book reviews 2023

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

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The best new books of 2023 include a little something for everyone, whether it’s the “will they or won’t they?” intensity of a romance novel or the seismic revelations of a tell-all celebrity memoir . But all-encompassing variety is just the start of what this year’s latest and greatest releases have to offer.

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.

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The 16 Best Books of 2023

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It’s hard to find something pithy to say about 2023, a year of dissonant extremes, when wildfires devoured Canadian forests , Twitter withered into X , the Titan submersible imploded into infamy, Silicon Valley’s power players rejoiced over the rise of generative AI, scientists cheered Crispr treatment breakthroughs, peace activists became terrorist-attack victims, and the world despaired over the thousands of children killed in Gaza . It’s not a tidy time. It is, frequently, a painful one.

Appropriate, then, that this was a year for unwieldy, searching, big-swing books. Doorstoppers and sagas rose to the moment, providing insight into an increasingly inscrutable world even when they couldn’t provide comfort. As always, this is an idiosyncratic, incomplete, and subjective list, the result of one person’s avid but disorganized reading schedule. But these are WIRED's best books of 2023. Here’s hoping this list helps you find your next great read.

If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more .

by Siddharth Kara

Electric is the enlightened alternative to climate-killing oil … right? Moving away from fossil fuels remains necessary, but Siddarth Kara captures a painful truth in Cobalt Red : The electric revolution has an underbelly , too. Rechargeable batteries, including those within phones and electric vehicles, are usually manufactured with cobalt, a metal plentiful in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Cobalt Red is a grim investigation into the conditions workers experience within “artisanal” cobalt mines; child labor is rampant, and death on the job is commonplace. It’s a call to arms to push companies using these batteries to clean up their supply chains, and for those of us who buy consumer devices to interrogate how they’re made and how we treat those who make them.

by Sean Michaels

Just as there was a rush of lockdown-themed novels following the first wave of Covid-19, it’s a near-certainty that readers are about to get hit with a deluge of fiction about large language models. It’s too bad, because Canadian novelist and music critic Sean Michaels has already written the definitive novel about art in the age of AI, one that incorporates machine-generated phrases and sentences in an unexpectedly moving way.

Do You Remember Being Born? follows a 75-year-old poet after she accepts an invitation to spend a week cowriting a poem with an AI trained on her work. A novel about the value of writing must clear a very high stylistic bar to succeed, and Michaels produces some of the most beautiful sentences published this year.

by Ling Ling Huang

After her mother and father are severely injured in a car accident, a piano prodigy finds work at a wellness startup called Holistik, where affluent customers indulge in gloriously weird beautifying treatments like pubic hair transplants. Natural Beauty is a delightfully baroque grotesque about wellness culture— Goopcore , if you will.

Ling Ling Huang’s debut novel can achieve a folkloric power in its creepiest moments; it’s a scary story you’d tell in a posh spa’s sauna instead of around a campfire. Recommended for anyone with mixed emotions about the rise of cosmetic Ozempic use.

by John Vaillant

The day John Vaillant’s book about Canadian wildfires came out in the US last summer, Canadian wildfires became a temporary American obsession . Skies in the northeastern United States turned orange, hazy, and hazardous as the result of more than 400 infernos in Canada’s vast boreal forests in early June. New York City’s air quality became the worst in the world, choked with smoke blown down from Quebec. Philadelphia urged residents to stay indoors. Fire weather, indeed. Great publicity, but so bleak—like releasing a history of terrorist attacks in September 2001.

Upon its release, I recommended Vaillant’s gripping account of the 2016 Fort McMurray fire as the best thing to read to understand this particular crisis, and that recommendation stands. It’s vital context for how our forests got so flammable.

by Zeke Faux

The month after Bloomberg reporter Zeke Faux’s Number Go Up came out, disgraced crypto bigwig Sam Bankman-Fried went on trial. It was good timing for Faux, as he’d opened his rollicking crypto-world travelogue with an account of meeting SBF. In fact, the opening line is a quote from Bankman-Fried: “I’m not going to lie,” SBF promises Faux. “This was a lie,” Faux writes. This accomplishes two things. First, it signals immediately to the reader that Faux gets it, that he knows Bankman-Fried was full of it. Second, it’s funny.

Number Go Up is definitely the best book to read for anyone who wants to understand what happened with SBF and FTX; I’d argue it’s also the best book to give any general-interest reader who wants to learn more about why crypto has crashed and burned.

by Rachel O’Dwyer

Irish writer Rachel O’Dwyer’s Tokens also came out shortly before the SBF trial, and it’s also an excellent book to pick up for anyone interested in crypto. It didn’t get as much attention as Number Go Up , in part because it has a more diffuse focus—O’Dwyer considers crypto as part of a larger movement into tokenized payment, including Twitch bits (the virtual goods used to reward Twitch streamers) and Axie Infinity’s doomed “Axie” NFTs. It’s an important addition to the growing blockchain canon, written with wit and generosity.

by Jackson Lears

Animal Spirits is a hard book to summarize without making it sound boring or esoteric—it’s an examination of American vitalist beliefs, ranging from philosophies promoted by self-help literature to Adam Smith’s invisible hand of the market—but it’s fascinating, broadly relevant, and yet another book you should read to grasp all the finance world madness of the past decade.

This gorgeously written cultural history isn’t about cryptocurrency at all—I don’t think historian Jackson Lears mentions it once in a nearly 400-page book—and yet I found myself returning to Animal Spirits repeatedly this year while watching the crypto world convulse, because it distills the psychology driving boom-and-bust cycles in tech and finance better than anything else.

by Nathan Hill

The opposite of a “slim volume,” Nathan Hill’s second novel is a brash, shaggy, and warm-blooded love note to Gen X. (And a gentle satire of internet culture: Downloaded porn, fitness wearables, and Facebook radicalization all figure prominently into the plot.)

Wellness is also an old-fashioned, occasionally overstuffed throwback of a book. Over 600 pages long, it centers on the love story of Jack and Elizabeth, two artsy students in 1990s Chicago who settle down together and find themselves straining toward happiness in middle age. Long live the social novel!

by Naomi Klein

You know Naomi Klein, right? Leftist journalist? Climate activist? Decidedly not the former liberal feminist writer turned conspiracy theorist Naomi Wolf? Somehow, people confuse the two Naomis. Klein gets mixed up with Wolf so much, in fact, a Twitter mnemonic was born: “If the Naomi be Klein you’re doing just fine / If the Naomi be Wolf, oh, buddy. Ooooof.”

Thus the basis of Klein’s new book, Doppelganger . Writing hundreds of pages based on Twitter discourse is, of course, a questionable choice. As she is quick to point out, though, Doppelganger is not really about Wolf. She’s merely an entry point to dissect the “intellectual and ideological mayhem” of the Covid era. How wellness entrepreneurs demonize medicine. How the far right appropriates and warps leftist talking points. How parents see their children as reflections of themselves. In all this, Klein writes, there’s a new doubling going on—distortions of what used to be more straightforward realities. It’s a wholly vital work, one only Klein could write.

by Yepoka Yeebo

Try as we might to move past it, we’re still living through the golden age of grifters, so Anansi’s Gold is another timely read for 2023. Reporter Yepoka Yeebo unravels the riveting tale of big-time conman John Ackah Blay-Miezah, an audacious, globe-trotting Ghanaian who convinced investors from Philadelphia to Accra that he could access a gold fortune allegedly lost by Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah.

