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THE BEST BOOKS

OF 2023
Each week, our editors and critics
recommend the most captivating, notable,
brilliant, thought-provoking, and talked-
about books. Now, as 2023 comes to an end,
we’ve chosen a dozen essential reads in
non!ction and a dozen, too, in !ction and
poetry.

By The New Yorker December 13, 2023

ESSENTIAL READ

The Bee Sting

by Paul Murray (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Fiction Paul Murray’s fourth novel is about the

eeriness of transformative change. Its more
than six hundred pages employ a rotating
structure: the four members of the Barnes
family—twelve-year-old PJ, his sister Cass, and
his parents Imelda and Dickie—take turns as
narrator. Irony, both caustic and elegiac,
"ourishes in the knowledge gaps between
characters. Again and again, details come back
reframed or reanimated by another perspective.
It’s hard to resist Murray in his schoolyard
mode, wittily choreographing nerds and bullies.
The chapters featuring Imelda and Dickie are
thornier, more treacherous, and formally more
ambitious, using stream of consciousness to
invoke the shattering power of grief and lust.
Murray is interested in denial and how it
ultimately fails to contain our unruly
attachments and weird desperation. The
catastrophic price of such denial is evident in
the book’s frequent allusions to the climate
crisis. As the book continues, the Earth’s
climate and the apocalyptic climate of the
Barnes family appear almost to merge, and
what began as a coming-of-age saga pulls in
stranger and darker forces.

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Read more: “ ‘The Bee Sting,’ a Family

Saga of Desperation and Denial,” by Katy
Waldman

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ESSENTIAL READ

Biography of X
by Catherine Lacey (Farrar, Straus &
Giroux)

Fiction In this intricate, meta!ctional novel,

a recently widowed writer embarks on a
biography of her late wife, an enigmatic
artist, author, and musician known only as
X. As the writer delves deeper into X’s life
and work—distinguished by X’s penchant
for adopting Cindy Shermanesque
personae—Lacey unfolds a startling
counter-history, in which the United States
has just reuni!ed, having dissolved, after
the Second World War, into three states:
one liberal, one libertarian, and one
theocratic. Throughout, Lacey artfully
blends historical anecdotes—X is seen
penning songs for David Bowie and
attending openings with Richard Serra—
into her !ctional universe, making
uncomfortable connections between X’s
fragile world and our own.

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ESSENTIAL READ

Birnam Wood
by Eleanor Catton (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Fiction Mira Bunting is the twenty-nine-year-

old founder of Birnam Wood, an activist
collective, in New Zealand, that illegally plants
gardens on unused land. One day, while
trespassing on a large farm, she stumbles upon
Robert Lemoine, a billionaire drone
manufacturer who offers to !nance the group.
In fact, Lemoine has his own agenda—he’s
purchasing the farm in secret, in order to
extract rare-earth minerals that will make him
the richest man in history—but this is just the
!rst of the novel’s many sleights of hand. The
story, which initially appears to be a study of
young, white leftists grappling with the ethics
of taking Lemoine’s money, evolves into a
shocking tale of deceit, misunderstanding, and
violence. Catton, who became the youngest
winner of the Booker for her previous novel,
“The Luminaries,” wants to revive plot as a
literary mode, and her book’s biggest twist is
that every choice matters, albeit in ways we
might not have anticipated.

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Read more: “Eleanor Catton Wants Plot

to Matter Again,” by B. D. McClay

ESSENTIAL READ | FROM OUR PAGES

The Country of the Blind

by Andrew Leland (Penguin Press)

Nonfiction In this moving memoir, Andrew

Leland recounts his journey from sight to
blindness, tracing his ever-shifting
relationship to his diminishing vision.
Suspended between the worlds of
blindness and sight—he will soon lose his
vision entirely—Leland explores the
history and culture of blindness: its
intersections with medicine, technology,
ableism. He travels to a residential school
for the blind, where he dons shades that
block his vision, and learns to cook meals
and cross streets. One former student tells
him, “Until you get profoundly lost, and
know it’s within you to get unlost, you’re
not trained—until you know it’s not an
emergency but a magni!cent puzzle.” The
book was excerpted on newyorker.com.

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ESSENTIAL READ

A Day in the Life of Abed

Salama
by Nathan Thrall (Metropolitan)

Nonfiction In 2012, a catastrophic traffic

collision in Jerusalem left a school bus
!lled with Palestinian children on !re for
more than thirty minutes before
emergency workers arrived. In this
chronicle of the disaster, Thrall, a
Jerusalem-based journalist, follows the
father of one of the victims, and examines
the response to the crash within the
context of modern Palestinian
dispossession. He depicts Israel’s
“architecture of segregation”—
encompassing checkpoints and byzantine
transit rules—which needlessly
complicated the rescue, leading to a delay
that left “small, scorched backpacks” on the
asphalt. Thrall’s account is a powerful
evocation of a two-tiered society that treats
children as potential combatants.

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ESSENTIAL READ

Fear Is Just a Word

by Azam Ahmed (Random House)

Nonfiction In 2010, the Zeta drug cartel

seized control of San Fernando, Mexico,
ushering in a wave of kidnappings and
murders. Its tactics were brutal: it forced its
hostages to !ght one another, and
sometimes dissolved its victims’ bodies in
acid. Ahmed, a correspondent for
the Times, retraces the story of Miriam
Rodríguez, whose daughter was abducted,
in 2014, and later killed. After government
officials proved ineffectual, Rodríguez
embarked on a search for justice, eventually
uncovering the identities of several people
complicit in the murder. Tragically,
Rodríguez herself failed to escape the
violence: she was shot to death for
challenging “the primacy of organized
crime.”

