book reviews fiction 2023

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The 10 Best Fiction Books of 2023

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T he best works of fiction published this year took us on all manner of journeys. There were big, physical trips across countries and continents, and, in one case, on foot through the untamed woods. And there were heavy, emotional treks to uncover answers about love and loss. In these books, the destination was often less important than the lessons learned along the way. From a bored copywriter in Berlin who follows a K-pop star to Seoul to a girl fleeing a colonial settlement , these protagonists were all searching for something, whether a shot at safety, a sense of purpose, or a chance to finally return home. Their quests were hopeful, daring, and at times devastating. Here, the 10 best fiction books of 2023.

More: Read TIME's lists of the best nonfiction books, songs , albums , movies , TV shows , podcasts and video games of 2023. Also discover the 100 Must-Read Books of the year.

10. Tremor , Teju Cole

The protagonist of Teju Cole’s first novel in over a decade shares many similarities with the author. Like Cole, the incisive Tunde is a Nigerian American artist and photographer who teaches at a prestigious college in New England. Tremor begins in Maine as Tunde hunts for antiques with his wife Sadako while meditating on colonialism as it relates to the objects he sees. Tunde is always pulling at the loose threads of the history that surrounds him, contemplating how the world has been shaped by the past. Forgoing a traditional narrative structure, Tremor takes a philosophical form to investigate everything from how Americans view art to how a marriage can quietly unravel.

Buy Now: Tremor on Bookshop | Amazon

9. Y/N , Esther Yi

In an age when parasocial relationships run rampant, Esther Yi’s daring debut couldn’t be more relevant. Y/N begins with an unnamed narrator living in Berlin whose boring job as a copywriter for an artichoke company leaves something to be desired. She spends much of her time in the fantasy worlds inside her head and online, where she writes fan fiction about a popular K-pop star named Moon. When the real-life Moon unexpectedly announces his retirement, the young woman feels compelled to drop everything and go to Seoul in search of the man she views as her soulmate. What ensues is a snarky and astute takedown of internet culture.

Buy Now: Y/N on Bookshop | Amazon

8. The Hive and the Honey , Paul Yoon

The third short-story collection from Paul Yoon spans centuries of the Korean diaspora, with each piece centering on everyday people as they navigate what it means to belong and question how much of their identities are wrapped up in collective history. There’s an ex-con attempting to understand the world, a Cold War–era maid looking for the son she left behind in North Korea, and a couple living in the U.K. whose quiet existence is complicated by the arrival of a boy at their corner store. Yoon tells the stories of characters at odds with their relationships to home and explores how trauma can linger in the most unexpected ways.

Buy Now: The Hive and the Honey on Bookshop | Amazon

7. Tom Lake , Ann Patchett

Don’t let the setting of Ann Patchett’s latest novel fool you. Yes, it’s the spring of 2020 and her characters are in COVID-19 lockdown, but this is no pandemic story. Tom Lake takes place in Michigan, where Lara and her husband are enjoying the rare opportunity to live once again with their three grown daughters. There, as the family passes the days tending to their cherry trees, Lara finally tells her girls the story they’ve been longing to hear—about how, in her young adulthood, she fell in love with a man who would go on to become a movie star.

Buy Now: Tom Lake on Bookshop | Amazon

6. Temple Folk , Aaliyah Bilal

The 10 stories in Aaliyah Bilal’s collection examine the lives of Black Muslims in America. In one, a daughter is haunted by her father’s spirit as she writes his eulogy, and the ghost makes her reconsider his commitment to Islam. In another, an undercover FBI agent reckons with unexpected empathy for the Nation of Islam. Throughout, parents and their children learn about the limitations and possibilities of faith. The result is a collection of wide-ranging narratives that touch on freedom and belonging.

Buy Now: Temple Folk on Bookshop | Amazon

5. The Vaster Wilds , Lauren Groff

When Lauren Groff’s novel opens, a young, unnamed girl has just escaped her 17th century colonial settlement. Starving and cold, she doesn’t know where she’s headed and is constantly on the verge of collapse. But, somehow, she finds the will to keep pushing forward. In Groff’s timeless adventure tale, the girl endures the physical threats and mental tests of navigating the woods, all while remaining determined that there is a life worth living on the other side.

Buy Now: The Vaster Wilds on Bookshop | Amazon

4. The Bee Sting , Paul Murray

Paul Murray’s domestic drama follows the four members of the troubled Barnes family after an economic downturn sends patriarch Dickie’s car business hurtling toward bankruptcy. Feeling the crush of impending doom surround them, the once functional unit is falling apart. Dickie’s wife Imelda has become obsessed with selling her belongings on eBay, their teenage daughter Cass is drinking instead of studying for her final exams, and their preadolescent son PJ is talking to a stranger he met online. Murray probes what it means to love and be loved in a world that feels increasingly like it’s on the cusp of expiration.

Buy Now: The Bee Sting on Bookshop | Amazon

3. Our Share of Night , Mariana Enriquez

In Mariana Enriquez’s transporting novel, translated from the original Spanish by Megan McDowell, a young boy and his father take a terrifying road trip. The boy’s mother has just died under mysterious circumstances, and the duo is traveling across Argentina to confront members of the Order, the cult she was born into. The Order is made up of wealthy families who will do anything to achieve immortality. And the boy just might have the skills they are looking for—a possibility that makes him vulnerable.

Buy Now: Our Share of Night on Bookshop | Amazon

2. The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store , James McBride

It’s 1972 and a skeleton has just been found in Pottstown, Pa. The question of who the remains belong to—and how they made it to the bottom of a well—pulls James McBride’s narrative decades into the past, to a time when the Black and Jewish residents of the neighborhood came together to protect a boy from being institutionalized. As McBride makes connections between the two storylines, he spins a powerful tale about prejudice, family, and faith.

Buy Now: The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store on Bookshop | Amazon

1. Biography of X , Catherine Lacey

At the center of Catherine Lacey’s novel is the fictional writer and artist X, one of the most celebrated talents of the 20th century. Though she’s hugely popular, most of her background is unknown; not even X’s wife CM knows her real name. When X dies, CM finds herself incensed by an inaccurate biography of her late wife. So she decides to write her own. The mystery of X’s identity is just the beginning of this daring story that seamlessly blends fiction and nonfiction to question the purpose of art itself.

Buy Now: Biography of X on Bookshop | Amazon

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• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/heres-a-dozen-books-from-2023-you-should-read-critics-say

Here’s a dozen books from 2023 you should read, critics say

As the year comes to a close, we’re sitting down with book critics to discuss some of the best books released in 2023. NPR’s Fresh Air book critic Maureen Corrigan and New York Times books editor Gilbert Cruz share their favorite fiction and nonfiction picks with Jeffrey Brown.

”Absolution” by Alice McDermott

– Maureen Corrigan

“The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store” by James McBride

“The Bee Sting” by Paul Murray

– Gilbert Cruz

“North Woods” by Daniel Mason

“The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder” by David Grann

“How to Say Babylon” by Safiya Sinclair

“Master Slave Husband Wife” by Ilyon Woo

“Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World” by John Vaillant

“Beware the Woman” by Megan Abbott

And more personal favorites…

Maureen Corrigan recommended “Tom Lake” by Ann Patchett and Gilbert Cruz suggested “Fourth Wing” and “Iron Flame” by Rebecca Yarros.

In his more than 30-year career with the News Hour, Brown has served as co-anchor, studio moderator, and field reporter on a wide range of national and international issues, with work taking him around the country and to many parts of the globe. As arts correspondent he has profiled many of the world's leading writers, musicians, actors and other artists. Among his signature works at the News Hour: a multi-year series, “Culture at Risk,” about threatened cultural heritage in the United States and abroad; the creation of the NewsHour’s online “Art Beat”; and hosting the monthly book club, “Now Read This,” a collaboration with The New York Times.

Anne Azzi Davenport is the Senior Producer of CANVAS at PBS NewsHour.

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The 45 Best New Books of 2023 You Won’t Put Down

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From fizzy summer beach reads to highbrow literary fiction, 2023’s most noteworthy releases so far are highly personal and deeply memorable. At the start of the year, readers were treated to heartfelt debut novels by Jessica George and Delia Cai. Throughout the spring and summer, modern literary forces like Brandon Taylor, Ann Patchett, and Zadie Smith returned with highly anticipated novels that were worth the wait. The momentum isn’t ending with the calendar year, either. Books arriving in fall and winter include Elizabeth Hand’s bone-chilling A Haunting on the Hill and Class , Stephanie Land’s follow-up to her best-selling memoir Maid . From a study of Brooklyn’s gilded upper class in Pineapple Street to a scammer’s anxiety-inducing lurch through the Hamptons in Emma Cline’s The Guest , this year’s best new books hook you from the first scene. Their characters are so memorable, you’ll want to revisit them again in the not-too-distant future. (Even the antiheroes.)

Read on for the best books of 2023 to add to your reading list now—and read a second time later—organized by release date. From the moment you pick them up, you won’t want to put them down. And if there’s a book lover in your life, any one of these titles would fit their definition of a luxury gift for the holiday season.

The Survivalists: A Novel

The Survivalists is one of the year’s most noteworthy new books on premise alone . Aretha, a partner-track lawyer who thrives on corporate success, descends into the world of Armageddon bunkers and doomsday arms dealing after she begins dating a coffee entrepreneur whose roommates are preparing for all sorts of unknown catastrophes while managing the roastery in their shared brownstone. On execution, The Survivalists delivers with a portrait of an underground corner of Brooklyn that’s so vividly captured, you may question what’s going on behind your favorite coffee shop.

Maame: A Novel

Maddie, the narrator of Jessica George’s stirring debut novel, has spent most of her 20s caring for her father, who has Parkinson’s disease. Her mother is in Ghana; her brother is on the road with a musician; neither offer much in terms of money or help. But a moment for Maddie to finally figure out what she wants from life, independent of her family, is on the horizon—just not in the way she initially expects. This is a coming-of-age novel that finds beauty in the messiness and complexity of growing up, with a narrator whose singular voice instantly captivated readers and reviewers.

There’s more where Maame came from: The novel has already been picked up for a TV adaptation.

Central Places: A Novel

Heroines who travel from a bustling city to their flyover-state hometown for the holidays often find trouble and maybe a new love interest in their old zip code. But Audrey Zhou, the narrator of Central Plac es, isn’t on the Hallmark trajectory when she books a Christmas trip back to Hickory Grove, Illinois, for her first visit since high school. Audrey intends to spend the week introducing her Chinese immigrant parents to her white fiancé and helping them feel like one family—a tough order, considering Audrey and her mother aren’t on the best terms. Instead, after run-ins with a past crush and old acquaintances, Audrey embarks on a self-reckoning that’s hilarious at some times, heartfelt at others, and impossible to put down the whole way through.

Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear

Wolfish ’s explorations of predators and prey in both the natural and man-made worlds defies easy categorization. The way Berry weaves an ecological adventure story about OR-7 , a wolf who makes a record-breaking journey away from an Oregon pack, with tales from her own coming-of-age, asks readers to reconsider their relationships with fear and the creatures who induce it.

I Have Some Questions for You: A Novel

Is I Have Some Questions for You a campus novel, a noir murder mystery, or a literary dissection of #MeToo social dynamics? With literary sensation Rebecca Makkai steering journalist Bodie Kane back to her high school alma mater to teach a workshop and, eventually, sift through the files on a former classmate’s death to potentially exonerate a wrongly accused killer, the answer is all of the above.

Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock

In 2019, Jenny Odell drew our collective attention to the attention economy’s downsides with her book How to Do Nothing . Saving Time offers another chance to shift our perspective on the systems we accept as the standard—specifically time, and how we structure and spend it. You might just put this book down with a whole new outlook on how you measure your days.

Pineapple Street: A Novel

Comedies skewering the 1 percent have borderline overstayed their welcome in film, but this novel’s take on the subgenre in fiction is laugh-out-loud good. It follows three women connected to the wealthier-than-wealthy Stockton family and their Brooklyn Heights brownstone: two Stockton siblings, Darley and Georgiana, and their sister-in-law with a middle-class background, Sasha. Love and money have always mixed like oil and water (not well), but Jackson finds new humor and warmth in her particularly witty debut.

Brother & Sister Enter the Forest: A Novel

Richard Mirabella braids two timelines into one propulsive narrative about survival. In the first: Justin, a queer teen, sets off on a catastrophic road trip with his first boyfriend after his love interest gets into violent trouble. In the second: It’s several years later, and Justin has arrived on his sister Willa’s doorstep, desperate for refuge but at risk of damaging them both with the aftereffects of his trauma.

Hello Beautiful: A Novel

Little Women fans will be endeared by Hello Beautiful ’s homage to the March siblings, in the form of the four Padavano sisters. Any lover of a sweeping family saga will be moved by the Padavanos’ unraveling after eldest daughter Julia meets Will, a man whose tragic past comes back to disrupt the entire family.

Romantic Comedy: A Novel

The title doesn’t lie: Curtis Sittenfeld sets up her latest novel with a plot that demands a fizzy on-creen adaptation, ASAP. Sally Milz, a writer on a fictional SNL twin, The Night Owls , has more or less given up on romance when pop star Noah Brewster signs on to host the show. Over a week of writing jokes and rehearsing the week’s lineup, Sally feels something that’s a lot like love—but you’ll have to read to see if their connection is real or just another sketch.

A Living Remedy: A Memoir

On one level, Nicole Chung’s second memoir is an elegy for her adoptive parents. On another, it’s an indictment of the broken health care systems that prevent a disappearing middle class from receiving the affordable care it desperately needs. Chung writes about and through her grief with clarity and wisdom. Her reflection on her early life and her parents’ last days is a salve for any reader who has experienced the specific devastation that is losing a parent.

Happy Place: A Novel

Happy Place is a different kind of Emily Henry romance. Harriet and Wyn, its leading duo, aren't a couple in the making. They're partners since college who quietly broke up months ago—and didn’t tell any of their friends before an annual group trip to Maine. Back at their usual summer escape, Harriet and Wyn have to fake that they’re still together for the friends they haven’t clued in to the truth, and maybe come to a new understanding with one another in the process. Don’t be surprised if you’re weeping through the last few chapters (in a cathartic way, we promise).

Homebodies: A Novel

Tembe Denton-Hurst’s debut novel astutely captures what it’s like to fight for yourself in a world that’s stacked against you. Unfairly ousted from her job, Mickey Hayward puts her experiences as a Black woman in media to paper in the hopes it’ll wake up the industry to the racism and sexism she endured. Instead, it hardly makes a ripple—until Mickey has left New York for her Maryland hometown and her letter reappears amid a larger scandal involving her old workplace.

Wildflower: A Memoir

How did Aurora James found her CFDA award–winning label Brother Vellies and galvanize retailers to take a stand for Black-owned brands through the Fifteen Percent Pledge? James’s forthcoming memoir recounts the peaks and valleys from childhood to adulthood that led her to the fashion industry—where she changed things for the better.

The Guest: A Novel

Emma Cline’s best-selling novel became the book of the summer for a reason. The Guest invites you to follow a down-on-her-luck scammer through one chaotic week in the Hamptons—where each day bring her to more desperate means of survival and manipulation than the one before.

Yellowface: A Novel

The unexpected death of acclaimed author Athena Liu presents (what looks like) an opportunity for struggling writer June Hayward to finally break through—by stealing Liu’s last manuscript and inventing an Asian-American identity to pass off Liu’s masterwork as her own. Posing as “Juniper Song,” June gets a taste of the literary success she stole and definitely doesn’t deserve. As she soon learns, she can’t keep up the lie forever—can she?

R.F. Kuang’s satirical thriller covers everything from white privilege to internet culture with increasingly eviscerating precision, the further June/Juniper spirals away from the truth.

The Late Americans: A Novel

Brandon Taylor’s third book is the most dazzling example of his sharp pen and keen observations of human nature yet. The Late Americans assembles a troupe of Iowa City student-artists and their lovers, friends, and neighbors in a novel that tracks their shifting relationships over the course of a single year. Taylor develops his characters so precisely, they feel like close friends: recognizable, sometimes infuriating, and always worth following to the book’s last page.

(Bonus recommendation: Check out Taylor’s literary newsletter while you wait for The Late Americans to arrive.)

