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The countdown

The 25 best books of the year, from Zadie Smith to Paul Murray

Our chief books critic Martin Chilton and arts editor Jessie Thompson round up 2023’s best reads, from captivating novels to moving memoirs

Friday 15 December 2023 12:59 GMT
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It’s been a great year for reading... here are our tops picks of 2023
It’s been a great year for reading... here are our tops picks of 2023 (The Independent)

A new novel from Zadie Smith, a bible for Noughties pop fans, a feminist perspective on George Orwell and a doorstopper biography on Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton – it’s been a very good year of reading.

Here’s our pick of the best books of 2023...

25. Weirdo by Sara Pascoe

“If I was a fictional character, people would think I was aspirational,” thinks Sophie, the protagonist of Sara Pascoe’s bittersweet debut novel, Weirdo. “‘She doesn’t even care about the consequences,’ the reviews would say. ‘OMG she is so free,’ teenagers might tweet about me.” Although Sophie has a depressing job in a pub and a depressing boyfriend called Ian, all the while nurturing an obsession with an old crush, it’s a knowing reminder that this is not the “messy woman” trope we’ve come to feel so fatigued by. Pascoe’s novel is something more unexpected, a hypnotising portrait of a woman in search of her place in the world, trying to understand why she feels like such a weirdo. A great side dish is Pascoe’s new podcast with pal and fellow author/comedian Cariad Lloyd, Weirdos Book Club. Each week, they have smart, witty conversations about books from Persuasion by Jane Austen to The Pumpkin Eater by Penelope Mortimer – it’s my favourite new podcast of the year. (Faber) Jessie Thompson

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24. Cheri by Jo Ann Beard

Jo Ann Beard, who was born in Moline, Illinois, in 1955, excels at describing pure sensory experiences and there is much to treasure in her previously released essays and non-fiction narratives, The Collected Works of Jo Ann Beard. One of the works in the compilation is Cheri, which has also been republished as a single volume and is dedicated to Cheri Tremble (1950-1977), a woman who died from cancer. Beard casts a cold and telling eye on terminal illness and she has a gift for original similes. Although the content is undoubtedly bleak, Beard’s writing is majestic and ultimately offers some hope, because the book is essentially less about death and more about what it is to be alive. Cheri is only 96 small, large-print pages, proving that, in the hands of a maestro, less can be so much more. (Serpent’s Tail) Martin Chilton

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23. Reach for the Stars: 1996-2006: Fame, Fallout and Pop’s Final Party by Michael Cragg

Music journalist Michael Cragg’s comprehensive oral history of the Noughties pop scene is the most fun book of the year. I savoured chapters at the end of long days, delighting in stories of how Antony from Blue got shoved to the end during photoshoots (so, brutally, he would be covered up the magazine’s free gift), and Claire from Steps had to perform “Deeper Shade of Blue” on SMTV with a raging hangover. Cragg also doesn’t shy away from the dark undertones of that time – young stars, barely out of school, often worked until they were burnt out and then got discarded for the next bright young thing. But for anyone who grew up idolising cheesy pop stars who mimed on Top of the Pops, this is your bible. (Nine Eight Books) JT

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Catherine Taylor’s evocative, moving memoir is set mainly in the 1970s and 1980s in Sheffield
Catherine Taylor’s evocative, moving memoir is set mainly in the 1970s and 1980s in Sheffield (source)

22. The Stirrings: A Memoir in Northern Time by Catherine Taylor

Catherine Taylor’s evocative, moving memoir is set mainly in the 1970s and 1980s in Sheffield, the South Yorkshire city in which Taylor grew up after her family moved from New Zealand. The book neatly balances a personal story – the problematic relationship with her father after her parents’ divorce, the scariness of finding out about her auto-immune condition – with an incisive social history of an era, told honestly through working-class eyes. I am sure the book must have been an emotionally draining one to write at times, especially in recollecting the trauma of dealing with an unplanned pregnancy. The Stirrings is also a tale of what it’s like to grow up as a woman in a man’s world. Medical men don’t come out well in the book, and neither do the police. What Taylor captures so adroitly is the way that the past is always full of such contrasting experiences. (W&N) MC

