nanny, whose devotion to their children spirals into a psychologically-charged cycle of jealousies, resentments, and violence. |
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Educated : a memoir
by Tara Westover This memoir traces the author's experiences as a child born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, describing her participation in her family's paranoid stockpiling activities and her resolve to educate herself well enough to earn acceptance into a prestigious university and the unfamiliar world beyond. |
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The great believers
by Rebecca Makkai A 1980s Chicago art gallery director loses his loved ones to the AIDS epidemic until his only companion is his daughter, who, decades later, grapples with the disease's wrenching impact on their family. By the author of The Hundred-Year House. |
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American prison : a reporter's undercover journey into the business of punishment
by Shane Bauer A ground-breaking and brave inside reckoning with the nexus of prison and profit in America. In 2014, Shane Bauer was hired for $9 an hour to work as an entry-level prison guard at a private prison in Winnfield, Louisiana. An award-winning investigative journalist, he used his real name; there was no meaningful background check. Four months later, his employment came to an abrupt end. But he had seen enough, and in short order he wrote an expose about his experiences that won a National Magazine Award and became the most-read feature in the history of the magazine Mother Jones. Still, there was much more that he needed to say. In American Prison, Bauer weaves a much deeper reckoning with his experiences together with a thoroughly-researched history of for-profit prisons in America from their origins in the decades before the Civil War. |
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Asymmetry
by Lisa Halliday The first novel by an award-winning writer explores the imbalances that spark and sustain dramatic human relations, tracing the overlapping stories of a young American editor's relationship with a famous older writer, an unexpected New York romance during the early years of the Iraq War, and an Iraqi-American man who is detained by immigration officers in Heathrow. |
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Priestdaddy
by Patricia Lockwood The author of Motherland, Fatherland, Homelandsexuals presents a darkly comic memoir about her relationship with her unconventional married Catholic priest father, describing emblematic moments from her youth and the crisis that led the author and her non-religious husband to briefly live in her parents' rectory. |
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Sing, unburied, sing : a novel
by Jesmyn Ward Living with his grandparents and toddler sister on a Gulf Coast farm, Jojo navigates the challenges of his tormented mother's addictions and his grandmother's terminal cancer before the release of his father from prison prompts a road trip of danger and hope. By the National Book Award-winning author of Salvage the Bones. |
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Prairie fires : the American dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder
by Caroline Fraser A comprehensive historical portrait of Laura Ingalls Wilder draws on unpublished manuscripts, letters, diaries, and official records to fill in the gaps in Wilder's published stories, sharing lesser-known details about her pioneer experiences while challenging popular misconceptions about how her books were ghostwritten and acknowledging the Native peoples that Wilder and settlers like her displaced. |
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The power : a novel
by Naomi Alderman When a new force takes hold of the world, people from different areas of life are forced to cross paths in an alternate reality that gives women and teenage girls immense physical power that can cause pain and death. |
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Locking up our own : crime and punishment in black America
by James Forman A consequential argument about race, crime and law in today's America by a Yale legal scholar and former public defender examines the urgent debates surrounding the criminal justice system and its activities involving mass incarceration, aggressive police tactics, and their impact on at-risk people of color and beleaguered law-enforcement officers. |
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Pachinko
by Min Jin Lee In the early 1900s, teenager Sunja, the adored daughter of a crippled fisherman, falls for a wealthy stranger at the seashore near her home in Korea. He promises her the world, but when she discovers she is pregnant--and that her lover is married--she refuses to be bought. Instead, she accepts an offer of marriage from a gentle, sickly minister passing through on his way to Japan. But her decision to abandon her home and reject her son's powerful father, sets off a dramatic saga that will echo down through the generations. |
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Grant
by Ron Chernow The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Washington: A Life presents a meticulously-researched portrait of the complicated Civil War general and 18th president, challenging the views of his critics while sharing insights into his prowess as a military leader, the honor with which he conducted his administration, and the rise and fall of his fortunes. |
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Exit west : a novel
by Mohsin Hamid The internationally best-selling author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist presents the story of two young lovers whose furtive affair is shaped by local unrest on the eve of a civil war that erupts in a cataclysmic bombing attack, forcing them to abandon their previous home and lives. |
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The evolution of beauty : how Darwin's forgotten theory of mate choice shapes the animal world--and us
by Richard O. Prum A major reevaluation of how evolutionary forces work, this book examines how mating preferences--what Darwin termed, "the taste for the beautiful"--have driven adaptive evolution and created an extraordinary range of aesthetic and elaborate ornament in the animal world. |
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Autumn
by Ali Smith A debut installment in a series about aging, time, love, and the nature of stories examines the dynamics of pop culture, meditation, and harvests in a world growing more bordered and exclusive. By the Booker Prize-nominated author of How to Be Both. |