Yeebo pulls off something near-magical here. She excavates an overlooked historical narrative as juicy as any true-crime blockbuster, where every detail is both fastidiously researched and completely over-the-top—one of Blay-Miezah’s major adversaries in his quest to scam? Former child star Shirley Temple Black, of course!—while also conveying how the colonial system nurtured and turbo-charged this dysfunction.

by Kashmir Hill

I dare you to read this alternately amusing and horrifying account of the rise of an oddball startup selling the world’s most powerful facial recognition tools without, at least one time, putting it down to google how to move to a remote location without Wi-Fi.

Shortly after starting a new job at The New York Times , longtime privacy reporter Kashmir Hill got a tip about Clearview AI , a tiny company that had quietly scraped photos from the internet to become a Shazam for people. In addition to providing the fullest account of how this company’s tech is used to undermine our privacy, Your Face Belongs to Us is also a finely-drawn portrait of the type of people who would sell this type of product, especially founder Hoan Ton-That , an intelligent misfit who seems driven more by personal insecurities than any genuine ideological commitments.

by C. E. McGill

I was not expecting to love this book so much. It seemed like it could be a Pride and Prejudice and Zombies -ish cash grab, trading on the enduring popularity of Frankenstein . (It is billed as an update and sequel of sorts to Mary Shelley’s classic.) It’s not. Our Hideous Progeny might start as a Frankenstein spinoff, following Victor Frankenstein’s grand-niece in 1850s London, but then it pivots into something that could reasonably be described as “bizarro queer feminist prequel to Jurassic Park .”

This is cozy horror perfected, the literary equivalent of spending a weekend storm-watching in a leaky castle in northern Scotland.

by Lexi Freiman

“Cancel culture satire” might be the most cursed phrase in the English language, but somehow Lexi Freiman wrote a cancel culture satire and it’s funny and tough and generous without ever being sentimental.

The Book of Ayn follows Anna, a horny contrarian novelist who gets ostracized by her lit-world pals after writing a poorly-received comic novel about the opioid crisis and subsequently becomes obsessed with Ayn Rand, then moves to a commune to destroy her ego. A meaner writer might’ve let Anna sour into a full-blown villain, but Freiman turns her into something more interesting: a narcissistic millennial writer character who defies cliche and always feels human.

by Antony Loewenstein

What does the Jeff-Bezos-phone-hacking incident have to do with the plight of the Palestinians? Australian-German journalist Antony Loewenstein connects the dots in this compelling, horrifying investigation. The Palestine Laboratory provides crucial context about the Israel–Hamas war , and the reality of life in the occupied Palestinian territories prior to October 7. Loewenstein examines how Israel tests weapons and surveillance technology on Palestinians living in Gaza and the West Bank, then sells these tools and services to other countries—including places like Saudi Arabia, which has used spyware from Israel’s NSO Group.

by Malcolm Harris

If you knew anything about Malcolm Harris before picking up Palo Alto , you’d probably guess that Palo Alto isn’t a starry-eyed hagiography of the region. Harris is one of the most widely-published left-wing journalists today, and he’s upfront about how repulsive he finds the tech oligarchy nurtured in his northern California hometown. But don’t mistake Palo Alto for a polemic: It’s a panoramic, deeply researched, and fundamentally truth-seeking history, one that brings even its most repugnant characters—Leland Stanford, Herbert Hoover—to three-dimensional life.

Required reading for anyone interested in the technology industry, Silicon Valley psychology, the development of photography, or American history.

by Brian Merchant

There’s no shortage of interesting nonfiction out right now about artificial intelligence and how it will change the world, our lives, the future, and more. But the most important book to read about the AI boom is about a completely different technological revolution, way back in the early 19th century.

Los Angeles Times technology columnist Brian Merchant’s Blood in the Machine is a spirited and thoughtful recounting of the Luddite uprising in response to the Industrial Revolution, one that draws parallel after parallel to the present. Read it and prepare to understand the current moment better. Also prepare to quell the urge to pick up a hammer.

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40 Most Anticipated Books of 2023

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Well plotted, well written, and well designed to make its points. Full review >

MARCH 7, 2023

by Eleanor Catton

This blistering look at the horrors of late capitalism manages to also be a wildly fun read. Full review >

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by Elizabeth McKenzie

McKenzie has created a wonderful addition to the crew of damaged characters beloved by readers, so very endearing and real. Full review >

by Rick Rubin

Learn, do, have fun: terrific encouragement for anyone embarking on a creative project, no matter what it might be. Full review >

by Tracy Kidder

A searching, troubling look at the terrible actualities of homelessness. Full review >

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An elegant and timely book. Full review >

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The Best Books of 2023 So Far

These are independent reviews of the products mentioned, but TIME receives a commission when purchases are made through affiliate links at no additional cost to the purchaser.

The best books of the year so far serve as a great reminder to always question the stories we hear. Where do they come from? And who gets to tell them? When we deconstruct history and look at its pieces in a new light, as many of these books do, we see things differently. In his page-turning new biography of Martin Luther King Jr. , Jonathan Eig provides an illuminating window into the activist’s emotional core . In Dyscalculia , Camonghne Felix reconsiders her romantic past to better understand her relationship with love. And in Biography of X , Catherine Lacey reveals how easily the ideas we hold as truths can fall apart through her protagonist’s quest to learn about her wife’s mysterious past. Here, the best books of the year so far.

A Living Remedy , Nicole Chung

In her first memoir, TIME contributor Nicole Chung described her experience growing up as a Korean American adoptee in a predominantly white town. Her follow-up, A Living Remedy , continues her exploration into identity, this time focusing on her grief after losing both of her parents. Chung’s father died of diabetes and kidney disease in 2018. Then, less than a year later, her mother is diagnosed with cancer and later dies during the COVID-19 pandemic. As Chung wrestles with these overwhelming losses in A Living Remedy , she dissects the inequities inherent to American society by recounting the challenges her parents faced in accessing medical care. The result is a moving portrait of a daughter reckoning with her place in a broken world—and making sense of life without her parents in it.

Buy Now : A Living Remedy on Bookshop | Amazon

King: A Life , Jonathan Eig

Jonathan Eig’s book on Martin Luther King Jr. is the first biography of the civil rights icon in decades. It’s a refreshing portrait of King, offering an intimate look inside the life of a man whose massive contributions to American history are known but whose emotional complexities are less so. Eig digs into everything—King’s family origins, his relationship with his wife, the pressures he faced from being so influential so early in his career—to create a portrait of the late activist that captures the dynamic and flawed human that he was. It’s a deftly researched and highly accessible account of a leader, and a new view into the many overlooked parts of King’s story.

Buy Now : King on Bookshop | Amazon

Our Share of Night , Mariana Enriquez

Spanning multiple decades, Argentine author Mariana Enriquez’s weird and wonderful novel, newly translated into English by Megan McDowell, doesn’t fit into just one genre. Oscillating seamlessly between historical fiction and supernatural horror, Our Share of Night centers on Juan and Gaspar, a father and son who are grieving Rosario, the wife and mother they just lost in a car accident. Complicating things is the fact that they are also on the run from the ruthless cult from which Rosario descends. Better known as the Order, the cult will do just about anything to achieve immortality, and Gaspar has developed powers that would make him a valuable asset. Set against a comprehensive backdrop of Argentine history, Our Share of Night offers an absorbing window into a terrifying, fantastical world.

Buy Now : Our Share of Night on Bookshop | Amazon

Dyscalculia , Camonghne Felix

In her debut memoir, poet Camonghne Felix details how a devastating breakup propels her into deep despair, forcing her to confront lingering childhood trauma and struggles with her mental health. Throughout, she returns to the learning disorder she faced as a child, “dyscalculia,” which made it difficult for her to understand math. In holding her dissolved relationship to the light, Felix wonders about the miscalculations she’s made when it comes to love. Her memoir is a striking meditation on pain, heartbreak, and what it takes to truly heal.