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21. August Blue by Deborah Levy

Deborah Levy’s beautifully atmospheric novel August Blue – set in Greece, France, London and Sardinia – succeeds as a dazzling portrait of melancholy and renewal. It is the tale of virtuoso musician Elsa M Anderson who is unmoored and crushed after the public humiliation of walking off stage. She then embarks on an odyssey of discovery across pandemic-hit Europe. Levy is a master novelist and in August Blue, a beguiling story of how identities collide and crack, she shows us what it feels like to be a divided self. The concert disaster and her own unsettling experience of encountering a mysterious doppelganger forces Elsa to confront what she wants out of life, or whether she even wants to continue with it. The novel has a touching and clever finale. (Hamish Hamilton) MC

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20. The Seventh Son by Sebastian Faulks

Sebastian Faulks’s beautifully written novel The Seventh Son is set over four parts – in 2030, 2031, 2047 and 2056 – and it is a stunning meditation on responsibility, decency, love, the intricacies of consciousness and what makes us human. The novel is about surrogate mother Talissa Adam, her genetically engineered child Seth – who is a hybrid of modern human and Homo sapiens Neanderthal – and the devious tech billionaire Lukas Parn who wants to play God. The Seventh Son lingers in the mind and provokes so many reflections on survival, the existence of the soul and the (surely) futile quest to understand the strange and fragile nature of human existence. (Hutchinson Heinemann) MC

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Henry Winkler gives a heart-warming and self-deprecating account of his life in ‘Being Henry: The Fonz… and Beyond’
Henry Winkler gives a heart-warming and self-deprecating account of his life in ‘Being Henry: The Fonz… and Beyond’ (source)

19. Being Henry: The Fonz... and Beyond by Henry Winkler

In 2023, bookshops were full of celebrity memoirs, including those of Barbra Streisand, Britney Spears and Pamela Anderson. My favourite, though, is from the wonderful actor Henry Winkler. After gaining global fame in the 1970s as “the Fonz” in Happy Days, Winkler went on to become a director, an author of children’s fiction and, in recent years, an Emmy-winning star of Barry. In Being Henry: The Fonz… and Beyond, he gives a heart-warming and self-deprecating account of his life. The book is full of Winkler’s trademark humour, including a superb anecdote about Robert de Niro. It’s a big “Ayyyyyy” to this autobiography! (MacMillan) MC

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18. The Nirvana Express: How the Search for Enlightenment Went West by Mick Brown

The Nirvana Express is a fascinating tale of the West’s love affair with spiritualism written by Mick Brown, who is in one of the very elite tiers of modern journalists. He brings all his skills for research, judicious analysis and eloquent writing to a thoroughly engrossing subject. Brown balances reports of the prejudices and racism of the British view of the Indian holy man (gurus were described as “pantomime” figures) with an account that offers rich insights into the appeal of hunting “a spiritual Eldorado”. This is a work of compelling, stylish social anthropology. (C Hurst & Co) MC

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17. Why Women Grow: Stories of Soil, Sisterhood and Survival by Alice Vincent

“To garden is to cultivate a superpower,” writes Alice Vincent in Why Women Grow: Stories of Soil, Sisterhood and Survival. The book, a meditation on why women are drawn to the soil, features dozens of conversations with women about their relationship with the earth and how gardening has profoundly changed them as people. The studies include an inmate on a working farm of a women’s open prison, a struggling gardener who finds a spiritual connection with sunflowers and a courageous Brixton-based community activist. Why Women Grow, with its gorgeous cover design by Rafaela Romaya featuring Vasilisa Romanenko’s painting In Bloom, is a joy, full of restless curiosity about gardening, about life, the longing for meaning and the simple yet quietly feminist act of creating a space for yourself. (Canongate) MC

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Katherine Heiny’s second short stort collection is funny, but sometimes unexpectedly sad
Katherine Heiny’s second short stort collection is funny, but sometimes unexpectedly sad (source)

