new book reviews 2023

The 45 Best New Books of 2023 You Won’t Put Down

Add them to your reading list ASAP

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From fizzy summer beach reads to highbrow literary fiction, 2023’s most noteworthy releases so far are highly personal and deeply memorable. At the start of the year, readers were treated to heartfelt debut novels by Jessica George and Delia Cai. Throughout the spring and summer, modern literary forces like Brandon Taylor, Ann Patchett, and Zadie Smith returned with highly anticipated novels that were worth the wait. The momentum isn’t ending with the calendar year, either. Books arriving in fall and winter include Elizabeth Hand’s bone-chilling A Haunting on the Hill and Class , Stephanie Land’s follow-up to her best-selling memoir Maid . From a study of Brooklyn’s gilded upper class in Pineapple Street to a scammer’s anxiety-inducing lurch through the Hamptons in Emma Cline’s The Guest , this year’s best new books hook you from the first scene. Their characters are so memorable, you’ll want to revisit them again in the not-too-distant future. (Even the antiheroes.)

Read on for the best books of 2023 to add to your reading list now—and read a second time later—organized by release date. From the moment you pick them up, you won’t want to put them down. And if there’s a book lover in your life, any one of these titles would fit their definition of a luxury gift for the holiday season.

The Survivalists: A Novel

The Survivalists is one of the year’s most noteworthy new books on premise alone . Aretha, a partner-track lawyer who thrives on corporate success, descends into the world of Armageddon bunkers and doomsday arms dealing after she begins dating a coffee entrepreneur whose roommates are preparing for all sorts of unknown catastrophes while managing the roastery in their shared brownstone. On execution, The Survivalists delivers with a portrait of an underground corner of Brooklyn that’s so vividly captured, you may question what’s going on behind your favorite coffee shop.

Maame: A Novel

Maddie, the narrator of Jessica George’s stirring debut novel, has spent most of her 20s caring for her father, who has Parkinson’s disease. Her mother is in Ghana; her brother is on the road with a musician; neither offer much in terms of money or help. But a moment for Maddie to finally figure out what she wants from life, independent of her family, is on the horizon—just not in the way she initially expects. This is a coming-of-age novel that finds beauty in the messiness and complexity of growing up, with a narrator whose singular voice instantly captivated readers and reviewers.

There’s more where Maame came from: The novel has already been picked up for a TV adaptation.

Central Places: A Novel

Heroines who travel from a bustling city to their flyover-state hometown for the holidays often find trouble and maybe a new love interest in their old zip code. But Audrey Zhou, the narrator of Central Plac es, isn’t on the Hallmark trajectory when she books a Christmas trip back to Hickory Grove, Illinois, for her first visit since high school. Audrey intends to spend the week introducing her Chinese immigrant parents to her white fiancé and helping them feel like one family—a tough order, considering Audrey and her mother aren’t on the best terms. Instead, after run-ins with a past crush and old acquaintances, Audrey embarks on a self-reckoning that’s hilarious at some times, heartfelt at others, and impossible to put down the whole way through.

Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear

Wolfish ’s explorations of predators and prey in both the natural and man-made worlds defies easy categorization. The way Berry weaves an ecological adventure story about OR-7 , a wolf who makes a record-breaking journey away from an Oregon pack, with tales from her own coming-of-age, asks readers to reconsider their relationships with fear and the creatures who induce it.

I Have Some Questions for You: A Novel

Is I Have Some Questions for You a campus novel, a noir murder mystery, or a literary dissection of #MeToo social dynamics? With literary sensation Rebecca Makkai steering journalist Bodie Kane back to her high school alma mater to teach a workshop and, eventually, sift through the files on a former classmate’s death to potentially exonerate a wrongly accused killer, the answer is all of the above.

Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock

In 2019, Jenny Odell drew our collective attention to the attention economy’s downsides with her book How to Do Nothing . Saving Time offers another chance to shift our perspective on the systems we accept as the standard—specifically time, and how we structure and spend it. You might just put this book down with a whole new outlook on how you measure your days.

Pineapple Street: A Novel

Comedies skewering the 1 percent have borderline overstayed their welcome in film, but this novel’s take on the subgenre in fiction is laugh-out-loud good. It follows three women connected to the wealthier-than-wealthy Stockton family and their Brooklyn Heights brownstone: two Stockton siblings, Darley and Georgiana, and their sister-in-law with a middle-class background, Sasha. Love and money have always mixed like oil and water (not well), but Jackson finds new humor and warmth in her particularly witty debut.

Brother & Sister Enter the Forest: A Novel

Richard Mirabella braids two timelines into one propulsive narrative about survival. In the first: Justin, a queer teen, sets off on a catastrophic road trip with his first boyfriend after his love interest gets into violent trouble. In the second: It’s several years later, and Justin has arrived on his sister Willa’s doorstep, desperate for refuge but at risk of damaging them both with the aftereffects of his trauma.

Hello Beautiful: A Novel

Little Women fans will be endeared by Hello Beautiful ’s homage to the March siblings, in the form of the four Padavano sisters. Any lover of a sweeping family saga will be moved by the Padavanos’ unraveling after eldest daughter Julia meets Will, a man whose tragic past comes back to disrupt the entire family.

Romantic Comedy: A Novel

The title doesn’t lie: Curtis Sittenfeld sets up her latest novel with a plot that demands a fizzy on-creen adaptation, ASAP. Sally Milz, a writer on a fictional SNL twin, The Night Owls , has more or less given up on romance when pop star Noah Brewster signs on to host the show. Over a week of writing jokes and rehearsing the week’s lineup, Sally feels something that’s a lot like love—but you’ll have to read to see if their connection is real or just another sketch.

A Living Remedy: A Memoir

On one level, Nicole Chung’s second memoir is an elegy for her adoptive parents. On another, it’s an indictment of the broken health care systems that prevent a disappearing middle class from receiving the affordable care it desperately needs. Chung writes about and through her grief with clarity and wisdom. Her reflection on her early life and her parents’ last days is a salve for any reader who has experienced the specific devastation that is losing a parent.

Happy Place: A Novel

Happy Place is a different kind of Emily Henry romance. Harriet and Wyn, its leading duo, aren't a couple in the making. They're partners since college who quietly broke up months ago—and didn’t tell any of their friends before an annual group trip to Maine. Back at their usual summer escape, Harriet and Wyn have to fake that they’re still together for the friends they haven’t clued in to the truth, and maybe come to a new understanding with one another in the process. Don’t be surprised if you’re weeping through the last few chapters (in a cathartic way, we promise).

Homebodies: A Novel

Tembe Denton-Hurst’s debut novel astutely captures what it’s like to fight for yourself in a world that’s stacked against you. Unfairly ousted from her job, Mickey Hayward puts her experiences as a Black woman in media to paper in the hopes it’ll wake up the industry to the racism and sexism she endured. Instead, it hardly makes a ripple—until Mickey has left New York for her Maryland hometown and her letter reappears amid a larger scandal involving her old workplace.