Buy Now : Dyscalculia on Bookshop | Amazon

The Wager , David Grann

In 1740, a British vessel called His Majesty’s Ship the Wager departed England on a mission to capture a Spanish galleon. But the Wager wrecked near the coast of Patagonia, and those who survived endured months of starvation and hardship. At least, that’s what the 30 sailors who made it out alive explained when they eventually arrived in Brazil. But months later, when a trio of castaways from another ship land in the same spot, they share a very different version of the events that took place in Patagonia. David Grann, author of Killers of the Flower Moon and The Lost City of Z , peels back the layers of a complex maritime drama in a masterfully drawn work of narrative nonfiction.

Buy Now : The Wager on Bookshop | Amazon

This Other Eden , Paul Harding

Inspired by real-life events that took place on Maine’s Malaga Island, one of the first racially integrated communities in the Northeast, Pulitzer Prize winner Paul Harding tells a grueling tale of isolation and injustice. In 1792, a formerly enslaved man and his Irish wife first arrived on the fictional Apple Island. More than a century later, the couple’s descendants are still there, and while their lives aren’t easy, they are at least far from the dangers happening inland. But any measure of peace they’ve secured is upturned by the presence of a missionary. The residents face eviction—and the threat of being institutionalized on the mainland. Harding follows a cast of characters through this horrifying upheaval as they grapple with what it means to belong.

Buy Now : This Other Eden on Bookshop | Amazon

The Half Known Life , Pico Iyer

Does paradise really exist? The question is at the center of Pico Iyer’s dazzling new work of nonfiction, which examines the many ways different cultures search for purposeful existence, and the paradoxical struggle for peace in a violent and fractured world. From Japan’s mountain temples to the streets of Belfast, Iyer wonders where utopia begins and how we can access it. In doing so, he suggests that paradise may not be a destination, but instead a journey.

Buy Now : The Half Known Life on Bookshop | Amazon

Greek Lessons , Han Kang

After losing her mother and custody of her son, the unnamed narrator of Han Kang’s stirring novel, newly translated into English by Deborah Smith and Emily Yae Won, decides to learn a new language. Then, one day while in her Greek class, she attempts to say something, but no words come out. Her voice is gone. In the same moment, across the room, her teacher is facing a battle against his depreciating vision. As the two bond over their puzzling sensory losses, they form an intense connection. Kang captures their relationship—and the relationships they both have with language and love—in quietly beautiful detail.

Buy Now : Greek Lessons on Bookshop | Amazon

Biography of X , Catherine Lacey

X is one of the most iconic and prolific artists and writers of the 20th century. The world is familiar with her work as a creative visionary—though no one, not even her wife, knows her real name or where she was born. After X suddenly dies, her wife, CM, decides she’s overdue to learn that information, and attempts to find answers to the questions that have been haunting her. X is a fictional character, but Catherine Lacey’s propulsive and kaleidoscopic novel makes her story feel plausible, piecing together the character’s life with an engrossing alternate history of the United States that’s full of references to real-life artists and writers. As CM uncovers more of X’s delectably illustrated past, Lacey unfurls a wholly original celebration of art, identity, and grief.

Buy Now : Biography of X on Bookshop | Amazon

Lone Women , Victor LaValle

It’s 1915 and mystery is swirling around Adelaide Henry, the daughter of Black farmers in California. When Victor LaValle introduces the character in his bruising fifth novel, she’s just set her family’s home ablaze. She’s on her way to Montana as a homesteader to collect on the promise of free land being offered by the government to “lone women” who are able to make it habitable. As Adelaide makes the trek, she brings with her a large trunk containing a secret that threatens to upend her life. Blending magical realism, history, and suspense, LaValle unravels a startling narrative about a woman running away from her troubled past and the horrors she faces as she tries to forge a better future.

Buy Now : Lone Women on Bookshop | Amazon

After Sappho , Selby Wynn Schwartz

Longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize and published in the U.S. this January, After Sappho is a tale of creativity, desire, and sexuality. Though it’s technically a novel, to categorize it as such would undermine Selby Wynn Schwartz’s thrilling reimagination of history and literary criticism, which culminates in a work of fiction that is deeply rooted in reality. In the book, Schwartz revisits the lives of groundbreaking early 20th-century feminists, from writers to actors to dancers, to explore the challenges they faced as queer artists with great contributions to make to the world. Schwartz weaves a tapestry of their voices to create a timeless yet timely narrative.

Buy Now : After Sappho on Bookshop | Amazon

The Covenant of Water , Abraham Verghese

Abraham Verghese, the best-selling author of the 2009 novel Cutting for Stone , returns with another epic tale, this time focusing on the fate of a cursed family in southern India. The Covenant of Water begins in 1900 as a 12-year-old girl marries a 40-year-old widower with a young son. Some years after their wedding, the girl discovers her husband’s son drowned in a ditch. It’s a cruel suffering that the family can’t seem to shake—they keep losing more of their own to the same fate—and they become determined to figure out the source of this strange affliction. Verghese follows the family over the course of nearly 80 years in this powerful and sweeping story about love, loss, and the strength of the human spirit.

Buy Now : The Covenant of Water on Bookshop | Amazon

Y/N , Esther Yi

The unnamed narrator of Esther Yi’s electric debut novel is obsessed with a K-pop idol named Moon. Bored with her life in Berlin, the narrator writes fan fiction about Moon, describing an imagined relationship with one of the most famous musicians in the world. Then the lines of reality start to blur: as the protagonist of her stories travels to Seoul to be with Moon, the narrator decides to make the journey, too. Yi weaves these threads together in sharp prose, offering an inventive novel about the strange and surprising stakes of worshiping a pop idol.

Buy Now : Y/N on Bookshop | Amazon

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• Nicola Coughlan Bet on Herself—And Won
• What Kind of President Would Kamala Harris Be?
• Is Adrenal Fatigue Real?
• Why It's So Hard to Quit Vaping
• Our Guide to Voting in the 2024 Election
• The 10 Races That Will Determine Control of the Senate
• Column: How My Shame Became My Strength
• Meet TIME's Newest Class of Next Generation Leaders

Write to Annabel Gutterman at [email protected]

The Must-Read Books of 2023

Fiction and non-fiction reads coming your way.

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Dedicated bookworms already know, there's just nothing like getting lost in a good book. Whether you're the type who loves to walk in someone else's shoes through a well-penned memoir (including one by everyone's favorite early aughts pop star), scare yourself silly with a page-turning mystery or thriller , get all hot and bothered with a juicy new romance novel , hold your breath through the twisty turns in an exciting suspense, learn something about the past via historical fiction or explore new worlds through sci-fi or speculative fiction , there's bound to be something you'll love in this list of the best new books of 2023 . Established favorites like Nicole Chung and Maggie Smith are back at it with breathtaking new work, and we've got a whole array of debut authors stand ready to capture your hearts.

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 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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What Book Should You Read Next?

Finding a book you’ll love can be daunting. Let us help.

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By The New York Times Books Staff

• Published April 16, 2023 Updated Sept. 4, 2024

Fiction | Nonfiction

For more recommendations, subscribe to our Read Like the Wind newsletter, check out our romance columnist’s favorite books of the year so far or visit our What to Read page.

At The New York Times Book Review, we write about thousands of books every year. Many of them are good. Some are even great. But we get that sometimes you just want to know, “What should I read that is good or great for me ? Well, here you go — a running list of some of the year’s best, most interesting, most talked-about books.

Give me a ferocious drama about family and art

The Hypocrite , by Jo Hamya

On an August afternoon in 2020, an aging British author arrives at a London theater to watch his daughter’s latest play — only to learn it’s a thinly veiled fictionalization of an argument they had on a Sicilian holiday years earlier. This sharp and agile novel is an art monster story and a dysfunctional family saga that explores the ethics of creating work inspired by real life. (Join the discussion of the book in the Book Review Book Club .)