16. Games and Rituals by Katherine Heiny

Katherine Heiny’s debut short story collection Single, Carefree, Mellow is a hoot, written with perfect rhythm and full of sharp observations about the weirdness of modern life. I wondered whether she would be able to repeat the trick with her second collection, Games and Rituals, but in fact found it a deeper, darker and even more satisfying read. In “Bridesmaid, Revisited”, a woman wears her old bridesmaid dress to work; in “561”, a husband and his new partner get moving house help from his ex; in “Twist and Shout”, an elderly man mistakes his hearing aid for a cashew nut. They are just as funny, but sometimes unexpectedly sad – more like life itself. (Fourth Estate) JT

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15. A Thread of Violence by Mark O’Connell

We’ve established by now that the true crime genre is icky – but isn’t uncovering the truth important? Should we try and understand the minds of murderers? And if we’re going to try, how do we tell those stories while treading the right ethical lines? Irish writer Mark O’Connell explores all of the questions as he gets to know Malcolm Macarthur, the bowtie-wearing socialite behind one of the most shocking murder cases in the history of modern Ireland. An uncomfortable literary page-turner in which O’Connell forces us to look closely at our own cultural appetites. Comparisons to Janet Malcolm are apt. (Granta) JT

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14. All Sorts of Lives: Katherine Mansfield and the Art of Risking Everything by Claire Harman

Claire Tomalin’s 1987 biography Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life may be a hard act to follow, but critic and English Literature scholar Claire Harman does it in her own distinct style. In All Sorts of Lives, Harman combines literary criticism with uncovering the life of the influential modernist writer, via chapters linked to individual short stories. The best literary biographies make you want to go back to the subject’s work with renewed passion, and Harman more than succeeds. In fact, her enthusiasm goes some way into bringing Mansfield’s own vitality to the page. Just look at the opening page: “When Katherine Mansfield died, on a freezing January night in 1923, it seemed as sudden as a light being switched off. Running upstairs triggered a violent consumptive cough, ‘a great gush of blood poured from her mouth’, and within minutes she was dead.” (Chatto & Windus) JT

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‘The Fraud’ is Zadie Smith’s first foray into historical fiction set around the ‘Tichborne Claimant’ battle, a legal cause célèbre in the 1870s
‘The Fraud’ is Zadie Smith’s first foray into historical fiction set around the ‘Tichborne Claimant’ battle, a legal cause célèbre in the 1870s (source)

13. The Fraud by Zadie Smith

“One of the complications of managing decline was nostalgia,” writes Zadie Smith in The Fraud, which is set in Victorian times. The novel is Smith’s first foray into historical fiction – but it also has so much to say about our present disintegrating little island and its obsession with sentimental reminiscence. The Fraud is a complex mosaic of interweaving plots, set around the “Tichborne Claimant” battle, a legal cause célèbre in the 1870s and a case Smith says she has been thinking about for more than a decade. The novel pulls off the trick of being both splendidly modern and authentically old and the characters, including pernicious lawyers, writers disfigured by egotism and milksop campaigners, are varied and entertaining. (Hamish Hamilton) MC

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12. The Earth Transformed: An Untold History by Peter Frankopan

Deny it or not, climate change will dominate the 21st century, as water shortages, famines, fires, and volcanic eruptions mix with large-scale migrations and mass extinctions to create complex, overwhelming problems for society. In this bleak context, Peter Frankopan, author of The Silk Roads and professor of global history at Oxford University, is well placed to offer an expert guide to the history of human interventions in the landscape, the role the climate has played in altering the history of the world and how our own species has shaped terrestrial, marine and atmospheric conditions. There is much intriguing and disturbing information in this 700-page epic and The Earth Transformed uses many new sources of climate data. The book, which contains absorbing illustrations and informative captions, is a sometimes dismaying read but it is a wise, well-researched and essential study for our precarious times. (Bloomsbury) MC

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11. The Hero of This Story by Elizabeth McCracken

Is it fiction? Is it memoir? Elizabeth McCracken’s beguiling novel dances with these very questions, playing with the boundary between life and art. A writer goes to London after the death of her mother. “I kept walking. It’s not much of a plot,” she writes. “As a fictional character I do very little of consequence.” Short but never slight, McCracken grapples with fundamental questions, from the ethics of putting real people in one’s work to the strange immortality that comes from turning them into characters. It becomes not just a spellbinding meditation on storytelling but a haunting summoning of McCracken’s own late mother. (Vintage) JT

