The 20 Best Books of 2023

Ever since his breakout debut, Friday Black, we’ve been eagerly awaiting Adjei-Brenyah’s sophomore outing. Nearly five years later, it arrived this past spring, and it surpassed all expectations. In a dystopian United States, the prison-industrial complex has gone private, leaving incarcerated people with no choice but to compete for their freedom in the Criminal Action Penal Entertainment system. Loretta Thurwar and Hamara “Hurricane Staxxx” Stacker have traveled together for years as Links in the same Chain-Gang, but as Thurwar nears her freedom, she contemplates how to bring dignity to her multi-racial and multi-gendered coalition of fellow gladiators. Reading Chain-Gang All-Stars in a nation addicted to violent sports that brutalize athletes of color, Adjei-Brenyah’s acerbic vision lands like a lightning bolt of truth.

Read an exclusive excerpt here at Esquire.

“Exiled from the American origin story, Indigenous people await the telling of a history that includes them,” writes Yale history professor Ned Blackhawk. The Rediscovery of America is that history—a sprawling study that situates Indigenous peoples at the heart of the American story, tracing a five century sweep from the first “epic encounter” between empires, all the way to twentieth century reservation activists. Blackhawk’s gripping retelling demonstrates how Indigenous peoples have shaped the trajectory of the American republic, from their role in the American Revolution to their refashioning of American law. Gripping and nuanced, The Rediscovery of America is an essential remedy to the historical record.

In this gutting memoir, an adopted daughter wrestles with grief, loss, and regret. Growing up in rural Oregon, Chung often felt “racial isolation” as the Korean-American daughter of white parents, who lived paycheck to paycheck. Many years later, after finding a community and a home on the East Coast, Chung suffered two devastating blows: within the span of two years, she lost her father to kidney disease and her mother to cancer. A Living Remedy recounts the agony of watching them grapple with their health amid financial instability and a dysfunctional healthcare system. Chung describes her father’s death as “negligent homicide, facilitated and sped by the state’s failure to fulfill its most basic responsibilities to him and others like him.” Keep the tissues close for this visceral and wrenching memoir—you’ll need them.

Read an essay by the author here at Esquire.

What should we do when we love the art, but hate the artist? In Monsters, one of our sharpest critics delivers a bracing meditation on the thorniest questions of the #MeToo era. Can we ethically consume the art of monstrous artists? Do we hold monstrous women to different standards than monstrous men? In the age of parasocial relationships, how much does fandom define us, and what’s a fan to do when our favorite artist betrays us? Dederer contends that these contradictions are baked into the endeavor of making and loving art. Lucid and fierce, generous and unflinching, Monsters is the most exhilarating study on this topic to date.

Read an interview with the author here at Esquire.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Evicted returns with another paradigm-shifting inquiry into America’s dark heart. This time, Desmond asks: how does the United States, the world’s richest nation, have more poverty than any other advanced democracy? Poverty, by America argues that poverty persists because the financially secure benefit from it, with landlords, banks, corporations, and politicians all reaping staggering gains from overcharging and under-serving Americans in need. Desmond advances a fierce argument: that alongside “aggressive, uncompromising antipoverty reforms,” it would take just $177 billion to end hunger and homelessness in America. As always, Desmond delivers a radical vision: a book that urges us to abandon old ways of thinking and dream a new path forward.

One of our finest nonfiction storytellers returns with a swashbuckling epic about shipwreck, scandal, mutiny, and murder. In 1741, when a British naval vessel was shipwrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia, its crew divided into factions and descended into violence. After five months marooned, some seamen sailed away in makeshift boats, abandoning their captain and his few remaining loyalists. Survivors of this perilous journey back to England were hailed as heroes—until the captain made a miraculous return, accusing his officers of mutiny. What followed was a court martial and a vicious war of words, with each side spinning a narrative to avoid death by hanging. Masterfully structured from a wealth of firsthand accounts, like logbooks, correspondence, and court martial testimony, The Wager is a thrilling voyage about tall tales, at sea and on land.

Read an interview with the author here at Esquire.

Ever since the time of the ancients, humans have gazed at the stars and wondered if we’re alone. But why do we seek kinship in the cosmos, and what does the search tell us about ourselves? In this captivating and expansive book, Green traces the long history of the search for extraterrestrial life, from astronomers like Galileo to modern-day NASA scientists. But beneath all that scientific history, Green locates a rich bedrock of philosophical and literary inquiry, encompassing everything from golden age sci-fi novels to Star Trek. Our best hopes and worst fears about extraterrestrial life, Green argues, are revealed as much in the stories we imagine as in the discoveries we make. Packed with wonder, humanity, and hope, The Possibility of Life will leave you grateful for life on Earth, even as you dream of first contact.