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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 best new books released in 2023, as selected by avid readers and critics

Topic: Books (Literature)

From Booker winners to debuts, here are our critics' picks of this best books of 2023. ( ABC Arts: Luke Tribe )

It may feel like a long time ago, now that we've reached the halcyon days of the festive season, but August was a big month for books.

Four of the books deemed the best of the year were released in that chilly month — perhaps it's a coincidence, perhaps it was a balm for our seasonal depression. Either way, our critics were here for it.

Among them are this year's Booker Prize winner but also a debut short story collection, which is a perfect demonstration of the breadth of books that took the fancy of Kate Evans, Claire Nichols, Sarah L'Estrange, Declan Fry and Cher Tan this year.

The books that captured them most over the past year take us everywhere from Trinidad in the 40s to the politics of the heavy metal scene, a futuristic (but disturbingly familiar) reality TV show and into the mind of a kind-of ghost from 19th century France.

So, as you sit back and contemplate the year that was (almost), these are the books we recommend you take with you.

Hungry Ghosts by Kevin Jared Hosein

"The hungry ghost, or preta, is a figure in ancient Hindu mythology … an incarnation of a person whose funeral rites have not been performed," Hosein told Sydney Writers' Festival. ( Supplied: Bloomsbury )

In 40s Trinidad, a rich farmer has disappeared. His glamorous wife, Marlee Changoor, has received a ransom note. But she has no intention of paying. She is finally free.

In Hungry Ghosts, Kevin Jarad Hosein introduces us to an unforgettable cast of complex people. There's Marlee and her employee Hansraj, who she pays to work as a night watchman in her husband's absence. There's Hansraj's disconnected wife Shweta and their angry son, Krishna, living in poverty in the nearby "barrack", crammed into a single room and dreaming of a better life.

With several other families packed into the crumbling barrack house, privacy is non-existent. They hear each other's arguments; they smell each other's vomit. And, as readers, we are also asked to pay attention. Grief, sex and violence are described in unflinching detail.

Hungry Ghosts is a rich and rewarding read, packed with characters you'll love one minute, and be appalled by the next. It's an incredible debut.

— Claire Nichols

Hungry Ghosts appeared in our Best Books of February , check out the full review and other great books from that month here . 

Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton

Catton became the youngest ever recipient of the Booker Prize when she won the award in 2013 at age 28 for The Luminaries. ( Supplied: Allen & Unwin )

Birnam Wood takes its name from a forest in Shakespeare's Macbeth, and most readers know that if a story is connected to this tragedy about a Scottish king's downfall, it's not going to be all lollipops and rainbows.

Indeed, Eleanor Catton's follow up to her Booker-winning novel The Luminaries is a fast-paced thriller, and is part of a growing literary trope that we on The Book Show call "bunker and billionaire" fiction.

In the novel, Birnam Wood is the name of a New Zealand guerilla gardening collective, led by the idealistic and driven Mira Bunting. She leads the group to a tract of seemingly abandoned farmland to rehabilitate the property. There she encounters the enigmatic American billionaire Robert Lemoine, who has his own plans for the property (cue the bunker trope).

Read on to find out who will be the victor in this murky battle of ideals versus capitalism.

— Sarah L'Estrange

Birnam Wood appeared in our Best Books of March , read the full review and see other great books from that month here .

Tomás Nevinson by Javier Marías

Hamish Hamilton

One of Spain's most celebrated novelists, Marías published 15 novels and won a slew of awards during his literary career. ( Supplied )

The final novel from Spanish novelist Javier Marías, who passed away late last year, offers a catnip-ready premise for spy/thriller fans: coaxed out of retirement to complete one last job, Tomás Nevinson — a half-English, half-Spanish spy — searches for the woman involved in a series of real-life terrorist attacks launched by Basque separatists in Spain.

The novel begins with Nevinson reflecting on the idea of killing Hitler before his rise to power — citing two examples, one fictional, one real — as a way of examining moral philosophy's trolley problem: can death ever be justified if it means preventing greater destruction? (Around the time the novel is set, Bill Clinton was finalising the Good Friday Agreement and losing opportunities to capture or kill Osama bin Laden, fearing collateral damage. Of course, no one knew 9/11 was around the corner.)

Tomás Nevinson offers a reflection on the historical antipathies and the relationship between peoples and nations. From the sorrows of Sarajevo and Rwanda, to Hamas and Israel currently caught in a war of incalculable carnage, Marías asks a perennial question: Where does enmity end?

Nevinson — described by his handlers as an "interpreter of lives" — gives Marías an opportunity to reflect on language, identity and the intractable limitations upon how much we can ever really know of ourselves or the world.

As in much of Marías' work, the writing moves with hypnotic grace. (And recommends itself to being read aloud: check out Ben Cura's wonderful audio recording.) The result is an ample display of Marías' many and various gifts, including a deft sense of humour and his agile ability to turn an aphorism ("You only have to introduce a little truth into a lie for the lie to seem not just credible, but irrefutable.")

Tomás Nevinson also represents a final chapter for one of the great translating partnerships of our time. Thanks to Margaret Jull Costa, anglophone readers may continue to read and reread nearly everything Marías has published since the 80s.

— Declan Fry

Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad

Grove Atlantic

Hammad featured in Granta's 2023 list of Best of Young British Novelists. ( Supplied: Grove Atlantic )

The setting of Enter Ghost is one of colonial occupation and constant unease. Yet things are still required to continue.

It is in these circumstances that Sonia, Isabella Hammad's Palestinian British thespian protagonist, goes to visit her sister in Haifa. There, amid some devastating discoveries, she ends up reconnecting with Mariam, an old family friend, and is reluctantly roped into an Arabic stage adaptation of Hamlet in the West Bank.

Hammad's prose is precise. The world she writes has a dialectical feeling to it — an oozing disquiet is present throughout, even if there are small moments of joy. The Palestinian Hamlet actors turn up late for rehearsals when they encounter Israeli checkpoints that needlessly detain them on account of their identity. In one particularly acute scene, Mariam asks the actor playing Hamlet, Wael, to simulate an altercation with an Israeli soldier to bring out the character's aggression. We're left to interpret how that feels.

Enter Ghost is the rare kind of novel that seeks to reconcile aesthetic and political aims. It is a metafictional narrative of Palestinian resistance and love.

Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

Harvill Secker

"I wanted it to be impossible to divorce the action of the book with the real life implications of the carceral state," Adjei-Brenyah told ABC RN's Big Weekend of Books. ( Supplied: Penguin Australia )

There's a new show in town, and it's as bloody as hell. Swinging machetes, chains, axes, knives … and tight, tight close-ups — because this is reality TV on steroids.

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah creates an America in which prisoners might be pardoned — if they agree to fight to the death in techno-filled arenas, while every aspect of their lives is broadcast with the roar and swirl of publicity, music and fanfare.

It's WWE wrestling with real red stuff and extra politics; it's adrenaline to the max; it's heart-pounding commentary.

This is a future fantasy world that is also now. Overwhelmingly, the prisoners fighting for their lives and freedom are black or people of colour. They work together in a group — chains — that reference the history of slavery and racialised incarceration. Speaking out, silencing, resistance, rebellion: it's all there, too.

This is a novel with a thumping pace and plenty of complicated narratives that build and intertwine and come together in a breathless crescendo.

The two women at the heart of it, warriors both, are allies and lovers — but we know they'll end up in the arena together. And the man whose mind has been shattered by surveillance and enforced silence will have a part to play too, won't he?

And what about the viewers/the readers, where do we stand? Adjei-Brenyah makes sure that our position is interrogated, too.

