best books to read 2017 about creativity

There are some beautiful love stories woven through the book’s many threads, in particular the central relationship between Julia, a wealthy woman who runs away from her husband and affluent lifestyle to be with Eve, a masculine-dressing tailor, and the subsequent tensions that arise over Julia’s longing to have a child together. With a masterful eye for historical detail, Beatrice Hitchman’s ambitious new novel plunges us headfirst into the bohemian world of Vienna’s early-20th- century golden age, as a sprawling cast of queer characters found themselves drawn into the liberal orbit of the city’s Jewish quarter in search of romance, companionship, or simply independence in an otherwise unforgiving world. Chloe Schama All of You Every Single One by Beatrice Hitchman (January 4)

At a moment when state control over women’s bodies (and autonomy) seems ever more chilling, the book feels horrifyingly unbelievable and eerily prescient all at once.

The School for Good Mothers (Simon & Schuster) picks up the mantel of writers like Margaret Atwood and Kazuo Ishiguro, with their skin-crawling themes of surveillance, control, and technology but it also stands on its own as a remarkable, propulsive novel. The tool for her forensically monitored progress is an uncanny robot baby, meant to stimulate her, challenge her, and, crucially, record her every movement, from loving gestures to instants of inattention. But no degree of contrition will spare her from the authorities who descend, first removing her child and then transplanting her to an abandoned college campus turned dystopian re-education facility where she will, ostensibly, learn what it truly takes to be a good mother. It’s a terrible thing to have done, and she knows it.

She doesn’t intend to be gone for long, but somehow time slips away, and before she realizes it, she’s been gone for hours. Jessamine Chan’s debut-like all truly terrifying nightmares-starts off in a banal, familiar way: an utterly exhausted mother, in a moment of sleep-deprived despair, does the unthinkable (and yet understandable) and walks out of her apartment, leaving her baby behind.

Best books to read 2017 about creativity