The 15 best books of 2023

Following from the success of ‘Babel’ and The ‘Poppy War’ series, Kuang’s fifth novel is her first dip outside the fantasy genre, and she does not disappoint here either. When Asian American literary darling Athena Liu dies in a freak accident, her jealous friend June Hayward – a struggling writer – steals an unpublished manuscript and passes it off as her own, simultaneously whitewashing Athena’s war epic about the Chinese Labour Corps, and also masquerading herself as a racially ambiguous (and therefore possibly Asian) writer. At once a satirical thriller, a critique of the publishing industry, and a shrewd prod at modern notions about race, identity, and appropriation, it is hard not to want more of Kuang’s words on our bookshelves.

What would you do if you found out you'd been cancelled overnight? That’s the question at the heart of ‘The List’, and it’s one that shifts and bends at every turn, leaving you feeling conflicted throughout. Adegoke’s debut holds a mirror up to the fragility of our digital public space, where the power struggle between overzealous stans and online vigilantes can either make or break you. It’s a sharp, compelling and at times, confronting read. Be prepared to have your views changed over and over and over…

This is a book I’ve been thinking about a lot this year. It follows a chef who, enticed by the ultra-rich in a future where food is scarce, discovers the meaning of pleasure and the inequality of survival. Not only does Zhang’s prose tickle our senses with visceral descriptions of food and desire, but she also weaves in themes like morality and death that sometimes can feel larger than life into tender, human moments. Alluring, sensual and ambitious. This is definitely a read you’d want to devour and revisit later for leftovers.

It’s such an enormous cliche to say that poets write the best novels, but K Patrick’s scorcher of a debut serves as proof that it’s often true. Set in a fusty single-sex boarding school during a sweltering English heatwave, the genre-defying, intensely erotic slow-burn romance is told from the viewpoint of a timid young butch woman, who has arrived from Australia to take up the post of Matron at the school, and soon finds herself utterly captivated by the headmaster’s magnetic wife Mrs S. It’s spectacularly horny (do not, as I did, make the mistake of reading it in the office kitchen on your lunch break,) but also stylishly written and brimming with clever ideas about looking and being seen. I devoured it over an appropriately blistering week in July, and haven’t really stopped thinking about it since.

This debut memoir from NYC comedian Zach Zimmerman serves up laugh-out-loud bits alongside wrenching emotional moments. The book charts the young comic’s journey from ‘a straight, meat-eating Christian conservative to a queer, vegetarian, atheist socialist.’ Zimmerman weaves punchy lists, like ‘Fashion Trends for the End of Days’ and ‘Some First-Date Flags to Watch Out For,’ along with deeper narrative pieces, including ‘The Twink on the Fire Escape.’ I’m eagerly awaiting Zimmerman’s next chapter.

It’s a little difficult to recommend Emma Cline’s ‘The Guest’ as an enjoyable reading experience but it is definitely a highly engaging one—akin to having a slow-burning panic attack. (After reading the final page, I realised I’d been clenching my jaw for the last two hours.) So why read it? Cline’s incisive take on the social mores of the Hamptons is fantastic and, at times, hilarious. As the novel’s protagonist Alex—a young, party girl running from (a lot) of trouble—bounces from house to house out east, her wake of self-destruction becomes thrillingly immersive. I’ve never read a better depiction of full-on psychological dissociation. It will have you in its grip until its final (ambiguous) sentence and leave you plenty to discuss once you’re finished.

This book is a ride and a half. Tracing the story of dance music through the dancers themselves, it’s a conflation of memoir and social history, written in beautiful, inquisitive prose. It gives weighted importance to Irish dance halls, discos at youth centres, the fondly-remembered east London venue Plastic People and the dancing we do in our kitchens when no one is looking. The conclusion? We’re all dancers – it’s part of what makes us human. Reading it has changed the way I think about movement on the daily.

A conventionally-structured book might simply be too functional, inflexible and unglamourous to properly do justice to someone as gloriously exceptional as New German Cinema filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Ian Penman – legendary writer, critic and master of lucid, joyous prose – instead offers up a patchwork portrait of RWF, one assembled of 450 observations, reflections, bits of research and more. Through those fragments you get a proper sense of how one can really wallow in both Fassbinder’s massive body of work and his personal mythology – but Mirrors also reeks of adoration and joy, a delightful, emotive and appropriately flashy ode.

