100 Notable Books of 2023

100 Notable Books of 2023 - The New York Times https://www.nytimesn7cgmftshazwhfgzm37qxb44r64ytbb2dj3x62d2lljs...
100 Notable Books of 2023

Each year, we pore over thousands of new books, seeking out the best
novels, memoirs, biographies, poetry collections, stories and more. Here
are the standouts, selected by the staff of The New York Times Book
Review.
Fiction | Nonfiction
Fiction
HISTORICAL FICTION
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AFTER SAPPHO by Selby Wynn Schwartz

Inspired by Sappho’s work, Schwartz’s debut novel offers an
alternate history of creativity at the turn of the 20th century,
one that centers queer women artists, writers and
intellectuals who refused to accept society’s boundaries.
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SOUTHERN THRILLER
ALL THE SINNERS BLEED by S.A. Cosby

In his earlier thrillers, Cosby worked the outlaw side of the
crime genre. In his new one — about a Black sheriff in a rural
Southern town, searching for a serial killer who tortures
Black children — he’s written a crackling good police
procedural.
FAMILY SAGA
THE BEE STING by Paul Murray

In Murray’s boisterous tragicomic novel, a once wealthy
Irish family struggles with both the aftermath of the 2008
financial crash and their own inner demons.
EXPERIMENTAL FICTION
BIOGRAPHY OF X by Catherine Lacey

Lacey rewrites 20th-century U.S. history through the
audacious fictional life story of X, a polarizing female
performance artist who made her way from the South to
New York City’s downtown art scene.
CLIMATE FICTION
BIRNAM WOOD by Eleanor Catton

In this action-packed novel from a Booker Prize winner, a
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collective of activist gardeners crosses paths with a

billionaire doomsday prepper on land they each want for
different purposes.
BLACKOUTS by Justin Torres

This lyrical, genre-defying novel — winner of the 2023
National Book Award — explores what it means to be erased
and how to persist after being wiped away.
THRILLER
BRIGHT YOUNG WOMEN by Jessica Knoll

In her third and most assured novel, Knoll shifts readers’
attention away from a notorious serial killer, Ted Bundy, and
onto the lives — and deaths — of the women he killed.
Perhaps for the first time in fiction, Knoll pooh-poohs
Bundy's much ballyhooed intelligence, celebrating the
promise and perspicacity of his victims instead.
LITERARY DYSTOPIA
CHAIN-GANG ALL-STARS by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

This satire — in which prison inmates duel on TV for a
chance at freedom — makes readers complicit with the
bloodthirsty fans sitting ringside. The fight scenes are so
well written they demonstrate how easy it might be to accept
a world this sick.
HISTORICAL FICTION FAMILY SAGA
THE COVENANT OF WATER by Abraham Verghese

Verghese’s first novel since “Cutting for Stone” follows
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generations of a family across 77 years in southwestern India

as they contend with political strife and other troubles —
capped by a shocking discovery made by the matriarch’s
granddaughter, a doctor.
CRIME
CROOK MANIFESTO by Colson Whitehead

Returning to the world of his novel “Harlem Shuffle,”
Whitehead again uses a crime story to illuminate a singular
neighborhood at a tipping point — here, Harlem in the 1970s.
CLIMATE FICTION
THE DELUGE by Stephen Markley

Markley’s second novel confronts the scale and gravity of
climate change, tracking a cadre of scientists and activists
from the gathering storm of the Obama years to the super-
typhoons of future decades. Immersive and ambitious, the
book shows the range of its author’s gifts: polyphonic
narration, silken sentences and elaborate world-building.
PSYCHOLOGICAL FICTION
EASTBOUND by Maylis de Kerangal

In de Kerangal’s brief, lyrical novel, translated by Jessica
Moore, a young Russian soldier on a trans-Siberian train
decides to desert and turns to a civilian passenger, a
Frenchwoman, for help.
FANTASY ROMANCE
EMILY WILDE’S ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF FAERIES by Heather Fawcett

