It’s best books season, my favorite time of the year, when we celebrate the rich trove of fiction that’s come out in the past 12 months. Here is the complete list of 100 Best Fiction Books of 2023, but let’s start with the books I’d been waiting impatiently for, such as Chain-Gang All-Stars (Pantheon, May 2), the “acerbic, poignant, and, at times, alarmingly pertinent dystopian novel” (as our reviewer called it) by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. It more than fulfills the promise of his 2018 debut, the story collection Friday Black.
It’s been 10 years since Eleanor Catton became the youngest winner of the Booker Prize with her historical novel The Luminaries; her new book, Birnam Wood (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, March 7), about a group of eco-activists in New Zealand, goes in a completely different direction. Our reviewer said, “This blistering look at the horrors of late capitalism manages to also be a wildly fun read.”
Abraham Verghese made his fans wait 14 years for his second novel, The Covenant of Water (Grove, Feb. 6), which conjures three generations in the life of a South Indian family. Our reviewer proclaimed, “By God, he’s done it again.” After the success of his first novel, Personal Days, Ed Park took 15 years to publish his second, Same Bed Different Dreams (Random House, Nov. 11), which, at 544 pages, is also twice as long. Our reviewer called it “a brash, rangy, sui generis feat of speculative fiction.”
As always, many wonderful volumes of short fiction were published this year. Jeffery Renard Allen’s Fat Time (Graywolf, June 20) is “a collection of wildly inventive and intensely realized stories [that] provide electrifying jolts to the very notion of ‘Black Experience,’ ” according to our review, while Katherine Heiny’s Games and Rituals (Knopf, April 18) is an “irresistibly amusing, bighearted collection.” Halle Hill’s debut, Good Women (Hub City Press, Sept. 12), set in the Deep South and Appalachia, is “a stunning slow burn brimming with observation, emotion, and incident.” In Wednesday’s Child, Yiyun Li (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Sept. 5) explores different shades of loss; our reviewer called these stories “quiet, beautiful accounts of journeys through hell.”
As with her last few books, Jhumpa Lahiri wrote her most recent collection, Roman Stories (Knopf, Oct. 10), in Italian, a language she learned while living in Italy, and then translated it into English (working with Todd Portnowitz). In the newest work, she examines the Eternal City with an outsider’s eye. “Filled with intelligence and sorrow, these sharply drawn glimpses of Roman lives create an impressively unified effect,” according to our review.
Other wonderful books in translation include This Is Not Miami by Fernanda Melchor (translated by Sophie Hughes; New Directions, April 4), a group of “absolutely stunning” portraits of life in Veracruz, according to our reviewer; Reykjavík by Ragnar Jónasson and Katrín Jakobsdóttir (translated by Victoria Cribb; Minotaur, Sept. 5), a gripping thriller about the cold case of a girl who went missing in 1956; and Shubeik Lubeik, written and illustrated by Deena Mohamed (Pantheon, Jan. 10), a graphic novel about a fantastical Egypt where wishes can come true—but only if they’re licensed correctly. Any of these books have the power to make a reader’s wishes for entertainment and enlightenment come true.
Laurie Muchnick is the fiction editor.