Girls and Their Horses: A Novel

Tensions have always run high in the elite (and usually, rich) equestrian world. Girls and Their Horses dials up the intrigue by several degrees, embedding a new-money family into an insular and highly competitive horseback riding community—where deceit, romance, and even murder aren’t out of the question in pursuit of a blue ribbon.

The Mythmakers: A Novel

Keziah Weir’s debut novel takes an age-old literary question—“Is this fiction actually based on reality?”—and twists it into a compelling story about art, perspective, and the line between inspiration and transgression. The Mythmakers isn’t from the perspective of a novelist, though: It begins with a down-on-her-luck journalist who recognizes herself in a short story by an acclaimed—and recently deceased—author.

Adult Drama and Other Essays

Three years after an essay about her (unhealthy) friendship with influencer Caroline Calloway went viral, Natalie Beach is delving into other can’t-look-away dramas—in her relationships, in her work, and in the world at large—with the same captivating voice that landed her on so many readers’ radar. This is a debut essay collection not to miss.

Halie LeSavage is the fashion commerce editor at Harper's BAZAAR . Her style reporting covers everything from reviewing the best designer products to profiling emerging brands and designers. Previously, she was the founding retail writer at Morning Brew and a fashion associate at Glamour .

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Last updated: May 16, 2024

With so much new fiction to choose from, it's not easy to find novels that are really worth spending your time reading. To help, we'll be collecting all our book recommendations relating to the best fiction of 2023 here. This includes novels picked by our deputy editor, Scotland-based author Cal Flyn, as well as books shortlisted for prestigious prizes, like the Booker Prize and the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

We also enjoy genre fiction. We'll be keeping a running list of the best mystery books of 2023, and adding interviews about prize-winning fiction books as they're announced by juries.

Our best fiction of 2023 list is part of our best books of 2023 series

The Best Novels of 2023: The Booker Prize Shortlist , recommended by Cal Flyn

Prophet song by paul lynch, the bee sting by paul murray, if i survive you by jonathan escoffery, western lane by chetna maroo, this other eden by paul harding, study for obedience by sarah bernstein.

Every year, the judges for the Booker Prize read more than a hundred books that have been submitted by their publishers in the hope of being recognised by one of the world's most prestigious literary awards. The 2023 shortlist features a novel-in-stories, an Irish dystopia, and plenty of family drama. Read more fiction recommendations on Five Books

Every year, the judges for the Booker Prize read more than a hundred books that have been submitted by their publishers in the hope of being recognised by one of the world’s most prestigious literary awards. The 2023 shortlist features a novel-in-stories, an Irish dystopia, and plenty of family drama. Read more fiction recommendations on Five Books

The Funniest Books of 2023 , recommended by Peter Florence

Darling by india knight, didn't nobody give a shit what happened to carlotta by james hannaham, mother hens by sophie mccartney, murder at crime manor by fergus craig, teen couple have fun outdoors by aravind jayan, the satsuma complex by bob mortimer.

Comedy comes in many flavours, explains Peter Florence —chair of the judges for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction. Here, he talks us through the varied shortlist for this year's prize: the six funniest books of 2023.

Comedy comes in many flavours, explains Peter Florence—chair of the judges for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction. Here, he talks us through the varied shortlist for this year’s prize: the six funniest books of 2023.

The Best Historical Fiction: The 2023 Walter Scott Prize Shortlist , recommended by Cal Flyn

These days by lucy caldwell, i am not your eve by devika ponnambalam, the sun walks down by fiona mcfarlane, ancestry: a novel by simon mawer, the chosen by elizabeth lowry, the geometer lobachevsky by adrian duncan.

Every year, the judges for the Walter Scott Prize highlight the best new historical fiction. In 2023, the shortlisted books include a slow-burn mystery set in colonial Australia and a thrilling new novel from the author of Fatherland . Cal Flyn , our deputy editor, takes us through the seven books that are set 60+ years in the past and yet speak to the present.

Every year, the judges for the Walter Scott Prize highlight the best new historical fiction. In 2023, the shortlisted books include a slow-burn mystery set in colonial Australia and a thrilling new novel from the author of Fatherland . Cal Flyn, our deputy editor, takes us through the seven books that are set 60+ years in the past and yet speak to the present.

The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Books of 2023: The Hugo Awards , recommended by Sylvia Bishop

Legends & lattes by travis baldree, the spare man by mary robinette kowal, the daughter of doctor moreau by silvia moreno-garcia, nona the ninth by tamsyn muir, the kaiju preservation society by john scalzi, babel: an arcane history by r. f. kuang.

The Hugo Awards, first presented in 1953, were originally known as the 'Science Fiction Achievement Awards.' But, in practice, their shortlists encompass speculative fiction as a whole, including fantasy—and is considered one of that genre's most prestigious prizes. Here, Sylvia Bishop offers an overview of this year's nominees in the 'Best Novel' category, which represent the most popular sci-fi and fantasy books of 2023.

The Hugo Awards, first presented in 1953, were originally known as the ‘Science Fiction Achievement Awards.’ But, in practice, their shortlists encompass speculative fiction as a whole, including fantasy—and is considered one of that genre’s most prestigious prizes. Here, Sylvia Bishop offers an overview of this year’s nominees in the ‘Best Novel’ category, which represent the most popular sci-fi and fantasy books of 2023.

The Best Romance Books of 2023 , recommended by Katherine D. Morgan

The fiancée farce by alexandria bellefleur, reggie and delilah’s year of falling by elise bryant, you, again by kate goldbeck, kiss and spell by celestine martin, new adult by timothy janovsky.

Looking for a love story that will make you swoon, wince, whoop, and cheer? We have some suggestions for you. Guest editor Katherine D. Morgan rounds up the best romance books of  2023: five emotional and entertaining novels that will really hit you where it hurts.

Award-Winning Novels of 2023 , recommended by Cal Flyn

Demon copperhead by barbara kingsolver, blackouts by justin torres.

The enormous variety of new, beautifully-blurbed books being published every month presents an agony of choice for the casual reader. Luckily, literary prize shortlists offer a shortcut to discovering some of the best novels of the year. Here, Five Books  deputy editor Cal Flyn offers a helpful round-up of the award-winning novels of the 2023 season and a few notable runners-up. Read more fiction recommendations on  Five Books

Notable Novels of Fall 2023 , recommended by Cal Flyn

The fraud by zadie smith, the maniac by benjamin labatut, a shining by jon fosse, translated by damion searls, my work by olga ravn, translated by sophia hersi smith & jennifer russell, the glutton: a novel by a. k. blakemore.

Outside it's autumnal and the nights are drawing in. All the better for admiring the bright lights of publishing's starriest season, when the shiniest baubles are released in time for the Christmas rush. Five Books  deputy editor Cal Flyn rounds up the most notable new novels of Fall 2023, including eagerly-awaited books from Zadie Smith and Jesmyn Ward, plus the buzziest new releases in literary fiction and novels-in-translation  

Outside it’s autumnal and the nights are drawing in. All the better for admiring the bright lights of publishing’s starriest season, when the shiniest baubles are released in time for the Christmas rush. Five Books  deputy editor Cal Flyn rounds up the most notable new novels of Fall 2023, including eagerly-awaited books from Zadie Smith and Jesmyn Ward, plus the buzziest new releases in literary fiction and novels-in-translation  

The Best Science Fiction of 2023: The Arthur C. Clarke Award Shortlist , recommended by Tom Hunter

Venomous lumpsucker: a novel by ned beauman, the red scholar's wake by aliette de bodard, plutoshine by lucy kissick, the anomaly by hervé le tellier, translated by adriana hunter, the coral bones by e.j. swift, metronome by tom watson.

Every year, the judges of the Arthur C Clarke Award select the best sci-fi novels of the previous twelve months. We asked prize director Tom Hunter to talk us through the six science fiction books that made the 2023 shortlist—including a space opera romance and a high-concept action thriller that has already won the most prestigious award in Francophone literature.

Notable Novels of Summer 2023 , recommended by Cal Flyn

The guest by emma cline, biography of x by catherine lacey, in memoriam by alice winn, harold: a novel by steven wright, small worlds by caleb azumah nelson.

New novels are piling up ready for summer 2023—but which of them should go straight to the top of your reading list? Five Books  deputy editor Cal Flyn offers a round-up of some of the most notable fiction titles of the season, including eagerly anticipated novels from Emma Cline and Naoise Dolan, plus a fictionalised account of the making of a blockbuster movie by Tom Hanks.

The Best Crime Novels of 2023 , recommended by Sophie Roell

The running grave by robert galbraith, dead of night by simon scarrow, gaslight by femi kayode, exiles by jane harper, bad kids by zijin chen.

From a police procedural set in World War II Berlin to a man pushing his in-laws off a wall in Ningbo, the variety of settings for crime fiction continue to provide a lot of opportunities for armchair travel. Our editor, Sophie Roell , an avid reader of crime novels, picks out some of her favourites of 2023. Read more fiction recommendations on Five Books

From a police procedural set in World War II Berlin to a man pushing his in-laws off a wall in Ningbo, the variety of settings for crime fiction continue to provide a lot of opportunities for armchair travel. Our editor, Sophie Roell, an avid reader of crime novels, picks out some of her favourites of 2023. Read more fiction recommendations on Five Books

We ask experts to recommend the five best books in their subject and explain their selection in an interview.

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The best novels of 2023

Including new novels by Naomi Alderman, Dolly Alderton, and Samantha Harvey

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The Future by Naomi Alderman

Good material by dolly alderton, orbital by samantha harvey, tackle by jilly cooper, julia by sandra newman, the pole and other stories by j.m. coetzee, the glutton by a.k. blakemore, western lane by chetna maroo, absolutely & forever by rose tremain, beasts of england by adam biles, holly by stephen king, prophet song by paul lynch, the fraud by zadie smith, the wren, the wren by anne enright, caret by adam mars-jones, open throat by henry hoke, tom lake by ann patchett, the bee sting by paul murray, ordinary human by megan nolan, be mine by richard ford, i am homeless if this is not my home by lorrie moore, big swiss by jen beagin, death under a little sky by stig abell, time shelter by georgi gospodinov, the making of another major motion picture masterpiece by tom hanks, the guest by emma cline, soldier sailor by claire kilroy, august blue by deborah levy, a house for alice by diana evans, pineapple street by jenny jackson, shy by max porter, romantic comedy by curtis sittenfeld, to battersea park by philip hensher, dr. no by percival everett, queen k by sarah thomas, old god’s time by sebastian barry, cursed bread by sophie mackintosh, birnam wood by eleanor catton, brutes by dizz tate, victory city by salman rushdie, the birthday party by laurent mauvignier (translation by daniel levin becker), white riot by joe thomas, the new life by tom crewe, age of vice by deepti kapoor.

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Fourth Estate 416pp £20; The Week Bookshop £15.99  

Naomi Alderman is one of our most consistently inventive writers, said Stephanie Merritt in The Observer . She combines "literary and historical erudition" with an "instinct for narrative pace". Her sixth novel is a typical offering, being at once a "satirical dystopian tech-thriller" and a "complex novel of ideas". Set in a world that's much like our own, only with "fancier gadgets", it begins with the three wealthiest people on the planet – who run "barely disguised versions of Amazon, Apple and Facebook/Twitter" – being notified, via an "exclusive early warning app", that civilisation is on the brink of collapse. They swiftly retreat to their respective bunkers. What follows is a hectic, crisscrossing story involving survivalist cults, much philosophical musing, and a "cascade of cataclysmic events", said Elizabeth Hand in The Washington Post . While there are some "terrific" scenes – notably an account of a Davos-style conference devoted to "selling post-apocalypse tech" – the novel can't decide if it's satire or parable, and at times becomes rather confusing. "The Future" is "frustrating" yet "immensely readable".

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Fig Tree 352pp £18.99; The Week Bookshop £14.99  

This second novel by Dolly Alderton (best known for her 2018 "hit" memoir " Everything I Know About Love ") is a work of "Hornbyesque charm", said Hephzibah Anderson in The Observer . Andy, the narrator, is a "jobbing" thirtysomething comedian who has just been dumped by his girlfriend Jen. The action is mainly concerned with Andy's "lovelorn misadventures" – including Instagramstalking Jen and her new boyfriend, "obsessively monitoring his bald spot", and "navigating the daunting practicalities of living in London unaided by Jen's corporate salary". The "smallness of the canvas" Alderton adopts makes this novel surprisingly "daring", said Michael Donkor in The Guardian . The "intensely limited focus on Andy" and his trials could have felt "repetitive or leaden" – but instead she uses it to capture the "myopia and obsessiveness that sudden heartbreak can bring". "Good Material" isn't going to "rewrite ideas about contemporary sexual politics". It is, however, a warm and funny work, which reveals Alderton to be a "writer comfortably settling into her groove".

Jonathan Cape 144pp £14.99; The Week Bookshop £11.99  

From a novel about Alzheimer's to medieval crime, Samantha Harvey is a novelist who "reinvents her career with each new book", said Alice Jolly in The Sunday Times . Her latest journey into "unexplored territory" is a "poetic and powerful" account of a day in the life of six astronauts on the International Space Station. Because the astronauts inhabit an "orbiting laboratory" that is travelling at 17,000 miles an hour, they orbit Earth 16 times per day, and so "see 16 dawns and 16 sunsets". Harvey's ability to capture this "constantly unravelling world" – "Asia come and gone. Australia a dark featureless shape against this last breath of light" – is the novel's most remarkable feature. 

Such passages are also counterbalanced by "moments of wry observation", said Emily Rhodes in The Spectator . Harvey finds humour in the space station's toilet arrangements – they are "split along Cold War lines" – and charts the sense of boundaries breaking down as the astronauts breathe "each other's overused air". Written in her trademark "luminous prose", this is a "slender, gleaming novel". 

Bantam 448pp £22; The Week Bookshop £17.99  

Jilly Cooper's latest novel – her 11th set in Rutshire – marks an unlikely shift in direction, said Cleo Watson in The Daily Telegraph . Rather than being about polo or opera, it is set in the world of football. Rupert Campbell-Black, Cooper's swaggering hero, has just bought a local team, Searston Rovers FC, and "with the kind of determination that only an Olympic show-jumping gold medal can instil, he sets his sights on winning the Premier League". This ambition is amusingly challenged by his players (led by star striker, Facundo Gonzalez), who are more interested in wife swapping than on-pitch glory. Cooper has always offered "huge pleasure", and I found it a struggle not to "gobble" this novel up "in one go". 

Although "Tackle!" contains the "reliable Cooper quotient of rising penises" and "lithe women with high breasts", she also weaves in darker themes, said Lucy Beresford in Literary Review . A sub-plot dealing with cancer is subtly done, as is another exploring the impact of growing up in a children's home. "With this novel, Cooper shoots again and scores."

Granta 400pp £18.99; The Week Bookshop £14.99  

It's quite a task, "to take on a classic and remake it from a new perspective", said Erica Wagner in The Daily Telegraph . But that's what US author Sandra Newman does in "Julia" – a retelling of George Orwell's "1984" from the perspective of Winston Smith's lover. A relatively slight character in Orwell's original, Newman's Julia feels fleshed out: she works as a mechanic in the Ministry of Truth, toiling on the "machines that produce fiction for the Party"; she lives in a dormitory with other women, and is "cynical, practical", a "ruthless survivor". Fascinating and "atmospheric", "Julia" "succeeds, brilliantly". 

It's a book that works on more than one level, said Natasha Walter in The Guardian . As well as being a "satisfying tribute act", it is also a critique of "1984", revealing things overlooked by Orwell – such as the way the restrictions of totalitarianism "weigh differently on women" than on men. Although the novel "starts to weaken" in its second half (the prison scenes in particular lack the power of 1984's), this is a work that "stands up well beside Orwell's original, and at many points enriches it". 

Harvill Secker 272pp £20; The Week Bookshop £15.99

"All writers go off", the late Martin Amis once said. Happily, there are no signs that 83-year-old J.M. Coetzee is "running out of steam", said James Purdon in Literary Review . The Nobel Prize-winner's latest work – consisting of a new novella, "The Pole", and five stories written over the past 20 years, four featuring his alter-ego Elizabeth Costello – reveals an author who has "slipped comfortably into a late style". The novella, which charts a brief affair between Witold, a 72-year-old concert pianist, and Beatriz, a fortysomething banker's wife, is Coetzee at his very best, said John Self in The Observer . It's "lighter in tone" than his early novels, and the melding of story and ideas is "exquisite". When Coetzee is as good as this, he makes you "wonder why other people bother". 