The world-building in this tale of a woman documenting a new
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kind of faerie is exquisite, and the characters are just as

textured and richly drawn. This is the kind of folkloric
fantasy that remembers the old, blood-ribboned source
material about sacrifices and stolen children, but adds a
modern gloss.
ENTER GHOST by Isabella Hammad

In Hammad’s second novel, a British Palestinian actor
returns to her hometown in Israel to recover from a breakup
and spend time with her family. Instead, she’s talked into
joining a staging of “Hamlet” in the West Bank, where she
has a political awakening.
HISTORICAL FICTION
FORBIDDEN NOTEBOOK by Alba de Céspedes

A best-selling novelist and prominent anti-Fascist in her
native Italy, de Céspedes has lately fallen into unjust
obscurity. Translated by Ann Goldstein, this elegant novel
from the 1950s tells the story of a married mother, Valeria,
whose life is transformed when she begins keeping a secret
diary.
HISTORICAL FICTION
THE FRAUD by Zadie Smith

Based on a celebrated 19th-century trial in which the
defendant was accused of impersonating a nobleman,
Smith’s novel offers a vast panoply of London and the
English countryside, and successfully locates the social
controversies of an era in a handful of characters.
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POETRY
FROM FROM by Monica Youn

In her fourth book of verse, a svelte, intrepid foray into
American racism, Youn turns a knowing eye on society’s
love-hate relationship with what it sees as the “other.”
GRAPHIC NOVEL HORROR
A GUEST IN THE HOUSE by Emily Carroll

After a lonely young woman marries a mild-mannered
widower and moves into his home, she begins to wonder how
his first wife actually died. This graphic novel alternates
between black-and-white and overwhelming colors as it
explores the mundane and the horrific.
LITERARY FICTION MYSTERY
THE HEAVEN & EARTH GROCERY STORE by James McBride

McBride’s latest, an intimate, big-hearted tale of community,
opens with a human skeleton found in a well in the 1970s, and
then flashes back to the past, to the ’20s and ’30s, to explore
the town’s Black, Jewish and immigrant history.
FAMILY SAGA
HELLO BEAUTIFUL by Ann Napolitano

In her radiant fourth novel, Napolitano puts a fresh spin on
the classic tale of four sisters and the man who joins their
family. Take “Little Women,” move it to modern-day Chicago,
add more intrigue, lots of basketball and a different kind of
boy next door and you’ve got the bones of this thoroughly
original story.
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HISTORICAL FICTION
A HISTORY OF BURNING by Janika Oza

This remarkable debut novel tells the story of an extended
Indo-Ugandan family that is displaced, settled and displaced
again.
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HORROR-TINGED THRILLER
HOLLY by Stephen King

The scrappy private detective Holly Gibney (who appeared
in “The Outsider” and several other novels) returns, this
time taking on a missing-persons case that — in typical King
fashion — unfolds into a tale of Dickensian proportions.
FAMILY SAGA
A HOUSE FOR ALICE by Diana Evans

This polyphonic novel traces one family’s reckoning after the
patriarch dies in a fire, as his widow, a Nigerian immigrant,
considers returning to her home country and the entire
family re-examines the circumstances of their lives.
VERY FAMOUS POEM
THE ILIAD by Homer

Emily Wilson’s propulsive new translation of the “Iliad” is
buoyant and expressive; she wants this version to be read
aloud, and it would certainly be fun to perform.
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FANTASY
INK BLOOD SISTER SCRIBE by Emma Törzs

The sisters in Törzs's delightful debut have been raised to
protect a collection of magic books that allow their keepers to
do incredible things. Their story accelerates like a fugue,
ably conducted to a tender conclusion.
HISTORICAL FICTION
KAIROS by Jenny Erpenbeck

This tale of a torrid, yearslong relationship between a young
woman and a much older married man — translated from
the German by Michael Hofmann — is both profound and
moving.
HISTORICAL FICTION
KANTIKA by Elizabeth Graver

Inspired by the life of Graver’s maternal grandmother, this
exquisitely imagined family saga spans cultures and
continents as it traces the migrations of a Sephardic Jewish
girl from turn-of-the-20th-century Constantinople to
Barcelona, Havana and, finally, Queens, N.Y.
CLIMATE FICTION
LAND OF MILK AND HONEY by C Pam Zhang

