Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing is a story told through a family tree that branches out across centuries and countries. The two matriarchs, Esi and Effia, are half-sisters separated at birth in the 18th-century Gold Coast (present-day Ghana). As adults, they nearly cross paths at the Cape Coast Castle, an outpost that was integral to the trans-Atlantic slave trade. One sister is forced to marry a British official, while the other is sold into slavery and shipped to America.

Knopf

Over the next 250 years, Gyasi follows the women’s descendants on their intersecting journeys across the United States and Ghana. Some are players in chapters of American history we know well, or thought we did. Others introduce us to less familiar stories in West Africa, including the terrible reality of African complicity in the slave trade.

Homegoing tells these diasporic stories inventively and beautifully: Each chapter is dedicated to a new character and a new period, but it’s always clear how the family bloodline runs through each. With this, her first novel, Gyasi traces the trauma, memories, and love passed between generations by those forced to separate and migrate.

Book I’m hoping to read before 2017 arrives: The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

— Anna Diamond, editorial fellow

The Hike by Drew Magary

Viking

Drew Magary’s latest novel is a modern fairy tale, but it’s also a horror story that you read with the lights on. The Hike follows Ben, a suburban family man, as his short walk in the woods is interrupted by a killer in a Rottweiler mask. He escapes down but finds himself lost in a surreal world populated by talking crabs and demons manifested from his childhood imagination. From here, there’s no escape for Ben (or, for that matter, for the reader). He faces a slew of obstacles, which strike relentlessly, chapter after chapter, slowly forcing him to adapt to his brutal new circumstances. I kept stopping to ask “Where was this going?” The ultimate answer to that question still rattles me. Every plot twist in this story is there for a reason, and in the end, that’s where the real horror lies.

Book I’m hoping to read before 2017 arrives: The Nix by Nathan Hill

— Jason Goldstein, senior developer

On Beauty by Zadie Smith

Before attending a recent reading of Zadie Smith’s newest novel, Swing Time, I hustled to finish her 2005 book On Beauty. When the earlier novel came up during the Q&A portion of the event, Smith explained that writing is a way for her to sate her curiosity by testing out different experiences—in the case of On Beauty, that of having an academic for a parent.

Penguin

Set just outside of Boston, the novel follows two feuding families headed by fathers who are professors at the same elite university and who, in many ways, act as foils for each other. Howard Belsey is a humorless white Englishman and anti-aesthete, struggling to write an epic renunciation of Rembrandt. Monty Kipps is a fiery visiting scholar of Caribbean descent and the author of a successful book praising the same artist.

As the novel progresses, the families’ lives become ever more intertwined, with burgeoning friendships, spats, deaths, and affairs. Smith navigates these complicated twists and turns with grace, sliding into the minds of her characters with such ease you’d never know these were lives she hadn’t lived. (Take the strong-willed Kiki Simmonds Belsey who, learning of her husband Howard’s infidelity, “found she could muster contempt for even his most neutral physical characteristics.”)

As always with Smith, the book is peppered with humor both light and dark. “Writing On Beauty, it dawned on me,” she joked at the reading, “there’s lots of ways to have an unhappy childhood.”

Book I’m hoping to read before 2017 arrives: The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

— Stephanie Hayes, assistant editor

Hot Milk by Deborah Levy

Albert Camus, when asked to summarize The Stranger, said, “In our society any man who does not weep at his mother's funeral runs the risk of being sentenced to death.” Echoes of this earlier work are apparent in Deborah Levy’s Hot Milk, an unsettling, poetic novel that was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize this year. Both works explore the relationship between mothers and children; existential crises; and societal expectations of remorse and empathy. Both reimagine the beach—usually a place of escapism—as a stagnant purgatory.

Bloomsbury

Hot Milk’s protagonist, Sofia, is a twentysomething graduate-school dropout who accompanies her mother, Rose, to the southern coast of Spain in search of a cure for Rose’s nebulous (and, in Sofia’s view, psychosomatic) paralysis. Their relationship is toxic and codependent: Sofia’s disrespectful attitude and doubts about her mother’s illness both inspires and feeds off Rose’s narcissism and demanding nature.

The doctor Rose has come to see, Gómez, takes Rose off her many pills, and sends Sofia—who has acted as her mother’s “waitress” for years—away to the beach. Removed from her mother, she is forced to consider that Rose is not a burden, but rather a crutch for her own immobility. Gómez later takes a medical interest in Sofia, explaining that her case is more compelling than her mother’s. “What is wrong with you?” he asks. Sitting on the blinding beach, Sofia makes abortive attempts to articulate this question, to differentiate between the symptoms and the disease. Yet her curiosity is detached, academic—and the question of whether her ennui is the result of a disorder, or merely an element of the human condition, remains unanswered. “Is it easier to surrender to death than to life?” she asks. It’s implied that mother and daughter—joined like an ouroboros—must each choose one.