I was less than impressed, said John Banville in The Guardian . Set out in numbered sections – "it is not clear to what purpose" – "The Pole "is a "glacial" and rather "frictionless" work. He makes a clear effort to avoid the "merely picturesque". At one point, he writes of a walk: "It is a pleasant autumn day. The leaves are turning, et cetera." There is "little in the way of novelty" in these stories, said Claire Lowdon in The Sunday Times . They revisit Coetzee's "enduring preoccupations", notably "desire, and the spiritual status of animals". Still, after the "dense philosophical slog" of his recent Jesus Trilogy, this book offers a welcome return to the "limpid narrative mode of earlier works such as the Booker-winning Disgrace". The collection as a whole "forms a cerebral swansong that will be obligatory reading for Coetzee fans".

Granta 336pp £14.99; The Week Bookshop £11.99  

The "Great Tarare" was a French peasant who achieved notoriety in the revolutionary period for his "prodigious ability to devour things", said Sandra Newman in The Guardian . By his teens, he was eating his own weight in meat each day – and later, as a street performer, he would consume household objects and even "live animals". Such a life clearly "begs to be fictionalised", and it's hard to think of anyone better equipped for the task than the "remarkable" A.K. Blakemore, whose previous novel, "The Manningtree Witches", deservedly won the Desmond Elliott Prize. Her account of Tarare's short life (he died aged 25) is a work of intoxicating language and "great intelligence". 

Moving between its subject's final days in the care of a nun and his impoverished childhood, "The Glutton" is a work of great "assurance and verve", said Stephanie Merritt in The Observer . Blakemore is equally at home evoking natural beauty or the "stench of rotting wounds". Few writers can be "truly likened to Hilary Mantel", but Blakemore's "rare ability to reanimate the past" means that she is one of them.

Picador 176pp £14.99; The Week Bookshop £11.99

Squash is a game of "peculiar solitude", in which you "never face your competitor, and play in eerily hermetic conditions", said Claire Allfree in The Times . In this "gorgeous debut", it evokes the inner life of its heroine, a promising young player whose devotion to the sport is in part a response to family tragedy. When the novel opens, narrator Gopi is 11 and "has just lost her mother". Her father ramps up her training; soon, she's playing "several hours a day". An "elegantly compressed coming-of-age novel", written in unadorned but expressive prose, Western Lane is a remarkable achievement – and deserves its place on this year's Booker shortlist.

It "feels like the work of a writer who knows what they want to do, and who has the rare ability to do it", agreed Caleb Klaces in The Guardian . Especially impressive is Maroo's ability to convey "emotional complexity by way of physical description". She's a talented writer, but this novel feels frustratingly slight and underdeveloped, said Claudia Rowan in The Daily Telegraph . I was "mildly intrigued", but was ultimately left "wanting more emotionally".

Chatto & Windus 192pp £16.99 The Week Bookshop £13.99

Rose Tremain isn't often thought of as a funny writer, but in this novel, her 17th, "she can be brilliantly wry", said Lucy Atkins in The Guardian . Set between the 1950s and the 1970s, the book is an "engrossing character study" of Marianne, a girl from the Home Counties who, aged 15, falls passionately in love with a floppy-haired 18-year-old named Simon. The relationship soon ends – Simon moves to Paris – but it defines much of Marianne's subsequent life. In 1960s London, which is "anything but swinging", Marianne is "lonely and miserable" as she first enrols at secretarial college, and then works as an assistant for a Fleet Street agony aunt (a job Tremain herself once did). She subsequently marries "kind Hugo", a horse-loving family friend – but when they visit Paris a few years later, Simon is "all she can think of". While on one level this is a "straightforward period drama", it also offers more "thoughtful pleasures", particularly in its moving and even-handed depiction of Marianne's unhappy, buttoned-up parents. 

There is indeed a "kind of magic" to the novel that is "hard to capture in a short review", said Rachel Cooke in The Observer . Marianne is a "marvellously original creation" – she's both conventional and "quite batty" – and the period details "are exquisite", from bath cubes and Basildon Bond notepaper to "sauces made from marmalade to go with baked ham". It may seem a little late in life for Tremain, who is 80, to be writing a coming-of-age story, said Sue Gaisford in the Financial Times . But her "hard-won experience" informs the novel, making it a "mesmerising, masterly and profoundly moving" exploration of the "comic, painful, life-long search for human understanding".

Galley Beggar Press 288pp; £10.99 The Week Bookshop £8.99  

Writing a sequel to a book as familiar as "Animal Farm" might seem a risky undertaking, said Patrick McGuinness in The Guardian . But the "risk pays off" in "Beasts of England", Adam Biles's "updated and retooled" version of George Orwell's classic. Set decades later on the same farm (which is now a petting zoo, complete with alpacas and geckos), the novel follows a series of "sinister events", including the emergence of a mysterious illness and an apparent attempt by the "ruling pigs" to sell off the farm's assets. Whereas Orwell's fable was about totalitarianism in general, the satirical target here is "unmistakably" England now: Brexit, the refugee crisis, Covid and Boris Johnson are all "allegorised" in this "clever, resourceful" tale. 

The problem is that there is "too much to follow", said Jeremy Wikeley in The Daily Telegraph : Biles crams in the "entire history of British politics since New Labour". His book succeeds when it leaves the realm of fable, and becomes more of a thriller – as in the "brilliantly weird" ending. "Beasts of England" is at its best "when it strikes out for new pastures".

Hodder 448pp £25; The Week Bookshop £19.99  

Stephen King's latest novel is both a "nail-biting crime fiction and a dystopian vision of contemporary America", said Joan Smith in The Sunday Times . Set at the height of the pandemic, when rows over mask wearing and vaccines were raging, it centres on a series of mysterious disappearances in a Midwestern town. The perpetrators, it emerges, are "two of the most unusual" serial killers in fiction – a pair of retired college professors, whose veneer of ordinariness has long "protected them from suspicion". On their trail is private detective Holly Gibney, who has appeared in King's fiction before, but never in a "starring role". 

It's a good thing that the "dogged", "resourceful" and neurodivergent Holly has been given such a major part, because as a character she "leaps off the page", said Catriona Ward in The Guardian . Equally memorable are the "macabre college professors", who are both "plausible and chilling". Not so much a whodunit as a whydunit – with a literary motive at its core – "Holly" is "lyrical and horrifying", and a "hymn to the grim pursuit of justice".

Oneworld 320pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

Paul Lynch’s Booker-longlisted fifth novel is the “Irish offspring” of “The Handmaid’s Tale” and “Nineteen Eighty-Four”, said Melissa Harrison in The Guardian . Set in a “shadow version” of present-day Dublin, where an unspecified crisis has led to the creation of a police state, it centres on a biologist named Eilish Stack, whose teacher husband mysteriously vanishes, one of hundreds “swallowed whole” by the state. Lynch writes in a “heightened, sometimes biblical language”, and eschews paragraph breaks – a device that intensifies the sense of claustrophobia, even if it initially takes some getting used to. Powerful and “horribly real”, “Prophet Song” is “as nightmarish a story as you’ll come across”.

I wasn’t convinced, said Max Liu in The i Paper . While Lynch’s sentences are “melodious”, they are full of “weird word choices”: a character “sleeves” her cardigan on before walking into a cellar of “colding gloom”. And many of its ideas “feel recycled”. The genuinely “absorbing” story at its heart partially makes up for these defects – but even so, “Prophet Song” would be a “surprising Booker winner”.

Hamish Hamilton 464pp £20; The Week bookshop £15.99

Zadie Smith’s first historical novel is an intricate mosaic brought to life by “gloriously light, deft writing”, said Alexandra Harris in The Guardian . Much of “The Fraud” follows a court case that gripped Britain in the 1870s, in which an Australian butcher claimed to be Sir Roger Tichborne, the heir to a baronetcy and a fortune, who had been lost in a shipwreck 17 years earlier. Among those fascinated by the saga was William Ainsworth, a novelist whose sales rivalled Charles Dickens’s. The first half of Smith’s novel resurrects him and the two women who shared his life: his wife Sarah and his cousin, housekeeper and intellectual foil Eliza Touchet. The second half tells the story of the main witness in the “Tichborne Claimant” trial, a black man named Andrew Bogle – reaching back to his father’s arrival on a sugar plantation in Jamaica. Few writers would dare mix comedy with the subject of slavery, and fewer still would pull it off, “mixing narrative delight with a vein of rapid, skimming satire”.

Moving back and forth between the 1830s and the 1870s, and punctuated with short, “almost aphoristic” chapters, “ The Fraud ” weaves its disparate elements together to “triumphant and memorable” effect, said Erica Wagner in The Daily Telegraph . Touchet is the key character, and what drives the novel is not so much the unravelling of the Claimant’s tale as her growing understanding of the world, and her grasp of issues such as the meaning of freedom and authenticity. It’s “a richly enjoyable, sophisticated book” by a writer at the peak of her powers.

I wasn’t convinced, said John Self in The Times . This is a “rich stew” of a novel, but its jumpy time scheme prevents any kind of narrative flow. There are also elements that are left strangely undeveloped, such as the fact that Eliza has had affairs with both William and his first wife. Smith’s gift for dialogue is as strong as ever, and I admired parts of “The Fraud” very much. “But I would much rather have loved it.” It doesn’t wholly convince, agreed Richard Godwin in the Evening Standard . The time frames are confusing, and the three strands don’t always intermesh: “but moment to moment, ‘The Fraud’ is a delight”. Smith has particular fun with William’s literary incontinence, his rivalry with Dickens, and the sharp-witted Sarah Ainsworth. For all its faults, this is a novel “full of people, ideas, humour, feeling and something like moral truth – the stuff of life”.

Jonathan Cape 288pp £18.99; The Week Bookshop £14.99

Anne Enright’s eighth novel is the “finest I have read in a long time”, said Luiza Sauma in The Daily Telegraph . Like her 2007 Booker-winner “The Gathering”, it explores “ancestral trauma”, telling the story of three generations of women, and that of Phil McDaragh, a “long-dead, not terribly famous” Irish poet, whose influence looms over them. The novel mostly alternates between the perspectives of Phil’s daughter Carmel and his twenty-something granddaughter Nell, who never knew him but tattoos her body with references to his poems. “The Wren, The Wren” is a “surprising and complex” book, lifted by the beauty of Phil’s verse (written by the novelist), with a “dark, lurking humour”.

“Damn, Enright can write,” said John Self in The Times . Like Martin Amis, she is a novelist of “scenes and sentences, not plots and character arcs”. Her approach – with “shards of brilliance flashing in every direction” – may not be for everyone. “But if you believe a book is a conversation between reader and writer, where you get out what you put in, then that’s a feature, not a bug.”

Faber 752pp £25; The Week Bookshop £19.99

During his prolific career, the literary critic Adam Mars-Jones has produced many “short stories, neat little novellas” and “slim” memoirs, said Claire Lowdon in The Sunday Times . But he has also written “three enormous novels” – all about one man: John Cromer. The first, “Pilcrow” (2008), charted Cromer’s 1950s childhood and “struggles with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis”. In the 733-page Cedilla (2011), Cromer “gains some independence”. Now we have Caret, covering less than a year of its subject’s life, yet running to 752 pages. The books are obscenely long, but they are “something apart”, and offer a “truly original narrative voice”.

Like its predecessors, Caret is short on “developments of a standard novelistic kind”, said Paul Genders in Literary Review . There is no real plot; the novel is made up of “uncannily acute acts of observation” – as Cromer outlines the “precise charms of a packet of Toffo sweets”, or describes a mouse getting stuck in a toaster. I finished it thinking that Mars-Jones is “possibly the best prose stylist currently writing in English”.

Henry Hoke’s “slim jewel of a novel” is narrated by a mountain lion living in the desert hills surrounding LA, said Marie-Helene Bertino in The New York Times . Inspired by the real-life case of P22 – a lion spotted prowling around the city in 2012 – it deploys its unconventional narrator (who identifies as queer) to brilliant comic effect.

The novel abounds with “leonine misunderstandings”, said Rahul Raina in The Guardian : scarcity is rendered as “scare city”; money is “green paper”. In some novels, such jokes would be cloying, but here the writing is “so wry and muscular” that you’re “ready to go anywhere Hoke wants to take you”. Propulsive and eventually heartbreaking, this is an “instant classic of xenofiction”.

Don’t worry: “Open Throat” is only about a lion in the way Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” was “about a large bug”, said Ron Charles in The Washington Post . The “fanged narrator” is a type familiar in American fiction: the “outcast naïf whose bewildered commentary plumbs our strange behaviour”. “Give this sinewy prose poem a chance”, and you’ll fall under its spell.

Bloomsbury 320pp £18.99; The Week Bookshop £14.99

With bestsellers such as “Bel Canto” and “The Dutch House”, Anne Patchett has established a reputation for writing “accessible fiction”, marked by a “determination to see the good in people”, said Lucy Atkins in The Guardian . Her latest is “possibly the most upbeat pandemic novel” yet written. In the summer of 2020, Lara, 57, the owner of a Michigan cherry orchard, finds her three grown-up daughters returning home. During the long days, she regales them with “glowing memories” of a brief romance she once had with a Hollywood star. These are interspersed with details of present-day farm life. While readers who had tricky lockdowns may not warm to the “homespun happiness” of this novel, I found it moving and “engaging”.

“Folksy” and “strangely peaceable”, “Tom Lake” has a “ribbon of sentimentality” running through it, said Rachel Cooke in The Observer . Yet “Patchett knows exactly what she’s doing” – and by its end, this “exquisitely controlled” work proves to be a quietly daring attempt to “take the temperature of a whole life, and by so doing, to prioritise happiness over misery”.

Hamish Hamilton 656pp £18.99; The Week Bookshop £14.99

Paul Murray, the author of “Skippy Dies”, is the “undisputed reigning champion of epic Irish tragicomedy”, said Ian Sansom in The Spectator . In this sprawling novel about the Barnes family – failing car-dealer Dickie, shopping-addicted mum Imelda, dreamy teenager Cass, bullied 12-year-old P.J. – he has produced “an immersive, brilliantly structured, beautifully written mega-tome”. Set after the 2008 crash but also moving four decades into the past, it’s “laugh-out-loud funny”, and deeply sad. “All you need is this, your suntan lotion and a few days off work and you’re good to go.”

Murray switches between the four main characters’ points of view, and what they don’t know about one another creates a “steady crackle of dramatic irony”, said Anthony Cummins in The Observer . There are twists aplenty, but it never turns into a guessing game. “It can’t be overstated how purely pleasurable The Bee Sting is to read.” It’s “carefully paced, brilliantly convincing and helped along by plenty of subtle satire”, said James Riding in The Times – a “huge, marbled wagyu steak of a novel”.

Jonathan Cape 224pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

Megan Nolan’s deservedly lauded debut, “Acts of Desperation”, examined the “interior life of a young woman beholden to a toxic partner”, said Holly Williams in The Observer . The young Irish writer’s follow-up has a much broader focus – but the results are similarly “compelling”.

Set in the 1990s, “Ordinary Human Failings” centres on a toddler’s disappearance from a south London estate – and the ensuing scandal as the perpetrator is revealed to have been a ten-year-old named Lucy Green. Lucy is the youngest member of a “reclusive clan of Irish immigrants who’ve never fitted in”, said Lucy Scholes in The Daily Telegraph . And much of Nolan’s “bold and beautiful” novel is devoted to telling their backstory, with the author showing the “interconnected lines of cause and effect” that led to Lucy’s crime.

Marked by its psychological insight, this is a brilliant follow-up to “Acts of Desperation”, said Claire Lowdon in The Sunday Times . It isn’t formally ambitious – more a “three-legged stool” than an “ornate grandfather clock” – but it shows her first novel was no fluke.

Bloomsbury 352pp £18.99; The Week Bookshop £14.99

The 79-year-old American author Richard Ford has published many books over his long and distinguished career. But he is best known for his novels featuring his “delightfully lugubrious everyman”, Frank Bascombe, said Ian Sansom in The Daily Telegraph . “Be Mine” is the “fifth and final Bascombe book”, and it captures the sportswriter-turned-real estate salesman in the “winter of his life”. Still working part-time, Frank is divorced from his second wife Sally, and spends much of his time caring for his 47-year-old son, Paul, who is dying of motor neurone disease. It’s a fitting end to the Bascombe novels.