Wildflower: A Memoir

How did Aurora James found her CFDA award–winning label Brother Vellies and galvanize retailers to take a stand for Black-owned brands through the Fifteen Percent Pledge? James’s forthcoming memoir recounts the peaks and valleys from childhood to adulthood that led her to the fashion industry—where she changed things for the better.

The Guest: A Novel

Emma Cline’s best-selling novel became the book of the summer for a reason. The Guest invites you to follow a down-on-her-luck scammer through one chaotic week in the Hamptons—where each day bring her to more desperate means of survival and manipulation than the one before.

Yellowface: A Novel

The unexpected death of acclaimed author Athena Liu presents (what looks like) an opportunity for struggling writer June Hayward to finally break through—by stealing Liu’s last manuscript and inventing an Asian-American identity to pass off Liu’s masterwork as her own. Posing as “Juniper Song,” June gets a taste of the literary success she stole and definitely doesn’t deserve. As she soon learns, she can’t keep up the lie forever—can she?

R.F. Kuang’s satirical thriller covers everything from white privilege to internet culture with increasingly eviscerating precision, the further June/Juniper spirals away from the truth.

The Late Americans: A Novel

Brandon Taylor’s third book is the most dazzling example of his sharp pen and keen observations of human nature yet. The Late Americans assembles a troupe of Iowa City student-artists and their lovers, friends, and neighbors in a novel that tracks their shifting relationships over the course of a single year. Taylor develops his characters so precisely, they feel like close friends: recognizable, sometimes infuriating, and always worth following to the book’s last page.

(Bonus recommendation: Check out Taylor’s literary newsletter while you wait for The Late Americans to arrive.)

Girls and Their Horses: A Novel

Tensions have always run high in the elite (and usually, rich) equestrian world. Girls and Their Horses dials up the intrigue by several degrees, embedding a new-money family into an insular and highly competitive horseback riding community—where deceit, romance, and even murder aren’t out of the question in pursuit of a blue ribbon.

The Mythmakers: A Novel

Keziah Weir’s debut novel takes an age-old literary question—“Is this fiction actually based on reality?”—and twists it into a compelling story about art, perspective, and the line between inspiration and transgression. The Mythmakers isn’t from the perspective of a novelist, though: It begins with a down-on-her-luck journalist who recognizes herself in a short story by an acclaimed—and recently deceased—author.

Adult Drama and Other Essays

Three years after an essay about her (unhealthy) friendship with influencer Caroline Calloway went viral, Natalie Beach is delving into other can’t-look-away dramas—in her relationships, in her work, and in the world at large—with the same captivating voice that landed her on so many readers’ radar. This is a debut essay collection not to miss.

Halie LeSavage is the fashion commerce editor at Harper's BAZAAR . Her style reporting covers everything from reviewing the best designer products to profiling emerging brands and designers. Previously, she was the founding retail writer at Morning Brew and a fashion associate at Glamour .

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A living remedy, above ground, after sappho, after the funeral, all the sinners bleed, anansi's gold, august blue, the bee sting, biography of x, birnam wood, chrome valley, the covenant of water, crook manifesto, the deadline, doppelganger, dyscalculia, the end of drum-time, family lore, fire weather, ghost music, the good life, the great reclamation, the great white bard, greek lessons, the half known life, the heaven & earth grocery store, hello beautiful, the hive and the honey, holding pattern, holler, child, how not to kill yourself, how to say babylon, i am still with you, i do everything i'm told, i have some questions for you, i love russia, king: a life, let us descend, let's go let's go let's go, liliana’s invincible summer, the male gazed, master slave husband wife, mott street, my name is barbra, none of the above, north woods, nothing special, our migrant souls, our share of night, owner of a lonely heart, pineapple street, the postcard, poverty, by america, the rachel incident, river sing me home, some people need killing, temple folk, terrace story, this other eden, the three of us, thunderclap, to free the captives, the vaster wilds, vengeance is mine, victory city, waiting to be arrested at night, wandering souls, what happened to ruthy ramirez, what you are looking for is in the library, when crack was king, the wren, the wren, you could make this place beautiful, the young man.

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By Kate Knibbs

The 16 Best Books of 2023

It’s hard to find something pithy to say about 2023, a year of dissonant extremes, when wildfires devoured Canadian forests , Twitter withered into X , the Titan submersible imploded into infamy, Silicon Valley’s power players rejoiced over the rise of generative AI, scientists cheered Crispr treatment breakthroughs, peace activists became terrorist-attack victims, and the world despaired over the thousands of children killed in Gaza . It’s not a tidy time. It is, frequently, a painful one.

Appropriate, then, that this was a year for unwieldy, searching, big-swing books. Doorstoppers and sagas rose to the moment, providing insight into an increasingly inscrutable world even when they couldn’t provide comfort. As always, this is an idiosyncratic, incomplete, and subjective list, the result of one person’s avid but disorganized reading schedule. But these are WIRED's best books of 2023. Here’s hoping this list helps you find your next great read.

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by Siddharth Kara

Electric is the enlightened alternative to climate-killing oil … right? Moving away from fossil fuels remains necessary, but Siddarth Kara captures a painful truth in Cobalt Red : The electric revolution has an underbelly , too. Rechargeable batteries, including those within phones and electric vehicles, are usually manufactured with cobalt, a metal plentiful in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Cobalt Red is a grim investigation into the conditions workers experience within “artisanal” cobalt mines; child labor is rampant, and death on the job is commonplace. It’s a call to arms to push companies using these batteries to clean up their supply chains, and for those of us who buy consumer devices to interrogate how they’re made and how we treat those who make them.

by Sean Michaels

Just as there was a rush of lockdown-themed novels following the first wave of Covid-19, it’s a near-certainty that readers are about to get hit with a deluge of fiction about large language models. It’s too bad, because Canadian novelist and music critic Sean Michaels has already written the definitive novel about art in the age of AI, one that incorporates machine-generated phrases and sentences in an unexpectedly moving way.

Do You Remember Being Born? follows a 75-year-old poet after she accepts an invitation to spend a week cowriting a poem with an AI trained on her work. A novel about the value of writing must clear a very high stylistic bar to succeed, and Michaels produces some of the most beautiful sentences published this year.

by Ling Ling Huang

After her mother and father are severely injured in a car accident, a piano prodigy finds work at a wellness startup called Holistik, where affluent customers indulge in gloriously weird beautifying treatments like pubic hair transplants. Natural Beauty is a delightfully baroque grotesque about wellness culture— Goopcore , if you will.

Ling Ling Huang’s debut novel can achieve a folkloric power in its creepiest moments; it’s a scary story you’d tell in a posh spa’s sauna instead of around a campfire. Recommended for anyone with mixed emotions about the rise of cosmetic Ozempic use.

by John Vaillant

The day John Vaillant’s book about Canadian wildfires came out in the US last summer, Canadian wildfires became a temporary American obsession . Skies in the northeastern United States turned orange, hazy, and hazardous as the result of more than 400 infernos in Canada’s vast boreal forests in early June. New York City’s air quality became the worst in the world, choked with smoke blown down from Quebec. Philadelphia urged residents to stay indoors. Fire weather, indeed. Great publicity, but so bleak—like releasing a history of terrorist attacks in September 2001.

