The Ten Best Books of 2023
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Below, you'll find a list of the ten best new books I read this year, along with a list of honorable mentions. I decided not to separate reissues, or books that were being published in America for the first time; for all intents and purposes, these books were new to readers here, whenever they were first written.
It goes without saying that this list is highly subjective, both because reading is an act of personal taste but also because, while I read a great many books published in 2023 this year, I have yet to read many of the year's most acclaimed titles (to name just a few, Doppelganger, The Bee Sting, and Blackouts, all of which I look forward to immensely). Some of the titles on this list have, like the ones I just mentioned, garnered a great deal of attention this year; others less so. I hope you find something new to read below.
In the coming weeks, I'll be sharing another list of the best backlisted titles I read in 2023. Until then, happy reading.
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Birnam Wood, Eleanor Catton
Though I’m listing these books in alphabetical order, if I had made a numbered list, Birnam Wood would my number one with a bullet. It took Catton ten years to write a follow-up to The Luminaries, for which she won the Booker Prize at the tender age of twenty-seven. Reading Birnam Wood, I found myself thinking about how valuable it is for writers to have the flexibility and financial security to take their time, especially after so much unexpected public attention. Catton wasn’t idle in those years — she wrote the screenplay for the 2020 film adaptation of Emma, an experience that informed the writing of Birnam Wood — but she evidently had ample time to think about what she wanted to write, and how. The result is a novel that is both breathtakingly paced and filled with characters whose foibles are excruciatingly believable.
The plot of Birnam Wood is too complex to sum up in a brief paragraph, its themes more so; I’ll say simply that the story involves a pernicious billionaire (is there any other kind?) whose interests collide with those of an ecological activist group in New Zealand. Chaos and disaster, predictably, ensue. No novel I read this year, new or old, made me feel anything as intensely as this one; after I finished it, I was physically nauseous for hours and upset for days. This may sound like a strange endorsement — who signs up for something that they know will make them feel so awful? — but it’s a privilege to experience art that can move us so deeply.
The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight, Andrew Leland
I have read a lot of memoirs about disability and illness this year, both new (or recent) and older, all of which have expanded and illuminated my ideas about disability and the body. Perhaps the most revelatory, though, was Andrew Leland’s memoir about blindness. Leland was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa, a condition in which a person’s sight gradually deteriorates into nothing, in his twenties; due to the slow progression of the disease, he long put off identifying as disabled, or even comfortably as “blind” (he can see more than many other blind people, for instance). In his forties, however, while writing this book, he examines his relationship to both terms and groups, and in doing so travels across the country meeting other blind people, attending meetings of national activist groups, and briefly going to “blind school,” where he learns to function without relying on what remains of his sight.
This fusion of memoir and journalism offers a personal window into a large and chronically neglected community. The majority of blind people in America are unemployed and face material hardships that few sighted, or generally abled, people are aware of (including myself, before reading this book). Stereotypes of blind people as being infantile and helpless (and even mentally challenged) persist. I think this is partly due to the fact that blind people are represented so infrequently in popular culture. Leland’s book works against these stereotypes and this absence of representation by delving into the history of blindness in America and into the lives of blind people living today, many of whom argue that blindness is a culture just as Deafness is.
The Disenchantment, Celia Bell
The Disenchantment has been my cause célèbre this year, the book I’ve recommended most after Birnam Wood and a frustrating embodiment of the current publishing system’s inability to find a healthy audience for so many of its titles. At this point, I almost feel bad harping on this issue, which can overshadow the book itself, but I only do so because I think this book is so well-written, so smart, and so pleasurable. It requires the reader to be smart and thoughtful, too, but it is not by any definition inaccessible or “challenging.” After my mother read it, on my recommendation, she told me it reminded her of being a middle-schooler and devouring historical fiction. I, too, felt swept up in Bell’s meticulously rendered world, which challenges dominant historical narratives by foregrounding the experience of women (in particular, queer women) but does not pander to modern sensibilities.
The Disenchantment takes place in 17th century Paris, and follows the Baroness Marie Catherine, who must balance her love of her children and of her secret lover, the countess Victoire, with her deference to her boorish husband. After her husband is murdered, her situation becomes much more precarious, particularly given that Paris is suffering a rash of poisonings. I recommend this book to anyone who loves historical fiction, but especially to those interested in French history, art history, and of course, stories about lesbians getting one over on the man.
Enter Ghost, Isabella Hammad
It is depressing to recommend this novel, which is set primarily in the West Bank, in the midst of the horrific genocide taking place in Gaza as I type. Hammad’s aims in writing this novel were evidently, at least in part, to represent a place and a people who have not often been given a voice in Western media. Now, those people are all over our screens, and people across the world are watching and thinking about them at all hours of the day, but not in a way that they would have chosen. And many, many of them are now dead.