— Kate Evans

Chain-Gang All-Stars appeared in our Best Books of June , check out the full review and other great books from that month here .

Tonight It's a World We Bury by Bill Peel 

Repeater Books

Peel started out writing album reviews for metal website Kill Your Stereo. ( Supplied: Repeater Books )

It's almost cursory to associate the black metal genre with the far right. Although it first began as a clarion call against Christianity, the scene became co-opted by figures such as Varg Vikernes and Faust, from whom proliferated right-wing views alongside bands who categorise themselves under the "NSBM" (national socialist black metal) umbrella.

But, as Bill Peel argues in Tonight It's a World We Bury, the genre is ripe for rehabilitation, particularly in this fractious era, to create a scene that holds Marxism as a value system as well as one of its political aims.

Peel's knowledge of the genre is vast. In this way — alongside close readings of philosophers like Mark Fisher and Byung-Chul Han — he manages to tell a compelling story of its past missteps, while also pointing out the bands who are bucking the status quo, preferring instead to visibly align themselves with the left.

What makes this book especially appealing is that, unlike many punters and thinkers of subcultural worlds, Peel doesn't revel in nostalgia.

Instead, he looks forward to possibilities yet unrealised, what could be further imagined. That in itself is part of a communist-minded paradigm — as Marx himself has written: "Reason cannot blossom without hope; hope cannot speak without reason".

Soldier Sailor by Claire Kilroy

"You feel trapped as a mother because you are," Kilroy told The Times in the UK. ( Supplied: Allen & Unwin )

Irish writer Claire Kilroy's novel blazes and shines with exhaustion, fury, love and resentment. In it, a woman (Soldier) addresses her baby son (Sailor) with all the weariness and heightened sensibility of someone at the end of their tether. And her tether is more like a frayed, gnawed rope.

Amid resentment of her husband, the humiliation of pram and doorway and buckles and supermarket tears, she is funny and ferocious and battling on and on.

Her writing takes us into the joy and the drag of her body: "My old enemy, the stairs."

Kilroy doesn't overplay the military language of her Soldier and Sailor — it's lighter, more flexible, vernacular.

There's an industrial hum throughout the book as well. Something's coming down the line, on tracks that thrum with power — and her language sparks and is polished with all the energy of life's machinery.

This is a novel where the plot is apparently about the commonplace — just getting through the first few years of a child's life — but she soaks it with tension and beauty and rage and movement and humour, so it's impossible to look away, and impossible to forget.

Soldier Sailor appeared in our Best Books of August , check out the full review and other great books from that month here .

Prophet Song by Paul Lynch

"Characters are rarely a choice for me. They step out of the darkness and demand to be written," Lynch told The Booker Prizes. ( Supplied: Simon & Schuster )

When I first read Prophet Song as one of the six 2023 Booker Prize shortlisted novels, I immediately knew it would win — and indeed it did .

The fifth novel by Irish writer Paul Lynch, it's set in a dystopian Ireland where a populist government has taken control and civil liberties are diminishing by the day. It is lyrical and electrifying, but this novel struck me because of its focus on the domestic rather than the militaristic or political.

Zeroing in on Eilish Stack — a microbiologist with four children and a husband who's been disappeared by the new regime — Prophet Song chronicles her efforts to hold her family together in the face of forces beyond her control. She's implored to escape the encroaching violence but, for Eilish, this prospect is akin to "tearing off your feet".

Paul Lynch told ABC RN's The Book Show that his purpose as a writer was to "get as close to myth" as possible, and in this novel he might just have achieved this coveted goal.

— Sarah L'Estrange

Prophet Song appeared in our Best Books of August , check out the full review and other great books from that month here .

Firelight by John Morrissey

Morrissey is a Melbourne writer of Kalkadoon descent whose work has been published in Overland, Voiceworks and Meanjin. ( Supplied: Text Publishing )

This debut collection of short fiction from John Morrissey offers a sly, teasing narrative voice, elegantly staged dialogue and an eye for the absurdities and indignities of contemporary life.

At times recalling Will Self — both authors share a droll narrative voice, interest in office space and alternative timelines, fabulist narrative and colonisation — there are a number of highlights throughout the collection.

Autoc, a tale of future "alien" contact, invites the reader into all manner of sinister magic: the atmosphere of the 19th-century macabre, the question of imperialism, and an unnerving dreamlike atmosphere reminiscent of the lecture hall scene in Dario Argento's Inferno. Five Minutes is a beautifully executed metafiction examining familial angst, bureaucracy and the probable outcomes of a giant centipede attack. Ivy mixes urban ennui with slacker wit, gradually transforming into a meditation on rapture.

Much of the wonder of these stories lies in their suggestiveness. Morrissey is capable of relating the bizarre with lucidity and a calmly sardonic touch. The narratives are elusive yet vividly realised, leaving their endings and implications to the reader's imagination.

They could be described as speculative fiction but, in truth, they are more firmly anchored to that genre's underlying fabric: ourselves, and our inescapable strangeness.

Tom Lake by Ann Patchett

Actor Meryl Streep narrates the audio version of Tom Lake. ( Supplied: Bloomsbury )

My copy of Tom Lake is looking increasingly worse-for-wear. Ann Patchett's ninth novel, with its green-blue floral cover, has been borrowed by my ABC colleagues over and over again since its July release.

The popularity makes sense. This is a book about summer love, cherry orchards and family ties, beautifully written by one of America's best-loved writers. It's a big warm hug of a book, with just enough bite to stop it drowning in sweetness.

Tom Lake is the name of a summer stock theatre, where our narrator Lara spent a season as a 20-something actress. It was there that she fell in love with Peter Duke — a magnetic, passionate actor who would go on to become a Hollywood star.

It's no spoiler to say that the romance was short-lived. Lara tells the story years later, as she and her three adult daughters pick cherries on the family farm. Lara didn't make it as an actress, and she married someone else. Her life is quiet, and quietly miraculous.

It's in this quiet contentment that Patchett does something revelatory. Tom Lake celebrates the joy that can be found in an ordinary, imperfect life. And isn't that something we can all aspire to?

Tom Lake appeared in our Best Books of August , check out the full review and other great books from that month here .

The Sitter by Angela O'Keeffe

O'Keeffe first encountered Cezanne's portraits of Hortense in 2017. "I was struck by her deceptively empty gaze, and how such a gaze is actually filled with possibility." ( Supplied: UQP )

The Sitter is the second novel by Australian author Angela O'Keeffe that takes the art world as its subject to dazzling effect. The first, Night Blue, anthropomorphised Jackson Pollock's famous painting Blue Poles, so don't expect a straight narrative in this new book.

The Sitter is an inventive conjuring of the post-Impressionist French artist Paul Cezanne's wife and model, Hortense Cezanne.

It's not, however, a straightforward re-writing of her life; instead, long dead Hortense appears as a presence in the French hotel room of an Australian writer who's researching her life for a novel. Hortense is not a ghost. In fact, the best way to think of this presence is as the manifestation of the writer's obsession.

This book is so exciting because Hortense becomes the observer of the writer rather than the perennially observed artist's subject. It's a slender, satisfying read that will send you to the paintings featuring Hortense and lead you to wonder what she's thinking as she looks out from the canvas.

Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood

Allen & Unwin

Wood told ABC RN's The Book Show that Stone Yard Devotional was the "deepest book" she's written. ( Supplied: Allen & Unwin )

Grief can linger in your bones or pare you right back to them. Bare, skeletal, stony. Rattling around inside the noise of a busy life.

Accomplished and assured writer Charlotte Wood (The Natural Way of Things, The Weekend, many more) has taken that lonely sound and placed it inside her unnamed narrator — a woman who is searching for respite and heads to a nunnery and retreat in regional New South Wales.