Upon its release, I recommended Vaillant’s gripping account of the 2016 Fort McMurray fire as the best thing to read to understand this particular crisis, and that recommendation stands. It’s vital context for how our forests got so flammable.

by Zeke Faux

The month after Bloomberg reporter Zeke Faux’s Number Go Up came out, disgraced crypto bigwig Sam Bankman-Fried went on trial. It was good timing for Faux, as he’d opened his rollicking crypto-world travelogue with an account of meeting SBF. In fact, the opening line is a quote from Bankman-Fried: “I’m not going to lie,” SBF promises Faux. “This was a lie,” Faux writes. This accomplishes two things. First, it signals immediately to the reader that Faux gets it, that he knows Bankman-Fried was full of it. Second, it’s funny.

Number Go Up is definitely the best book to read for anyone who wants to understand what happened with SBF and FTX; I’d argue it’s also the best book to give any general-interest reader who wants to learn more about why crypto has crashed and burned.

by Rachel O’Dwyer

Irish writer Rachel O’Dwyer’s Tokens also came out shortly before the SBF trial, and it’s also an excellent book to pick up for anyone interested in crypto. It didn’t get as much attention as Number Go Up , in part because it has a more diffuse focus—O’Dwyer considers crypto as part of a larger movement into tokenized payment, including Twitch bits (the virtual goods used to reward Twitch streamers) and Axie Infinity’s doomed “Axie” NFTs. It’s an important addition to the growing blockchain canon, written with wit and generosity.

by Jackson Lears

Animal Spirits is a hard book to summarize without making it sound boring or esoteric—it’s an examination of American vitalist beliefs, ranging from philosophies promoted by self-help literature to Adam Smith’s invisible hand of the market—but it’s fascinating, broadly relevant, and yet another book you should read to grasp all the finance world madness of the past decade.

This gorgeously written cultural history isn’t about cryptocurrency at all—I don’t think historian Jackson Lears mentions it once in a nearly 400-page book—and yet I found myself returning to Animal Spirits repeatedly this year while watching the crypto world convulse, because it distills the psychology driving boom-and-bust cycles in tech and finance better than anything else.

by Nathan Hill

The opposite of a “slim volume,” Nathan Hill’s second novel is a brash, shaggy, and warm-blooded love note to Gen X. (And a gentle satire of internet culture: Downloaded porn, fitness wearables, and Facebook radicalization all figure prominently into the plot.)

Wellness is also an old-fashioned, occasionally overstuffed throwback of a book. Over 600 pages long, it centers on the love story of Jack and Elizabeth, two artsy students in 1990s Chicago who settle down together and find themselves straining toward happiness in middle age. Long live the social novel!

by Naomi Klein

You know Naomi Klein, right? Leftist journalist? Climate activist? Decidedly not the former liberal feminist writer turned conspiracy theorist Naomi Wolf? Somehow, people confuse the two Naomis. Klein gets mixed up with Wolf so much, in fact, a Twitter mnemonic was born: “If the Naomi be Klein you’re doing just fine / If the Naomi be Wolf, oh, buddy. Ooooof.”

Thus the basis of Klein’s new book, Doppelganger . Writing hundreds of pages based on Twitter discourse is, of course, a questionable choice. As she is quick to point out, though, Doppelganger is not really about Wolf. She’s merely an entry point to dissect the “intellectual and ideological mayhem” of the Covid era. How wellness entrepreneurs demonize medicine. How the far right appropriates and warps leftist talking points. How parents see their children as reflections of themselves. In all this, Klein writes, there’s a new doubling going on—distortions of what used to be more straightforward realities. It’s a wholly vital work, one only Klein could write.

by Yepoka Yeebo

Try as we might to move past it, we’re still living through the golden age of grifters, so Anansi’s Gold is another timely read for 2023. Reporter Yepoka Yeebo unravels the riveting tale of big-time conman John Ackah Blay-Miezah, an audacious, globe-trotting Ghanaian who convinced investors from Philadelphia to Accra that he could access a gold fortune allegedly lost by Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah.

Yeebo pulls off something near-magical here. She excavates an overlooked historical narrative as juicy as any true-crime blockbuster, where every detail is both fastidiously researched and completely over-the-top—one of Blay-Miezah’s major adversaries in his quest to scam? Former child star Shirley Temple Black, of course!—while also conveying how the colonial system nurtured and turbo-charged this dysfunction.

by Kashmir Hill

I dare you to read this alternately amusing and horrifying account of the rise of an oddball startup selling the world’s most powerful facial recognition tools without, at least one time, putting it down to google how to move to a remote location without Wi-Fi.

Shortly after starting a new job at The New York Times , longtime privacy reporter Kashmir Hill got a tip about Clearview AI , a tiny company that had quietly scraped photos from the internet to become a Shazam for people. In addition to providing the fullest account of how this company’s tech is used to undermine our privacy, Your Face Belongs to Us is also a finely-drawn portrait of the type of people who would sell this type of product, especially founder Hoan Ton-That , an intelligent misfit who seems driven more by personal insecurities than any genuine ideological commitments.

by C. E. McGill

I was not expecting to love this book so much. It seemed like it could be a Pride and Prejudice and Zombies -ish cash grab, trading on the enduring popularity of Frankenstein . (It is billed as an update and sequel of sorts to Mary Shelley’s classic.) It’s not. Our Hideous Progeny might start as a Frankenstein spinoff, following Victor Frankenstein’s grand-niece in 1850s London, but then it pivots into something that could reasonably be described as “bizarro queer feminist prequel to Jurassic Park .”

This is cozy horror perfected, the literary equivalent of spending a weekend storm-watching in a leaky castle in northern Scotland.

by Lexi Freiman

“Cancel culture satire” might be the most cursed phrase in the English language, but somehow Lexi Freiman wrote a cancel culture satire and it’s funny and tough and generous without ever being sentimental.

The Book of Ayn follows Anna, a horny contrarian novelist who gets ostracized by her lit-world pals after writing a poorly-received comic novel about the opioid crisis and subsequently becomes obsessed with Ayn Rand, then moves to a commune to destroy her ego. A meaner writer might’ve let Anna sour into a full-blown villain, but Freiman turns her into something more interesting: a narcissistic millennial writer character who defies cliche and always feels human.

by Antony Loewenstein

What does the Jeff-Bezos-phone-hacking incident have to do with the plight of the Palestinians? Australian-German journalist Antony Loewenstein connects the dots in this compelling, horrifying investigation. The Palestine Laboratory provides crucial context about the Israel–Hamas war , and the reality of life in the occupied Palestinian territories prior to October 7. Loewenstein examines how Israel tests weapons and surveillance technology on Palestinians living in Gaza and the West Bank, then sells these tools and services to other countries—including places like Saudi Arabia, which has used spyware from Israel’s NSO Group.

by Malcolm Harris

If you knew anything about Malcolm Harris before picking up Palo Alto , you’d probably guess that Palo Alto isn’t a starry-eyed hagiography of the region. Harris is one of the most widely-published left-wing journalists today, and he’s upfront about how repulsive he finds the tech oligarchy nurtured in his northern California hometown. But don’t mistake Palo Alto for a polemic: It’s a panoramic, deeply researched, and fundamentally truth-seeking history, one that brings even its most repugnant characters—Leland Stanford, Herbert Hoover—to three-dimensional life.