Zhang’s lush, keenly intelligent novel follows a chef who’s
hired to cook for an “elite research community” in the Italian
Alps, in a not-so-distant future where industrial-agricultural
experiments in America’s heartland have blanketed the
globe in a crop-smothering smog.
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HORROR HISTORICAL FICTION
LONE WOMEN by Victor LaValle

The year is 1915, and the narrator of LaValle’s horror-tinged
western has arrived in Montana to cultivate an unforgiving
homestead. She’s looking for a fresh start as a single Black
woman in a sparsely populated state, but the locked trunk
she has in stow holds a terrifying secret.
GRAPHIC NOVEL
MONICA by Daniel Clowes

In Clowes’s luminous new work, the titular character,
abandoned by her mother as a child, endures a life of
calamities before resolving to learn about her origins and
track down her parents.
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COMING-OF-AGE MYSTERY
THE MOST SECRET MEMORY OF MEN

by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr
Based on a true story and translated by Lara Vergnaud,
Sarr’s novel — about a Senegalese writer brought low by a
plagiarism scandal — asks sharp questions about the state of
African literature in the West.
DYSTOPIA SOCIAL SATIRE
THE NEW NATURALS by Gabriel Bump

In Bump’s engrossing new novel, a young Black couple,
mourning the loss of their newborn daughter and
disillusioned with the world, start a utopian society — but
tensions both internal and external soon threaten their
dreams.
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HISTORICAL FICTION
NORTH WOODS by Daniel Mason

Mason’s novel looks at the occupants of a single house in
Massachusetts over several centuries, from colonial times to
present day. An apple farmer, an abolitionist, a wealthy
manufacturer: The book follows these lives and many others,
with detours into natural history and crime reportage.
HISTORICAL FICTION
NOT EVEN THE DEAD by Juan Gómez Bárcena

An ex-conquistador in Spanish-ruled, 16th-century Mexico is
asked to hunt down an Indigenous prophet in this novel by a
leading writer in Spain, splendidly translated by Katie
Whittemore. The epic search stretches across much of the
continent and, as the author bends time and history, lasts
centuries.
THE NURSERY by Szilvia Molnar

“I used to be a translator and now I am a milk bar.” So begins
Molnar’s brilliant novel about a new mother falling apart
within the four walls of her apartment.
HORROR
OUR SHARE OF NIGHT by Mariana Enriquez

This dazzling, epic narrative, translated from the Spanish by
Megan McDowell, is a bewitching brew of mystery and
myth, peopled by mediums who can summon “the Darkness”
for a secret society of wealthy occultists seeking to preserve
consciousness after death.
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WEALTHY FAMILY SAGA
PINEAPPLE STREET by Jenny Jackson

Jackson’s smart, dishy debut novel embeds readers in an
upper-crust Brooklyn Heights family — its real estate, its
secrets, its just-like-you-and-me problems. Does money buy
happiness? “Pineapple Street” asks a better question: Does
it buy honesty?
HORROR
THE REFORMATORY by Tananarive Due

Due’s latest — about a Black boy, Robert, who is wrongfully
sentenced to a fictionalized version of Florida’s infamous and
brutal Dozier School — is both an incisive examination of the
lingering traumas of racism and a gripping, ghost-filled
horror novel. “The novel’s extended, layered denouement is
so heart-smashingly good, it made me late for work,” Randy
Boyagoda wrote in his review. “I couldn’t stop reading.”
FANTASY
THE SAINT OF BRIGHT DOORS by Vajra Chandrasekera

Trained to kill by his mother and able to see demons, the
protagonist of Chandrasekera’s stunning and lyrical novel
flees his destiny as an assassin and winds up in a politically
volatile metropolis.
SAME BED DIFFERENT DREAMS by Ed Park

Double agents, sinister corporations, slasher films, U.F.O.s —
Park’s long-awaited second novel is packed to the gills with
creative elements that enliven his acerbic, comedic and
lyrical odyssey into Korean history and American paranoia.
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TAKE WHAT YOU NEED by Idra Novey