The novel centres on a “long, flat, boring” road trip the pair make to Mount Rushmore, said Simon Ings in The Times . It’s a “quotidian” portrait of heroism – much of the action focuses on the practicalities of their journey – but it feels true to life. And, impressively, from this “grim material” Ford has crafted a “bright comedy”, full of jokes and “bickering” dialogue, said John Self in the Financial Times . The result is a “book to sit back and wallow in” – and a moving end to a “magnificent series”.

Faber 208pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

The US novelist and short-story writer Lorrie Moore has long been drawn to the darkly “off-beat”, said Erica Wagner in The Times . And her compelling fourth novel is no exception: a “slender ghost story”, it is poised “between the living and the dead”. While visiting his brother Max, who has cancer, in hospital, Finn discovers that his ex-girlfriend, Lily, has died by suicide. Finn drives to her burial site, only to find her “waiting for him”: though she’s dead, and her body is decomposing, she is somehow still capable of movement and speech. “What follows is a bizarre road trip”, as they drive together to Tennessee to donate her body to medical science.

While this isn’t Moore’s best novel, “there are pleasures here for fans of her wordplay and dark humour”, said Mia Levitin in The Daily Telegraph . And beneath its jokey surface “runs an achingly poignant reckoning with grief”. It’s a novel certain “to divide people”, said Philip Hensher in The Spectator . At first, it seemed “wilful” and “self-absorbed”. But on the third reading, I found it had “an appalling power”.

Faber 336pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

This “uproariously funny” novel by the US writer Jen Beagin is a brilliant satire on therapy culture, said Mia Levitin in the Financial Times . After breaking off a “ten-year engagement”, Greta, 45, leaves Los Angeles and moves to Hudson, upstate New York, where she takes a job transcribing for a local sex therapist. In this “tiny community”, Greta inevitably recognises the voices of people she has heard spilling their secrets; one of these is 28-year-old gynaecologist Flavia, whom Greta has nicknamed “Big Swiss”. Greta knows Flavia, a “magnetic mix of Teutonic stoicism and vulnerability”, has never had an orgasm and “finds sex with her husband a chore”. The pair “embark on a torrid affair” – though Greta doesn’t tell Flavia about her job.

There’s a “lot more cunnilingus” in this novel than I expected, said Lucy Bannerman in The Times . But it’s also a brilliant depiction of Hudson, a prosperous but “seedy” place where “corporate lawyers reinvent themselves as antique dealers”. “Big Swiss” is being turned into an HBO series, with “Killing Eve” star Jodie Comer . It’ll definitely be “worth an eavesdrop”.

HarperCollins 352pp £14.99; The Week Bookshop £11.99

“Stig Abell has such a versatile CV” – his career has encompassed both The Sun and the Times Literary Supplement, and he is now a presenter on Times Radio – that it isn’t that surprising to find him dipping a toe into “crime-writing waters”, said Andrew Rosenheim in The Spectator . What may be surprising is “how well he’s done it”.

“Death Under a Little Sky” is set in a tiny village in a nameless part of England, to which police detective Jake Jackson retires after inheriting a large house from his uncle. Initially, he leads a solitary existence, but he soon befriends Livia, an attractive local vet. When human bones are uncovered during the village’s treasure hunt, the pair investigate the mystery together.

This is a “joyful dive into the detective genre”, said Alison Flood in The Observer . Abell’s love of crime fiction “shines through, as Jake ponders what the likes of Jack Reacher might do in a messy situation”. I was charmed by the “eccentric cast of characters”; and also engrossed by the “increasing sense of menace, as Jake digs into what happened”.

Orion 304pp £9.99; The Week Bookshop £7.99

The Bulgarian author Georgi Gospodinov’s third novel – which has just won the 2023 International Booker Prize – centres on a clinic in Switzerland for patients suffering from amnesia, said Sam Sacks in The Wall Street Journal . The brainchild of a mysterious therapist called Gaustine, the clinic works by immersing its patients in the past: “each floor represents a different decade and is filled with the minutiae of the era”. The clinic proves so successful that Gaustine soon opens its doors to those who don’t suffer from memory impairment – but who simply want to escape the present. A discursive, complex novel that recalls the works of Orhan Pamuk, “Time Shelter” is “difficult but rewarding”.

“This novel could have been a clever, high-concept intellectual game with little by way of emotional investment,” said Patrick McGuinness in The Guardian . Gospodinov, though, is a writer of “great warmth”, and Gaustine’s clinic becomes the “perfect conceit” for exploring 20th century history and the power of nostalgia. Angela Rodel’s skilful translation into English means that its virtues are on “abundant display”.

Cornerstone 416pp £22; The Week Bookshop £17.99

Weighing in at more than 400 pages, Tom Hanks’s debut novel is excessively long, said Andrew Billen in The Times . But that’s its only real flaw. The story begins with “legendary director and screenwriter” Bill Johnson inviting a film reviewer named Joe Shaw onto the set of his latest project, a superhero movie called “Knightshade”. What follows is Joe’s account of the production, with every aspect of the process described in detail, from the absurd behaviour of the leading actors (one insists on sleeping in a tent) to the “ruthless euphemisms of Tinseltown”. The results are both revealing and entertaining: “there will never be a superior account” of how a blockbuster gets made.

It would be nice to see this book as a satirical tale pricking Hollywood’s “pompous self-regard”, said Xan Brooks in The Guardian . Alarmingly, though, Hanks seems to be “deadly serious”. So awed is he by the world of film that everything is a “source of endless fascination”. The result is a “bland busman’s holiday” of a novel that “can’t see the wood for the trees”.

Chatto & Windus 304pp £18.99; The Week Bookshop £14.99

Emma Cline became a 27-year-old literary sensation when her “exceptional” debut, “The Girls” – “a heady story” of a Charles Manson-like cult told through the eyes of a teenager – was published in 2016, said Emily Watkins in The Independent . In her “exquisite” second novel, Cline again tells the story of a troubled young woman – and this time the results are “even better”.

Alex, 22, is an escort and small-time confidence trickster who has alienated virtually everyone she knows in New York, said Ron Charles in The Washington Post . When the story opens, she has fled to Long Island – where she looks upon the population of wealthy holidaymakers as a “field ready to harvest”. We follow her over five days, “as she lurks around the island, appearing wherever hosts are too polite to question her presence”; an acquaintance is sending her threatening messages about the money she stole from him. Written in Cline’s “sleek, cool style”, “The Guest” is a “smouldering thriller” about desire, deception and class envy.

Cline is a writer of “unmistakeable talent”, but I found this book a big disappointment, said Ann Manov in The Daily Telegraph . In essence, it’s a “15-page character sketch stretched to novel length”. The dialogue is “painful”, the “psychology heavy-handed”, and even Cline seems bored at times: many scenes peter out “more by exhaustion than design”. I disagree, said Rob Doyle in The Guardian . “The Guest”, for me, is a “gorgeously smart affair whose deceptive lightness conceals strange depths and an arresting originality”. It can be read on many levels: as a “treatise on neoliberal precariousness”; as a study of “metaphysical estrangement”; or simply as an “elevated beach read”.

Faber 256pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

Claire Kilroy is best known for her savage satires on contemporary Ireland, said Rosemary Goring in Literary Review . “Soldier Sailor”, her first novel in more than a decade, could hardly be more different: its subject is first-time motherhood. Narrated by an unnamed woman who describes her “earliest days” left alone with her son while her self-obsessed husband focuses on his work, this is a story of “wet wipes, teething and collapsing buggies”. If that sounds unappealing, “fear not”: Kilroy spins a “compelling tale”, one that “plumbs the depths of her narrator’s soul” while being liberally laced with humour. The novel “reads as easily as a postcard”, but manages to be “profound”.

The pleasure of this novel lies in the way Kilroy makes us see “familiar things for the first time”, said John Self in The Times . Putting a dummy in a screaming baby’s mouth is “like putting a pin back into a grenade”; a dishwasher opened mid-cycle has a “dripping metal maw, like part of a ship winched from the seabed”. Observant, witty and even “pretty pacey”, “Soldier Sailor” is “exceptionally good”.

Hamish Hamilton 256pp £18.99; The Week Bookshop £14.99

“From Dostoevsky to Hitchcock’s ‘Vertigo’, the doppelgänger is among the delights of literature and film alike,” said Olivia Laing in The Observer . And it’s a theme that Deborah Levy explores to striking effect in her “deeply Freudian” ninth novel. Elsa M. Anderson is a concert pianist who has recently lost her nerve and “walked off stage mid-performance” in Vienna. In the wake of this “unforgivable act”, she is “drifting around Europe”, teaching piano to the children of the wealthy. One day, in an Athens market, she spots a stranger wearing the same coat as her, and is “compelled by the sense that she is looking at herself”. Over the pages that follow, the doppelgänger reappears, as she pursues Elsa “from Athens to London to Paris”.

Levy uses the device of the doppelgänger to explore her protagonist’s self-fracturing, said M. John Harrison in The Guardian . An orphan raised by an overbearing piano teacher, Elsa has little idea who she is. Written in Levy’s trademark “quick and bare” prose, and poised “between comedy and darkness”, “August Blue” is a thrilling performance.

Chatto & Windus 352pp £18.99; The Week Bookshop £14.99

“Diana Evans’s last novel, ‘Ordinary People’, followed two black middle-class couples in contemporary London” as they “navigated the disillusionments of midlife”, said Elizabeth Lowry in The Daily Telegraph . Her new novel alights on the same four characters a few years later, all now unhappily divorced. One man, Michael, has taken up with a “sexy singer”, but still spends much of his time “yearning” for his ex, Melissa. The other man, Damian, is pursuing an “exciting single existence”, but leaves “anger and confusion in his wake”. The two women, meanwhile, are both made “distraught” by their teenage children’s problems. The message of this “compassionate and sharp” novel is that it’s dangerous to disassociate yourself from the past.

Evans occasionally strives too hard to hitch her drama to “real-life events”, said Lucy Bannerman in The Times : there are lots of “clunky” references to the Grenfell fire, Brexit and the like. “Be reassured”, however: such interruptions don’t spoil the fun. Big-hearted and often extremely funny, “A House for Alice” is a “beautifully observed” novel.

Hutchinson Heinemann 320pp £14.99; The Week Bookshop £11.99

It’s unusual to come across “a novel about the 1% that isn’t a satire or an insane potboiler”, said India Knight in The Sunday Times . But Jenny Jackson’s “blissfully enjoyable” debut is neither. Instead, it’s a story about a “family of New York property squillionaires” who happen to be “nice people”. The Stocktons are an “exceptionally tightly knit” family of five who have lived for decades in the same Brooklyn Heights brownstone. But when Chip and Tilda, the parents, decide to downsize, it triggers various family tensions that suck in all three of their adult children. A “very funny” novel about class, money, family and love, “Pineapple Street” is “one to pack for summer, whether you’re headed for the Hamptons or the Norfolk Broads”.

Whether describing the endless games of tennis the Stocktons play, or discussing the intricacies of pre-nups, Jackson chronicles their lives in “granular detail”, said Christobel Kent in The Guardian . “Minutely observed”, and “packed with one-liners”, “Pineapple Street” is a novel that largely justifies its author’s insistence that “we give the super-rich a chance”.

Faber 128pp £12.99; The Week Bookshop £9.99

Max Porter’s fourth book, set in the mid-1990s, is a “virtuosic novella that tracks a single day in the life of a troubled boy”, said Michael Delgado in Literary Review . Sixteen-year-old Shy is a resident of Last Chance, a rural home for young offenders. As the novel opens – at 3:13am – the teenager is “sneaking away”, carrying a backpack full of rocks. The narrative follows him as he walks – he’s headed for a pond – assailed by “breathless memories”. Porter’s “jagged” prose is inspired by the music of the era, specifically the drum ‘n’ bass that Shy adores. It makes for a “wonderful, troubling act of empathy”.

Like Porter’s previous books (including his prize-winning debut “Grief is the Thing with Feathers”), this slim novel deploys the “tricks and tropes” of modernism while remaining “hugely readable”, said The Guardian . Porter’s obvious love for his central character is what makes this possible. But in some respects, notably its schmaltzy ending, the novel disappoints. It’s a work of “many patches”: some “brilliantly coloured”, a few rather “bare”.

Doubleday 320pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

Curtis Sittenfeld’s enjoyable new novel is a “love letter to the prototypical romcom”, said Scaachi Koul in The New York Times . Sally Milz, a comedy sketch-writer in her late 30s, has become “embittered by her life’s many little heartbreaks”, and doubts she will ever find love. On the show she works on (which resembles “Saturday Night Live”), “mediocre-looking” male colleagues seem able to “date way out of their league” – while the women remain single. But when an “ageing pop icon” named Noah hosts the show one week, Sally suddenly finds her heart “aflutter”. The novel becomes an exploration of whether “someone like her” (fun and intelligent, but not especially glamorous) can “bag someone like him”.

Sittenfeld’s “command of structure, pace and dialogue is faultless”, said Anthony Cummins in The Observer . This book treads “well-tilled terrain” – Covid-19, modern celebrity, the art of writing – but it does so with “panache”. An “affable and intelligently crafted tale of work and love”, this is a novel that’s refreshingly unafraid to give readers “what they want”.

Fourth Estate 304pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

“The pandemic has prompted a spate of novels, and more no doubt will follow,” said Adrian Turpin in Literary Review . But few are likely to better capture the “strangeness” of that time than Philip Hensher’s “To Battersea Park”. This clever, original work consists of four sections, said Lucy Scholes in The Daily Telegraph . Part one follows a writer with a “striking resemblance to Hensher” who “bakes elaborate cakes” and seethes at joggers in the park. Part two widens the perspective to other characters, before, in part three, Hensher ventures into “postapocalyptic” territory, as he follows a man walking in Kent in the aftermath of a deadly “fifth wave”. The final section returns to the writer, who’s by now struggling with a bout of Covid.

This is a frankly baffling work, said Peter Kemp in The Sunday Times . The early parts are full of “grindingly dull” descriptions of everyday objects, while the futuristic “excursion” in Kent “reads like a re-casting of Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” by Joe Orton on an off day”. It’s “pompous” and “off-putting”, and, by the end, strongly soporific.

Influx 276pp £9.99; The Week Bookshop £7.99

For four decades, Percival Everett has been the “unsung Jonathan Swift of modern American fiction”, churning out a series of “clever, funny and mercilessly satirical” works, said Robert Collins in The Times . His recent success with “The Trees” – a “stupendous novel” about the legacy of slavery, which was shortlisted for last year’s Booker Prize – finally brought him to wider attention. Now, he has published “Dr. No”, an “alchemical” spoof of an Ian Fleming novel that “smuggles into its harebrained pages another sly satire of race in America”.

The central character, Wala Kitu, is a maths professor at Brown University whose “speciality is the idea of nothing”, said Stuart Kelly in The Spectator . His work attracts the attention of a black billionaire called John Sill, who “offers him ludicrous sums of money” to help achieve his goal of becoming a Bond villain. Combining the “zany and the profound” in a novel isn’t easy – but Everett manages to blend ruminations on the “notion of nothingness” with a “hijinks plot”. He is an “astonishing writer” – and “Dr. No” is another “beautifully choreographed” work.

Serpent’s Tail 288pp; £14.99 The Week Bookshop £11.99

Cracking open this “classy” debut will “produce a titillating sensation familiar to viewers of the hit series “The White Lotus”, said Claire Lowdon in The Sunday Times . On page one, we learn there has been a death – and the rest of the novel follows the events leading up to it. Melanie, the narrator, is private tutor to Alex, daughter of Russian billionaires. As she tutors Alex – in the Alps, in Monaco, and on a “mega-yacht in the Maldives” – Melanie learns “a great deal” about her family. Sarah Thomas, a former tutor to the super-rich, has written a “hot holiday read to brighten up the last few weeks of winter”.