It’s not the most singular literary achievement of 2023, but Suzanne Heywood has a remarkable story to tell and by god she tells it in her memoir Wavewalker. In the middle of the seventies her parents decided that they would retrace Captain Cook’s third voyage for murky reasons - long story short she spent her entire childhood living on the titular yacht, subjected to her father’s often bewildering whims as to where to sail and what to do next. It’s an extraordinary tale of adventure, yes, but also truly catastrophic parenting, bordering on child abuse.

Kind of akin to a Canadian, millennial version of ‘Bridget Jones’ Diary’, comedy writer Monica Heisey’s debut novel Really Good Actually feels like a bit of a survey on what it is to be a single woman right now. Following ‘surprisingly young divorcée’ Maggie for the year following her split from the husband she married in her mid-twenties, the most striking thing about this book is that it tells you something you know – that old adage: the only way is through – but it finds funny new ways to do it. In the process, Heisey also sets her satirical sights on wellness culture, and the impossible standards of beauty and behaviour women constantly feel the weight of, in a way that feels properly relatable rather than cloying or like a moisturiser advert.

Jen Beagin’s ‘Big Swiss’ is kooky and clever and had me laughing out loud while reading, something few books achieve. The novel is a weird, somewhat love story between Greta, a sex therapist’s transcriptionist, and Big Swiss, a patient she falls in love with while listening to and transcribing her sessions. Big Swiss is a repressed married woman, while Greta is totally unhinged, living in a dilapidated Dutch farmhouse swarming with bees. Filled with eccentric characters, it’s a super funny book in my favourite literary canon: middle-aged women doing crazy shit.

‘New Yorker’ writer Michael Schulman’s history of the Academy Awards is full of behind-the-scenes gossip and movie-palace intrigue. But his meticulously researched survey — subtitled ‘A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat, and Tears’— also uses the Oscars as a lens to examine larger issues in the film industry and American culture in general, including the Red Scare, the rise of organized labour and the marginalization of nonwhite artists. This 500-page admixture of glitz and dirt is worth its weight: It’s a trove of gilt-y pleasures.

No one captures London quite like Zadie Smith. The Willesden-born writer is the 21st century’s answer to Charles Dickens, effortlessly encapsulating the capital’s vibrant, eclectic soul. This time, she delves into London’s Victorian past for her first historical novel, at the centre of which is the ‘Tichborne trial’ – a real case that took place in the 1860s involving a man who claimed to be a wealthy aristocrat thought to be lost at sea. Despite the man obviously being a ‘fraud’, the case captures people’s imaginations, with the public coming out in droves to support tye ‘fun-loving, beer-swilling, aristocratic man of the people’. Smith draws parallels between the 1800s and today that smash through the centuries, bursting into stark realisations about everything from race to populism in 21st-century Britain. As is her way, there are also keen character studies, razor-sharp dialogue and shrewd points on the nature of writing and human failure thrown in for good measure. It’s a whirlwind of a read.

I can't in clear conscience say that Britney Spears’ autobiography is one of the actual best books of the year when so many works with more literary merit have landed on our shelves. But there’s still something gripping about ‘The Woman In Me’. It’s a gothic thriller, a horror story about a woman who’s trapped in a body that’s ruthlessly controlled by her father, involuntarily drugged and imprisoned in a mental hospital, and manipulated into becoming a cash cow for her whole family. If ’90s pop culture was a sugary alcopop, this book is the inevitable hangover, queasy and throat-stingingly sad.

In his latest novel, M R Carey – who wrote zombie horror 'The Girl With All The Gifts’ – can't be confined to just one tiny universe, and must instead explore the multiverse, or the idea that there are infinite universes. Sounds too big, too unwieldy? Well, he keeps it tight by looking at a small group of characters who can ‘step’ between universes, many of which are ruled over by a giant empire called the Pandominion. In its physical, animalistic diversity it nods to greats like Larry Niven, in its wild eyed technological awe it nods to Arthur C Clarke, but it remains its own, unique thing. It ends on too much of a cliffhanger for my liking, but the whole thing acts as a neat, effective metaphor for freedom and domination, empire and liberty.