Required reading for anyone interested in the technology industry, Silicon Valley psychology, the development of photography, or American history.

by Brian Merchant

There’s no shortage of interesting nonfiction out right now about artificial intelligence and how it will change the world, our lives, the future, and more. But the most important book to read about the AI boom is about a completely different technological revolution, way back in the early 19th century.

Los Angeles Times technology columnist Brian Merchant’s Blood in the Machine is a spirited and thoughtful recounting of the Luddite uprising in response to the Industrial Revolution, one that draws parallel after parallel to the present. Read it and prepare to understand the current moment better. Also prepare to quell the urge to pick up a hammer.

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150 Most Anticipated Books of the Fall

SEPT. 19, 2023

by Susie Boyt

Readers who are averse to crying in public be warned: You’ll want to sit with this astounding story at home. Full review >

OCT. 10, 2023

by Cassandra Clare

A wonderfully enjoyable series opener. Full review >

OCT. 3, 2023

GRAPHIC NOVELS & COMICS

by Daniel Clowes

A timeless nugget of polished pulp. Full review >

OCT. 17, 2023

by Teju Cole

A provocative and profound meditation on art and life in a world of terror. Full review >

NOV. 14, 2023

by Michael Cunningham

This subtle, sensitively written family story proves poignant and quietly powerful. Full review >

by Lydia Davis

A collection that you'll want to keep on your bedside table by one of America’s most original short story writers. Full review >

OCT. 31, 2023

by Tananarive Due

A novel that reminds its readers that racism forges its own lasting, unbearable nightmares. Full review >

by Anne Enright

Tender and truthful as ever, Enright offers a beguiling journey to selfhood. Full review >

SEPT. 12, 2023

by Diana Evans

A baggy, striking, perceptive slice of intergenerational life. Full review >

by Helen Garner

Brilliantly constructed and puzzling in a good way, the way that even our own lives can be puzzling to us. Full review >

by Lauren Groff

The writing is inspired, the imaginative power near mystic, but some will wish for more plot. Full review >

OCT. 24, 2023

by Eskor David Johnson

An inventive, beautifully written debut that will leave readers wanting more. Full review >

AUG. 29, 2023

by Angie Kim

The claim that a book will change your life often seems like exaggeration. Here the potential is real. Full review >

by Benjamín Labatut

Sharply written fiction ably capturing primitive emotions and boundary-breaking research. Full review >

by Jhumpa Lahiri ; translated by Jhumpa Lahiri with Todd Portnowitz

Filled with intelligence and sorrow, these sharply drawn glimpses of Roman lives create an impressively unified effect. Full review >

by Daniel Mason

Like the house at its center, a book that is multitudinous and magical. Full review >

SEPT. 26, 2023

by Ayana Mathis

An affecting and carefully drawn story of a family on the brink. Full review >

NOV. 7, 2023

by Alice McDermott

This transporting, piercing, profound novel is McDermott’s masterpiece. Full review >

by Molly McGhee

Upton Sinclair meets modern workplace satire—with a lot of heart. Full review >

by Tim O'Brien

A broadly engaging and entertaining work. Full review >

SEPT. 4, 2023

by Olga Ravn ; translated by Sophia Hersi Smith & Jennifer Russell

A stunning book that speaks aloud thoughts the reader believed had been theirs alone in long nursery hours of the night. Full review >

SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY

by V.E. Schwab

A delicious treat for fans of the Shades of Magic series and a lush, suspenseful fantasy in its own right. Full review >

SEPT. 5, 2023

by Zadie Smith

Intelligent and thoughtful but not quite at this groundbreaking writer’s usual level of excellence. Full review >

by James Frankie Thomas

The best novels of 2023

Including new novels by Naomi Alderman, Dolly Alderton, and Samantha Harvey

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The Future by Naomi Alderman

Good material by dolly alderton, orbital by samantha harvey, tackle by jilly cooper, julia by sandra newman, the pole and other stories by j.m. coetzee, the glutton by a.k. blakemore, western lane by chetna maroo, absolutely & forever by rose tremain, beasts of england by adam biles, holly by stephen king, prophet song by paul lynch, the fraud by zadie smith, the wren, the wren by anne enright, caret by adam mars-jones, open throat by henry hoke, tom lake by ann patchett, the bee sting by paul murray, ordinary human by megan nolan, be mine by richard ford, i am homeless if this is not my home by lorrie moore, big swiss by jen beagin, death under a little sky by stig abell, time shelter by georgi gospodinov, the making of another major motion picture masterpiece by tom hanks, the guest by emma cline, soldier sailor by claire kilroy, august blue by deborah levy, a house for alice by diana evans, pineapple street by jenny jackson, shy by max porter, romantic comedy by curtis sittenfeld, to battersea park by philip hensher, dr. no by percival everett, queen k by sarah thomas, old god’s time by sebastian barry, cursed bread by sophie mackintosh, birnam wood by eleanor catton, brutes by dizz tate, victory city by salman rushdie, the birthday party by laurent mauvignier (translation by daniel levin becker), white riot by joe thomas, the new life by tom crewe, age of vice by deepti kapoor.

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Fourth Estate 416pp £20; The Week Bookshop £15.99  

Naomi Alderman is one of our most consistently inventive writers, said Stephanie Merritt in The Observer . She combines "literary and historical erudition" with an "instinct for narrative pace". Her sixth novel is a typical offering, being at once a "satirical dystopian tech-thriller" and a "complex novel of ideas". Set in a world that's much like our own, only with "fancier gadgets", it begins with the three wealthiest people on the planet – who run "barely disguised versions of Amazon, Apple and Facebook/Twitter" – being notified, via an "exclusive early warning app", that civilisation is on the brink of collapse. They swiftly retreat to their respective bunkers. What follows is a hectic, crisscrossing story involving survivalist cults, much philosophical musing, and a "cascade of cataclysmic events", said Elizabeth Hand in The Washington Post . While there are some "terrific" scenes – notably an account of a Davos-style conference devoted to "selling post-apocalypse tech" – the novel can't decide if it's satire or parable, and at times becomes rather confusing. "The Future" is "frustrating" yet "immensely readable".

