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Presenting members of The White Review editorial team, esteemed contributors, and friends of the magazine on the books they’ve been reading in 2017       LUKE BROWN, author of My Biggest Lie   The most sensible thing in book culture this year was the overdue presence of Gwendoline Riley on the prizelists, for her fifth novel First Love (Granta) Written with poetic precision and black wit, this is a novel about the difficulty of loving and being loved, about the way the personal mythologies of our partners make us take strange shapes in their imagination There is a controlled rage at the heart of all her novels but here it erupts into scenes of marital argument that recall Roth’s My Life as a Man in their delicious nastiness Luke Kennard’s debut novel The Transition (Fourth Estate), set in the accelerating disaster of the near future, is based on a superb premise: what if the solution to the property crisis is to force insolvent millennials to move into the interior-designed Victorian homes of childless older couples who will mentor them on how to become useful members of society? Full of scenes of exquisite comedy, there is a howling sadness at the core of this book; as well as being a timely satire this is also a story about difficult love   I couldn’t work out why the praise was so unreserved for the book that won the Booker, an amusing pantomime lent gravity by a clever structure, and the manipulative use of a child’s death Colson Whitehead wrote the much better historical novel of the same period in The Underground Railroad (Fleet), making the novel of slavery feel fresh with an ingenious organising principle: what if the Underground Railroad was a literal railroad? The device allows for a compelling tour of the American experience under slavery as Cora, the novel’s heroine, flees north across the states of America Whitehead restrains his comic impulse here for a serious subject; the prose is laconic; the events are horrific       THOMAS BUNSTEAD, translator of Nocilla Dream   I went to a Cervantes event at the end of 2016 at King’s in London and made two discoveries: Declan Ryan read a poem