This elegant novel resonates with implication beyond the
taut contours of its central story line. In Novey’s deft hands,
the complex relationship between a young woman and her
former stepmother hints at the manifold divisions within
America itself.
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HISTORICAL FICTION
THIS OTHER EDEN by Paul Harding

In his latest novel, inspired by the true story of a devastating
1912 eviction in Maine that displaced an entire mixed-race
fishing community, Harding turns that history into a lyrical
tale about the fictional Apple Island on the cusp of
destruction.
FAMILY SAGA
TOM LAKE by Ann Patchett

Locked down on the family’s northern Michigan cherry
orchard, three sisters and their mother, a former actress
whose long-ago summer fling went on to become a movie
star, reflect on love and regret in Patchett’s quiet and
reassuring Chekhovian novel.
HISTORICAL FICTION
THE UNSETTLED by Ayana Mathis

This novel follows three generations across time and place: a
young mother trying to create a home for herself and her son
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in 1980s Philadelphia, and her mother, who is trying to save

their Alabama hometown from white supremacists seeking
to displace her from her land.
HISTORICAL FANTASY
VICTORY CITY by Salman Rushdie

Rushdie’s new novel recounts the long life of Pampa
Kampana, who creates an empire from magic seeds in 14th-
century India. Her world is one of peace, where men and
women are equal and all faiths welcome, but the story
Rushdie tells is of a state that forever fails to live up to its
ideals.
ROMANCE
WE COULD BE SO GOOD by Cat Sebastian

This queer midcentury romance — about reporters who
meet at work, become friends, move in together and fall in
love — lingers on small, everyday acts like bringing home
flowers with the groceries, things that loom large because
they’re how we connect with others.
COMING-OF-AGE
WESTERN LANE by Chetna Maroo

In this polished and disciplined debut novel, an 11-year-old
Jain girl in London who has just lost her mother turns her
attention to the game of squash — which in Maroo’s graceful
telling becomes a way into the girl’s grief.
SHORT STORIES
WITNESS by Jamel Brinkley
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Set in Brooklyn, and featuring animal rescue workers,

florists, volunteers, ghosts and UPS workers, Brinkley’s new
collection meditates on what it means to see and be seen.
A STORY OF OBSESSION
Y/N by Esther Yi
In this weird and wondrous novel, a bored young woman in
thrall to a boy band buys a one-way ticket to Seoul.
SATIRE
YELLOWFACE by R.F. Kuang

Kuang’s first foray outside of the fantasy genre is a breezy
and propulsive tale about a white woman who achieves
tremendous literary success by stealing a manuscript from a
recently deceased Asian friend and passing it off as her own.
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Nonfiction
U.S. HISTORY
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THE 272 by Rachel L. Swarns

Building on her groundbreaking work for The Times, Swarns
fashions a complex portrait of 19th-century American
Catholicism through the story of the nearly 300 people
enslaved on Jesuit plantations who were sold in 1838 to save
Georgetown University from ruin.
BIOGRAPHY TRUE CRIME
ANANSI’S GOLD by Yepoka Yeebo

Yeebo, a journalist, tracks down the elusive story of John
Ackah Blay-Miezah, who revolutionized the “advance fee”
scam (say, a Nigerian prince wants to wire you money), and
contextualizes it within a Ghana — and a world — that
allowed him to thrive.
ARCTIC EXPLORATION
BATTLE OF INK AND ICE by Darrell Hartman

This fast paced, true-life adventure revives the headline-
grabbing debate over which explorer reached the North Pole
first — and which newspaper broke the news.
MEMOIR
THE BEST MINDS by Jonathan Rosen

A literary and compassionate examination of the porous line
between brilliance and insanity, this riveting memoir traces
the author’s childhood friendship and sometime rivalry with
a neighbor and Yale classmate who is now in prison for
murdering his girlfriend.
THE DEEP STATE
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BOTTOMS UP AND THE DEVIL LAUGHS by Kerry Howley

Howley writes about the national security state and those
who get entangled in it — fabulists, truth tellers, combatants,
whistle-blowers. Like many of us, they have left traces of
themselves in the digital ether by making a phone call,
texting a friend, looking something up online.
U.S. HISTORY
BUILT FROM THE FIRE by Victor Luckerson

