My best reads of 2023!
My best reads of 2023
Throughout December, I Iook forward to hearing about everyone’s favourite books of the year. Looking back on my own reading notes for 2023, I notice that compared to recent years I’ve read books published relatively recently. I think this is a good indication that this has been a stellar period for my kind of fiction. Here are several I can thoroughly recommend – the books that have stayed with me:
Remote Sympathy by Catherine Chidsey (Europa Editions, 2021)
One of my first reads of the year dealt with grim subject matter. Remote Sympathy is set in World War 2 in the environs of the Buchenwald concentration camp. We see the camp from the perimeter, so to speak, as seen by the families of the SS German officers who operated the camp. It details how one woman in particular, Frau Greta Hahn, fails to grasp the truth that lies behind that perimeter fence. That is, until she becomes increasingly dependent on an inmate, Lenard Weber, a former physician, who is allocated to the Hahn family as a servant. It’s a totally immersive novel, beautifully crafted.
Cuddy by Benjamin Myers (Bloomsbury Circus, 2023)
This is definitely one of my top novels of recent years. Cuddy won the 2023 Goldsmiths Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker. It’s an ambitious, experimental, epic novel, which spans from Lindisfarne in the 8th century to a present-day austerity Britain. Written in four parts, the novel is held together by the story of St Cuthbert (the titular Cuddy), a hermit and unofficial patron saint of the north of England.
Boy Parts by Eliza Clark (Influx, 2020)
Boy Parts had been on my TBR pile since it was published by Influx. But somehow it took me three years to get around to starting it. I found myself blown away by this dark comedy, which follows art photographer Irina as she persuades young men to model for her in explicit poses. Shocking, funny and engrossing, I could not put this book down.
His Bloody Project – Graeme Macrae Burnet (Saraband, 2016)
After reading and loving Case Studies by Graeme Macrae Burnet, I decided I should go back and read his highly acclaimed earlier novel, His Bloody Project (shortlisted for the Man Booker 2016). I am partial to historical fiction, and this novel, set in 1869 in the Scottish Highlands, delivers a totally riveting and psychologically intense reading experience. The author portrays the malicious undercurrents in a small highland community – undercurrents that lead to murderous hatred.
Demon Copperhead by Kingsolver (Faber and Faber, 2022)
In Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver takes aim at the ongoing and tragic crisis of opioid addiction, in a modern retelling of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield. Winner of 2023 Women’s Prize and co-recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, it’s a convincing novel with rich, believable characters. I admit I nearly bailed when the novel took a deep dive into American football culture, but I’m glad I persisted. Slightly too long, but an ambitious novel that achieves its aims.
In Ascension by Martin MacInnes (Atlantic, 2023)
An equally sprawling (in a good way) novel, In Ascension takes the reader from the thermal vents on the ocean floor to a space mission to the edge of the solar system investigating a suspected alien first-contact. The main character is marine biologist Dr Leigh Hasenboch who, as a child, found a temporary escape from her dysfunctional family by swimming outdoors. The story returns repeatedly to Leigh’s fraught relationship with her sister and parents. In Ascension was longlisted for the Booker Prize and has rightly gained a wide readership. An ambitious novel, gorgeous prose, heart-rending and absorbing, with an ending that works well for me.
Prophet Song by Paul Lynch (Oneworld, 2023)
Winner of this year’s Booker prize, Prophet Song is a dystopia set in Dublin. An authoritarian regime has come to power and is attempting to suppress rebel incursions. Paul Lynch asks an ages-old question: when do you know it’s time to leave? Or, to put it another way: why do some people leave it too late? The story is centred on Eilish Stack, mother of four, who is fending as best she can following the detention of her detective husband by the secret police. By association she comes under suspicion and loses her job as a scientist. Her elder son leaves Dublin to join the rebels, while she clings to old routines, reluctant to take help from her sister living in Canada. It’s good to see a dystopia winning the Booker!