In this context, a novel may seem like a trivial thing; compared to the deaths of over 17,000 people, including over 7,000 children, it certainly is. But I still think that stories have value. Hammad, with the luxury of time, is able to delve fully into the psyche of her protagonist, Sonia, a Palestinian-British actor who has returned to Palestine from London for the first time in many years, and winds up agreeing to star in a production of Hamlet that will be performed in the West Bank. Sonia has complex feelings about her homeland; like Hamlet, she initially wavers before committing to her task. All around her is the specter of violence: of the Nakba and the first and second intifadas, of the threat of betrayal by informants, of the checkpoints, of Israeli soldiers who disrupt their set and performances. The book, too, wonders how important art can be amidst an occupation and eventually concludes: very, because art is human, and even to be human is sometimes an act of resistance.
Ex-Wife, Ursula Parrott
Few books brought me as much joy this year as did Ex-Wife, McNally Jackson’s reissue of Ursula Parrott’s bestseller of the 1920s, in which divorcées date, drink, buy fancy dresses, and even sometimes go to work. Until this year, Parrott was mostly forgotten (she died broke in a charity ward); happily, this reissue and new biography have reelevated her. This wonderful novel combats the prevalent idea that people (in particular, women) in the past were invariably straitlaced, repressed, and helpless. Protagonist Patricia’s life is eye-opening by contrast. At first, she reacts to her husband leaving her for another woman with petulance and denial; later, as it becomes clear that he’s not coming back (at least not yet — she holds onto hope that he one day might for a long time), she moves in with a girlfriend, starts going out with a series of men she likes or tolerates, sleeping with some of them, and drinks to ease the pain. Expensive clothes help, too.
Though in some ways, Ex-Wife is obviously a novel of the 1920s — when Patricia and her wayward husband finally do decide to get divorced, they have to stage a scene of him being unfaithful to her so that the divorce will be authorized by the courts — in many other ways Patricia feels no different from a woman at any other time in the last one-hundred years. She cares a lot about her job as an ad-woman (she even, like Peggy Olson decades later, gets a secretary of her own), despairs of ever finding a man she’ll like enough to stick with, feels disconnected from her stuffy New England family, and even gets an abortion. That Parrott could write about these experiences so candidly in 1929, and find such a large audience, speaks to how much readers understood at the time about the reality of sex and relationships.
The Fraud, Zadie Smith
I was beside myself with glee when I first learned that Zadie Smith’s next novel would be set in my beloved Victorian era, and specifically feature fictionalizations of authors of the period — chiefly, the hack writer William Harrison Ainsworth, but also Charles Dickens. My excitement was justified when I read the novel itself, a bravura recreation of the mid-nineteenth century in London as seen through the eyes of Eliza Touchet, the widowed cousin of Ainsworth, and Andrew Bogle, a formerly enslaved Jamaican who became a public figure in the course of a fraud trial in the early 1870s. The Fraud is not a pastiche of Victorian fiction, but Smith’s mastery of the history of the period and its language, and her focus on two characters who exist in different ways on the fringes of mainstream society, offers fresh insight into what life was like for people who did not typically feature as the protagonists of Victorian novels.
Eliza, or Mrs. Touchet, is the center and most enchanting feature of The Fraud: a smart, curious, obstinate older woman who is forced to put up with all kinds of things she doesn’t like because she has neither money nor much power, but whose brain is always alert, always observing. She becomes fascinated by the Tichborne trial, in which Bogle appears as a witness, partly due to her ravenous curiosity about the rest of the world, and about human behavior. She is most curious, though, about Bogle himself, a curiosity that is both earnest and fetishistic. Smith also allows Bogle to tell his own story, in his own words, opening up the novel’s London setting into Jamaica and other parts of Europe. This shift in perspective serves to open up the Victorian novel itself: in these books, slavery at the West Indies were rarely discussed and almost never in any real depth. Certainly, formerly enslaved people were not given the privilege of a large chunk of a novel’s narrative. The Fraud rectifies this history.
Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom, Ilyon Woo
Ellen and William Craft, a married couple who were enslaved in Georgia and who occupy the center of Master Slave Husband Wife, escaped from their bonds in 1848, first to Philadelphia and eventually to England, where they (in particular, William) worked as abolitionist speakers. The entire span of their lives was remarkable — but nothing was as shocking or daring as the plan they adopted to escape slavery, in which the pale-skinned Ellen posed as a disabled young white man, and dark-skinned William as her slave.
This is the sort of story that, frankly, seems too good to be true. If you made it up, critics would probably be skeptical. But the Crafts somehow pulled it off, despite the fact that Ellen could not read (among all the other potential problems and dangers). The Crafts’ understanding and manipulation of so many subject positions — disability, race, gender — is as dizzying as their determination to be free is humbling. Ellen was related to the family that enslaved them and, by all accounts, lived a fairly comfortable life, but as she told others later, she was willing to die before she returned to Georgia, and she firmly put a stop to the press referring to her as “the white slave” on account of her pale skin. These people understood the complexities of their situation and the world in which they lived, and made shockingly brave decisions to change that situation and that world.
