Most important books of 2016

Books are slow food. It generally takes two years, two hardworking years, to cook up a book from idea to publication. Some writers can go faster — those who publish a book a year (or more) are working at top speed — while others write much more slowly, ruminating and reworking and false-starting for a decade or more. More than any other medium, books give us deep, rich stories that stand apart from the hubbub.

These are the 10 most important books of 2016. No matter when they started or how long they took, they touched on something that was essential this year, and will be essential when we look back at it from 2017 and beyond.

• “The Underground Railroad,” by Colson Whitehead — Pick your metaphor: Grand slam, EGOT, Royal flush. Whitehead’s novel “The Underground Railroad” — the story of a young woman’s escape from slavery via an imaginary railroad that brings her to different, imperfect versions of America — was a success on every level. Its publication date was moved up by a month so Oprah could pick it for her popular book club; it also won the National Book Award for fiction.

• “Trump Revealed: An American Journey of Ambition, Ego, Money, and Power,” by Michael Kranish and Marc Fisher — This swift book is the exception to the rule. Kranish and Fisher worked like lightning to get “Trump Revealed” to print while he was a presidential candidate (it was published in late August, a month after the Republican convention). The writers turned the reporting of their fellow Washington Post reporters into a detailed, researched story of Trump that included 20 hours of face-to-face interviews with the man himself.

• “Evicted,” by Matthew Desmond — Desmond moved to a trailer park in Milwaukee in 2008 known for its substandard conditions to begin gathering stories of eviction; later, he moved into a run-down apartment complex. He follows eight families struggling to get by while paying more than 70 percent of their incomes for housing, falling behind, being evicted, trying again.

• “The Sun Is Also a Star,” by Nicola Yoon — Yoon’s sophomore novel was a National Book Award finalist for young people’s literature. It’s told from two main points of view: Daniel, a poetry-loving Korean American teenager whose parents want him to be a doctor, and Natasha, a student who hopes to be a scientist and is trying to prevent her family from being deported back to Jamaica.

• “Shrill,” by Lindy West — At 34, West came of age as a writer in the full light of the internet, a young feminist speaking out against fat-shaming — publicly addressing her colleague at the Stranger, Dan Savage — and writing about periods and rape jokes at Jezebel the Guardian. These pieces are collected here, along with her thoughts about how vital it is for young women to raise their voices.

• “The White Donkey,” by Maximilian Uriarte — It was 2010 when Uriarte, a lance corporal in the Marine Corps, created the online comic “Terminal Lance,” which swiftly developed a fan base. Using some of the same characters, he created a more serious and involved graphic novel, “The White Donkey,” based on his 2007 deployment in Iraq.

• “City of Thorns: Nine Lives in the World’s Largest Refugee Camp,” by Ben Rawlence — According to the UNHCR, there are more than 65 million people worldwide who have been forcibly displaced. The world’s largest refugee camp, Dadaab in northern Kenya, is the temporary-turned-permanent home to as many as 600,000 people. That’s where Rawlence, a former researcher for Human Rights Watch, spent five months for this book.

• “Born to Run,” by Bruce Springsteen — One of our biggest rock stars, Springsteen has written a new canon of rock songs that deeply integrate his own desire, trouble and longing with the larger story of America. This memoir, the first from the 67-year-old, tells of his Catholic upbringing, his youthful ambitions, his adult convictions and his deep commitment to social justice.

• “Frantumaglia,” by Elena Ferrante — Ferrante, the Italian author of the internationally bestselling Neapolitan novels, is a phantom, a pseudonym. “Frantumaglia” is an autobiographical assemblage of writings, sharing some of her history (possibly fabricated) and explaining that she wants to remain unknown because of the burdens put on female writers.

• “Swing Time,” by Zadie Smith — Smith is one of today’s literary lights, and her novel has the flow of Fred and Ginger in “Swing Time,” the movie that gives this novel its name. It’s about two young, mixed-race dancers growing up in England; the friends push and pull against each other as they deal with class, ambition and race.