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Fig Tree 352pp £18.99; The Week Bookshop £14.99  

This second novel by Dolly Alderton (best known for her 2018 "hit" memoir " Everything I Know About Love ") is a work of "Hornbyesque charm", said Hephzibah Anderson in The Observer . Andy, the narrator, is a "jobbing" thirtysomething comedian who has just been dumped by his girlfriend Jen. The action is mainly concerned with Andy's "lovelorn misadventures" – including Instagramstalking Jen and her new boyfriend, "obsessively monitoring his bald spot", and "navigating the daunting practicalities of living in London unaided by Jen's corporate salary". The "smallness of the canvas" Alderton adopts makes this novel surprisingly "daring", said Michael Donkor in The Guardian . The "intensely limited focus on Andy" and his trials could have felt "repetitive or leaden" – but instead she uses it to capture the "myopia and obsessiveness that sudden heartbreak can bring". "Good Material" isn't going to "rewrite ideas about contemporary sexual politics". It is, however, a warm and funny work, which reveals Alderton to be a "writer comfortably settling into her groove".

Jonathan Cape 144pp £14.99; The Week Bookshop £11.99  

From a novel about Alzheimer's to medieval crime, Samantha Harvey is a novelist who "reinvents her career with each new book", said Alice Jolly in The Sunday Times . Her latest journey into "unexplored territory" is a "poetic and powerful" account of a day in the life of six astronauts on the International Space Station. Because the astronauts inhabit an "orbiting laboratory" that is travelling at 17,000 miles an hour, they orbit Earth 16 times per day, and so "see 16 dawns and 16 sunsets". Harvey's ability to capture this "constantly unravelling world" – "Asia come and gone. Australia a dark featureless shape against this last breath of light" – is the novel's most remarkable feature. 

Such passages are also counterbalanced by "moments of wry observation", said Emily Rhodes in The Spectator . Harvey finds humour in the space station's toilet arrangements – they are "split along Cold War lines" – and charts the sense of boundaries breaking down as the astronauts breathe "each other's overused air". Written in her trademark "luminous prose", this is a "slender, gleaming novel". 

Bantam 448pp £22; The Week Bookshop £17.99  

Jilly Cooper's latest novel – her 11th set in Rutshire – marks an unlikely shift in direction, said Cleo Watson in The Daily Telegraph . Rather than being about polo or opera, it is set in the world of football. Rupert Campbell-Black, Cooper's swaggering hero, has just bought a local team, Searston Rovers FC, and "with the kind of determination that only an Olympic show-jumping gold medal can instil, he sets his sights on winning the Premier League". This ambition is amusingly challenged by his players (led by star striker, Facundo Gonzalez), who are more interested in wife swapping than on-pitch glory. Cooper has always offered "huge pleasure", and I found it a struggle not to "gobble" this novel up "in one go". 

Although "Tackle!" contains the "reliable Cooper quotient of rising penises" and "lithe women with high breasts", she also weaves in darker themes, said Lucy Beresford in Literary Review . A sub-plot dealing with cancer is subtly done, as is another exploring the impact of growing up in a children's home. "With this novel, Cooper shoots again and scores."

Granta 400pp £18.99; The Week Bookshop £14.99  

It's quite a task, "to take on a classic and remake it from a new perspective", said Erica Wagner in The Daily Telegraph . But that's what US author Sandra Newman does in "Julia" – a retelling of George Orwell's "1984" from the perspective of Winston Smith's lover. A relatively slight character in Orwell's original, Newman's Julia feels fleshed out: she works as a mechanic in the Ministry of Truth, toiling on the "machines that produce fiction for the Party"; she lives in a dormitory with other women, and is "cynical, practical", a "ruthless survivor". Fascinating and "atmospheric", "Julia" "succeeds, brilliantly". 

It's a book that works on more than one level, said Natasha Walter in The Guardian . As well as being a "satisfying tribute act", it is also a critique of "1984", revealing things overlooked by Orwell – such as the way the restrictions of totalitarianism "weigh differently on women" than on men. Although the novel "starts to weaken" in its second half (the prison scenes in particular lack the power of 1984's), this is a work that "stands up well beside Orwell's original, and at many points enriches it". 

Harvill Secker 272pp £20; The Week Bookshop £15.99

"All writers go off", the late Martin Amis once said. Happily, there are no signs that 83-year-old J.M. Coetzee is "running out of steam", said James Purdon in Literary Review . The Nobel Prize-winner's latest work – consisting of a new novella, "The Pole", and five stories written over the past 20 years, four featuring his alter-ego Elizabeth Costello – reveals an author who has "slipped comfortably into a late style". The novella, which charts a brief affair between Witold, a 72-year-old concert pianist, and Beatriz, a fortysomething banker's wife, is Coetzee at his very best, said John Self in The Observer . It's "lighter in tone" than his early novels, and the melding of story and ideas is "exquisite". When Coetzee is as good as this, he makes you "wonder why other people bother". 

I was less than impressed, said John Banville in The Guardian . Set out in numbered sections – "it is not clear to what purpose" – "The Pole "is a "glacial" and rather "frictionless" work. He makes a clear effort to avoid the "merely picturesque". At one point, he writes of a walk: "It is a pleasant autumn day. The leaves are turning, et cetera." There is "little in the way of novelty" in these stories, said Claire Lowdon in The Sunday Times . They revisit Coetzee's "enduring preoccupations", notably "desire, and the spiritual status of animals". Still, after the "dense philosophical slog" of his recent Jesus Trilogy, this book offers a welcome return to the "limpid narrative mode of earlier works such as the Booker-winning Disgrace". The collection as a whole "forms a cerebral swansong that will be obligatory reading for Coetzee fans".

Granta 336pp £14.99; The Week Bookshop £11.99  

The "Great Tarare" was a French peasant who achieved notoriety in the revolutionary period for his "prodigious ability to devour things", said Sandra Newman in The Guardian . By his teens, he was eating his own weight in meat each day – and later, as a street performer, he would consume household objects and even "live animals". Such a life clearly "begs to be fictionalised", and it's hard to think of anyone better equipped for the task than the "remarkable" A.K. Blakemore, whose previous novel, "The Manningtree Witches", deservedly won the Desmond Elliott Prize. Her account of Tarare's short life (he died aged 25) is a work of intoxicating language and "great intelligence". 

Moving between its subject's final days in the care of a nun and his impoverished childhood, "The Glutton" is a work of great "assurance and verve", said Stephanie Merritt in The Observer . Blakemore is equally at home evoking natural beauty or the "stench of rotting wounds". Few writers can be "truly likened to Hilary Mantel", but Blakemore's "rare ability to reanimate the past" means that she is one of them.

Picador 176pp £14.99; The Week Bookshop £11.99

Squash is a game of "peculiar solitude", in which you "never face your competitor, and play in eerily hermetic conditions", said Claire Allfree in The Times . In this "gorgeous debut", it evokes the inner life of its heroine, a promising young player whose devotion to the sport is in part a response to family tragedy. When the novel opens, narrator Gopi is 11 and "has just lost her mother". Her father ramps up her training; soon, she's playing "several hours a day". An "elegantly compressed coming-of-age novel", written in unadorned but expressive prose, Western Lane is a remarkable achievement – and deserves its place on this year's Booker shortlist.