The New Earth, Jess Row
Part of me is surprised that The New Earth has not received more attention this year: it is an ambitious book, a fat family saga that incorporates ideas about climate change, race, nationality and the project of nationhood, Buddhism and spirituality, and Israel and Palestine, among others. (The book’s ambition, length, and headiness are all reasons why it might intimidate readers, too.) The youngest sibling of the Jewish Winter clan, Bering, volunteers at an NGO in the West Bank fifteen years before the beginning of the novel, and is killed by IDF soldiers, throwing the family into even turmoil and trauma. The Winters had not been getting along well beforehand, and in the intervening years they split apart and communicate infrequently. The family is forced back together when Winter, the middle daughter, announces her engagement to Zeno, her undocumented partner, as well as her pregnancy.
For readers willing to commit to the novel’s length and density, The New Earth is a rewarding and immense experience. I love long books, which are few and far-between these days. There is a unique pleasure and privilege in reading a book that has taken its author almost a decade to write, as in this case; the ideas are so deeply developed, the science and history so thoroughly researched. And that time allows the author to know his characters very deeply. The characters in this family are uncommonly intelligent — brilliant, even — and talky, but they feel like a family, and Row does not hesitate to delve into the deep traumas in all of their pasts that have damaged their current relationships (including, in one case, incest). By the end of the novel, some relationships have been repaired, and others remain damaged, perhaps irreparably, an acknowledgment that life cannot always be fixed, and does not always go on.
Reproduction, Louisa Hall
I happen to have read a lot of books about motherhood and childbirth this year; at first, this was an accident, and then, after I learned that two of my closest friends were pregnant, I started to seek them out. One of my favorites was Reproduction, a work of autofiction (at least partly) by Louisa Hall, which chronicles the narrator’s efforts to get pregnant, her complex miscarriages and eventual birth of a child, as well as her friendship with Anna, a genetic scientist who is tempted to edit one of her own embryos before embarking on IVF. Throughout, Hall invokes Mary Shelley and Frankenstein, an obvious inspiration for Anna’s godlike tinkering with biology.
Hall’s prose is spare and straightforward — I think if I excerpted any individual sentence, it would seem unremarkable — but that spareness allows her to write about complicated, traumatic, and verboten topics about the (biologically) female body with startling and revealing candor. Every time I read a book that includes a graphic description of childbirth, for instance, whether that book was written in the 1950s or in 2023, I feel shocked. While information about pregnancy and childbirth is much more publicly available now than it was seventy years ago, it is still seen as a private issue. Filmic depictions of childbirth, for instance, do not typically resemble the real thing, and a similar sense of decorum tends to infect fiction. Hall’s candor is bracing, and serves a political purpose (she wonders what she would do about a miscarriage that requires a dilation and cutterage in a state where abortion is now illegal) in a country increasingly hostile to pregnancy. It’s hard not to feel that Anna is acting too much like god as she edits her embryo, but in another light she’s exerting a new form of female control over the process of reproduction that is increasingly controlled by the state.
This House of Grief, Helen Garner
Like many people these days, I have a complicated relationship with true crime. Most iterations of the genre make me queasy, but I can’t deny having some fascination with real-life acts of violence or malfeasance. I suspect most people do, which no doubt explains the true crime boom and the fact that “true crime” has been a subject of fascination at least as far back as the English Renaissance, where plays were performed about prominent real-life murders.
Helen Garner’s account of the murder trial of Robert Farquharson is a rare case of an account of a crime — or, more accurately, an account of a trial — that carefully examines the criminal court system, the media response (of which Garner is a part), and the moral implications of Farquharson’s behavior as humanely as possible. Farquharson was tried for the murder of his three sons, Jai, Tyler, and Bailey, who were drowned after he drove his car into a river while they were in the car. The book is harrowing reading, partly because Garner does not attempt to censor her own emotional response to the trial, and partly because she writes about the witnesses and Farquharson himself with such acute observation. Garner is also a masterful novelist, and she draws on those skills to write this book, without pretending she can see inside the minds of the various personae involved in the case. She also does not lose sight of the fact that caused the trial in the first place: the death of three children, whose image haunts the novel’s final pages and will haunt the minds of anyone who reads this book.
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Honorable Mentions: A Guest at the Feast: Essays, Colm Tóibín; Lover Man, Alston Anderson; The Marriage Question: George Eliot’s Double Life, Clare Carlisle; Oh My Mother! A Memoir in Nine Adventures, Connie Wang; People Collide, Isle McElroy; The Rachel Incident, Caroline O’Donoghue; Siblings, Brigitte Reimann; Terrace Story, Hilary Leichter; Waiting to Be Arrested at Night: A Uyghur Poet’s Memoir of China’s Genocide, Tahir Hamut Izgil