This ambitious history, by a journalist based in Tulsa,
provides an authoritative account of the prosperous Black
neighborhood decimated by the city’s 1921 race massacre
and a gripping portrait of the community resurrected in its
aftermath.
SCIENCE INVESTIGATIVE REPORTING
COBALT RED by Siddharth Kara

Cobalt is essential to the tech industry, but as Kara’s
harrowing account demonstrates, it comes at a high cost:
Much of the mineral is mined in toxic conditions for
subsistence wages in Congo — all too often, by children.
SCIENCE
CROSSINGS by Ben Goldfarb

Goldfarb, an environmental journalist, crafts a fascinating
and sensitive look at the costs of roads, both for wild animals
and for the humans whose cities are divided by highways
along racial lines.
POP CULTURE
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DAUGHTER OF THE DRAGON by Yunte Huang

Huang’s new book, a biography embedded in cultural
criticism, is an absorbing account of the life and times of the
Chinese American starlet Anna May Wong, whose career
spanned silent movies, talkies and television.
POLITICS
DOPPELGANGER by Naomi Klein

After she was repeatedly confused online with the feminist
scholar turned anti-vaxxer Naomi Wolf, Klein turned the
experience into this sober, stylish account of the lure of
disdain and paranoia.
MEMOIR
EASILY SLIP INTO ANOTHER WORLD

by Henry Threadgill and Brent Hayes Edwards
The jazz artist Henry Threadgill’s ardent memoir ranges
from his maddening wartime experiences in Vietnam to his
boundary-pushing musical career.
SCIENCE
THE EXCEPTIONS by Kate Zernike

Zernike’s excellent and infuriating tale of the fight for
fairness at M.I.T. and beyond is not merely a fast-paced
account of one woman’s accomplishments but a larger
history of women in STEM (or lack thereof).
SCIENCE
FIRE WEATHER by John Vaillant

This timely and riveting account of the 2016 McMurray
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wildfire explores not just that Canadian inferno but what it

bodes for the future. Vaillant has a chillingly serious
message: This is the inevitable result of climate change, and
it will happen again and again.
INVESTIGATIVE REPORTING
THE GREAT ESCAPE by Saket Soni

In this gripping account, Soni, a labor organizer, details the
story of several hundred Indian men lured to this country on
promises of work and green cards, who ended up in semi-
captivity in Mississippi until his efforts to free them.
MEMOIR PHILOSOPHY
THE HALF KNOWN LIFE by Pico Iyer

In talking to people the world over about what paradise
means to them, Iyer provides hours of thought-provoking
meditations. “Paradise becomes something different in every
neighbor’s head,” he says.
MEMOIR
HOW TO SAY BABYLON by Safiya Sinclair

In this breathless, scorching memoir of a girlhood spent
becoming the perfect Rasta daughter and an adolescence
spent becoming one of Jamaica’s most promising young
poets, Montego Bay drips with as much tender sensuality
and complexity as the buoyant patois of Sinclair’s parents’
banter.
PHILOSOPHY HISTORY
HUMANLY POSSIBLE by Sarah Bakewell
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In earlier books, Bakewell has written about Montaigne and

the existentialists; here, she manages to wrangle seven
centuries of humanist thought into a brisk narrative with
characteristic wit and clarity, resisting the traps of windy
abstraction and glib oversimplification.
WORLD WAR II
JUDGMENT AT TOKYO by Gary J. Bass

This comprehensive treatment of the prosecution of
Japanese war crimes after World War II is an elegantly
written and immersive account of a moment that shaped not
just the politics of the region, but of the Cold War to come.
BIOGRAPHY
KING by Jonathan Eig

The first comprehensive biography of Martin Luther King Jr.
in decades, Eig’s book draws on a landslide of recently
released government documents as well as letters and
interviews. This is a book worthy of its subject: both an
intimate study of a complex and flawed human being and a
journalistic account of a civil rights titan.
RELIGION POLITICS
THE KINGDOM, THE POWER, AND THE GLORY

by Tim Alberta
Having detailed how President Trump's rise to power
occurred amid a years-long civil war within the Republican
party in his 2019 book "American Carnage," Alberta, a staff
writer for The Atlantic, turns his eye on another institution
that has become split in two as a result of the former
president: the American evangelical movement.
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MIDDLE EAST HISTORY
THE LAND OF HOPE AND FEAR by Isabel Kershner

