The Picador team share their books of the year
As 2017 draws to a close some of the Picador team reflect on the books they've loved reading this year.

Francesca Main, Publishing Director
This year two novels – George Saunders' Lincoln in the Bardo and Naomi Alderman's The Power – floored me with their originality, imagination and wit and made me feel newly excited by what fiction can do. But I also loved the quieter pleasures of Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge and Katherine Heiny's Standard Deviation, books that mirrored the joys and pains of everyday life.
The book I've recommended most often this year is Alexandra Marzano-Lesnevich's The Fact of a Body. Part memoir, part true crime, it's a wholly extraordinary exploration of memory, murder, trauma and inheritance that asks searing questions about morality and truth.
Ansa Khan Khattak, Editor
2017 felt like an excellent year for authors experimenting with the novel form and what fiction can do.
George Saunders' Lincoln in the Bardo was a very worthy Booker winner, in a year where the shortlist teemed with brilliant writers. The fact that Saunders' novel manages to be so playful in terms of form, but sacrifice none of the emotion that one might expect from an account of a father visiting his son's tomb makes it certainly one of the best novels I've read this year.
I also found Hari Kunzru's White Tears absolutely brilliant. Quite aside from the dark plot – which becomes more like a ghost story the further in you get – the questions it forces the reader to ask about authenticity, exploitation, and appropriation, seem very much like questions we should be asking ourselves today.
And if I might pick a book which technically fell into last year, but in 2017 received the recognition it very much deserved: I would urge anyone who hasn't read David France's Baillie Gifford-winning How to Survive a Plague to do so. It is many things: an incredible work of journalism, a devastating story of loss, a testimony to the power of grassroots activism, and an important reminder that the AIDS crisis was nothing short of a plague – the handling of which on the part of those in positions of responsibility fell tragically and unforgivably short.
Ravi Mirchandani, Associate Publisher
From my reading, non-fiction excited me more than fiction this year. One exceptional book was no better than I had expected, Harvard historian's Maya Jasanoff's The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World. Part criticism, part biography, part travel writing, partly a book about how Conrad's writings illuminate our world as well as his, but mostly unclassifiable, Jasanoff's new book is as original and revealing about the world as her previous two. As Patrick French put it in the Guardian ‘The Dawn Watch will win prizes, and if it doesn't there is something wrong with the prizes'.
The other was to me a discovery. It is not often that I buy a book by a writer unknown to me on the basis of a single rave review, but I entirely shared the enthusiasm of the Sunday Times reviewer of Kapka Kassabova's Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe. Writing about the borderlands between Turkey, Greece and Bulgaria, between the Islamic world and the Christian, in an equally unclassifiable combination of oral history, memoir, literary reference and travel writing, poet Kassabova writes both beautifully and insightfully about a tiny part of the world writ large.
Kris Doyle, Senior Editor
My choice of fiction is going to sound short-sighted, but I'm afraid it's true: my favourite novel of 2017 was a Picador. Let Go My Hand by Edward Docx did something truly rare in my experience of reading fiction: it made me both laugh and cry. It has a fine literary intelligence, crackling sentences, a lot of heart, and characters so vividly drawn I wished I could meet them in real life. I loved it!
Although I read a lot of good non-fiction this year, there was one book that stood out. Dear Ijeawele by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. I rushed through it on holiday the first time in a single sitting, enjoying her wit and argument; then I read it a second time to reflect on her wisdom, articulacy and masterful prose. I've turned to it for reference a few times already this year, and I've bought several copies for other people. It's a very small book, but it's full of brilliance. It moved me, provoked me, changed my mind, made me nod along in agreement; it offers hope as well as warning. I'd recommend it to anyone.
Elle Jones, Metadata Manager
This year Frances Spufford's Golden Hill was a real stand-out for me. Set in the early days of New York, it's an astonishingly vivid and visual novel, with a cleverly crafted plot. Each scene is so beautifully brought to life – it's one of the most transporting historical novels I've read in a long time.
I also deeply enjoyed Katherine Arden's enchanting Russian fairy tale, The Bear and the Nightingale. It's really rich and complex, and absolutely perfect for those who love Old Peter's Russian Tales