She is not herself religious, and while she's longing for some sort of reflective space, she's scratchy with irritation at the rituals and bad food and seemingly pointless gliding about of the other women. Her irritation is itself a pleasure — funny, eye-rolling, cutting through any earnest piousness as we sink into her inner world.

There's plenty of outer world to be going on with, too: a murder; a celebrity nun; ferocious and difficult memories; sharply worded encounters with this community of nuns — and a mouse plague.

This mouse plague takes those bones of grief and plunges our hero — and us, as readers — back into the body. You can feel the curve of a foot as it encounters a small furry body in a shoe (gah!), or the horrifying wiggle in the small of her back as she gets into a car and then launches out of it again, an entire enmeshed cushion of small bodies writhing against our imagination.

Fine, intelligent writing.

— Kate Evans

Stone Yard Devotional appeared in our Best Books of October , check out the full review and other great books from that month here .

Alien Daughters Walk Into the Sun by Jackie Wang 

Semiotext(e)

"I liked the process of metabolising subjective experiences through writing," Wang told Another Magazine. ( Supplied: Semiotext(e) )

Many may know Jackie Wang as the author of Carceral Capitalism (2018), an incisive examination into contemporary incarceration techniques. Few may know of her beginnings as a punky zine writer — her 2009 personal zine On Being Hard Femme provided a fun and expansive provocation on gender that I still stand by today. So I was pleasantly surprised to discover that zine, as well as other early writings, have been collected into something Wang refers to as "an almanac of extreme girlhood".

In the introduction Wang laments her assimilation into so-called respectable institutions: "I no longer know how to live as though the impossible were possible. I only know what I'm supposed to do to lead a successful life. I have a PhD from Harvard now. I put money away into a retirement account while I write from the comfort of a tenure-track job."

Within this volume of collected writing — nudged on by her friend, the poet Bhanu Kapil — is a kind of double-edgedness: while it grieves the loss of a more carefree, reckless and ultimately naïve time (it can also be said that this loss is engendered by how capital has completely permeated our lives), it's similarly a guidebook to possible existences. It's Proust's "retrospective illumination" put into practice.

Alien Daughters Walk into the Sun appeared in our Best Books of November , check out the full review and other great books from that month here .

Women and Children by Tony Birch

In 2017, Birch became the first Indigenous writer to be awarded the Patrick White Award. ( Supplied: UQP )

It might sound strange to describe a novel centred on violence as "tender". But that's certainly the case with Tony Birch's stunning fifth novel.

The book is set in 1965. Eleven-year-old Joe Cluny lives with his mum, Marion, and his sister, Ruby, in a safe and loving home. He's getting into trouble at his Catholic school and spending long days with his beloved grandfather, Charlie.

Then one night, violence arrives on the family's doorstep. Joe's aunt, Oona, is bruised and bleeding, after being beaten by her partner. And while the wider community has learned to look away from domestic violence — Ruby, while leading her beaten aunt through the street, observes that Oona has become an "invisible woman" — the Cluny family will confront it.

The tenderness is found in a series of small, perfect moments: Joe and Charlie sharing a buttery bacon sandwich; Ruby cleaning her aunt's bruised body. Birch's prose is clear-eyed and unpretentious, taking readers right to the heart of the story. And what a heart it is.

Women and Children appeared in our Best Books of November , check out the full review and other great books from that month here .

What I Saw, Heard, Learned by Giorgio Agamben

Agamben gained notoriety for his criticism of the responses of the United States to 9/11 and the Italian government to the COVID-19 pandemic. ( Supplied: University of Chicago Press )

Italy's foremost philosopher, Giorgio Agamben, was a friend and collaborator of everyone from Pier Paolo Pasolini and Italo Calvino to Ingeborg Bachmann and Jacques Derrida.

This year, Seagull Books (publishers of great work like Hélène Cixous' Well-Kept Ruins, and Hussein Barghouthi's Among the Almond Trees) offered their latest title from the 81-year-old.

What I Saw, Heard, Learned is a series of startling, wise and often beautiful aphorisms and reflections. One chapter reads: "What water taught me: delight, when our foot no longer finds its hold and our body almost unwillingly gives in and swims." Or how about this? "Writing, I learned that happiness lies not in poetizing, but in being poetized by something or someone we cannot know."

The book is an intellectual and spiritual summa from a thinker who has meant much to many. Remarkable and thrillingly evocative, it closes with a moving account of Agamben being given a page of writing he made at the age of eight or nine by his mother, a piece that foreshadowed "the secret core of my philosophy".

Like the parables of Walter Benjamin or Zhuangzi, the memory approaches a kind of Daoist enlightenment, accepting that every work is only a failed iteration of some more fully realised ambition.

As Agamben writes, if "I really tried to cross the threshold of silence that accompanies every thought, I wouldn't have written a thing."

Tune in to ABC RN at 10am Mondays for The Book Show and 10am Saturdays for The Bookshelf .

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The Goodreads Choice Awards: The Best Books of 2023, According to Goodreads Readers

It’s that time of the year again, when the book review site Goodreads asks its users to pick the most popular books of the year. From November, readers all over the world have voted in the Goodreads Choice Awards and now the results are in.

Let’s see what the 15 th Annual Goodreads Awards says about the best books of 2023. 5,879,213 votes were cast, and these were the results:

Fiction Winner: Yellowface by R.F. Kuang

Yellowface was released this year with much fanfare. The novel follows failed author, June Heyward, as she steals the manuscript of her frenemy Athena Liu and passes off the work as her own after Liu dies in a freak pancake accident. Yellowface holds up a mirror to the publishing industry, the book community and social media.

Historical Fiction Winner & Best Debut Novel Winner: Weyward by Emilia Hart

Weyward is a historical fiction novel that follows three women across three timelines, 1619, 1842 and 2019. Jumping between the stories of these women, readers explore feminine growth, and transformative power rooted in the natural world.

Mystery/Thriller Winner: The Housemaid’s Secret by Freida McFadden

Freida McFadden beat out heavy hitters like Riley Sager and Lisa Jewell winning this year’s Goodreads Awards. The sequel to The Housemaid, this psychological thriller, follows Millie Calloway, a maid with a secret who works for wealthy clients in the Garricks, and soon finds herself caught in the middle of a web of mystery and manipulation.

Romance Winner: Happy Place by Emily Henry

Emily Henry is on a hot streak, winning her third year in a row in this category. Happy Place is her latest winning book. This adult romance follows a couple who just broke up, but doesn’t want to put a damper on the upcoming trip they have with friends.  

Romantasy Winner: Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros

Running away with this year’s votes is Rebecca Yarro’s romantasy novel, Fourth Wing. Following the story of Violet Sorrengail who becomes a dragon rider for Navarre. She must attend Basgiath War College a dangerous college for dragon riders and she must survive. Booktok took this book straight to the best-seller list and with that made it Goodreads’ Award choice for Romantasy.

Fantasy Winner: Hellbent by Leigh Bardugo

Leigh Bardugo returns to win with the sequel of Ninth House, another winner from 2019. This dark academia follows Ivy League straight to hell with its protagonist Galaxy ‘Alex’ Stern.

Science Fiction Winner: In The Lives of Puppet by TJ Klune

Goodreads readers choose TJ Klune’s new book In the Lives of Puppets as their pick for best Science Fiction. A novel about a unique family living in a hidden home nestled within a grove of trees. When a new android comes into the picture, it reveals the dark past that threatens the harmony of this family.