Thomas skilfully captures both the “mind-blowing excess” and “existential misery” of those who’ve won “the oligarch lottery”, said Melissa Katsoulis in The Times . Alex’s parents “live a life that most of us can only dream of”, and yet crave the “one thing money can’t buy: acceptance into old-money European society”. Eventually, their “self-hatred implodes” – and Melanie has a “ringside seat” when it does. Having lured you in with its “beach-read vibes”, Queen K ultimately proves “devastating”.

Faber 272pp £18.99; The Week Bookshop £14.99

“Some writers can tell a good story,” said Ian Sansom in The Daily Telegraph . “Some can turn a nice phrase. Some can provoke and some can soothe.” But Sebastian Barry “can seemingly do it all”. Tom Kettle, the protagonist of his latest novel, is a “washed-up” cop who lives on the east coast of Ireland, in a “run-down annexe of an old Victorian castle”. There, he dwells extensively on “memories of his beloved wife June”, until one day he receives a visit from two policemen, who invite him back onto the force for the “cold-case investigation of the murder of a priest many years before”. It sounds a somewhat pulpy set-up – “the grizzled cop back on the beat”. But there are ways “to spin such shopworn tales”, and Barry knows them all. “Old God’s Time” is a “vivid” evocation of Ireland’s recent history, with a love story at its centre and “a cast of superb tragi-comic supporting characters”.

The most striking feature of this “transcendent” novel is Barry’s total immersion in his protagonist’s “imaginative world”, said Melissa Harrison in The Guardian . The “grief-stricken” Kettle is a somewhat unreliable witness – he’s a “survivor of more than one disaster”, including abuse as a boy in a Catholic orphanage – but so masterfully does Barry evoke his “living consciousness” that the effect is “sublime, almost uncanny”. This is a masterpiece, and “I don’t expect to read anything as moving for many years”.

While “Old God’s Time” is “a powerful story”, I found it rather baffling, said Alex Peake-Tomkinson in The Spectator . For instance, various characters are “presented initially as living people”, but in fact turn out to be dead. Barry’s style can be “long-winded”, and “readers will need their wits about them to have any grasp of the plot”.

Hamish Hamilton 192pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

Sophie Mackintosh’s third novel is “inspired by a 1951 mass poisoning in a French commune”, said Claire Allfree in The Daily Telegraph . This event, in the village of Pont-Saint-Esprit, left seven people dead and 50 in asylums, and is thought to have been caused by a local baker. Using these facts as a starting point, Mackintosh crafts a mysterious tale which centres on Elodie, the baker’s wife, and her “voyeuristic obsession” with a glamorous newcomer called Violet. A “shimmering fever-dream of a novel”, “Cursed Bread” is also “refreshing” in its brevity: at less than 200 pages, it “contains more riches than many a novel twice its length”.

The story of the poisoning was “begging to be turned into a novel”, said Jesse Crispin in The Times – but this “dreamy sapphic romp” is a big disappointment. The historical background is “left vague and incompletely rendered”, as Mackintosh focuses relentlessly on Elodie and Violet. It’s a fable, not a historical document, said Jo Hamya in The Guardian . And I thought it was “brilliant”: an “uncanny” and “quietly rich maturation of Mackintosh’s skill”.

Granta 432pp £20; The Week Bookshop £15.99

It’s ten years since, at 28, Eleanor Catton became the youngest ever Booker Prize winner for “The Luminaries”, a historical saga set in her native New Zealand. Now at last she’s back with a second book, said Shahidha Bari in the FT , and it’s quite a surprise – an “explosive” thriller about climate change and the future of humanity. Its protagonists are “eco-warriors” who plant sustainable crops on disused land, and its plot kicks off when they risk their integrity by making a pact with an “enigmatic” American billionaire who is interested in the same neglected swathe of the South Island as they are.

Catton casts a “beady comic eye” on her millennial eco-activists, said James Walton in The Daily Telegraph , with delicious observations of the egotism, puritanism and self-pity behind their ostentatious altruism. And the satire doesn’t let up when she turns to her “shadowy” billionaire, apparently inspired in part by the libertarian PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. But the book is wildly exciting too, a full-blooded thriller complete with gun-toting goons, a “Bond-style” chase and a virtuoso, pulse-racing finale.

Faber 240pp £14.99; The Week Bookshop £11.99

This “astonishing debut” will “burrow under your skin”, said Laura Hackett in The Sunday Times . Written by the London-based, Orlando-raised writer Dizz Tate, it is a tale of “toxic friendship, female rage, sexual abuse and trauma”, set in a decaying Florida housing estate, and narrated by a Greek chorus of 13-year-old girls. As it opens, Sammy – a slightly older girl with whom the chorus is obsessed – has just gone missing. As the adults search for her with torches and metal poles, it appears that the narrators “know more than they admit”.

What unfolds is a story of “grotesque horror” – one which isn’t always an “easy read”, but which is compulsive throughout. Tate is a writer with “talent in spades”, said Madeleine Feeny in The Guardian . The sense of place is “remarkable” – her descriptions of Florida are superb – and her portrait of early adolescence “feels bracingly true”. But too much is crammed into Brutes: not only a “bewildering arsenal of horror clichés”, but an increasingly “frenzied” plot. With her next novel, Tate should remember that “less is more”.

Cape 352pp £22; The Week Bookshop £17.99

Since Salman Rushdie moved to the US in 2000, his novels have fallen into two camps, said Hadley Freeman in The Sunday Times . Some (“Fury”, “Quichotte”) have been “satirical takes on modern America”; the others (such as “Shalimar the Clown”) have been “lyrical narratives about his native India”. Rushdie’s new novel, “Victory City”– his first to be published since the “brutal attack” last August that left him blind in one eye – belongs in that second group. A historical fantasy set in medieval India, it purports to be a modern translation of an epic autobiographical poem, written by a demigod named Pampa Kampana. Although packed with death and destruction, it comes across as “one of Rushdie’s most joyful” novels. It is “a total pleasure to read”.

We first meet Pampa as a (non-divine) nine-year-old, whose mother is one of many widows committing suicide on a “great bonfire along the river”, said Ron Charles in The Washington Post . As Pampa watches her mother burn, she resolves never to “sacrifice her body merely to follow dead men into the afterworld”. Instead, she tells herself, she will live to be “impossibly” old. Impressed by her defiance, a goddess gives her an assortment of magical powers. Aged 18, Pampa grows a “spectacular city” from vegetable seeds, on the spot where her mother died. This, it becomes clear, is an actual city – Bisnaga in southern India – which was the capital of the Vijayanagara empire in the 15th and 16th centuries. Pampa’s initial hope for Bisnaga is that it will become a “kind of feminist utopia” – a place of gender equality and “variegated sexual delight”. Instead, over the next two centuries, she watches her kingdom “grow and stumble” before it is eventually destroyed (as the historical Bisnaga was) by Muslim invaders in 1565.

With its “lashings of wildly imaginative, slightly bonkers storytelling”, “Victory City” is vintage Rushdie, said James Walton in The Spectator . While it has flaws – notably, a rather “repetitive” storyline – there’s something “undeniably stirring” about seeing Rushdie perform his “greatest hits with such undiminished commitment”. The best writing comes near the end, when Pampa is blinded using a hot iron rod, said Michael Gorra in The New York Times . “Victory City” was completed before last August – and so Rushdie could not have known that his own fate would be uncannily similar. It is “not the first time that he has been the Cassandra of his own fate” – and it underlines the fact that he is an author whose “work will always matter”.

Fitzcarraldo Editions 504pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

“Imagine a Stephen King thriller hijacked by Proust,” said Lee Langley in The Spectator . Laurent Mauvignier’s “mesmerising” novel does for terror “what Javier Marías did for the spy story”. Set in rural France, it revolves around a surprise party that farmer Patrice is preparing for his wife’s birthday. Christine, their neighbour, is baking a cake when a stranger knocks on her door, asking to be shown around. She sends him away – but he returns later, no longer alone. What results is a story of “nerve-shredding tension, but related in serpentine, elegant prose”.

This is a novel that “has us reading from behind our hands, as we watch its ensemble cast stumble into catastrophe”, said Anthony Cummins in The Observer . The intruders show up early on; “400 pages of agony remain”. And it all culminates in an “extravagantly choreographed set-piece blow-out of nigh-on unbearable jeopardy”. Mauvignier is lauded in France, but not all that well known in Britain, said Susie Goldsbrough in The Times . This gory, “classy” novel should change that.

Arcadia 400pp £18.99; The Week Bookshop £14.99

Joe Thomas’s “enthralling” thriller is set in east London during the late 1970s and early 1980s, said John Dugdale in The Sunday Times . The period was marked by simmering tensions between the National Front – who’d patrol Brick Lane every Sunday morning – and minority communities and their supporters. Clearly a fan of David Peace’s “Red Riding” quartet, Thomas has followed its example in “mixing real and fictional figures and connecting politics and policing”. Among the book’s large cast are a Hackney police officer investigating a black man’s death in a police station, and Margaret Thatcher, portrayed “scheming in Opposition”.

This novel is an “admirable attempt” to capture an “ugly period of recent British history”, said Colin Grant in The Guardian . The plot is “propulsive”, and there are other good things: the “foreboding atmosphere around anti-fascist marches”; Thatcher’s “quirkily comic dialogue with her husband Denis”. But “White Riot” is let down by thin characters and clunky dialogue. It’s “painted with broad brushstrokes”; it “could have done with another coat”.

Chatto & Windus 384pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

In this “enthralling” debut, Tom Crewe fictionalises the lives of two men who “planted the seeds” of modern sexual freedom, said Johanna Thomas-Corr in The Sunday Times . John Addington Symonds and Henry Havelock Ellis were Victorian academics whose (then) illicit desires (Symonds was homosexual; Ellis liked to watch women urinate) led them, in 1897, to co-author a pioneering textbook, “Sexual Inversion”, which aimed to present gay men as “healthy, well-adjusted individuals”. Crewe’s novelised version of their collaboration “reads a little like a Victorian take on Alan Hollinghurst’s “The Line of Beauty” crossed with E.M. Forster’s ‘Maurice’”. It will surely be “one of the most talked-about debuts of 2023”.

Full of “exquisite” writing, and “moments of furtive queer intimacy”, The New Life is an “intricate and finely crafted” novel, said Peter Kispert in The New York Times – and a “meaningful tribute” to two pioneers. The “total absence of humour” is a drawback, said Rupert Christiansen in The Daily Telegraph . But otherwise, this is a debut of “rare quality”.

Fleet 560pp £20; The Week bookshop £15.99

Deepti Kapoor’s stunning debut is “a rare case of a book bounding as high as its hype”, said Ron Charles in The Washington Post . Touted as an Indian “Godfather” – and already set to be made into a major TV series – it’s a “hypnotic story” of corruption and inequality set in the “broiling nexus” of modern-day Delhi. On page one, a horrific car crash occurs, when a Mercedes speeding through the city careers off the road and kills five people sleeping by the roadside. When the authorities turn up, they find a 22-year-old at the wheel, reeking of whisky.

What follows is a “big dynastic saga of organised crime”, in which “low life and high society” collide, said Jake Arnott in The Guardian . There are three main characters: Ajay (the drunk chauffeur), who grew up in “squalor and privation” in Uttar Pradesh; his employer, Sunny Wadia, the “playboy scion of a major criminal family”; and Neda Kapur, a journalist whose investigations into corruption are compromised when she embarks on an “ill-fated relationship” with Sunny. While the novel excels as a “commercial crime thriller”, it “deserves literary plaudits as well” – for its “lyrical touches”, its characterisation, and its “razor-sharp” social analysis.

I was less convinced, said Susie Goldsbrough in The Times . The “opening gambit” is excellent (if unoriginal), and there are some moving scenes, but overall the novel feels too much like an Indian-set “knock-off” of the “great Mob family epics”, with tinges of the HBO series “Succession”. There are the usual clichés – the over-ambitious son with “daddy issues”; the exploitation of underlings – and the plotting is meandering. “If you want an epic about modern India, read ‘A Suitable Boy’.”

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The Must-Read Books of 2023

Fiction and non-fiction reads coming your way.

We've been independently researching and testing products for over 120 years. If you buy through our links, we may earn a commission. Learn more about our review process.

This has been a banner year for new books, so you're sure to find something on this list that intrigues you. Books also make great gifts , especially for people who are otherwise impossible to buy for—they always fit, don't need to be walked or fed and can go with you wherever you do. And when you're done here, head on over to the GH Book Club to find even more feel-good reads. We'll keep your bookshelf stocked all year long.

Flores and Miss Paula by Melissa Rivero

Three years after losing their beloved patriarch, Flores and her mother, Paula butt heads about everything: their respective jobs, romantic lives (or lack thereof) and what they're going to do about their impending eviction. This is a story about love and loss, the meaning of family and the importance of community, passion and what happens when it's misdirected or lost entirely. It's one of those books where the characters quickly feel like friends, then family. You won't be able to put it down.

RELATED: Join GH+ For the Chance to Review This Book (And More!)

Age of Vice: A Novel by Deepti Kapoor

This stunning crime epic starts off with a car crash that leaves five people dead, a driver who wasn't supposed to be there and a lot of unanswered questions. More Qs emerge throughout as we come to know the wealthy Wadia family, loyal servant Ajay and journalist Neda, who all find themselves swept up in a complex, gasp-inducing drama that accelerates to an explosive ending. Block out some time: You won't be able to put this one down.

Liar, Dreamer, Thief by Maria Dong

Sure, Katrina knows every detail of her coworker Kurt's life, but that doesn't make her a stalker. And yeah, she followed him to a bridge late at night where she sees him jump to his death right after he tells her it's all her fault. But she's the victim here... right ? This surreal mystery is perfect for fans of Severance or anyone who wishes their own workplace had a little more spice.

How to Sell a Haunted House by Grady Hendrix

The writer who brought us The Final Girl Support Group and The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires returns with the heartfelt, terrifying and yes, funny story of two siblings locked in a battle over selling their late parents' house. It just so happens that the house wants in on the wrestling match, and it's full of dolls who can't seem to stay put. Maybe put your kids' stuffies in the closet for this one.

Decent People by De'Shawn Charles Winslow

It's 1976 and three secretive siblings have been shot in the still-segregated town of West Mills, North Carolina. The authorities don't have a sense of urgency about the crime, but someone has a lot of questions for which she expects answers — Jo Wright, freshly back home from NYC and ready to take matters into her own hands. You'll find yourself rooting for the nosy, self-appointed detective as she uncovers far more than she bargained for in her hunt for justice.

RELATED: Books By Black Authors to Add to Your Reading List

The Faraway World: Stories by Patricia Engel

These 10 compelling stories follow characters that feel as real as I do, grappling with human struggles that feel both uniquely new and nearly universal. If you're looking for a collection that will touch your heart and make you look at your fellow humans more generously, this one's a can't-miss.

Someone Else's Shoes by Jojo Moyes

Freaky Friday is all grown up in this heartfelt and heartwarming tale of two women in very different circumstances who get the chance to quite literally walk in each other's shoes after a bag mix-up at the gym. From the storyteller behind Me Before You comes a story of reinvention that just might inspire you to make a change yourself — just buy your own shoes.

Stealing: A Novel by Margaret Verble

Kit, a young Cherokee girl, gets ripped away from what's left of her family and sent to a Christian boarding school just when she's most vulnerable. There, she suffers horrifying abuse but finds solace in her journal, where she records what happens to her and what she remembers about her past. It's a historical reckoning with a hint of mystery that keeps the plot past-your-bedtime propulsive.

RELATED: Best Books by Native American Authors

Your Driver Is Waiting: A Novel by Priya Guns

A queer feminist retelling of the 1970's film Taxi Driver , this one had me laughing loud enough to draw looks on the subway, and that takes some doing. It's a crackling social commentary on the social justice movements of our time, the gig economy, performative wokeness and who gets to speak on behalf of the disadvantaged. It's a fast-paced read that begs to be devoured.

I Have Some Questions for You: A Novel by Rebecca Makkai

A privileged boarding school that covered up an old murder, a former student-turned-podcast host and guest professor who can't help digging up long-buried secrets, and all the fallout thereof? This psychological thriller hits all the high notes, complete with at least a few revelations you won't see coming.

What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez by Claire Jiménez

In this hilarious and heartwarming novel, the Ramirez family is still reeling after 13-year-old Ruthy disappeared 12 years ago. So when oldest sister Jessica spots a woman on a raunchy reality TV show that she swears is Ruthy, she just has to know for sure. Together with her mother Dolores and youngest sister Nina, they set off from Staten Island on a road trip that will show them just how much family means, even through some snort-inducing hijinks.