Groff’s seventh novel begins with a high-octane escape: under the cover of darkness, a young woman flees colonial Jamestown, bound for parts unknown. Pursued by English soldiers and menaced by the brutal New England winter, her frantic flight threatens to kill her at every turn—but to remain in the settlement, riven by plague and famine, would be unbearable. Though the white-knuckled tale of this young woman, known only as “the girl,” Groff enlivens the dark crevices of colonial history. But the ambitions of The Vaster Wilds are loftier than this—in fact, they’re downright cosmic. As the girl heads north on foot, she questions everything she’s been taught about the new world, its Indigenous people, and how to understand God. Deranged with hunger and cold, she receives a hard-won education from the woods. The result is an ecstatic transformation—one that’s a haunting and holy experience to read and behold.

Read an interview with the author here at Esquire.

Doppelgänger began when Naomi Klein, the liberal activist and blockbuster writer, became regularly mistaken for Naomi Wolf, the liberal feminist author turned conspiracy theorist and anti-vaxxer. Amid a decade of defending her own reputation against Wolf’s escalating conservatism, Klein tail-spinned into obsession, tracking Wolf’s right-wing media appearances in a quest to understand her “flight from reality.” But this book’s outlook is far broader than Klein’s own doppelgänger trouble; rather, it opens outward onto a roving survey of how doubling organizes our social and political lives. The concept of the doppelgänger, Klein insists, can help us understand our uncanny political moment, where “millions of people have given themselves over to fantasy.” Doppelgänger is a lucid frame on conspiracy movements and digital doubling, and a powerful implication of the double lives we choose to ignore.

Read an interview with the author here at Esquire.

Fans of The Plot and The Book of Goose will fall hard for Yellowface, Kuang’s biting thriller about an act of literary theft and its staggering consequences. When Athena Liu, a Chinese-American literary darling, dies suddenly in her apartment, her old friend June Hayward, a struggling white novelist, seizes the manuscript left behind on her desk: a novel about the World War I Chinese Labor Corps. June passes the novel off as her own, allows her publisher to rebrand her as the ethnically ambiguous Juniper Song, and enjoys smash success—until social media backlash and an anonymous user named @AthenaLiusGhost threaten to expose her secret. Taut and twisty, Yellowface is a deft satire that exposes how the book publishing industry appropriates, exploits, and erases writers of color.

If Pew, Lacey’s visionary 2020 novel, seemed like the height of her ambition, think again. Now, she’s back with an even more staggering achievement: Biography of X, an alternate history of the United States told through the eyes of a grieving widow unraveling her late wife’s secrets. Determined to write an accurate biography of her wife, the famous performance artist X, crime reporter C.M. Lucca goes in search of X’s mysterious past. The quest sends her into the dark heart of a post-war America split into two territories, and deep into the inconsistencies of X’s shapeshifting past. All roads lead to one final destination: the truth about their marriage, which isn’t what it seems. In this masterpiece about the slippery nature of art, identity, and truth, Lacey contemplates a question that haunts us all: can we ever truly know the people we love?

Violent delights abound in this historical horror tale from one of the genre’s most exciting voices. In 1914, Adelaide Henry sets fire to her childhood home and flees eastward, carrying only a locked steamer trunk containing a mysterious secret. She hopes to outrun her past and start a new life in Montana, where “lone women” can stand on their own two feet as homesteaders. But as the sole Black woman in a too-white town, Adelaide isn’t welcomed with open arms—and when the lock on her steamer trunk is broken, all hell breaks loose. Rich in secrets, suspense, and dread, LaValle’s latest is a gripping and heartfelt thriller about how lone women survive a harsh world.

Read an interview with the author here at Esquire.

One of our finest practitioners of the short story form returns with a dazzling new collection about the themes that have always obsessed her: loss, longing, and loneliness. Though Li’s characters are distinctive and finely drawn, mothers and children recur; in one story, an immigrant woman working as a postpartum nanny imagines running away with the baby, while in another, the mother of an autistic boy contemplates the differences between their minds. In another standout, a mother grieving her son’s suicide opens a spreadsheet of everyone she’s ever known who has died, prompting a new bout of grief for her long-dead grandfather. As the collection’s title suggests, Wednesday’s Child is full of woe, but Li’s fictions are never one-note—rather, they capture the full tapestry of the human condition. Packed with extraordinary beauty and quiet devastation, these stories cut quick and deep, like a knife in the dark.