Orbital by Samantha Harvey (Jonathan Cape, 2023)
Top marks for a succinct, beautifully written novel set on a space station orbiting earth. Six astronauts carry out their experiments while observing the earth with wonder. Time has little meaning on the space station, which orbits the earth 16 times in 24 hours. Samantha Harvey describes the ‘whipcrack of dawn’ that the astronauts experience time and time again each day. They observe their home planet where the boundaries between countries are invisible. Earth appears natural and beautiful. But the astronauts come to a startling realisation that the earth is not unspoilt. Human impact on the natural world is everywhere in evidence once they look for it. This short novel includes a simple but useful map, which shows the 16 orbits made by the astronauts in this one fictional day.
Julia by Sandra Newman (Granta, 2023)
How can any writer of speculative fiction resist this retelling of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, written from the perspective of Julia? In Sandra Newman’s novel we see Julia as a reckless adventurer within the world of Oceania as she pursues sexual encounters which are not sanctioned. She becomes an agent for inner party member, O’Brian, setting honey traps and encouraging her victims to denounce Big Brother. We learn about Julia’s fascinating backstory, we revisit the rat scene in Room 101, and we are rewarded by Newman’s fascinating and satisfactory conclusion.
Currently on the bedside table:
The Deluge by Stephen Markley, which I am loving (though this is a long, long book), Hilary Mantel’s A Memoir of My Former Self, The Last White Man by Mohsin Hamid, I Am, I Am, I Am by Maggie O’Farrell.
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While I am here, I am delighted that my essay on Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale was published this year in Dead Ink’s Writing the Future, edited by Dan Coxon and Richard V. Hirst. You can buy it here direct from Dead Ink!
Also, I am interviewed for the Friends of the Earth podcast series Imagining Tomorrow, launched earlier this month. In this uplifting series, award-winning podcaster and author Emma Newman pieces together the roadmap to utopia by interviewing inventors, communities and science fiction authors.
Happy reading and listening, everyone!
Historical fiction, it often strikes me, has much in common with speculative fiction in terms of world building. Many aspects of historical worlds are known to us, and certain aspects of a future world seem easier to predict than others. But writers of historical and science fiction must apply themselves to filling in the gaps. This year, my favourite historical novel was Hamnet (Tinder Press, 2020) by Maggie O’Farrell — beautifully realised and richly detailed in depicting life during the closing years of the sixteenth century in Stratford-upon-Avon.
One of the delights of my year was catching up with the novella Small Things Like These (Faber & Faber, 2021) by Claire Keegan. The story is tightly focussed on a coal merchant and his interaction with a convent and the Magdalene laundry run by the nuns. Keegan prompts the reader to ask what they themselves would do. Would the reader, in similar circumstances, fail in their lack of curiosity, turn a blind eye, or would they intervene?
There is little I can add to the praise for Sea of Tranquility (Picador, 2022) by Emily St John Mandel, but I can say that Mandel is now a must-read author for me. I saved this novel to read on holiday in the latter part of the year. It did not disappoint. Smart, fragmented, and intriguing from start to finish. Sea of Tranquility combines historical, contemporary and future settings. Wonderful.
Another novel combining past, present and future storylines is The Coral Bones (Unsung Stories, 2022) by E.J. Swift. I was fortunate to read this novel in manuscript. It’s an elegant novel — a beautifully crafted love letter to our endagered coral reefs, confirming Swift as a writer of compelling eco-fiction.
I returned once again this year to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (Jonathan Cape, 1986) because I’m writing an essay about the influence of that novel on my own fiction. Though I have read The Handmaid’s Tale at least four times over the decades, I found new, startling resonances in the wake of Trumpism and the overturning of Roe versus Wade. It makes me wonder if I should return to more old favourites!
Sandra Newman’s The Men (Granta, 2022) struck me as an equally confrontational feminist novel. I read it immediately after The Handmaid’s Tale. In Newman’s novel, all people with a Y chromosome — both young and old — disappear overnight. The author imagines a world run by women, prompting the reader to ask what would be gained and what would be lost. Equal parts utopia-dystopia-mystery-horror.