RELATED: Best Books by Latinx Authors

Confidence by Rafael Frumkin

From the dead-eyed stare of Elizabeth Holmes to the snake oil shysters of old, America loves a scam. Or at least, that's what best friends and sometimes-lovers Ezra and Orson are banking on. The two meet at a summer camp for troubled teens and are soon using Orson's Adonis-like looks as the frontman for Nulife, a company that promises bliss. But just like the wizard behind the curtain, things aren't what they seem in this delightfully suspenseful novel.

The London Séance Society by Sarah Penner

Spooky season may have passed, but the occult obeys no laws of man, calendar included. In this fierce, feminist historical fiction, a London men's club claims to communicate with the dead, but their chicanery is threatened by an indomitable spiritualist who actually does. This is a gripping story you'll want to read in broad daylight, full of delicious scandal that goes all the way to the top, then back down into the depths of darkness.

Hang the Moon: A Novel by Jeanette Walls

Fans of plucky heroines will find a lot to love in Sallie, the daughter of big-shot Duke and sister to the timid Eddie. When an accident leads to her banishment, everyone in their small Virginia town all but gives up on her. But Sallie returns nine years later ready to fight for her place in the family, and there's a lot of spunk in Sallie yet.

A Living Remedy: A Memoir by Nicole Chung

The past few years have caused a lot of us to question truths we'd previously taken for granted: Who is the "middle class?" When we say we're there for each other, what does that really mean? Who defines the "American dream," anyway? In this beautiful and thought-provoking memoir, Chung explores great depths of grief and rage as she takes a hard look at the pervasive inequality in American society and what community really means.

Cursed Bread: A Novel by Sophie Mackintosh

Based on the unsolved mystery of a mass poisoning in 1951, this wonderfully weird book sees the residents of a small town lose their collective minds. Some say it's spoiled bread, some say it's a government conspiracy, but whatever the cause, mass hysteria has everyone vibrating at a fever pitch. And then an alluring new couple arrives in town, and things escalate even further. You'll just have to read to see what I mean.

You Could Make This Place Beautiful: A Memoir by Maggie Smith

This is a memoir of a woman who recommits to herself after heartbreak, but it's also a meditation on patriarchal power dynamics, a mother's love for her children and what that means in today's world and how to bet on yourself, even and especially when we're told not to. If you expected Smith's latest to serve as a balm for the soul and a rallying cry for the heart, you won't be disappointed.

Life and Other Love Songs by Anissa Gray

Ozro’s disappearance on his 37th birthday breaks his wife and daughter’s hearts, especially as the years go by without a trace. Shuttling from the 1970s to the 1990s and following the fraught journey of the Great Migration to Detroit and New York, this is a story of how the cords of one family’s hopes can fray over time, especially if some of its members hold secrets that test their strength.

If We're Being Honest by Cat Shook

When Gerry dies suddenly, his far-flung family returns to Georgia to mourn their patriarch. But when his best friend reveals a shocking secret during his eulogy, it throws the clan into turmoil. Suddenly, the Williams cousins are forced to confront their own secrets while grappling with a new perspective on the man they thought they knew in this heartwarming family saga.

Graveyard of Lost Children by Katrina Monroe

As a baby, Olivia narrowly escaped being murdered and now that she’s a mother herself, the “dead women” that haunted her mom have begun whispering to her too. Olivia’s post-partum life isn’t the joyful time she expected, and she’s starting to suspect her baby isn’t hers at all. This harrowing tale of what it means to be a good mother will keep you up at night, whether you have kids or not.

Lizz (she/her) is a senior editor at Good Housekeeping , where she runs the GH Book Club, edits essays and long-form features and writes about pets, books and lifestyle topics. A journalist for almost two decades, she is the author of Biography of a Body and Buffalo Steel. She also teaches journalism as an adjunct professor at New York University's School of Professional Studies and creative nonfiction at the Muse Writing Center, and coaches with the New York Writing Room. 

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The best books of 2023

Are you looking for the best new fiction titles published in English this year, so far? From novels to short stories, magical realism to satire, explore this year’s most remarkable fiction – and the books that should be on your TBR pile in 2023

Our round-up features all the books that were longlisted for the International Booker Prize and Booker Prize in 2023.

A Spell of Good Things by  Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀

A dazzling story of modern Nigeria and two families caught in the riptides of wealth, power, romantic obsession and political corruption

Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀’s breathtaking novel shines a light on the haves and have-nots of Nigeria, and the shared humanity that lives in between.  

Ẹniọlá is tall for his age, a boy who looks like a man. His father has lost his job, so Ẹniọlá spends his days running errands, collecting newspapers and begging - dreaming of a big future.  Wuraola is a golden girl, the perfect child of a wealthy family, and now an exhausted young doctor in her first year of practice. But when sudden violence shatters a family party, Wuraola and Ẹniọlá’s lives become inextricably intertwined… 

A Spell of Good Things by Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀

A System So Magnificent It Is Blinding  by  Amanda Svensso , translated by  Nichola Smalley

This joyful family saga about free will, forgiveness, and interconnection poses a question: are we free to create our own destinies or are we just part of a system beyond our control?

In October 1989, a set of triplets is born, and it is at this moment their father chooses to reveal his affair. Pandemonium ensues. 

Over two decades later, Sebastian is recruited to join a mysterious organisation, where he meets Laura Kadinsky, a patient whose inability to see the world in three dimensions is not the only intriguing thing about her. Meanwhile, Clara has travelled to Easter Island to join a doomsday cult, and the third triplet, Matilda, is in Sweden, trying to escape from the colour blue.  

Then, something happens that forces the triplets to reunite. Their mother calls with worrying news: their father has gone missing and she has something to tell them, a 25-year secret that will change all their lives.

A System So Magnificent it is Blinding by Amanda Svensso

All the Little Bird-Hearts by  Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow

Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow’s lyrical and poignant debut novel offers a deft exploration of motherhood, vulnerability and the complexity of human relationships

Sunday Forrester does things more carefully than most people. On quiet days, she must eat only white foods. Her etiquette handbook guides her through confusing social situations, and to escape, she turns to her treasury of Sicilian folklore. The one thing very much out of her control is Dolly - her clever, headstrong daughter, now on the cusp of leaving home.  

Into this carefully ordered world step Vita and Rollo, a charming couple who move in next door and proceed to deliciously break just about every rule in Sunday’s book. Soon they are in and out of each other’s homes, and Sunday feels loved and accepted as never before. But beneath Vita and Rollo’s polish lies something else, something darker. For Sunday has precisely what Vita has always wanted for herself: a daughter of her own.  

All the Little Bird-Hearts by Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow

Boulder by  Eva Baltasar , translated by  Julia Sanches

Eva Baltasar demonstrates her pre-eminence as a chronicler of queer voices navigating a hostile world - in prose as brittle and beautiful as an ancient saga. 

Working as a cook on a merchant ship, a woman comes to know and love Samsa, who gives her the nickname ‘Boulder’. When the couple decide to move to Reykjavik together, Samsa announces that she wants to have a child. She is already 40 and can’t bear to let the opportunity pass her by.  

Boulder is less enthused but doesn’t know how to say no - and so finds herself dragged along on a journey that feels as thankless as it is alien. With motherhood changing Samsa into a stranger, Boulder must decide where her priorities lie, and whether her yearning for freedom will trump her yearning for love.

Boulder by Eva Baltasar

How to Build a Boat by  Elaine Feeney

With tenderness and verve, Elaine Feeney tells the story of how one boy on a unique mission transforms the lives of his teachers, and brings together a community

Jamie O’Neill loves the colour red. He also loves tall trees, patterns, rain that comes with wind, the curvature of many objects, books with dust jackets, cats, rivers and Edgar Allan Poe.  

At the age of 13, there are two things he especially wants in life: to build a Perpetual Motion Machine, and to connect with his mother Noelle, who died when he was born. In his mind, these things are intimately linked.  

And at his new school, where all else is disorientating and overwhelming, he finds two people who might just be able to help him.  

How to Build a Boat by Elaine Feeney

If I Survive You by  Jonathan Escoffery

An exhilarating novel-in-stories that pulses with style, heart and barbed humour, while unravelling what it means to carve out an existence between cultures, homes and pay cheques

In 1979, as political violence consumes their native Kingston, Topper and Sanya flee to Miami. But they soon learn that the welcome in America will be far from warm.    

Trelawny, their youngest son, comes of age in a society that regards him with suspicion and confusion. Their eldest son Delano’s longing for a better future for his own children is equalled only by his recklessness in trying to secure it.  

As both brothers navigate the obstacles littered in their path – an unreliable father, racism, a financial crisis and Hurricane Andrew – they find themselves pitted against one another. Will their rivalry be the thing that finally tears their family apart? 

If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery

In Ascension by Martin McInnes

Exploring the natural world with wonder and reverence, this compassionate, deeply inquisitive epic reaches outward to confront the great questions of existence, while looking inward to illuminate the human heart

Leigh grew up in Rotterdam, drawn to the waterfront as an escape from her unhappy home life. Enchanted by the undersea world of her childhood, she excels in marine biology, travelling the globe to study ancient organisms.  

When a trench is discovered in the Atlantic Ocean, Leigh joins the exploration team, hoping to find evidence of Earth’s first life forms. What she instead finds calls into question everything we know about our own beginnings, and leaves her facing an impossible choice: to remain with her family, or to embark on a journey across the breadth of the cosmos.   

In Ascension by Martin MacInnes

Is Mother Dead  by  Vigdis Hjorth , translated by  Charlotte Barslund

‘To mother is to murder, or close enough,’ thinks Johanna, as she looks at the spelling of the two words in Norwegian.

Recently widowed, Johanna is back in Oslo after a long absence to prepare for a retrospective of her art. The subject of her work is motherhood and some of her more controversial paintings have brought about a dramatic rift between parent and child.  

This new proximity, after decades of acrimonious absence, set both women on edge. Before too long, Johanna finds her mother stalking her thoughts, and herself stalking her mother’s house. 

Is Mother Dead by Vigdis Hjorth

Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv  by  Andrey Kurkov , translated by  Reuben Woolley

Shot through with Kurkov’s unique brand of black humour and vodka-fuelled magic realism,  Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv  is an affectionate portrait of one of the world’s most intriguing cities. 

Strange things are afoot in the cosmopolitan city of Lviv, western Ukraine. Seagulls are circling and the air smells salty, though Lviv is a long way from the sea. A ragtag group gathers round a mysterious grave in Lychakiv Cemetery - among them an ex-KGB officer and an ageing hippy he used to spy on. Before long, Captain Ryabtsev and Alik Olisevych team up to discover the source of the ‘anomalies’. 

Meanwhile, Taras - who makes a living driving kidney-stone patients over cobblestones in his ancient Opel Vectra – is courting Darka, who works nights at a bureau de change despite being allergic to money. The young lovers don’t know it, but their fate depends on two lonely old men, relics of another era, who will stop at nothing to save their city.

Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv by Andrey Kurkov

Ninth Building , by  Zou Jingzhi , translated by  Jeremy Tiang

A fascinating collection of vignettes based on the author’s life in China during the Cultural Revolution.

Revisiting his experiences as a boy in Beijing and then as a teenager exiled to the countryside, Zou captures a side of the Cultural Revolution that is seldom talked about - the sheer tedium and waste of young life under the regime, as well as the gallows humour that accompanies such desperate situations.

Ninth Building by Zou Jingzhi

Old God’s Time by Sebastian Barry

In his beautiful, haunting novel, in which nothing is quite what it seems, Sebastian Barry explores what we live through, what we live with, and what may survive of us

Recently retired policeman Tom Kettle is settling into the quiet of his new home, a lean-to annexed to a Victorian Castle overlooking the Irish Sea. For months he has barely seen a soul, catching only glimpses of his eccentric landlord and a nervous young mother who has moved in next door.  

Occasionally, fond memories of the past return - of his family, his beloved wife June and their two children. But when two former colleagues turn up at his door with questions about a decades-old case, one which Tom never quite came to terms with, he finds himself pulled into the darkest currents of his past. 

Pearl by  Siân Hughes

Siân Hughes contemplates both the power and the fragility of the human mind in her haunting debut novel, which was inspired by the medieval poem of the same name

Marianne is eight years old when her mother goes missing. Left behind with her baby brother and grieving father in a ramshackle house on the edge of a small village, she clings to the fragmented memories of her mother’s love; the smell of fresh herbs, the games they played, and the songs and stories of her childhood.  

As time passes, Marianne struggles to adjust, fixated on her mother’s disappearance and the secrets she’s sure her father is keeping from her. Discovering a medieval poem called Pearl - and trusting in its promise of consolation - Marianne sets out to make a visual illustration of it, a task that she returns to over and over but somehow never manages to complete.  

Tormented by an unmarked gravestone in an abandoned chapel and the tidal pull of the river, her childhood home begins to crumble as the past leads her down a path of self-destruction. But can art heal Marianne? And will her own future as a mother help her find peace? 

Pearl by Siân Hughes

Prophet Song by Paul Lynch

A mother faces a terrible choice, in Paul Lynch’s exhilarating, propulsive and confrontational portrait of a society on the brink

On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find the GNSB on her doorstep. Two officers from Ireland’s newly formed secret police want to speak with her husband.  

Things are falling apart. Ireland is in the grip of a government that is taking a turn towards tyranny. And as the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, Eilish finds herself caught within the nightmare logic of a collapsing society – assailed by unpredictable forces beyond her control and forced to do whatever it takes to keep her family together.  

Pyre  by  Perumal Murugan , translated by  Aniruddhan Vasudevan

Young love is pitted against social discrimination in Perumal Murugan’s powerful and compelling novel, set in the rural Tamil Nadu of the 1980s.

Saroja and Kumaresan are in love. And in danger. After a whirlwind romance they marry in a small southern Indian town, before returning to Kumaresan’s family village. But the newlyweds are harbouring a dangerous secret: they belong to different castes, and if the villagers find out they will be in grave peril. 

Faced with venom from her mother-in-law, and pointed questions from her new neighbours, Saroja struggles to adjust to a lonely and uncomfortable life. Kumaresan throws himself into building a business, hoping to scrape together enough money for them to start over somewhere new. But as vicious whispers encircle the couple, will their love be enough to keep them safe?

Pyre by Perumal Murugan

Standing Heavy by  GauZ’ , translated by  Frank Wynne

A unique insight into everything that passes under a security guard’s gaze, which also serves as a searingly witty deconstruction of colonial legacies and capitalist consumption.

Amidst the political bickering of the inhabitants of the Residence for Students from Côte d’Ivoire and the ever-changing landscape of French immigration policy, two generations of Ivoirians attempt to make their way as undocumented workers, taking shifts as security guards at a flour mill. This sharply satirical yet poignant tale draws on the author’s own experiences as an undocumented student in Paris.

Standing Heavy by Gauz’

Study for Obedience by  Sarah Bernstein

In her accomplished and unsettling second novel, Sarah Bernstein explores themes of prejudice, abuse and guilt through the eyes of a singularly unreliable narrator

A woman moves from the place of her birth to a ‘remote northern country’ to be housekeeper to her brother, whose wife has just left him. Soon after she arrives, a series of unfortunate events occurs: collective bovine hysteria; the death of a ewe and her nearly-born lamb; a local dog’s phantom pregnancy; a potato blight.  

She notices that the community’s suspicion about incomers in general seems to be directed particularly in her case. She feels their hostility growing, pressing at the edges of her brother’s property. Inside the house, although she tends to her brother and his home with the utmost care and attention, he too begins to fall ill…

Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein

Still Born  by  Guadalupe Nettel , translated by  Rosalind Harvey

Guadalupe Nettel’s gripping and insightful fourth novel explores one of life’s most consequential decisions – whether or not to have children.

Alina and Laura are independent and career-driven women in their mid-thirties, neither of whom have built their future around the prospect of a family. Laura has taken the drastic decision to be sterilised, but as time goes by Alina becomes drawn to the idea of becoming a mother.   

When complications arise in Alina’s pregnancy and Laura becomes attached to her neighbour’s son, both women are forced to reckon with the complexity of their emotions, in Nettel’s sensitive and surgically precise exploration of maternal ambivalence. 