Published months before the Israel-Hamas war, this book by
a longtime correspondent in Jerusalem presents a
complicated portrait of the many communities and faiths
that constitute Israel three-quarters of a century into its
existence.
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MEMOIR
LILIANA’S INVINCIBLE SUMMER by Cristina Rivera Garza

In 1990, Rivera Garza’s 20-year-old sister was murdered in
Mexico. That case is the inspiration and launching point for
this memoir, a personal and cultural look at femicide in
Mexico.
BIOGRAPHY
LIVES OF THE WIVES by Carmela Ciuraru

The relationships at the center of Ciuraru’s lively and
absorbing new literary history vary widely, but are united by
questions of ego and agency, competition and resentment.
MEMOIR
A LIVING REMEDY by Nicole Chung

Chung’s powerful second memoir is a look at family, illness
and grief, and the way systemic issues like access to health
care, capitalism and racism exacerbate loss.
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U.S. HISTORY
MASTER SLAVE HUSBAND WIFE by Ilyon Woo

Woo’s book recounts a daring feat: the successful flight north
from Georgia in 1848 by an enslaved couple disguised as a
sickly young white planter and his male slave. But her
meticulous retelling is equally a feat — of research,
storytelling, sympathy and insight.
ART POP CULTURE
MONSTERS by Claire Dederer

“Everyone alive is either canceled or about to be canceled,”
writes the author of this sometimes maddening, always
challenging meditation on polarizing cultural figures
(Nabokov, Polanski, et al.) and the struggle to reconcile great
art with the misdeeds of its creators.
MEMOIR
MY NAME IS BARBRA by Barbra Streisand

“I’m the greatest star!” the 21-year-old actress defiantly
sang in Broadway’s 1964 hit “Funny Girl.” Nearly six decades
later, over 992 pages, Streisand chronicles how she delivered
on that promise, a rocket ride from Brooklyn to Malibu.
BIOGRAPHY
THE ODYSSEY OF PHILLIS WHEATLEY

by David Waldstreicher
A beautiful and cogently argued biography offers a radical
new vision of the life and work of colonial America’s brilliant
Black female poet.
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SOCIOLOGY
ORDINARY NOTES by Christina Sharpe

In this volume of 248 numbered notes, Sharpe assembles
memories and insights, artifacts and artworks, balancing the
persistence of racism and brutality with a rich variety of
Black life.
POP CULTURE
OSCAR WARS by Michael Schulman

A deeply researched and compulsively readable history digs
into the scandal-soaked history of the Academy Awards.
SOCIOLOGY
OUR MIGRANT SOULS by Héctor Tobar

Tobar, a longtime journalist, delivers a kaleidoscopic account
of Latino American experience, dispelling stereotypes and
underscoring diversity in prose that is by turns lyrical,
outraged, scholarly and affectingly personal.
MEMOIR
PAGEBOY by Elliot Page

The Oscar-nominated actor offers a brutally honest account
of child stardom, the pressure to conform in Hollywood and,
ultimately, the announcement of his gender transition in
2020.
SOCIOLOGY
POVERTY, BY AMERICA by Matthew Desmond

The central claim of this manifesto by the Princeton
sociologist is that poverty in the United States is the product
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not only of larger economic shifts, but of choices and actions

by more fortunate Americans.
U.S. HISTORY
THE REDISCOVERY OF AMERICA

by Ned Blackhawk
This ambitious retelling of the American story,
by a historian who is also a Native American,
places Indigenous populations at the center, a
shift in perspective that yields fresh insights
and thought-provoking questions.
PHILOSOPHY BIOGRAPHY
THE RIGOR OF ANGELS by William Egginton