I also enjoyed a relatively recent classic, Gilead (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004) by Marilynne Robinson, which is a slow-burn novel about family, fathers and sons, religion and faith, a love of life in the face of approaching death, and the attempt to open one’s heart and set the record straight before it’s too late.
Midway through 2021, I embarked on what would prove to be a deeply rewarding experience, a decidedly unusual one for me. I rarely tackle novels in a series, so I surprised myself by reading back-to-back Hilary Mantel’s Tudor trilogy: Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies and The Mirror and The Light. This second pandemic year left me somewhat rudderless, and I felt comforted to inhabit the Tudor court for several weeks! Mantel’s trilogy led me to devour a range of non-fiction books and tv dramas set in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. I approached the end of 2021 thoroughly steeped in Plantagenet and Tudor history.
I read Lampedusa as the reality of Covid-19 unfolded, as the virus started to spread from Italy. I was in France at the time and decided to dash home to Scotland. Steven Price’s novel, set in 1950s Sicily, depicts a time when Europe still reeled from the destruction of the Second World War. The novel imagines the last days of Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa as he struggles to finish his novel, The Leopard, a classic of Italian literature, published posthumously. Once wealthy, he now lives in poverty with his wife in the bombed ruins of their mansion. An intimate novel, ultimately uplifting, and one that has stayed with me.
Following the joy, last year, of reading Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy and essay collection Coventry, I picked up Leaving the Atocha Station—the first in Ben Lerner’s trilogy—hoping for the same auto-fictional thrill. Leaving the Atocha Station follows Adam, an American poet, during his writing residency in Madrid. I loved this witty novel! Initially the narrator inhabits a zone of uncertainty owing to his poor Spanish, and he almost enjoys mis-communicating with the people around him. He repeatedly loses his way in the streets of Madrid, constantly on the verge of spinning out of control with his medication, hash and booze. He tells lies about his family because he can get away with it—no one in Madrid knows his background. But gradually his Spanish improves and his lies start to catch up with him. I expect I’ll read the next two books in the trilogy pretty soon.
As we all entered lockdown, I found myself—along with many writers!—dwelling on how to write fiction in the era of Covid. So, I looked back to see how writers approached their fiction during the Second World War. The Love-charm of Bombs provided a lengthy yet compelling reading experience at a time when I struggled to tear myself away from news bulletins. Lara Feigel gives a detailed insight into the writing lives, loves and wartime occupations of key writers of the era—Graham Green, Elizabeth Bowen, Rose Macaulay, Hilde Spiel and Henry Yorke.
Two intertwined storylines are set in Vineland—a 19th-century utopian community, but now an unfashionable suburb. A modern-day family grapples with complex relationships between generations. A traditional family in the 1870s aspires to climb the social ladder. We meet Mary Treat, the real-world naturalist who corresponds with Charles Darwin, and this provides an enchanting thread, the most seductive part of the novel for me.
A Separation delves into the minutiae of a marriage in the process of disintegration, and is mainly set in rural Greece—a Peloponnese landscape scorched by wildfires. The atmosphere is menacing, conveying a sense of impending disaster regarding the main character’s missing husband and the future of the natural environment. Kitamura’s writing is precise, exquisite. The narrator’s observations about her husband, boyfriend, in-laws and hotel staff are penetrating. Simply breath taking.
Ghost Species is a captivating novel and it formed a wonderful, early highlight for me in 2020. The story brings together a tech billionaire, a secretive laboratory in a remote location in Tasmania, and the vexed issue of species resurrection. The relationship between scientist Kate and Eve, a child, is beautifully and sensitively drawn. It’s an emotional read. And, if you’d like to know more, read this piece in Los Angeles Review of Books –
Without doubt this contemporary novel is both powerful and brutal. The parallels are clear between the unnamed narrator’s self-destructive tendencies and our self destruction as a species regarding climate catastrophe and species extinction. Absolutely, I feel the author achieved what she set out to achieve. So, full marks. The narrator is an aspiring writer who works shifts as an emergency-dispatch operator. She appears to believe she has no control over events affecting her life. In the same way, I suppose many people, in the face of rolling ecological disasters, feel a similar attitude of surrender-to-circumstances. This intimation of defeatism Ieft me feeling dispirited, but I’m certainly glad to have read The Inland Sea.