Still Born by Guadalupe Nettel

The Bee Sting by Paul Murray

A patch of ice on the road, a casual favour to a charming stranger, a bee caught beneath a bridal veil – can a single moment of bad luck change the direction of a life?

Dickie’s once-lucrative car business is going under - but rather than face the music, he’s spending his days in the woods, building an apocalypse-proof bunker. His exasperated wife Imelda is selling off her jewellery on eBay while half-heartedly dodging the attentions of fast-talking cattle farmer Big Mike.  

Meanwhile, teenage daughter Cass, formerly top of her class, seems determined to binge-drink her way to her final exams. And 12-year-old PJ, in debt to local sociopath ‘Ears’ Moran, is putting the final touches to his grand plan to run away. 

Yes, in Paul Murray’s brilliant tragicomic saga, the Barnes family is definitely in trouble. So where did it all go wrong? And if the story has already been written – is there still time to find a happy ending?  

The Birthday Party  by  Laurent Mauvignier , translated by  Daniel Levin Becker

This gripping tale of the violent irruptions of the past into the present, from a major contemporary French writer, is a deft unravelling of the stories we hide from others - and from ourselves.

Buried deep in rural France, little remains of the isolated hamlet of the Three Lone Girls, save a few houses and a curiously assembled quartet: Patrice Bergogne, inheritor of his family’s farm; his wife, Marion; their daughter, Ida; and their neighbour, Christine, an artist.  

While Patrice plans a surprise for his wife’s fortieth birthday, inexplicable events start to disrupt the hamlet’s quiet existence: anonymous, menacing letters, an unfamiliar car rolling up the driveway. And as night falls, strangers stalk the houses, unleashing a nightmarish chain of events. 

The Birthday Party by Laurent Mauvignier

The Gospel According to the New World by  Maryse Condé , translated by  Richard Philcox

A miracle baby is rumoured to be the child of God. Award-winning Caribbean author Maryse Condé follows his journey in search of his origins and mission.

Baby Pascal is strikingly beautiful, brown in complexion, with grey-green eyes like the sea. But where does he come from? Is he really the child of God? So goes the rumour, and many signs throughout his life will cause this theory to gain ground.  

From journey to journey and from one community to another, Pascal sets off in search of his origins, trying to understand the meaning of his mission. Will he be able to change the fate of humanity? And what will the New World Gospel reveal? 

The Gospel According to the New World by Maryse Condé

The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng

Based on real events, Booker Prize-shortlisted Tan Twan Eng’s masterful novel of public morality and private truth examines love and betrayal under the shadow of Empire

It is 1921 and at Cassowary House in the Straits Settlements of Penang, Robert Hamlyn is a well-to-do lawyer, his steely wife Lesley a society hostess. Their lives are invigorated when Willie, an old friend of Robert’s, comes to stay.   

Willie Somerset Maugham is one of the greatest writers of his day. But he is beleaguered by an unhappy marriage, ill-health and business interests that have gone badly awry. He is also struggling to write. The more Lesley’s friendship with Willie grows, the more clearly she see him as he is – a man who has no choice but to mask his true self.  

As Willie prepares to face his demons, Lesley confides secrets of her own, including her connection to the case of an Englishwoman charged with murder in the Kuala Lumpur courts – a tragedy drawn from fact, and worthy of fiction.  

This Other Eden  by Paul Harding

Full of lyricism and power, Paul Harding’s spellbinding novel celebrates the hopes, dreams and resilience of those deemed not to fit in a world brutally intolerant of difference

Inspired by historical events,  This Other Eden  tells the story of Apple Island: an enclave off the coast of the United States where castaways - in flight from society and its judgment - have landed and built a home.  

In 1792, formerly enslaved Benjamin Honey arrives on the island with his Irish wife, Patience, to make a life together there. More than a century later, the Honeys’ descendants remain, alongside an eccentric, diverse band of neighbours.  

Then comes the intrusion of ‘civilization’: officials determine to ‘cleanse’ the island. A missionary schoolteacher selects one light-skinned boy to save. The rest will succumb to the authorities’ institutions - or cast themselves on the waters in a new Noah’s Ark… 

This Other Eden by Paul Harding

Time Shelter  by  Georgi Gospodinov , translated by  Angela Rodel

A ‘clinic for the past’ offers a promising treatment for Alzheimer’s sufferers: each floor reproduces a decade in minute detail, transporting patients back in time. 

An unnamed narrator is tasked with collecting the flotsam and jetsam of the past, from 1960s furniture and 1940s shirt buttons to scents, and even afternoon light. But as the rooms become more convincing, an increasing number of healthy people seek out the clinic as a ‘time shelter’, hoping to escape the horrors of modern life - a development that results in an unexpected conundrum when the past begins to invade the present. 

Intricately crafted, and eloquently translated by Angela Rodel,  Time Shelter  cements Georgi Gospodinov’s reputation as one of the indispensable writers of our times, and a major voice in international literature. 

Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov

Western Lane by Chetna Maroo

Chetna Maroo’s tender and moving debut novel about grief, sisterhood, a teenage girl’s struggle to transcend herself – and squash

Eleven-year-old Gopi has been playing squash since she was old enough to hold a racket. When her mother dies, her father enlists her in a quietly brutal training regimen, and the game becomes her world.  

Slowly, she grows apart from her sisters. Her life is reduced to the sport, guided by its rhythms: the serve, the volley, the drive, the shot and its echo. But on the court, she is not alone. She is with her pa. She is with Ged, a 13-year-old boy with his own formidable talent. She is with the players who have come before her. She is in awe.  

Whale  by  Cheon Myeong-kwan , translated by  Chi-Young Kim

An adventure-satire of epic proportions, which sheds new light on the changes Korea experienced in its rapid transition from pre-modern to post-modern society.

Set in a remote village in South Korea,  Whale  follows the lives of three linked characters: Geumbok, an extremely ambitious woman who has been chasing an indescribable thrill ever since she first saw a whale crest in the ocean; her mute daughter, Chunhui, who communicates with elephants; and a one-eyed woman who controls honeybees with a whistle. A fiction that brims with surprises and wicked humour, from one of the most original voices in South Korea. 

Whale by Cheon Myeong-kwan

While We Were Dreaming  by  Clemens Meyer , translated by  Katy Derbyshire

Startlingly raw and deeply moving, this extraordinary debut novel from one of Germany’s most ambitious writers is full of passion, hope and despair. 

Rico, Mark, Paul and Daniel were 13 when the Berlin Wall fell in autumn 1989. Growing up in Leipzig at the time of reunification, they dream of a better life somewhere beyond the brewery quarter. Every night they roam the streets, partying, rioting, running away from their fears, their parents and the future, fighting to exist, killing time. They drink, steal cars, feel wrecked, play it cool, longing for real love and true freedom. 

While We Were Dreaming by Clemens Meyer

More book recommendations from the Booker Library

10 of the best very short books from the booker library.

We’ve compiled a selection of Booker-nominated novels that make a big impact in around 200 pages or less. They may be small, but they’re perfectly formed

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What's the best booker prize screen adaptation, 32 books that have inspired the international booker prize 2023 shortlistees, ten booker-nominated books to inspire a fresh start, share this page.

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The 10 Best Book Reviews of 2023

Parul sehgal on james ellroy, merve emre on italo calvino, namwali serpell on "hit me" novels, and more.

Good book criticism is booming right now. I have at least some degree of confidence in saying this because for the past six years, I’ve been keeping track of my favorite reviews to prepare for these annual roundups, and my 2023 longlist was by far the biggest and most difficult to narrow down.

We’ve lost venues for writing about books (RIP Astra ), but we’ve gained some as well, including a few we feared were dead (welcome back, Bookforum ). But publications aside, the sheer number of critics who take reviews seriously as a genre of creative nonfiction—with attention to style, momentum, humor, and surprise—feels to me like it’s only getting bigger.

Here are my 10 favorite book reviews of 2023, though it easily could have been 100.

Brought to you by Book Marks , Lit Hub’s home for book reviews.

Parul Sehgal on James Ellroy’s The Enchanters ( The New Yorker )

Sehgal is still the GOAT when it comes to writing ledes. This one might be my all-time favorite of hers.

“In the spring of 1995, dozens of snakes appeared on the beaches of Southern California. Panic. A Biblical curse, some held, to punish the wicked. ‘California has been given so many signs: floods, drought, fires, earthquakes lifting mountains two feet high in Northridge,’ the California congresswoman Andrea Seastrand declared. ‘Yet people turn from His ways.’ The Los Angeles Times made soothing noises, counselling against the curse theory. But the obvious person to consult would have been a native son of Los Angeles who saw geography as destiny, who specialized in snakes of all stripes, and whose characters find, in natural disasters, their only competitors in the making of mayhem.”

Merve Emre on Italo Calvino’s The Written World and the Unwritten World , translated by Ann Goldstein ( The New Yorker )

Emre and Calvino are a dream pairing on the level of Scorsese and DiCaprio. I also love her use of second person, which can be as difficult as a broadsword to wield well.

“The bookstore in your neighborhood sits on a busy corner. You pass it on your walk to work in the mornings, and on your walk home in the evenings, and although you sometimes admire the clever geometries of its window display, rarely do you take a closer look. But, not long ago, the sight of a particular book made you pause. Your eye lingered on its pure-white cover and on a curious shape cut into it. Without thinking, you walked into the store. The clerk was working at her computer. The other customers were leafing through books lifted from the great pyramids of new releases on the front table. No one paid any attention to you.”

Phillip Maciak on Jaime Green’s The Possibility of Life ( The New Republic )

I rarely laugh out loud when reading criticism, but Maciak made it happen in this take on one of my favorite books of the year.

“I remember being considerably less excited about seeing Ellie’s dad than Ellie was when I saw Contact in high school… Likewise, I recall being similarly disappointed when Jessica Chastain unravels the mysteries of the universe in Christopher Nolan’s own visually arresting wormhole epic Interstellar, only to realize that the unseen intelligence transmitting messages to her was also, if you can believe it, her long lost father Matthew McConaughey. Are there any aliens out there who don’t look like our dads? My kingdom for a xenomorph!”

Ginny Hogan on Josh Hawley’s Manhood ( The Nation )

Hogan is the other critic who made me laugh out loud this year, right from the first paragraph.

“Josh Hawley, best known for fleeing a mob he helped incite, has written a book on manhood. In Hawley’s defense, he began writing the book before everyone found out about the running-away situation. But it was, unfortunately, after he did the running.”

Namwali Serpell on 10 recent novels ( New York Review of Books )

Serpell’s criticism is written with the same striking, fluid precision as her fiction. It’s impossible to stop reading her once you start. She also coins a new phrase here, ambisextrous .

“Lately there’s been a spate of novels written by young women that have a remarkably similar plot. I’ve been calling them the ‘hit me’ books. Let’s be less incendiary: let’s call them the ‘remaster novels.’”

Michelle Hart on Emma Cline’s The Guest ( Los Angeles Times )

I love it when a critic instills a sense of the author’s style into their own writing, as Hart does here.

“They say not to use high beams in fog. The water vapor refracts the intense glare of headlights back toward the driver in a way that actually decreases visibility. Best, then, to use low light. This is the vibe of a story by Emma Cline, who writes so luminously about the haziness of female desire that even the most revelatory moments unfold in a sort of soft focus.”

Ayesha A. Siddiqi on Zadie Smith’s The Fraud ( Bookforum )

First of all, Bookforum is back! What a treat. Covering a book by a literary powerhouse like Smith is no small task, and Siddiqi adds crucial context on how The Fraud conflicts with Smith’s other writing about art.

“The way Smith treats every detail in her book as equally important forecloses The Fraud ’s potential and exposes how ill served Smith is by her philosophy on fiction. After years of deriding the shallowness of treating art as a site of radical struggle, Smith is left with a book that falters as art because of how shallowly it treats political consciousness.”

J. Howard Rosier on Celes Tisdale’s When the Smoke Cleared ( The Nation )

Rosier is one of our clearest-eyed critics of historical fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, and an expert at weaving past narratives together with new insights.

“The smoldering embers of a failed revolution hang over When the Smoke Cleared , a collection of poems by Attica inmates along with Tisdale’s journal entries from the period, as well as a searing introduction by Nowak. Among the many strengths of this anthology is a blunt acknowledgment of the uprising as part of much larger historical mechanisms: namely, the last gasps of the civil rights movement and the nation’s violent reaction to Black liberation.”

Malavika Praseed on Abraham Verghese’s The Covenant of Water ( Chicago Review of Books )

Praseed brings her own experience and historical knowledge to bear in this concise but nuanced look at Verghese’s first novel in 15 years.

“Kerala is a complex region, anchored by its history of multiple religions, competing political ideals, and creative legacy. I have seen these firsthand in myriad visits to my grandmothers’ houses, and heard the stories my mother and father often tell. Verghese brings all these elements to the forefront with numerous plotlines concerning the Saint Thomas Christian faith, the rise of Communism in Kerala, and the inclusion of literary and artistic characters.”

Lauren LeBlanc on Ali Smith’s Companion Piece ( Los Angeles Times )

LeBlanc accomplished the feat of getting me interested in a book I had unfairly dismissed as an optional “spin-off” of Smith’s seasonal quartet.

“It is remarkable to be alive at the same time as Scottish writer Ali Smith. No one else, I would argue, captures our ongoing contemporary nightmare in a manner that is both expansively imaginative and the perfect mirror of its abrupt absurdity.”

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The Best Reviewed Fiction of 2023

Featuring anne enright, lorrie moore, zadie smith, anne patchett, colson whitehead, and more.

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The points are tallied, the math is done, and the results are in.

Yes, all year long the diligent and endearingly disgruntled Book Marks elves have been mining reviews from every corner of the literary internet. Brows furrowed, stomachs growling, they’ve worked from break of dawn to blink of dusk, seven days a week, scouring the book review sections of over 150 publications—from the New York Times to the Sydney Morning Herald , the Toronto Star to the London Review of Books —all so that we can now say with certainty that these are the best reviewed fiction titles of 2023.

Happy reading!

1. The Wren, the Wren by Anne Enright (W. W. Norton & Company)

18 Rave • 2 Positive Read an interview with Anne Enright here

“So convincingly has Ms. Enright conjured the archetype of the wandering Irish bard who leaves behind him a legacy of abandoned women and melodious, honey-tongued verse … Is it possible for poems to be fictitious? In fact, these nostalgic odes to love and Ireland are limpid, lilting, wholly credible stand-alone works … One of Ms. Enright’s remarkable feats is to write believably across three generations, capturing epochal differences but also a buried, or even repressed, continuity. The fullness of Ms. Enright’s talent is reflected as well in her treatment of what has come to be known, a bit glibly, as the ‘art monster.’”

–Sam Sacks ( The Wall Street Journal )

2. Tom Lake by Ann Patchett (Harper)

19 Rave • 4 Positive • 1 Mixed Read an interview with Ann Patchett here

“Not that a heart is not broken at some point, but it breaks without affecting the remarkable warmth of the book, set in summer’s fullest bloom … This generous writer hits the mark again with her ninth novel … Knowing Patchett’s personal history with motherhood makes the fullness of the maternal feelings she imagines for Lara Kenison particularly poignant.”

–Marion Winik ( The Washington Post )

3. After the Funeral by Tessa Hadley (Knopf)

15 Rave • 6 Positive Read an interview with Tessa Hadley here

“This new collection is a great introduction to her work and for those of us already familiar with Hadley, it’s a great addition. Throughout the collection, Hadley spins out character studies of (mostly) women at odds with themselves, their partners, their families, or life in general … Hadley does a wonderful job of weaving past and present together as the sisters are forced to confront their memories and relationships. And, of course, there are those moments of shining prose … Rife with deft and often beautiful prose, and astute but compassionate characterization, this is a wonderful collection.”

–Yvonne C. Garrett ( The Brooklyn Rail )

4. I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home by Lorrie Moore ( Knopf)

20 Rave • 9 Positive • 6 Mixed • 1 Pan Read an interview with Lorrie Moore here

“Moore excels in…[the] neurotic but intimate conversations that go nowhere, and the scenes in the hospice are viscerally done … Moore shows that grief and ghosts can be written about persuasively, and wittily, without turning a novel into a horror story … A triumph of tone and, ultimately, of the imagination. For Moore, death doesn’t necessarily mark the end of a story.”