It "feels like the work of a writer who knows what they want to do, and who has the rare ability to do it", agreed Caleb Klaces in The Guardian . Especially impressive is Maroo's ability to convey "emotional complexity by way of physical description". She's a talented writer, but this novel feels frustratingly slight and underdeveloped, said Claudia Rowan in The Daily Telegraph . I was "mildly intrigued", but was ultimately left "wanting more emotionally".

Chatto & Windus 192pp £16.99 The Week Bookshop £13.99

Rose Tremain isn't often thought of as a funny writer, but in this novel, her 17th, "she can be brilliantly wry", said Lucy Atkins in The Guardian . Set between the 1950s and the 1970s, the book is an "engrossing character study" of Marianne, a girl from the Home Counties who, aged 15, falls passionately in love with a floppy-haired 18-year-old named Simon. The relationship soon ends – Simon moves to Paris – but it defines much of Marianne's subsequent life. In 1960s London, which is "anything but swinging", Marianne is "lonely and miserable" as she first enrols at secretarial college, and then works as an assistant for a Fleet Street agony aunt (a job Tremain herself once did). She subsequently marries "kind Hugo", a horse-loving family friend – but when they visit Paris a few years later, Simon is "all she can think of". While on one level this is a "straightforward period drama", it also offers more "thoughtful pleasures", particularly in its moving and even-handed depiction of Marianne's unhappy, buttoned-up parents. 

There is indeed a "kind of magic" to the novel that is "hard to capture in a short review", said Rachel Cooke in The Observer . Marianne is a "marvellously original creation" – she's both conventional and "quite batty" – and the period details "are exquisite", from bath cubes and Basildon Bond notepaper to "sauces made from marmalade to go with baked ham". It may seem a little late in life for Tremain, who is 80, to be writing a coming-of-age story, said Sue Gaisford in the Financial Times . But her "hard-won experience" informs the novel, making it a "mesmerising, masterly and profoundly moving" exploration of the "comic, painful, life-long search for human understanding".

Galley Beggar Press 288pp; £10.99 The Week Bookshop £8.99  

Writing a sequel to a book as familiar as "Animal Farm" might seem a risky undertaking, said Patrick McGuinness in The Guardian . But the "risk pays off" in "Beasts of England", Adam Biles's "updated and retooled" version of George Orwell's classic. Set decades later on the same farm (which is now a petting zoo, complete with alpacas and geckos), the novel follows a series of "sinister events", including the emergence of a mysterious illness and an apparent attempt by the "ruling pigs" to sell off the farm's assets. Whereas Orwell's fable was about totalitarianism in general, the satirical target here is "unmistakably" England now: Brexit, the refugee crisis, Covid and Boris Johnson are all "allegorised" in this "clever, resourceful" tale. 

The problem is that there is "too much to follow", said Jeremy Wikeley in The Daily Telegraph : Biles crams in the "entire history of British politics since New Labour". His book succeeds when it leaves the realm of fable, and becomes more of a thriller – as in the "brilliantly weird" ending. "Beasts of England" is at its best "when it strikes out for new pastures".

Hodder 448pp £25; The Week Bookshop £19.99  

Stephen King's latest novel is both a "nail-biting crime fiction and a dystopian vision of contemporary America", said Joan Smith in The Sunday Times . Set at the height of the pandemic, when rows over mask wearing and vaccines were raging, it centres on a series of mysterious disappearances in a Midwestern town. The perpetrators, it emerges, are "two of the most unusual" serial killers in fiction – a pair of retired college professors, whose veneer of ordinariness has long "protected them from suspicion". On their trail is private detective Holly Gibney, who has appeared in King's fiction before, but never in a "starring role". 

It's a good thing that the "dogged", "resourceful" and neurodivergent Holly has been given such a major part, because as a character she "leaps off the page", said Catriona Ward in The Guardian . Equally memorable are the "macabre college professors", who are both "plausible and chilling". Not so much a whodunit as a whydunit – with a literary motive at its core – "Holly" is "lyrical and horrifying", and a "hymn to the grim pursuit of justice".

Oneworld 320pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

Paul Lynch’s Booker-longlisted fifth novel is the “Irish offspring” of “The Handmaid’s Tale” and “Nineteen Eighty-Four”, said Melissa Harrison in The Guardian . Set in a “shadow version” of present-day Dublin, where an unspecified crisis has led to the creation of a police state, it centres on a biologist named Eilish Stack, whose teacher husband mysteriously vanishes, one of hundreds “swallowed whole” by the state. Lynch writes in a “heightened, sometimes biblical language”, and eschews paragraph breaks – a device that intensifies the sense of claustrophobia, even if it initially takes some getting used to. Powerful and “horribly real”, “Prophet Song” is “as nightmarish a story as you’ll come across”.

I wasn’t convinced, said Max Liu in The i Paper . While Lynch’s sentences are “melodious”, they are full of “weird word choices”: a character “sleeves” her cardigan on before walking into a cellar of “colding gloom”. And many of its ideas “feel recycled”. The genuinely “absorbing” story at its heart partially makes up for these defects – but even so, “Prophet Song” would be a “surprising Booker winner”.

Hamish Hamilton 464pp £20; The Week bookshop £15.99

Zadie Smith’s first historical novel is an intricate mosaic brought to life by “gloriously light, deft writing”, said Alexandra Harris in The Guardian . Much of “The Fraud” follows a court case that gripped Britain in the 1870s, in which an Australian butcher claimed to be Sir Roger Tichborne, the heir to a baronetcy and a fortune, who had been lost in a shipwreck 17 years earlier. Among those fascinated by the saga was William Ainsworth, a novelist whose sales rivalled Charles Dickens’s. The first half of Smith’s novel resurrects him and the two women who shared his life: his wife Sarah and his cousin, housekeeper and intellectual foil Eliza Touchet. The second half tells the story of the main witness in the “Tichborne Claimant” trial, a black man named Andrew Bogle – reaching back to his father’s arrival on a sugar plantation in Jamaica. Few writers would dare mix comedy with the subject of slavery, and fewer still would pull it off, “mixing narrative delight with a vein of rapid, skimming satire”.

Moving back and forth between the 1830s and the 1870s, and punctuated with short, “almost aphoristic” chapters, “ The Fraud ” weaves its disparate elements together to “triumphant and memorable” effect, said Erica Wagner in The Daily Telegraph . Touchet is the key character, and what drives the novel is not so much the unravelling of the Claimant’s tale as her growing understanding of the world, and her grasp of issues such as the meaning of freedom and authenticity. It’s “a richly enjoyable, sophisticated book” by a writer at the peak of her powers.