Challenging, ambitious and elegant, this mind-expanding
book explores nothing less than “the ultimate nature of
reality” through the work of three figures: the Argentine
writer Jorge Luis Borges, the German quantum physicist
Werner Heisenberg and the 18th-century German
philosopher Immanuel Kant.
BIOGRAPHY
SCHOENBERG by Harvey Sachs

Sachs has written well for decades about conventional
classical music. This impassioned defense of Arnold
Schoenberg — creator of some of the most challenging music
ever — might seem surprising from him, but Schoenberg’s
life was one of the 20th century’s great narratives.
MEMOIR
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SINK by Joseph Earl Thomas

The lush prose of this memoir perfectly suits the author’s
tender, teeming boyhood imagination, in which video-game
and manga characters offered more guidance than volatile
adults did. Most remarkable is Thomas’s matter-of-fact
depiction of the daily depredations he faced without losing
his spirit or his abundant creative gifts.
ART HISTORY
THE SLIP by Prudence Peiffer

From Ellsworth Kelly to Agnes Martin to Robert Indiana, a
group of scrappy artists gathered in illegal studios at the tip
of Lower Manhattan in the 1950s, trying to provide an
answer to Abstract Expressionism. This group biography
reflects the excitement of those years — and our debt to
them.
INVESTIGATIVE REPORTING
SOME PEOPLE NEED KILLING by Patricia Evangelista

In powerful, gripping prose, a Philippine journalist recounts
her investigation into the campaign of extrajudicial murders
under former President Rodrigo Duterte.
ART HISTORY
SPOKEN WORD by Joshua Bennett

Bennett’s engaging history of a literary and cultural
movement that took hold in many realms — including music,
theater, film, television and, of course, poetry — tracks its
evolution from the earliest days of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe
on the Lower East Side to the first iterations of slam poetry
and beyond.
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TRUE CRIME
A THREAD OF VIOLENCE by Mark O’Connell

O’Connell brings literary flourish and a philosophical bent to
this investigation of an infamous and confounding Irish
murder case.
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WORLD WAR II MUSIC
TIME’S ECHO by Jeremy Eichler

This cultural history takes up works by Schoenberg, Britten,
Shostakovich and Richard Strauss that reflect on World War
II and the Holocaust, urging listeners to consider the link
between music and remembrance.
POLITICS
THE UNDERTOW by Jeff Sharlet

Anxious about America’s political divides, and fearful that
they presage the end of the union, Sharlet spent a year
speaking with conservative pastors, gun fanatics and QAnon
adherents, among others. The result is an eloquent cri de
coeur by a writer struggling to meet political and moral
unreason with compassion and grace.
MEDIA
UNSCRIPTED by James B. Stewart and Rachel Abrams

This jaw-dropping chronicle by two Times reporters of the
final years of Sumner Redstone, the head of Paramount, is an
epic tale of toxic wealth and greed populated by connivers and
manipulators, not least Redstone himself.
25 of 27 22/11/2023, 07:29
MEMOIR
UP HOME by Ruth J. Simmons

Simmons’s evocative account of her
remarkable trajectory from Jim Crow Texas,
where she was the youngest of 12 children in a
sharecropping family, to the presidencies of
Smith College and Brown University shines
with tenderness and dignity.
SHIPWRECK!
THE WAGER by David Grann

After the H.M.S. Wager was shipwrecked off the coast of
Patagonia in 1742, surviving crew members returned to
England with dramatic — and starkly conflicting — tales
about what had transpired. Grann recreates the voyage in all
its enthralling horror.
MEMOIR
WAITING TO BE ARRESTED AT NIGHT by Tahir Hamut Izgil

Offering a rare glimpse into the life and culture of China’s
brutally persecuted Muslim Uyghur minority, this eloquent
memoir by a poet who escaped with his family to the United
States (and translated by Joshua L. Freeman) unfolds a
horror story with calm restraint.
SCIENCE
WHAT AN OWL KNOWS by Jennifer Ackerman