Book I’m hoping to read before 2017 arrives: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, edited by Karen V. Kukil

— Isabel Henderson, editorial fellow

The Waves by Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf’s The Waves is the kind of book that demands to be written about, even as it resists simple encapsulation. It follows six school friends, Neville, Bernard, Louis, Jinny, Susan, and Rhoda, from childhood through old age, as they shape and define and revise their identities. Over time and in turn they are lonely, ambitious, uncertain, regretful, and impatient; they deal with love and poetry and parenthood and dreams they never quite achieved. Each in their own way, they come to love another classmate, Percival; later, each in their own way, they grieve his death.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

What stands out the most about The Waves, though—and what might make it hardest to love, and hardest to write about—is its style, a radical experiment in character and narration. The novel is written in a series of interior monologues, in which the characters aren’t differentiated by voice so much as by their various ways of relating to the world—through nature, in Susan’s case, or through a mercurial stream of human observations, in Bernard’s. Rhoda and Neville, meanwhile, suffer from constant self-doubt. You get the sense, reading, that this is a record of thoughts the characters themselves are barely aware that they have. Maybe you even recognize, as I did, things that you too have felt, and would express, if only you had the words.

Book I’m hoping to read before 2017 arrives: The Story of a New Name by Elena Ferrante

— Rosa Inocencio Smith, assistant editor

Time Travel by James Gleick

The idea of time travel has had a weirdly salient presence in American culture this year. A surreal presidential race, which prompted many observers to leap through time in search of context, led some people to fictional alternate realities (see: Biff Tannen, Back to the Future) and transported others to moments from the actual past (see: Michiko Kakutani’s review of Volker Ullrich’s work). Many of those dispirited by Donald Trump’s victory have expressed a desire to catapult forward in time—Rip Van Winkle style—by, say, four or eight years. All the while, 2016 has seemed to stretch on for eons, longer than any single year in recent memory. Was election day really only six weeks ago?

Pantheon

Given all this, it seems fated that 2016 was also the year that produced James Gleick’s extraordinary book, Time Travel, which explores the scientific, technological, and literary intersection of a surprisingly modern concept. “Somehow,” Gleick marvels, “humanity got by for thousands of years without asking, What if I could travel into the future? What would the world be like? What if I could travel into the past—could I change history?” Gleick examines why the concept emerged when it did—officially, in 1895, with the publication of H.G. Wells's The Time Machine—and how the idea of time travel has reverberated through culture ever since.

Much of Time Travel focuses on technology. It’s no coincidence, Gleick argues, that time-travel narratives flourished in the early 20th century, at the dawn of a new age in transportation and communication, when layers of time became visible in sometimes jarring ways. He also investigates the nature of time itself, examining through both scientific and literary texts the idea that the past and the future can be physical places—a notion essential for the concept of time travel.

Ultimately, Time Travel centers around a single question: Why do we need time travel? To find the answer, Gleick brilliantly stitches together moments at seemingly disparate points in history: He goes from explaining the plot of an episode of Doctor Who in one sentence to revisiting the invention of the Cinématographe in 1890s France the next. But what could be a dizzying narrative is deftly handled. And that’s because Gleick’s adventure in time travel is, in the end, not about distinctions between past and future, but a love letter to “the unending now.”

Book I’m hoping to read before 2017 arrives: Seveneves by Neal Stephenson

— Adrienne LaFrance, staff writer

Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit

Haymarket

This collection of essays begins with perhaps Solnit’s most famous one, first published in 2008, of the same name. In it, Solnit recounts the night a man described to her in length a new book he'd heard about—"with that smug look I know so well in a man holding worth, eyes fixed on the fuzzy far horizon of his own authority"—only to be informed, when he was finally done, that Solnit had written it. The essay gave rise to the term "mansplaining," and the encounter therein would serve as a dictionary-worthy example of the act, which has been around since, I assume, the dawn of time. Solnit puts mansplaining on a long spectrum of male behavior that women have endured for centuries, an "archipelago of arrogance" dominated by a deep-rooted disregard for women's "right to speak, to have ideas, to be acknowledged to be in possession of facts and truths, to have value, to be a human being." She explores this spectrum in the remaining, thoroughly reported essays, from the street harassment of strangers, to the violent rapes of young girls, to the deaths of wives at the hands of their husbands. So, warning: This could be demoralizing read. But it's an important and necessary reminder of the ways in which women on this planet share a singular experience that, at its core, can transcend geography, ethnicity, and ideology. Men explain things to women all the time, everywhere. That knowledge creates a sense of fellowship that makes hearing these stories—which should be told, and often—a little bit more bearable.

Book I’m hoping to read before 2017 arrives: All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation by Rebecca Traister

— Marina Koren, senior associate editor

Private Citizens by Tony Tulathimutte

William Morrow

Tony Tulathimutte distances himself from the thrown-about claim that what he’s written is the “voice of a generation” millennial novel. As any reasonable person would. That sounds like the worst possible thing. Private Citizens is more like a classically good novel that’s unique for being set in the immediate now and for so skillfully showing the best and worst of young adulthood. A dryly self-conscious walk through the heads of a cast of mostly miserable young Bay-Area friends being mostly miserable, often hilariously, and somehow hopefully.

Book I’m hoping to read before 2017 arrives: How to Be a Person in the World by Heather Havrilesky

— James Hamblin, senior editor