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‘Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World’ is a mesmerising collection of 26 essays by the late National Book Award winner Barry Lopez
‘Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World’ is a mesmerising collection of 26 essays by the late National Book Award winner Barry Lopez (source)

10. Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World: Essays by Barry Lopez

National Book Award winner Barry Lopez, who died of cancer, aged 75, on Christmas Day 2020, is celebrated in a mesmerising collection of 26 essays, Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World. Lopez had an enquiring, original mind, and he loved exploring the edges of the world. The book includes vivid accounts of his trip on an ice-breaking vessel in Antarctica, training as a scuba diver and observing walruses in the wild. Again and again, he reminds you of the “therapeutic dimensions of a relationship with place”. The essay that scorched itself into my mind, however, is the one in which he deals openly and bravely with his harrowing childhood and the sexual abuse that started when Lopez was just six. Despite the deep sorrow, the book is one that overflows with compassion. You finish the book awed by Lopez’s quest for understanding the predicaments that nearly everyone encounters, at some level, at some time, in their lives. I was enthralled by embracing his fearlessly burning mind. (Notting Hill Editions) MC

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9. I am Homeless If This is Not My Home by Lorrie Moore

When Finn, the despondent middle-aged teacher who is the protagonist of I am Homeless If This is Not My Home, contemplates “other couples”, he thinks of them as having grown wearily accustomed to each other. “They had cooked each other. Each was the frog and each was the heated water,” writes Lorrie Moore. It is a typically imaginative and original turn of phrase from Moore, in her first novel since 2009’s Women’s Prize-shortlisted A Gate at the Stairs. After visiting his dying brother Max in a New York hospital, Finn is called back to deal with the tragic death of his former lover Lily. What happens next is described by the publishers as a strange journey that “opens up a trap door in reality”. They are underselling what becomes, in Moore’s talented hands, a truly startling black comedy road trip, with a “death-adjacent” spectre. (Faber) MC

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8. Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life by Anna Funder

George Orwell had good reason to fear an objective, honest account of his life, because the charge sheet against him is long and damning. Anna Funder, author of the excellent Stasiland, is a huge admirer of Orwell’s magnificent fiction and essays. This doesn’t sway her from a devastating portrait of an appalling human being and a sexual predator. Funder’s book, a skilful blend of fiction, illuminating personal reflections and biography (and including excerpts from letters by Eileen to her best friend Norah Symes Myles), lays bare his self-absorption and selfishness in numerous small, telling details. In Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life, Funder achieves her objective of giving a proper voice to Eileen O’Shaughnessy, Orwell’s first wife. (Viking) MC

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Secrets are withheld in a story that offers small plot twists and reveals that pack the power of a defibrillator shock in Ann Patchett’s dazzling novel
Secrets are withheld in a story that offers small plot twists and reveals that pack the power of a defibrillator shock in Ann Patchett’s dazzling novel (source)

7. Tom Lake by Ann Patchett

Tom Lake is set in the pandemic, when Lara Kenison, now 57 and living on a cherry farm in rural Michigan, slowly reveals to her three grown-up daughters the story of her affair with Peter Duke, a Hollywood superstar. By the conclusion of the dazzling novel, the reader ends up knowing more than the daughters. Secrets are withheld in a story that offers small plot twists and reveals that pack the power of a defibrillator shock. The characters are varied and astutely drawn and the way Patchett – who has been writing great fiction for decades – handles Lara’s inner life is sublime. The humour is subtle and Patchett, the rough age of the protagonist, has deft things to say about sexism, power dynamics, the effect of the climate crisis on the mentality of the young and the deep truths we all learn about life as we get older. (Bloomsbury) MC

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6. Held by Anne Michaels

In Held, Toronto-born Anne Michaels explores the effects, over time, of our inner lives, and how our inner comprehensions, desires and doubts work slow transformations. Michaels is a writer who moves gracefully between award-winning poetry and captivating fiction – and there is a lyrical beauty to the novel, which weaves across time from 1917 to 2025, spanning four generations. Hope is a constant theme in the work of Michaels, a former winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, and the gorgeous Held confirms why she believes that “hope is never a luxury. It is a necessity, and it is powerful.” With Anne Michaels, you know you are in the presence of a real and rich sensibility. (Bloomsbury) MC