I wasn’t convinced, said John Self in The Times . This is a “rich stew” of a novel, but its jumpy time scheme prevents any kind of narrative flow. There are also elements that are left strangely undeveloped, such as the fact that Eliza has had affairs with both William and his first wife. Smith’s gift for dialogue is as strong as ever, and I admired parts of “The Fraud” very much. “But I would much rather have loved it.” It doesn’t wholly convince, agreed Richard Godwin in the Evening Standard . The time frames are confusing, and the three strands don’t always intermesh: “but moment to moment, ‘The Fraud’ is a delight”. Smith has particular fun with William’s literary incontinence, his rivalry with Dickens, and the sharp-witted Sarah Ainsworth. For all its faults, this is a novel “full of people, ideas, humour, feeling and something like moral truth – the stuff of life”.

Jonathan Cape 288pp £18.99; The Week Bookshop £14.99

Anne Enright’s eighth novel is the “finest I have read in a long time”, said Luiza Sauma in The Daily Telegraph . Like her 2007 Booker-winner “The Gathering”, it explores “ancestral trauma”, telling the story of three generations of women, and that of Phil McDaragh, a “long-dead, not terribly famous” Irish poet, whose influence looms over them. The novel mostly alternates between the perspectives of Phil’s daughter Carmel and his twenty-something granddaughter Nell, who never knew him but tattoos her body with references to his poems. “The Wren, The Wren” is a “surprising and complex” book, lifted by the beauty of Phil’s verse (written by the novelist), with a “dark, lurking humour”.

“Damn, Enright can write,” said John Self in The Times . Like Martin Amis, she is a novelist of “scenes and sentences, not plots and character arcs”. Her approach – with “shards of brilliance flashing in every direction” – may not be for everyone. “But if you believe a book is a conversation between reader and writer, where you get out what you put in, then that’s a feature, not a bug.”

Faber 752pp £25; The Week Bookshop £19.99

During his prolific career, the literary critic Adam Mars-Jones has produced many “short stories, neat little novellas” and “slim” memoirs, said Claire Lowdon in The Sunday Times . But he has also written “three enormous novels” – all about one man: John Cromer. The first, “Pilcrow” (2008), charted Cromer’s 1950s childhood and “struggles with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis”. In the 733-page Cedilla (2011), Cromer “gains some independence”. Now we have Caret, covering less than a year of its subject’s life, yet running to 752 pages. The books are obscenely long, but they are “something apart”, and offer a “truly original narrative voice”.

Like its predecessors, Caret is short on “developments of a standard novelistic kind”, said Paul Genders in Literary Review . There is no real plot; the novel is made up of “uncannily acute acts of observation” – as Cromer outlines the “precise charms of a packet of Toffo sweets”, or describes a mouse getting stuck in a toaster. I finished it thinking that Mars-Jones is “possibly the best prose stylist currently writing in English”.

Henry Hoke’s “slim jewel of a novel” is narrated by a mountain lion living in the desert hills surrounding LA, said Marie-Helene Bertino in The New York Times . Inspired by the real-life case of P22 – a lion spotted prowling around the city in 2012 – it deploys its unconventional narrator (who identifies as queer) to brilliant comic effect.

The novel abounds with “leonine misunderstandings”, said Rahul Raina in The Guardian : scarcity is rendered as “scare city”; money is “green paper”. In some novels, such jokes would be cloying, but here the writing is “so wry and muscular” that you’re “ready to go anywhere Hoke wants to take you”. Propulsive and eventually heartbreaking, this is an “instant classic of xenofiction”.

Don’t worry: “Open Throat” is only about a lion in the way Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” was “about a large bug”, said Ron Charles in The Washington Post . The “fanged narrator” is a type familiar in American fiction: the “outcast naïf whose bewildered commentary plumbs our strange behaviour”. “Give this sinewy prose poem a chance”, and you’ll fall under its spell.

Bloomsbury 320pp £18.99; The Week Bookshop £14.99

With bestsellers such as “Bel Canto” and “The Dutch House”, Anne Patchett has established a reputation for writing “accessible fiction”, marked by a “determination to see the good in people”, said Lucy Atkins in The Guardian . Her latest is “possibly the most upbeat pandemic novel” yet written. In the summer of 2020, Lara, 57, the owner of a Michigan cherry orchard, finds her three grown-up daughters returning home. During the long days, she regales them with “glowing memories” of a brief romance she once had with a Hollywood star. These are interspersed with details of present-day farm life. While readers who had tricky lockdowns may not warm to the “homespun happiness” of this novel, I found it moving and “engaging”.

“Folksy” and “strangely peaceable”, “Tom Lake” has a “ribbon of sentimentality” running through it, said Rachel Cooke in The Observer . Yet “Patchett knows exactly what she’s doing” – and by its end, this “exquisitely controlled” work proves to be a quietly daring attempt to “take the temperature of a whole life, and by so doing, to prioritise happiness over misery”.

Hamish Hamilton 656pp £18.99; The Week Bookshop £14.99

Paul Murray, the author of “Skippy Dies”, is the “undisputed reigning champion of epic Irish tragicomedy”, said Ian Sansom in The Spectator . In this sprawling novel about the Barnes family – failing car-dealer Dickie, shopping-addicted mum Imelda, dreamy teenager Cass, bullied 12-year-old P.J. – he has produced “an immersive, brilliantly structured, beautifully written mega-tome”. Set after the 2008 crash but also moving four decades into the past, it’s “laugh-out-loud funny”, and deeply sad. “All you need is this, your suntan lotion and a few days off work and you’re good to go.”

Murray switches between the four main characters’ points of view, and what they don’t know about one another creates a “steady crackle of dramatic irony”, said Anthony Cummins in The Observer . There are twists aplenty, but it never turns into a guessing game. “It can’t be overstated how purely pleasurable The Bee Sting is to read.” It’s “carefully paced, brilliantly convincing and helped along by plenty of subtle satire”, said James Riding in The Times – a “huge, marbled wagyu steak of a novel”.

Jonathan Cape 224pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

Megan Nolan’s deservedly lauded debut, “Acts of Desperation”, examined the “interior life of a young woman beholden to a toxic partner”, said Holly Williams in The Observer . The young Irish writer’s follow-up has a much broader focus – but the results are similarly “compelling”.

Set in the 1990s, “Ordinary Human Failings” centres on a toddler’s disappearance from a south London estate – and the ensuing scandal as the perpetrator is revealed to have been a ten-year-old named Lucy Green. Lucy is the youngest member of a “reclusive clan of Irish immigrants who’ve never fitted in”, said Lucy Scholes in The Daily Telegraph . And much of Nolan’s “bold and beautiful” novel is devoted to telling their backstory, with the author showing the “interconnected lines of cause and effect” that led to Lucy’s crime.

Marked by its psychological insight, this is a brilliant follow-up to “Acts of Desperation”, said Claire Lowdon in The Sunday Times . It isn’t formally ambitious – more a “three-legged stool” than an “ornate grandfather clock” – but it shows her first novel was no fluke.