I enjoyed Sarah Moss’s previous novels, particularly Cold Earth (
I held high hopes of this novel, and it delivered! I particularly enjoyed the tense relationship between the main character, Vincent, and her half-brother, centred on his theft (or appropriation as he saw it) of her five-minute video collection. A complex narrative, multi-stranded, about the wealthy people brought down by a Ponzi investment scheme. But for me the novel also described the conflicting attractions of city life versus living closer to nature and wilderness. As such it seemed to speak to our pandemic experience.
Impressive and deeply unsettling, The Divers’ Game holds a mirror to the current splits in society and the fear of otherness. The story is set in a future where poorer people and immigrants are segregated. They’re treated with contempt and cruelty. Society is controlled by fear and the population enacts bizarre public rituals, grotesque—in my minds’ eye, reminiscent of Goya’s darkest work.
I met Yvonne Battle-Felton in the Second Life Book Club during lockdown where our avatars gave readings! Remembered is an historical novel opening in 1910 in Philadelphia amid city riots. The main character, Spring, explains to her dying son about their family history. And so the novel develops as a multi-generational story, which takes the reader through the years of slavery and emancipation. It’s a novel of revelations, about the heart-breaking decisions mothers were willing to take to undermine the plantation owners.
Last year I dipped into this essay collection, but this year I read Sightlines straight through. Kathleen Jamie’s landscape writing is poetic, authentic and unshowy. She takes the reader to the most remote islands of Scotland as she studies petrels and gannets, seals and orcas. In her essay “Pathologies,” Jamie takes the reader into the pathology lab of a Dundee hospital as she inspects diseased cells through a microscope, detecting those details that signal a patient’s chance of survival. It’s almost an odd-one-out essay in the collection, and it completely swept me away. I’ve thought of it repeatedly during this pandemic year, as Jamie’s microscopic observations offer a strange consolation.
How have I not read this gorgeous short novel before? It offers proof that novels do not need to be doorstoppers to convey emotional depth and offer real insights about our relatively modern history. A Month in the Country depicts the poverty of post-First World War life in rural Yorkshire, where a de-mobbed and shell-shocked young man renovates a Medieval fresco in the village church of Oxgodby. Art, history, romance, and an archaeological mystery. Wonderful.
A short novel that obliges the reader to make guesses. I felt I’d tuned into a radio play having missed the first five minutes. It denies completion for the reader and emphasises the unfinished nature of most experiences.
Another novel that had me searching for answers. It’s a compelling story about a remote archaeological dig. Are the archaeologists truly stranded? Is everyone in the outside world dead? Will the plane arrive on the agreed date? Are members of the team hiding the true gravity of outside events. Are other team members colluding? And there’s an undertone of humour—all these characters with PhDs but minimal survival skills.
I love writer biographies and this is a fine example. Acker made her mark as an experimental writer in 60s New York. She flitted between New York, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle and London. Her connection with the art world figures—Vito Acconci, Carolee Schneemann, Martha Rosler, Dan Graham, Robert Mapplethorpe, Richard Serra, Lucy Lippard, Sol LeWitt—offers fascinating asides. A biography that gets into the detail of Acker’s writing methodology.
Although some readers found this book challenging, I found myself sucked in straightaway. I learned a great deal about daily life during The Troubles. I felt extremely grateful for this insight, and I’ve recommended Milkman to all my friends.
This is a novel—part memoir, part fiction—which explores how to navigate the world as a creative person. At the core lies a simple question about the main character, Sheila: Will she or won’t she finish writing her play? But the over-arching question posed by Heti is whether art is a narcissistic endeavour. An authentic story about a playwright who is a hairdresser by day.