Horror Winner: Holly by Stephen King

In the Goodreads world King isn’t a stranger. His name is very familiar in these lists, especially as a winner. Sometimes he’s just on the list: 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, the list goes on. Sometimes it’s not even for horror. In 2018, he won twice, taking home thriller and horror. This year, he won again in horror. Holly is his newest novel about fan favourite private investigator Holly Gibney, putting her up against a pair of depraved antagonists.

Young Adult Fantasy & Science Fiction Winner: Divine Rivals – Rebecca Ross

Another Booktok Sensation wins. In this Young Adult Fantasy by Rebecca Ross sees two enemies become more. Iris hopes to get a promotion as a columnist at the Oath Gazette. There she meets her rival Roman Kitt. When Roman stumbles onto letters that Iris secretly writes to her brother, he writes back to her, and they both forge a connection in the mists of a gods war.

Young Adult Fiction Winner: Check & Mate by Ali Hazelwood

This year, Ali Hazelwood dips her toes into the young adult romance genre with Check & Mate. This is her first Young adult fiction novel and it follows checkmate prodigy Mallory as she gives up on her love for chess to take care of her mother.

Nonfiction Winner: Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond

Nonfiction choice for this year takes a look at poverty in the U.S. Matthew Desmond takes a deep dive into the job within the pages of Poverty, by America. This nonfiction exploration beat out Butts: A Backstory by Heather Radke and The Art Thief by Michael Finkel for Goodreads Best Nonfiction for 2023.

Memoir & Autobiography Winner: The Woman in Me – Britney Spears

Released just in time for the awards, this late release The Woman in Me is the long-awaited memoir by Pop sensation Britney Spears. The book dives into Spears’ journey through life, her trial, her experience within the music industry and her love of music.

History & Biography Winner: The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder by David Grann

Goodreads readers voted David Grann’s tale of an imperial vessel as it embarked on a secret mission during a war with Spain Best in History & Biography. The book follows the journey of the British vessel, the Wager, as it finds itself wrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia.

Humor Winner: Being Henry: The Fonz and Beyond by Henry Winkler

Henry Wrinkler lets us in on the iconic character of the Fonz and goes beyond his stardom to share his personal journey and the lifelong impact of fame. Filled with heart, charm and self-deprecating humour, Being Henry goes beyond the glitz and glamour of Hollywood and explores the deeper meaning of Winkler’s life.

And there we have it. All of the winners for 2023’s Goodreads Awards were chosen by the readers. Have you read any of these for the best books of 2023? Do you agree or disagree with their choices? Did you vote in the Goodreads awards? Comment below and let us know!

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Kid reviews of, reckless: powerless, book 2.

• Common Sense Says
• Parents Say 0 Reviews
• Kids Say 6 Reviews

Based on 6 kid reviews

Kid Reviews

Even better than the first.

the characters were built up even more in this book and are incredibly complex and have relatable feelings. the plot twists and close scrapes were amazing.

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One of my favorite books.

I love this book so much! it is very different from powerless. I love the banter between Kai and Paedyn. I hated when it turned to Kitts pov, I couldn’t wait for his pov to be over. the plot twist was crazy. the cliff hanger is torture! there is more romance in reckless than there was in powerless. there is some kissing but there isn’t much more spice than that. there is some swearing, pretty much the same as powerless. i can’t wait for fearless to come out on April 8th 2025!

A MUST READ!!

Ohhh my goodness!! This is the best book I have ever read! there were many tears and laughs! Kai and Paedyns love for each other is so cute!! I love this book and I can’t wait for the third one!!

Unoriginal but fun

I loved this book a lot it’s the sequel to powerless and I feel like Lauren did a very good job with this book it gives dance of thieves vibes but better some violence

This title has:

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What to Read Next

Dance of Thieves, Book 1

The Darkness Within Us

Heartless Hunter: The Crimson Moth, Book 1

Romantic fantasy books for teens, teen romance novels, related topics.

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Book review: Sinister spycraft, weird horror as Jeff VanderMeer returns to Area X in Absolution

By Jeff VanderMeer Science-fiction/Farrar, Straus & Giroux/Paperback/528 pages/$24.98

In a remote ruin called Dead Town, in a place called the Forgotten Coast, in an unnamed backwater of the US, a group of biologists set up camp to study the landscape.

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The Black Highway

By simon toyne, you must sign in to see if this title is available for request. sign in or register now, send netgalley books directly to your kindle or kindle app, to read on a kindle or kindle app, please add [email protected] as an approved email address to receive files in your amazon account. click here for step-by-step instructions., also find your kindle email address within your amazon account, and enter it here., pub date jun 24 2025 | archive date aug 19 2025, william morrow, general fiction (adult) | mystery & thrillers.

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Description

Laughton Rees is back in the latest novel from the bestselling author of the Sanctus trilogy—this time, with a case that hits uncomfortably close to home and threatens the thing Laughton values most: her daughter.

Forensic specialist Laughton Rees is not ashamed of her checkered past—after all, her youthful indiscretions led to the birth of her daughter Gracie, the person she loves most in the world—but when Gracie’s father unexpectedly turns up in their lives again, Laughton is automatically wary.

Shelby Facer is a dangerous man, formerly imprisoned for his involvement in an international drug trafficking ring, and no matter what Laughton once felt for him, she doesn’t want him anywhere near Gracie. But when Shelby claims that he has information about an especially difficult murder case she is working, she can’t turn him down.

A body with no head or hands has recently turned up in the river Thames, and the police are at a loss until Shelby identifies the man. The victim was part of a highly secretive smuggling ring Shelby was involved with during his and Laughton’s youth—which Laughton’s father, former commissioner for the Metropolitan police, was investigating before he died.

Laughton throws herself into her father’s old files to try to trace the connections between past and present, but as she and DCI Tannahill Khan circle closer to the truth, the case becomes dangerously personal. When another body turns up, mutilated just like the first, the victim is no stranger to Laughton. She’ll have to face the darkest parts of her past to find the man behind the murders—before he takes away everything she loves.

Laughton Rees is back in the latest novel from the bestselling author of the Sanctus trilogy—this time, with a case that hits uncomfortably close to home and threatens the thing Laughton values most:...

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Grand Ave Arts: All Access and Genevieve Gaignard: The best of L.A. arts this weekend

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“Warriors,” Lin-Manuel Miranda and Eisa Davis’ concept album inspired by the 1979 cult hit movie and Sol Yurick’s 1965 novel of the same name, debuts today from Atlantic Records . It features a starry voice cast, including actors Billy Porter, Colman Domingo, Michaela Jaé Rodriguez and Utkarsh Ambudkar, and hip-hop royalty such as Busta Rhymes, RZA, Ghostface Killah and Nas . But this time around, the central gang of the New York City thriller is women, played by Amber Gray, Phillipa Soo, Jasmine Cephas Jones, Sasha Hutchings and others .

I’m staff writer Ashley Lee , pausing my personal “Warriors” listening party — and continuous wishing for a full production in the future — to bring you a fresh weekend edition of Essential Arts with my colleague Jessica Gelt .