There are some 260 species of owls spread across every
continent except Antarctica, and in this fascinating book,
26 of 27 22/11/2023, 07:29
Ackerman explains why the birds are both naturally

wondrous and culturally significant.
BIOGRAPHY
WIFEDOM by Anna Funder

Even George Orwell, whose dealings with
women were often problematic, admitted that
he behaved badly toward his first wife, Eileen
O’Shaughnessy. This book focuses on
O’Shaughnessy, and combines her story with a
bravura analysis of female invisibility.
U.S. HISTORY
YOU HAVE TO BE PREPARED TO DIE BEFORE YOU CAN

BEGIN TO LIVE by Paul Kix
The 1963 campaign to integrate Birmingham, Ala., led to
shocking brutality: youths blasted by fire hoses and set upon
by snarling police dogs. Kix, a journalist, weaves those
images into a harrowing narrative of a crucial juncture in the
civil rights movement.
When you purchase an independently ranked book through our site, we earn an affiliate
commission.
Illustrations by Silvia Tack.
27 of 27 22/11/2023, 07:29

100 Notable Books of 2023

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100 Notable Books of 2023 - The New York Times https://www.nytimesn7cgmftshazwhfgzm37qxb44r64ytbb2dj3x62d2lljs...

100 Notable Books of 2023

AFTER SAPPHO by Selby Wynn Schwartz

ALL THE SINNERS BLEED by S.A. Cosby

THE BEE STING by Paul Murray

BIOGRAPHY OF X by Catherine Lacey

BIRNAM WOOD by Eleanor Catton

collective of activist gardeners crosses paths with a

BLACKOUTS by Justin Torres

BRIGHT YOUNG WOMEN by Jessica Knoll

CHAIN-GANG ALL-STARS by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

HISTORICAL FICTION FAMILY SAGA

THE COVENANT OF WATER by Abraham Verghese

generations of a family across 77 years in southwestern India

CROOK MANIFESTO by Colson Whitehead

THE DELUGE by Stephen Markley

EASTBOUND by Maylis de Kerangal

EMILY WILDE’S ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF FAERIES by Heather Fawcett

kind of faerie is exquisite, and the characters are just as

ENTER GHOST by Isabella Hammad

FORBIDDEN NOTEBOOK by Alba de Céspedes

THE FRAUD by Zadie Smith

FROM FROM by Monica Youn

GRAPHIC NOVEL HORROR

A GUEST IN THE HOUSE by Emily Carroll

LITERARY FICTION MYSTERY

THE HEAVEN & EARTH GROCERY STORE by James McBride

HELLO BEAUTIFUL by Ann Napolitano

A HISTORY OF BURNING by Janika Oza

HOLLY by Stephen King

A HOUSE FOR ALICE by Diana Evans

VERY FAMOUS POEM

THE ILIAD by Homer

INK BLOOD SISTER SCRIBE by Emma Törzs

KAIROS by Jenny Erpenbeck

KANTIKA by Elizabeth Graver

LAND OF MILK AND HONEY by C Pam Zhang

HORROR HISTORICAL FICTION

LONE WOMEN by Victor LaValle

MONICA by Daniel Clowes

THE MOST SECRET MEMORY OF MEN

DYSTOPIA SOCIAL SATIRE

THE NEW NATURALS by Gabriel Bump

NORTH WOODS by Daniel Mason

NOT EVEN THE DEAD by Juan Gómez Bárcena

THE NURSERY by Szilvia Molnar

OUR SHARE OF NIGHT by Mariana Enriquez

WEALTHY FAMILY SAGA

PINEAPPLE STREET by Jenny Jackson

THE REFORMATORY by Tananarive Due

THE SAINT OF BRIGHT DOORS by Vajra Chandrasekera

SAME BED DIFFERENT DREAMS by Ed Park

TAKE WHAT YOU NEED by Idra Novey

THIS OTHER EDEN by Paul Harding

TOM LAKE by Ann Patchett

THE UNSETTLED by Ayana Mathis

in 1980s Philadelphia, and her mother, who is trying to save

VICTORY CITY by Salman Rushdie

WE COULD BE SO GOOD by Cat Sebastian

WESTERN LANE by Chetna Maroo

WITNESS by Jamel Brinkley

Set in Brooklyn, and featuring animal rescue workers,

YELLOWFACE by R.F. Kuang