The Best Books of 2023

Bret Easton Ellis’s new novel is a long-awaited return to form, as he mines the full sardonic potential of autofiction to tell the story of horny Eighties’ rich kid Bret Easton Ellis, a 17-year-old smart ass with more than a taste for sex and drugs, who’s just getting started on his debut novel, Less Than Zero. For young Bret, the regular vicissitudes of regular high school life in Los Angeles get an extra frisson when, naturally, a vicious serial killer starts making his presence felt.

Back to that question of “best books” again, what do we mean exactly? Best deployment of sparkling prose? In this case, probably not. Best alternative use of Elizabeth Arden Eight-hour cream? Debatable. Best way to add fuel the world’s most public family dispute and ignite the flagging publishing industry with record-breaking sales? On those terms, Prince Harry’s book will take some beating – or given one of the book’s key revelations, a light spanking – in 2023.

Reading Aleksandar Hemon’s work, one is always struck by the capacity of his intellect, and the lightness and dexterity with which complex and momentous themes are handled. That his latest novel begins in Sarajevo – the city of Hemon’s birth – with the ill-fated visit from Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and goes on to chart the love story of two soldiers across conflicts and continents, is no surprise, but his prose is sure to delight in ever-inventive ways.

The lyrical third novel by Paul Harding, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his debut, Tinkers, is set on Apple Island, a tiny piece of land just off the coast of Maine, where a small, rag-tag group of residents scratch out a living from the land and sea. The island takes its name from the trees planted there by the community’s founder, one Benjamin Honey, whose own mixed heritage of “American, Bantu, Igbo” is echoed through those of his descendants, who think little of the variety of their skin tones until the arrival of a white teacher, bringing with him life-shattering enthusiasms and prejudices.

A new epic novel by Salman Rushdie is always going to be a major publishing event, but it can’t help but become even more significant by dint of being the first book to be released after the author sustained life-changing injuries after being attacked on stage in New York last year. In Victory City, which he had already completed, Rushdie looks set to explore territory that has proved so rich for him before: the story of a seemingly ordinary young girl who becomes invested with the powers of a deity, the effects of which play out across a city and over centuries.

Kevin Jared Hosein may have spent more than a decade working as a biology teacher, but his new novel shows that there’s been a fully formed novelist hiding under his lab coat the whole time (OK he hasn’t exactly been hiding his talents: he won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 2018). Hungry Ghosts is an extraordinarily accomplished story set in the 1940s in Trinidad, where the author lives, where issues of class, race and inequality are brought to the fore by the mysterious disappearance of a wealthy local man.

For his latest insightful, humorous enquiry into how and why we live in the ways that we do, New Yorker staff writer Adam Gopnik turns his attention to the idea of mastery, and of exactly what it takes to be really, really good at something. From baking to drawing to driving to magic (rabbit-in-a-hat stuff, not actual wizardry), Gopnik delves into the minds of the experts by walking, perceptively and thoughtfully, in their shoes.

A recently retired policeman, Tom Kettle, is roused from his new-found solitude – sitting in a wicker chair, watching the sea, thinking of his dead wife, June – by two former colleagues from the Garda, who want his insight into a case that’s proving difficult. A familiar set-up, perhaps, but the quietly dazzling way in which Barry, author of The Secret Scripture and Days Without End (both of which won the Costa Prize) explores Tom’s fragmented and difficult past, from childhood sexual abuse to the brutal experiences of civil conflict, is unique and profound.

There are few writers who can explore the psyche – and also the limits of language to describe it – with the lyricism and economy of Max Porter. The author of Lanny and Grief Is the Thing With Feathers returns with a new novel, Shy, in which we inhabit the mind of a troubled young man who has just left an institution for those who fit that particular description, and is on a one-way track to… salvation? Destruction? And just over 100 pages, it won’t take long to find out.

The new novel from American author Emma Cline, whose 2016 debut The Girls, about a teenager who falls in with a Manson-esque cult, caused something of a sensation, is sure to be a big seller of the early summer. This time her subject is another young woman who’s looking for her place in the world, though this one is an Anna Delvey-style grifter on vacation in an elite enclave, whose doing her darnedest not to be found out.

There’s something wide-eyed and lovely about the way Caleb Aumah Nelson writes about what it is to be young and alive to the world, as he did in his debut, Open Water, which won the Costa First Novel Award in 2021. This novel is about the dynamic between a father and son over three summers in London and Ghana, but it is also about music, and dancing, and those pleasures in life that are simple and yet also everything.

With Martin Scorsese’s film adaptation of his 2017 book, Killers of the Flower Moon, due this year, there’ll be plenty of interest in David Grann’s latest non-fiction work, The Wager, about an 18th-century British ship that was wrecked off the coast of Patagonia and the possibly mutinous circumstances that led it its dramatic fate. Grann has the twin gifts of a knack for impeccable reporting and an eye for ripping yarn, so expect to be hooked.

Does it feel a little unfair that Tom Hanks, as well as being a beloved screen icon and two-time Academy Award winner, is not too shabby at writing fiction either? Well maybe, but it’s hard to begrudge the guy and, as his debut short story collection, Uncommon Type, proved in 2017, it’s a verifiable fact, so we just have to deal. His first novel, out this year, which tells the story of the chaotic making of a fictional war movie, is as ambitious and likeable as he is.

Acts of Desperation author Megan Nolan’s sophomore novel is set in the 1990s, where an investigative reporter looking into the death of a child – purportedly at the hands of another – is drawn into a web of intrigue surrounding a mysterious Irish immigrant family who may or may not be implicated.

In the third novel by Brandon Taylor, author of Filthy Animals and Real Life, a group of friends (and more-than-friends) in Iowa City navigate the slings and arrows of early adulthood, culminating in a log-cabin showdown in which they contemplate their respective futures.