–Abhrajyoti Chakraborty ( The Guardian )

5. Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck (New Directions)

15 Rave • 9 Positive Read an excerpt from Kairos here

“A cathartic leak of a novel, a beautiful bummer, and the floodgates open early … If Kairos were only a tear-jerker, there might not be much more to say about it. But Erpenbeck, a German writer born in 1967 whose work has come sharply to the attention of English-language readers over the past decade, is among the most sophisticated and powerful novelists we have. Clinging to the undercarriage of her sentences, like fugitives, are intimations of Germany’s politics, history and cultural memory … She is writing more closely to her own unconscious … I don’t generally read the books I review twice, but this one I did … Profound and moving.”

–Dwight Garner ( The New York Times )

6. August Blue by Deborah Levy (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

13 Rave • 8 Positive • 2 Mixed

“Ms. Levy rewards close readers by packing her sardine-can-slim novels with tight connections … August Blue, which builds to a moving climax, is more emotionally accessible than Ms. Levy’s previous novels. But it too encompasses the cerebral and the sentimental, realism and surrealism, love and loss, the drive to create art—and the ambiguities of human relations.”

–Heller McAlpin ( The Wall Street Journal )

7. The Bee Sting by Paul Murray (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

18 Rave • 5 Positive • 5 Mixed Read an excerpt from The Bee Sting here

“ The Bee Sting …ought to cement Murray’s already high standing. Another changeup, it’s a triumph of realist fiction, a big, sprawling social novel in the vein of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom . The agility with which Murray structures the narrative around the family at its heart is virtuosic and sure-footed, evidence of a writer at the height of his power deftly shifting perspectives, style and syntax to maximize emotional impact. Hilarious and sardonic, heartbreaking and beautiful—there’s just no other way to put it: The Bee Sting is a masterpiece.”

–Jonathan Russell Clark ( The Los Angeles Times )

8. Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

21 Rave • 7 Positive • 3 Mixed • 1 Pan Read an excerpt from Birnam Wood here

“Bold, ambitious … A grand, chilling thriller tightly bound by inescapable concerns … Birnam Wood moves at a faster clip with arguably higher stakes. Make no mistake: It’s a book that grips you by the throat until its final paragraph. Catton successfully scorches the earth with her prose … Little feels certain or safe. The literary novel binds itself with a genre thriller in Catton’s hands … Free to play with form, Catton winds methodically through the minds of her characters … I’ll unabashedly state that Birnam Wood is a brash, unforgettable novel.”

–Lauren LeBlanc ( The Boston Globe )

9. Crook Manifesto by Colson Whitehead (Doubleday)

15 Rave • 10 Positive • 4 Mixed • 1 Pan Read an interview with Colson Whitehead here

“Both deceptively substantive and sneakily funny, a wise journey through Harlem days and nights as lived by Ray Carney, a conscientious furniture salesman and family man who happens to run a little crooked … Whitehead has always had a sharp instinct for the workings of culture … Whitehead’s New York of the ‘70s is a fully realized universe down to the most meticulous details, from the constant sirens and bodega drug fronts to a sweltering, abandoned biscuit factory … A…reminder, as if we still needed one, that crime fiction can be great literature. These books are as resonant and finely observed as anything Whitehead has written.”

–Chris Vognar ( The Los Angeles Times )

10. The Fraud by Zadie Smith (Penguin Press)

20 Rave • 6 Positive • 9 Mixed • 1 Pan

“It offers a vast, acute panoply of London and the English countryside, and successfully locates the social controversies of an era in a handful of characters … Touchet is the most morally intelligent character Smith has written … The book’s structure is uneven. One wishes, for instance, that the chapters would signal their time jumps more consistently … But these infelicities stop mattering when we are deep into the trial and the book turns into a portrait of people with thwarted ambitions, of people who, like Ainsworth, become frauds without knowing … As always, it is a pleasure to be in Zadie Smith’s mind, which, as time goes on, is becoming contiguous with London itself. Dickens may be dead, but Smith, thankfully, is alive.”

–Karan Mahajan ( The New York Times Book Review )

Our System:

RAVE = 5 points • POSITIVE = 3 points • MIXED = 1 point • PAN = -5 points The ten books with the highest points totals are then ranked by weighted average 

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4 crime and suspense novels make for hot summer reading

Maureen Corrigan

Maureen Corrigan picks four crime and suspense novels for the summer. NPR hide caption

There’s something about the shadowy moral recesses of crime and suspense fiction that makes those genres especially appealing as temperatures soar.

Books We Love

20 new books hitting shelves this summer that our critics can't wait to read.

Ash Dark As Night Penguin Random House hide caption

Ash Dark as Night, by Gary Phillips

I’m beginning my recommendations with two distinctive novels that appeared this spring. Gary Phillips introduced the character of LA crime photographer and occasional private eye Harry Ingram in the 2022 novel, One-Shot Harry . The second novel of this evocative historical series is called Ash Dark as Night and it opens in August 1965 during the Watts riots. Harry, who’s one of two African American freelancers covering the riots, has looped his trademark Speed Graphic camera around his neck and headed into the streets.

We’re told that Harry’s situation is, of course, riskier than that of his white counterparts: “[M]aybe one of these fellas might well get a brick upside their head from a participant, but were less likely to be jacked-up by the law. Ingram realized either side might turn on him.” Indeed, when Harry captures the death of an unarmed Black activist at the hands of the LAPD, the photo makes him famous, as well as a target.

This novel is steeped in period details like snap-brim hats and ragtop Chevy Bel Air convertibles, along with walk-ons by real life figures like pioneering African American TV journalist Louis E. Lomax. But it’s Harry’s clear-eyed take on the fallen world around him that makes this series so powerful.

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Blessed Water Zando hide caption

Blessed Water, by Margot Douaihy

You might think a mystery about an inked-up lesbian Punk musician-turned-nun is a little far-fetched; but New Orleans, the setting of the Sister Holiday series, is the city of far-fetched phenomenon, both sacred and profane. Margot Douaihy’s second book in this queer cozy series is called Blessed Water and it finds the 34-year-old Sister Holiday up to her neck in murky flood waters and priests with secrets. Douaihy’s writing style — pure hard-boiled Patti Smith -- contains all the contradictions that torment Sister Holiday in her bumpy journey of faith. Here she is in the Prologue recalling how she survived swallowing a glass rosary bead:

After my prayers for clarity, for forgiveness, for a cigarette, ... deep inside the wet cave of my body was an unmistakable tickle. ... The bead fought my stomach acid for hours, leaching its blessing or poison or unmet wish. Anything hidden always finds a way to escape, no matter its careful sealing.

Amen to that, Sister Holiday.

The Expat Pegasus Crime hide caption

The Expat, by Hansen Shi

The main character in Hansen Shi's excellent debut spy novel is an alienated young man named Michael Wang. He’s a first generation Chinese American a few years out of Princeton who’s hit the bamboo ceiling at General Motors in San Francisco, where he’s been working on technology for self-driving cars. Enter a femme fatale named Vivian who flatters Michael into believing that his brilliance will be recognized by her enigmatic boss in China. Once Michael settles into life in Beijing, however, he realizes he’s been tapped, not as a prodigy, but a patsy. The Expat wraps up too abruptly, but it’s also true that I wanted this moody espionage tale to go on longer.

The God of the Woods Riverhead Books hide caption

The God of the Woods, by Liz Moore

Liz Moore’s extraordinary new literary suspense novel reminds me of Donna Tartt ’s 1992 debut, The Secret History. There are superficial similarities: Both are thick intricate novels featuring young people isolated in enclosed worlds — in Tartt’s story, a Vermont college campus; in Moore’s, a summer camp in New York’s Adirondack mountains. But, the vital connection for me was a reading experience where I was so thoroughly submerged in a rich fictional world, that for hours I barely came up for air.

There’s a touch of Gothic excess about The God of the Woods, beginning with the premise that not one, but two children from the wealthy Van Laar family disappear from Camp Emerson in the Adirondacks 14 years apart. Moore’s story jumps around in time, chiefly from the 1950s into the '70s and features a host of characters from different social classes — campers, counselors, townspeople and local police — and the Van Laars themselves.

2 books offer just the right summer mix of humor and nostalgia

The precision of Moore’s writing never flags. Consider this reflection by Tracy, a 12-year-old camper who recalls that: “Her father once told her casually that she was built like a plum on toothpicks, and the phrase was at once so cruel and so poetic that it clicked into place around her like a harness.”

Moore’s previous book, Long Bright River , was a superb social novel about the opioid crisis in Philadelphia; The God of the Woods is something weirder and stranger and unforgettable.

Happy summer reading wherever your tastes take you.

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• Perspectives

2023 Preview: Fiction Books

BY Laurie Muchnick • Jan. 2, 2023

Happy New Year! We’ve moved past the “looking back” phase of 2022 and are on to the “looking ahead” phase of 2023. Here are 10 fiction titles to keep an eye out for.

Deepti Kapoor’s Age of Vice  (Riverhead, Jan. 3) tells the story of Ajay, a poor boy from Uttar Pradesh who goes to work for a rich, ruthless family. Soon he’s made to take the fall for a crime he didn’t commit. “It doesn’t take long for the reader to become invested in the Mario Puzo–esque drama,” says our review.

Why would a coffee roaster, a lawyer, and their housemates be operating a gunrunning operation from their Brooklyn brownstone? You’ll find out in The Survivalists (Soft Skull, Jan. 10), a novel by Kashana Cauley, a former writer for The Daily Show With Trevor Noah . Our starred review says: “What really sets this debut novel apart is its finely tuned balance between extremes: humor and drama, conspiracy and reason, careful preparation and total chaos.”

Cherie Dimaline, a Canadian Métis author, is best known for her young adult fiction (she won the  Kirkus Prize for young readers’ literature in 2017). In her adult novel, VenCo (Morrow, Feb. 7), 27-year-old Lucky St. James lives with her grandmother in Toronto—until they’re plunged into a hidden world of witches and magic that takes them to New Orleans in search of an otherworldly spoon.

Fans of Julie Otsuka’s The Swimmers will enjoy Western Lane , a debut novel from Chetna Maroo (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Feb. 7). It tells the story of Gopi, an 11-year-old who becomes obsessed with the game of  squash after her mother dies—and is very good at it. “Gopi’s retrospective narration accumulates slow layers of heartbreak,” according to our starred review. “A debut novel of immense poise and promise.”

In The Sun Walks Down (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Feb. 14), Fiona McFarlane creates a farming community in 1883 Australia and follows along as its residents search for a missing child over the course of a week. Our starred review says the book “offers intimate human drama, ruminations on the intersections of art and life, and a sweeping, still relevant view of race and class in Australia—and, by extension, the U.S.…A masterpiece of riveting storytelling.”

Rebecca Makkai follows up her 2018 National Book Award finalist, The Great Believers , with I Have Some Questions for You  (Viking, Feb. 21), about a podcast producer who returns to her old boarding school to teach a short class, using the murder of one of her own classmates as material. “Well plotted, well written, and well designed to make its points,” according to our review.

Elizabeth McKenzie’s last book, The Portable Veblen  (2016), had some passionate fans at Kirkus, and they’ve been looking forward to her new novel, The Dog of the North  (Penguin Press, March 14). This picaresque tale follows Penny Rush from a California road trip with her grandmother’s accountant to a journey to Australia looking for her long-missing parents. “McKenzie has created a wonderful addition to the crew of damaged characters beloved by readers, so very endearing and real,” according to our starred review.

Eleanor Catton made Booker Prize history in two ways with her last novel, The Luminaries  (2013)—she was the youngest winner, and her book was the longest. Now, a decade later, she returns with Birnam Wood  (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, March 7), about a group of activist gardeners in New Zealand who cross paths with an American billionaire. What could go wrong?

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s short story collection, Friday Black , was one of the most exciting debuts of 2018. His first novel, Chain-Gang All-Stars  (Pantheon, April 4), imagines an all-too-plausible dystopian America where the prison system earns big bucks by having prisoners compete like gladiators for their freedom.

I spent most of the summer of 2020 sitting in my backyard, trying to avoid Covid and reading James McBride’s Deacon King Kong . In spite of the background hum, that was one of the most pleasurable reading experiences I’ve ever had. McBride returns with The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store (Riverhead, Aug. 8), moving from Red Hook, Brooklyn, to the Chicken Hill neighborhood of Pottstown, Pennsylvania, in the 1970s, introducing the African Americans and immigrant Jews who live together there.

Laurie Muchnick is the fiction editor.

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• Cast & crew
• User reviews

The Bikeriders

After a chance encounter, headstrong Kathy is drawn to Benny, member of Midwestern motorcycle club the Vandals. As the club transforms into a dangerous underworld of violence, Benny must cho... Read all After a chance encounter, headstrong Kathy is drawn to Benny, member of Midwestern motorcycle club the Vandals. As the club transforms into a dangerous underworld of violence, Benny must choose between Kathy and his loyalty to the club. After a chance encounter, headstrong Kathy is drawn to Benny, member of Midwestern motorcycle club the Vandals. As the club transforms into a dangerous underworld of violence, Benny must choose between Kathy and his loyalty to the club.

• Jeff Nichols
• Jodie Comer
• Austin Butler
• 104 User reviews
• 114 Critic reviews
• 70 Metascore

• Funny Sonny

• Gary Rogue Leader

• The Kid's Mother
• (as Mierka 'Mookie' Girten)

• The Kid's Father
• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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Did you know

• Trivia 'The Bikeriders' was the name of the 1967 photo-book by Danny Lyon but always intended as a working title during production. However nobody could think of anything better so the name was kept for the release.
• Goofs While Kathy is recording her interview in Florida, the reel is spinning in the reel to reel deck, but there is no tape visible.

Brucie : What about the bar?

Johnny : Burn it down.

• Connections Features The Wild One (1953)
• Soundtracks Lonely Room Written by J. M. Rigter and Willie Murray Performed by Mickey Murray Courtesy of Sun Records

User reviews 104

• Jun 18, 2024
• How long is The Bikeriders? Powered by Alexa
• June 21, 2024 (United States)
• United States
• Official Instagram
• Official Site
• Cincinnati, Ohio, USA
• Focus Features
• Regency Enterprises
• New Regency Productions
• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• $11,642,755
• Jun 23, 2024
• $15,614,755

Technical specs

• Runtime 1 hour 56 minutes
• Dolby Digital

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4 Fun, Flirty New Romance Novels

Our columnist has summery new recommendations.

Credit... Michela Buttignol

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By Olivia Waite

Olivia Waite is the Book Review’s romance fiction columnist. She writes queer historical romance, fantasy and critical essays on the genre’s history and future.

• June 23, 2024

It’s a great setup for a joke: A superhero walks into a gay bar and gets rescued from avid fans by a drag queen. It’s also where we begin Philip Ellis’s contemporary romance WE COULD BE HEROES (Putnam, 370 pp., paperback, $20). Patrick Lake, who plays the comic book hero Captain Kismet in the Hollywood franchise, is a closeted A-lister with a restrictive morality clause in his contract. The drag queen is Grace Anatomy, a.k.a. Will, who works nights at a bar called the Village Inn in Birmingham, England — where Patrick’s filming the latest Captain Kismet movie — and days at a used-book shop.

A superhero’s mask hides a face but reveals a deeper truth. This is also true for drag queens, of course — and drag artists have long been the staunch heart of the queer community. Patrick, whose face is globally famous but whose self stays carefully locked away, is desperate for anyone who sees him as a person. Will offers him a drag community, a scrappy found family and a yearning for love that more than matches Patrick’s own.

This is one of those everything books: You laugh, you cry. Also, to my great joy, there’s a secondary plotline about postwar comic creators that is a love letter to Michael Chabon’s “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.”

The neon gleam of pulp fiction also illuminates Rebecca Fraimow’s LADY EVE’S LAST CON (Solaris, 368 pp., paperback, $16.99), a vivacious heist romance set on a far-future satellite, New Monte. Ruth Johnson’s only loyalty is to her sister — but their usual game of “fleece the wealthy idiot” got upset when Jules fell in love with their latest mark, Esteban, and ended up heartbroken. Now Ruth is determined to make the man pay: She’ll play the well-bred ingénue, get the jerk to propose and skip town with his cash when he learns she’s really an unsuitable nobody.

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