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ESSENTIAL READ

Fire Weather
by John Vaillant (Knopf)

Nonfiction In 2016, a wild!re ripped

through the oil town of Fort McMurray, in
Alberta, hot enough to vaporize toilets and
bend a street light in half. It was the most
expensive disaster in Canada’s history. This
alarming account tracks the destruction,
the role of !re in industry in the past
hundred and !fty years, and the
disregarded alarms about the environment
raised by scientists, dating as far back as
the eighteen-!fties. “Climate science came
of age in tandem with the oil and
automotive industries,” Vaillant writes, and
their futures are as linked as their pasts.
The number of places facing fates similar
to Fort McMurray’s is rapidly increasing,
even as “our reckoning with industrial
CO2” moves painfully slowly.

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ESSENTIAL READ

The Fraud
by Zadie Smith (Penguin Press)

Fiction This kaleidoscopic novel revolves

around the real-life trial of a man who, in
late-nineteenth-century London, claimed
to be the heir to a fortune. Smith relates
the impressions of a housekeeper as she
observes others’ opinions of the case, which
trans!xed—and split—the public, and was
complicated by the testimony of a formerly
enslaved man from Jamaica. The sprawling
story is !lled with jabs at the hypocrisy of
the upper class, characters who doubt
institutions, and corollaries of the pugilistic
rhetoric of contemporary populism; with
characteristic brilliance, Smith makes the
many parts of the tale cohere. “Human
error and venality are everywhere, churches
are imperfect, cruelty is common, power
corrupt, the weak go to the wall,” the
housekeeper re"ects.

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ESSENTIAL READ | FROM OUR PAGES

Grand Tour
by Elisa Gonzalez (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Poetry This vivid, searching début

collection traverses and troubles borders
between nations, languages, lovers, the past
and the present, the living and the dead;
combining re"ections on art and history
with astute observations of everyday life,
Gonzalez contends with the world’s
capacity for profound suffering and for
near-unbearable beauty in equal measure.
Several poems, including “Failed Essay on
Privilege,” were !rst published in The New
Yorker.

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ESSENTIAL READ

The Guest
by Emma Cline (Random House)

Fiction Near the start of “The Guest,” Alex, a

sex worker, is booted out of a mansion by
Simon, her affluent boyfriend. They appear to
be on the ritzy east end of Long Island, though
the location is never named. Alex must make a
choice: she can return to the city, where she has
no friends, no apartment, and a vaguely
menacing man on her heels, or she can wait
out Simon’s anger, hoping he’ll take her back at
his annual Labor Day party, in six days’ time.
She chooses the latter. Her only tools are a bag
of designer clothes, a mind fogged by
painkillers, and a dying phone. But what
follows is riveting, a class satire shimmed into
the guise of a thriller. Because Alex is young,
pretty, well-dressed, and white, the privileged
people she meets believe that she’s one of
them. They let her into their parties, their
country club, their cars, their homes. Alex, like
Cline, is a consummate collector of details, and
part of the book’s pleasure is its depiction of
the one percent—their meaningless banter,
their blandly interchangeable clothes. But Alex
is too passive a character for revenge. The book
isn’t a caustic takedown of the rich so much as
a queasy reminder of their invulnerability.

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Read more: “Emma Cline’s Vacay-

Bummer Novel,” by Sarah Chihaya

ESSENTIAL READ

I Am Homeless if This Is Not My

Home
by Lorrie Moore (Knopf)

Fiction In the nineteenth century, Libby, the

proprietress of a rooming house, writes to her
dead sister about her new gentleman lodger,
who, we come to learn, is a notorious assassin.
The frame shifts; it is 2016, and Finn, a
teacher, learns that his ex-girlfriend Lily has
killed herself. Or has she? He !nds her
wandering a graveyard, dirt ringing her mouth,
not deeply dead but, she says, “death-adjacent.”
She asks to be taken to a body farm in
Tennessee and used for forensic research; Finn
agrees. Thus begins the !rst of two road trips
featuring a corpse. We recognize shades of the
Orpheus myth, catch the passing references to
Faulkner, but “I Am Homeless if This Is Not
My Home” feels most pointed in its response
to an old question in Moore’s own work: what
does it mean to come home? A work of
determined strangeness and pain, Moore’s new
novel is an almost violent kind of achievement,
slicing open the conventional notions of
narrative itself.

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Read more: “Lorrie Moore’s Death-

Defying New Novel,” by Parul Sehgal

ESSENTIAL READ

I Love Russia
by Elena Kostyuchenko, translated from the
Russian by Bela Shayevich and Ilona Yazhbin
Chavasse (Penguin Press)

Nonfiction In 2005, when Kostyuchenko started

as an intern at the storied Russian independent
newspaper Novaya Gazeta, Vladimir Putin was
relatively new to the Presidency and high oil
prices were fuelling a consumer boom. But
Kostyuchenko was less interested in the Russia
hurtling forward than the one left behind, a
place—or, rather, a people—de!ned by trauma
and disorientation, hardiness and resolve. A
decade and a half later, she spent two weeks