For four decades now, McDermott has written one exquisite novel after another, but her latest, a poignant tale of women and girls living on the periphery of the Vietnam War, may just be her masterpiece. Absolution takes place in Saigon circa 1963, where a small community of American corporate wives consider their own moral obligations as they live in privileged luxury against a backdrop of unimaginable horrors. As some of the women shrink into their prescribed roles, others break the rules to perform radical acts of altruism for the people of Vietnam. Decades later, one woman’s daughter is left to wonder: did they do good, or not? In this richly imagined novel, packed with unforgettable characters, McDermott soars in a profound quest of moral inquiry.

The author of Lurking makes her blistering fiction debut with Wrong Way, a closely observed tale of how individual lives are shattered by Big Tech treachery. After years scraping by in the gig economy, Teresa’s life changes forever when she’s hired by AllOver, a tech behemoth billing itself as “an experience company.” AllOver’s new rideshare service boasts driverless cars, but the reality is more sinister—instead, contractors like Teresa operate the vehicles while hiding inside a secret compartment. Clinging to the job for financial security, Teresa loses herself in AllOver’s hollow promises. Wrong Way is a chilling portrait of economic precarity, and a disturbing reminder of how attempts to optimize life and work leave us all alienated.

Read an interview with the author here at Esquire.

O’Brien’s first novel in two decades was well worth the wait. In 2019, a “lying infection” has taken hold of the nation, and our narrator Boyd Halverson, a disgraced journalist, now makes a living flooding the internet with “fresh untrue truth content.” Pushed to the brink of despair, he robs a bank, kidnaps the teller, and lights out across America’s highways with his hostage, bound for Mexico. The getaway morphs into a quest for revenge on the man who tanked Boyd’s journalism career, and soon enough, these unlikely bandits are dodging uproarious brushes with danger. In the age of “mythomania,” O’Brien takes aim at the lies that power this country, and how and why they sustain us. America Fantastica peers straight into the dark heart of the American psyche, and it's unafraid of the comedy and tragedy staring back.

Read an interview with the author here at Esquire.

The visionary author of How to Do Nothing returns to challenge the notion that “time is money.” In this hopeful and subversive cultural history, Odell traces the origins of our market-based understanding of time, arguing that how we organize our days has always been “a history of extraction, whether of resources from the earth or of labor time from people.” Odell’s research is rigorous, but Saving Time’s real triumph lies in her road map for experiencing time outside the capitalist clock. Instead of “hoarding” time, we should “garden” it, attuning ourselves to the natural world and prioritizing meaningful human connections. Expect to feel changed by this radical way of seeing.

Read an interview with the author here at Esquire.

In Iowa City, a coterie of young bohemians struggle with intimacy, class, and purpose. A master of characterization, Taylor juggles a large cast of friends and peers orbiting the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, interconnected by their studies and their relationships. The central figure is Seamus, a poet questioning the relevance of his work and antagonizing his peers. Elsewhere in the novel, privilege drives a wedge between Fyodor and Timo, two lovers strained by different resentments (Fyodor fumes about Timo’s middle-class upbringing, while vegetarian Timo is disgusted by Fyodor working in a meatpacking plant). Masterfully directed by Taylor, characters swim in and out of the story, exploring a lived-in symphony of questions about what it means to make art, love truthfully, and live morally.

Read an interview with the author here at Esquire.

Welcome back to the Technicolor world of Ray Carney: furniture salesman, family man, and sometimes-criminal. Last seen in Harlem Shuffle, Carney returns for another bruising round of moral misadventures in Crook Manifesto, the second installment in Whitehead’s planned three-volume series. Crook Manifesto finds Carney upwardly mobile and back on the straight and narrow, but all it takes to pull him back into Harlem’s criminal underbelly is one tortured trade. Of course, there’s no “one last time” for men like Carney, who soon becomes an unwilling accomplice to a corrupt detective on a long, dark night of the soul. The consequences of that brutal night ricochet across Carney’s life, dragging him ever further down into the morass of danger, dirty deals, and double lives he’s fought so hard to escape. In this stylish social novel for the twenty-first century, Whitehead soars to new heights.

In a near future ravaged by climate disaster, smog has blotted out the sun, killing most of Earth’s crops. Our narrator, a nameless young chef, is left to cook with lackluster bioengineered ingredients as she muses, “Chef had lost its meaning.” Everything changes when she accepts a head chef position at a secretive food research community on the French-Italian border, where she encounters unimaginable bounty. But her job is not what it seems, and her billionaire employer’s plans for the future raise questions about just who gets to eat well. Land of Milk and Honey is a sensory fantasia, rich in luscious descriptions of food, sex, and nature. In these beguiling pages, Zhang tells a powerful story about the thorny intersections of privilege and pleasure.

Read an essay by the author here at Esquire.