At the outset, I felt slightly daunted by the length of this novel, but I found myself zipping along thanks to the four-part structure and a fascinating range of point of view characters. For me, the highlight is found in the wonderful character of Patricia Westerford, a tree specialist, who I’ve thought about many times since I finished reading the novel. Her academic reputation is trashed by male peers when she suggests that trees can communicate. A fascinating and redemptive storyline, within an ambitious novel.
Sophie Bentwood lives in Brooklyn and is bitten by a stray cat, leading to her uncharacteristic decision to go for a middle-of-the-night drink with her husband’s business partner. And in these strange circumstances, she rashly reveals to him that she has had an affair. She reflects on that affair through this short novel, and on her husband’s disinclination or inability to explore his feelings, or other people’s motivations. The novel’s theme—that chaos might overwhelm polite society at any turn—is brilliantly set up in the opening pages in its descriptions of a part-gentrified but still seedy Brooklyn neighbourhood.
I was intrigued to read how Amitav Ghosh addressed climate change in this novel, coming in the wake of his non-fiction work The Great Derangement—his reflection on realist fiction’s limited ability to handle environmental and climate catastrophe. I enjoyed this novel partly for its setting in the mangroves of the Sundarbans, the delta of the Bengal River. It deals with the human impact of flooding. And one of his main characters is Priya, a marine biologist who investigates the beaching of freshwater dolphins. This novel feels one step removed from realism as it delves into local myth and doesn’t shy away from unrealistic coincidences in its plot.
Cusk’s Outline trilogy and her collection of essays, Coventry, provided the high point of my reading year. I read the first two parts of the trilogy—Outline and Transit—in quick succession. Later in the year I read Coventry and, finally, the third part of the trilogy, Kudos. Cusk is one of the most audacious writers around at the moment, experimenting with form, specifically with the visibility or invisibility of her narrator. I’m glad I read these four books in the order I did, because her essays informed how I read Kudos. The trilogy is a brilliant and I can’t wait to read more of Cusk.
Unlike some readers, I feel the most successful part of this climate-change novel is that set on The Wall. I felt drawn into the life of Kavanagh who patrols this massive coastal defence, aimed at repelling climate migrants. Lanchester slows down time as he describes, in pared back prose, the detail of being on shift, with the monotony and the ever-present fear of attack. There is sufficient backstory. Minimal info-dumping. And for me the elements of concrete poetry worked well. The later sections seem a little rushed but the ending is satisfying.
This is a compelling, fragmentary, multiple point-of-view novel that deals with violence against women. More specifically, it examines how a violent event has shaped the psyche of a creative writing tutor. Smart and very readable. A true literary thriller.
A novel of two halves. The first is set on a seismic survey vessel operating illegally in the Arctic and is totally convincing in its detail of seismic operations. Jarrett successfully creates an eco-thriller vibe with strong characters. The second is set some years in the future revisiting some of the original crew members who are now surviving as best they can in an environmentally ravaged world.
This is a poetic and beautifully structured novel set in a world that is suffering water shortages as a result of climate change. The story is told in the form of vignettes, which are linked by the various characters’ sometimes tenuous relationships. I do recall, back in the late 70s, some serious discussion about the feasibility of towing icebergs from the Arctic to the Middle East. In Stillicide, icebergs are towed to the UK!
Another short read and my last of 2019. I’ve been meaning to read this since its release and following multiple recommendations by friends. It didn’t disappoint. I enjoy the detail of other people’s working lives and I truly warmed to this convenience store woman whose personal motto seems to be, If you are going to do a job, you might as well do it well. A good note to end my year on!
I was fortunate to read ahead of publication, M. T. Hill’s novel The Breach, which will be published in March 2020 (Titan), following his well-received 2019 novel, Zero Bomb. The Breach is a crossover of psychological thriller, horror and hard SF. Hill displays his signature gritty style, and The Breach is the most visceral of his novels to date. Hill brings together the worlds of journalists, climbers, steeplejacks and urban explorers among a cast of totally authentic characters.
The Rift centres on the disappearance of seventeen-year-old Julie and her reappearance twenty years later to the astonishment of her sister Selena and her mother. Where has Julie been? Does she dare to tell them?