Best bets: On our radar this week

You’re reading Essential Arts

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Grand Ave Arts: All Access Fifteen of the city’s arts and cultural institutions take over downtown’s Grand Avenue for the city’s eighth annual open-air open house. Create a Jasper Johns -inspired painting via the Broad , watch an L.A. Opera recital, tour Walt Disney Concert Hall , learn how to perform sound effects from a Foley artist with the L.A. Phil , sample musical instruments at the Colburn School’s Instrument Petting Zoo — all activities are family-friendly and free (online RSVPs are encouraged). The day’s programming also includes performances by DJ Kita , Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles , harpist-composer Alfonso Rolando Ortiz , Peruvian dance troupe INCA , Chinese chamber ensemble Melody of China and a cappella doo-wop group the Alley Cats . Saturday, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Grand Avenue, from Temple to 5th Street. grandavearts.org

‘Symphony of Rats’ “Two titans of the theatrical avant-garde come together in this Wooster Group deconstruction of a Richard Foreman play,” wrote Times theater critic Charles McNulty of this sold-out seven -show run, about a U.S. president who receives questionable messages from otherworldly beings. Directed by Elizabeth LeCompte and Kate Valk , “This surreal production reimagines the work of a playwright who developed a trademark aesthetic that’s every bit as daringly unconventional as the Wooster Group’s own.” Friday-Sunday and Tuesday-Wednesday, 8:30 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, 2 p.m. REDCAT, 631 W. 2nd St., downtown L.A. redcat.org

‘Genevieve Gaignard: Thinking Out Loud’ “Gaignard makes serious playthings of the building blocks of culture, race, religion and gender,” wrote Times contributor Leah Ollman in 2017 . The biracial artist is back at Vielmetter with a third solo exhibition: mixed-media collages, displayed amid clouds strung whimsically overhead and altars situated throughout the space. Gaignard will be in conversation with writer-producer Mara Brock Akil at the contemporary art gallery on Saturday at 2 p.m. The exhibition is on view through Nov. 9. Vielmetter Los Angeles, 1700 S. Santa Fe Ave., #101. vielmetter.com

— Ashley Lee

The week ahead: A curated calendar

FRIDAY Ain’t Misbehavin’ Winner of three Tony Awards, this jumpin’ musical features the music of Fats Waller and the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and ’30s. Through Nov. 3. Musical Theatre West, 4350 E. 7th St., Long Beach. musical.org

Crump’s: The Lost Exhibition The Midcentury Modern artwork of Rolly Crump, the animator turned theme park designer who was instrumental in the early design of Disneyland, will be on display, curated by his son, Christopher. 5-10 p.m. Friday; 1-9 p.m. Saturday; and 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Sunday. Song Word Art House, 8912 W. Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood. song-word.com

Humans 2.0 The next chapter of Circa’s internationally acclaimed “Humans” (presented at the Wallis in 2019), a tightly woven choreography of bodies created by circus visionary Yaron Lifschitz. 7:30 p.m. Friday. 2 p.m. Saturday. The Wallis, Bram Goldsmith Theater, 9390 N. Santa Monica Blvd., Beverly Hills. thewallis.org

SATURDAY Art & Science Family Festival Can’t get enough of PST? Curious minds can engage in this free daylong event where you can make your own suncatcher, experience the medieval view of the cosmos, create your own piece of wearable art based on your astrological sign, hear music, indulge in nature and more. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday . The Getty Center, 1200 Getty Center Drive, L.A. getty.edu

Black Lodge CAP UCLA presents the skin-crawlingly creepy ultra-weird sort-of-opera, brilliantly performed by Timur and the Dime Museum; preceded by the leave-your-skin-behind immersive experience “Bardo,” created and directed by Sandra Powers. 6:30 p.m. The opera begins at 8 p.m. Saturday. The United Theater on Broadway, 929 S. Broadway, downtown L.A. cap.ucla.edu

Kooza Under the big top, Cirque du Soleil unveils a story written and directed by David Shiner involving a naive clown, an enigmatic trickster and a bizarre and exotic world. Through Jan. 5. Santa Monica Pier. cirquedusoleil.com

Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra Music director Jaime Martín opens LACO’s season with “Morning,” as Haydn’s Sixth Symphony is known, as well as a mourning traveler in Schoenberg’s arrangement of Mahler’s “Songs of a Wayfarer” and Brahms’ lullaby-rich Second Symphony. 7:30 p.m. Saturday. The Alex Theatre, 216 N. Brand Blvd., Glendale; 4 p.m. Sunday . The Wallis, 9390 N. Santa Monica Blvd., Beverly Hills. laco.org

Joni Mitchell and the Joni Jam The Canadian singer’s comeback as a live performer (after she suffered a debilitating brain aneurysm in 2015) reaches her adopted hometown with two shows for which she’ll be joined by any number of famous local admirers. 7 p.m. Saturday; 6:30 p.m. Sunday. Hollywood Bowl, 2301 N. Highland Ave., Hollywood. hollywoodbowl.com

The Piano Lesson Director Gregg T. Daniel continues working his way through August Wilson’s 20th century cycle with one of its pillars, a 1930s Pittsburgh-set drama revolving around a dispute between a brother and sister over a family heirloom. Through Nov. 10. A Noise Within, 3352 E. Foothill Blvd., Pasadena. anoisewithin.org

SUNDAY Mapping the Infinite: Cosmologies Across Cultures The exhibition, a collaboration with scientists at the Carnegie Observatories and Griffith Observatory, poses the questions “Who are we and how did we get here?” while examining the ways artists, artisans, scientists and others have sought answers. Through March 2. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Resnick Pavilion, 5905 Wilshire Blvd. lacma.org

Culture news and the SoCal scene

Legendary designer Diane von Furstenberg is 77 and says she’s focusing on her legacy, yet shows no signs of slowing down. She recently came to Los Angeles in support of an exhibit about her life and work called “Diane von Furstenberg: Woman Before Fashion” at the Skirball Cultural Center . The show features examples of Von Furstenberg’s famous wrap dress throughout the years. “It’s always the young who rediscover it,” Von Furstenberg told The Times in an interview.

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Times art critic Christopher Knight is diligently making the rounds at various PST Art exhibits around town. He recently went to the Brick (an exhibition space formerly known as LAXArt ) to take in “ Life on Earth: Art & Ecofeminism .” Knight says that although the subject matter is more vast than the modest exhibit can grab hold of, there is still plenty to chew on. Particularly when climate change is ravaging Earth in unprecedented ways.

“Insistence on the supremacy of people over the natural world is cited as the primary source of environmental destruction. Furthermore, the practice is tightly bound to the seemingly intransigent social marginalization of women. Remember Mother Nature?” writes Knight.

Broadway is rallying theater fans to vote with a new short film called “ Newsies ” from Broadway Votes , a nonpartisan get-out-the-vote initiative. The piece is directed by Kenny Ortega , who also directed the 1992 movie musical, and features the songs “ Carrying the Banner ” and “ Seize the Day ,” both of which were revised and updated by the original composer Alan Menken , along with lyricist Jack Feldman , and Harvey Fierstein , who wrote the book for the 2012 Broadway show. The Times’ Ashley Lee has the behind-the-scenes scoop .

The National Gallery of Art is getting a new president in Darren Walker , who arrives at the institution after 11 years heading up the Ford Foundation . Walker has been a trustee at the National Gallery since 2019, and succeeds Mitchell P. Rales .

L.A. is in the midst of the 17th annual Disability Art Exhibition , presented by the City of Los Angeles Department on Disability , in collaboration with Councilmembers Imelda Padilla and Kevin de León and the Department of Cultural Affairs . Taking place through Oct. 25 at the Henry P. Rio Bridge Gallery in L.A. City Hall , the exhibition features work by 50 artists with disabilities and is presented with full inclusion in mind. The museum labels feature image descriptions and Braille, and there is a web component for those unable to attend in person.

And last but not least

Bravo to Charli XCX , who revealed another brilliant motivation for that combination of fluorescent green and blurry lowercase text .

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Jessica Gelt is an arts and culture writer for the Los Angeles Times.

Ashley Lee is a staff reporter at the Los Angeles Times, where she writes about theater, movies, television and the bustling intersection of the stage and the screen. An alum of the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center’s National Critics Institute and Poynter’s Power of Diverse Voices, she leads workshops on arts journalism at the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival. She was previously a New York-based editor at the Hollywood Reporter and has written for the Washington Post, Backstage and American Theatre, among others.

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