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5. Normal Women: 900 Years of Making History by Philippa Gregory

Normal Women reframes the past by telling the important stories of women that have been left out by so many male historians and diarists who, as Philippa Gregory remarks, simply “amplified” themselves. Gregory, a superb historical novelist and acclaimed historian, covers the themes of work, health, wealth, sex, religion, politics, warfare, employment, class, slavery, sport and education in nine sections, starting with “Doomsday 1066-1348”, when the “tyranny of men” was first solidified. The book is full of surprises and the illustrations are varied and interesting. Sexual violence towards women is a depressing constant in the 900 years covered in the book. Normal Women is a brilliant, essential read, although I would imagine that women readers will be left exasperated by an examination of the way men have gotten away with rigging the game for so long. As Gregory drolly notes, “There was great benefit to men – especially incompetent men of all classes – in excluding women from profitable and interesting work”. (William Collins) MC

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Poet Amy Key uses Joni Mitchell’s ‘Blue’ album to riff and reflect on a life lived largely without romantic love in ‘Arrangements in Blue’
Poet Amy Key uses Joni Mitchell’s ‘Blue’ album to riff and reflect on a life lived largely without romantic love in ‘Arrangements in Blue’ (source)

4. Arrangements in Blue by Amy Key

Not since Deborah Levy’s The Cost of Living has there been a memoir I’ve been as desperate to press into the hands of people I love. Poet Amy Key uses Joni Mitchell’s Blue album to riff and reflect on a life lived largely without romantic love, but there is nothing small or limited about this expansive, gorgeously written book. “I resent how culture can conspire to make single women feel as though their lives aren’t ‘real’ enough,” Key writes. She contemplates finding new “rules for pleasure” as she holidays alone and makes her home a place to host her community of creative friends. Even if you’re paired up, this is an essential manual for pursuing a rich inner life. (Jonathan Cape) JT

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3. Old God’s Time by Sebastian Barry

Old God’s Time is the story of what “the unabashed cruelty of the Fates” has done to a recently retired detective called Tom Kettle. He is a memorably haunted character. Kettle, an inquisitive policeman for forty years, a man with a large, bandy body and a beat-up boxer’s face, is living quietly in retirement, enjoying the calm of his lean-to annexed to a Victorian Castle overlooking the Irish sea. His “peace” is interrupted when the horrors of his past, particularly those involving his beloved wife June and his children Winnie and Joe, come back to haunt him. Old God’s Time, which reflects on family, crime, war and love, will leave you sunk in sadness – but also full of admiration for the truth and beauty of literature when it’s in the hands of a true master. (Faber) MC

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2. The Bee Sting by Paul Murray

Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting was shortlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize – losing out to Paul Lynch’s atmospheric dystopian novel Prophet Song – and it stands as one of the best novels of the year. It’s a compelling, thought-provoking tragic-comic family drama, told in multiple voices, and set in Ireland. The characters, of all ages, are memorable and convincing, the plot is a cracker and it will keep you gripped, amused and provoked throughout 656 brilliant pages. (Hamish Hamilton) MC

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It took biographer Roger Lewis more than a decade to write ‘Erotic Vagrancy’ about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor’s volatile relatiosnship
It took biographer Roger Lewis more than a decade to write ‘Erotic Vagrancy’ about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor’s volatile relatiosnship (source)

1. Erotic Vagrancy: Everything About Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor by Roger Lewis

The volatile relationship of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, who married each other twice and were genuinely spellbound by each other, was obsessive, disturbed and psychotic. It took biographer Roger Lewis more than a decade to write Erotic Vagrancy and the dedication shows in the painstaking, brilliant interweaving of detail, anecdote and explanation. Lewis offers his own funny running commentary on their lives and the celebrities spinning in their orbit. This masterpiece of biography is a completely engrossing account of two remarkable personalities, whose lives were lived in the full glare of public scrutiny. It’s a shocking, twisted and funny story, told with panache. It’s also pure entertainment. (Riverrun) MC

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