Bloomsbury 352pp £18.99; The Week Bookshop £14.99

The 79-year-old American author Richard Ford has published many books over his long and distinguished career. But he is best known for his novels featuring his “delightfully lugubrious everyman”, Frank Bascombe, said Ian Sansom in The Daily Telegraph . “Be Mine” is the “fifth and final Bascombe book”, and it captures the sportswriter-turned-real estate salesman in the “winter of his life”. Still working part-time, Frank is divorced from his second wife Sally, and spends much of his time caring for his 47-year-old son, Paul, who is dying of motor neurone disease. It’s a fitting end to the Bascombe novels.

The novel centres on a “long, flat, boring” road trip the pair make to Mount Rushmore, said Simon Ings in The Times . It’s a “quotidian” portrait of heroism – much of the action focuses on the practicalities of their journey – but it feels true to life. And, impressively, from this “grim material” Ford has crafted a “bright comedy”, full of jokes and “bickering” dialogue, said John Self in the Financial Times . The result is a “book to sit back and wallow in” – and a moving end to a “magnificent series”.

Faber 208pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

The US novelist and short-story writer Lorrie Moore has long been drawn to the darkly “off-beat”, said Erica Wagner in The Times . And her compelling fourth novel is no exception: a “slender ghost story”, it is poised “between the living and the dead”. While visiting his brother Max, who has cancer, in hospital, Finn discovers that his ex-girlfriend, Lily, has died by suicide. Finn drives to her burial site, only to find her “waiting for him”: though she’s dead, and her body is decomposing, she is somehow still capable of movement and speech. “What follows is a bizarre road trip”, as they drive together to Tennessee to donate her body to medical science.

While this isn’t Moore’s best novel, “there are pleasures here for fans of her wordplay and dark humour”, said Mia Levitin in The Daily Telegraph . And beneath its jokey surface “runs an achingly poignant reckoning with grief”. It’s a novel certain “to divide people”, said Philip Hensher in The Spectator . At first, it seemed “wilful” and “self-absorbed”. But on the third reading, I found it had “an appalling power”.

Faber 336pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

This “uproariously funny” novel by the US writer Jen Beagin is a brilliant satire on therapy culture, said Mia Levitin in the Financial Times . After breaking off a “ten-year engagement”, Greta, 45, leaves Los Angeles and moves to Hudson, upstate New York, where she takes a job transcribing for a local sex therapist. In this “tiny community”, Greta inevitably recognises the voices of people she has heard spilling their secrets; one of these is 28-year-old gynaecologist Flavia, whom Greta has nicknamed “Big Swiss”. Greta knows Flavia, a “magnetic mix of Teutonic stoicism and vulnerability”, has never had an orgasm and “finds sex with her husband a chore”. The pair “embark on a torrid affair” – though Greta doesn’t tell Flavia about her job.

There’s a “lot more cunnilingus” in this novel than I expected, said Lucy Bannerman in The Times . But it’s also a brilliant depiction of Hudson, a prosperous but “seedy” place where “corporate lawyers reinvent themselves as antique dealers”. “Big Swiss” is being turned into an HBO series, with “Killing Eve” star Jodie Comer . It’ll definitely be “worth an eavesdrop”.

HarperCollins 352pp £14.99; The Week Bookshop £11.99

“Stig Abell has such a versatile CV” – his career has encompassed both The Sun and the Times Literary Supplement, and he is now a presenter on Times Radio – that it isn’t that surprising to find him dipping a toe into “crime-writing waters”, said Andrew Rosenheim in The Spectator . What may be surprising is “how well he’s done it”.

“Death Under a Little Sky” is set in a tiny village in a nameless part of England, to which police detective Jake Jackson retires after inheriting a large house from his uncle. Initially, he leads a solitary existence, but he soon befriends Livia, an attractive local vet. When human bones are uncovered during the village’s treasure hunt, the pair investigate the mystery together.

This is a “joyful dive into the detective genre”, said Alison Flood in The Observer . Abell’s love of crime fiction “shines through, as Jake ponders what the likes of Jack Reacher might do in a messy situation”. I was charmed by the “eccentric cast of characters”; and also engrossed by the “increasing sense of menace, as Jake digs into what happened”.

Orion 304pp £9.99; The Week Bookshop £7.99

The Bulgarian author Georgi Gospodinov’s third novel – which has just won the 2023 International Booker Prize – centres on a clinic in Switzerland for patients suffering from amnesia, said Sam Sacks in The Wall Street Journal . The brainchild of a mysterious therapist called Gaustine, the clinic works by immersing its patients in the past: “each floor represents a different decade and is filled with the minutiae of the era”. The clinic proves so successful that Gaustine soon opens its doors to those who don’t suffer from memory impairment – but who simply want to escape the present. A discursive, complex novel that recalls the works of Orhan Pamuk, “Time Shelter” is “difficult but rewarding”.

“This novel could have been a clever, high-concept intellectual game with little by way of emotional investment,” said Patrick McGuinness in The Guardian . Gospodinov, though, is a writer of “great warmth”, and Gaustine’s clinic becomes the “perfect conceit” for exploring 20th century history and the power of nostalgia. Angela Rodel’s skilful translation into English means that its virtues are on “abundant display”.

Cornerstone 416pp £22; The Week Bookshop £17.99

Weighing in at more than 400 pages, Tom Hanks’s debut novel is excessively long, said Andrew Billen in The Times . But that’s its only real flaw. The story begins with “legendary director and screenwriter” Bill Johnson inviting a film reviewer named Joe Shaw onto the set of his latest project, a superhero movie called “Knightshade”. What follows is Joe’s account of the production, with every aspect of the process described in detail, from the absurd behaviour of the leading actors (one insists on sleeping in a tent) to the “ruthless euphemisms of Tinseltown”. The results are both revealing and entertaining: “there will never be a superior account” of how a blockbuster gets made.

It would be nice to see this book as a satirical tale pricking Hollywood’s “pompous self-regard”, said Xan Brooks in The Guardian . Alarmingly, though, Hanks seems to be “deadly serious”. So awed is he by the world of film that everything is a “source of endless fascination”. The result is a “bland busman’s holiday” of a novel that “can’t see the wood for the trees”.

Chatto & Windus 304pp £18.99; The Week Bookshop £14.99

Emma Cline became a 27-year-old literary sensation when her “exceptional” debut, “The Girls” – “a heady story” of a Charles Manson-like cult told through the eyes of a teenager – was published in 2016, said Emily Watkins in The Independent . In her “exquisite” second novel, Cline again tells the story of a troubled young woman – and this time the results are “even better”.

Alex, 22, is an escort and small-time confidence trickster who has alienated virtually everyone she knows in New York, said Ron Charles in The Washington Post . When the story opens, she has fled to Long Island – where she looks upon the population of wealthy holidaymakers as a “field ready to harvest”. We follow her over five days, “as she lurks around the island, appearing wherever hosts are too polite to question her presence”; an acquaintance is sending her threatening messages about the money she stole from him. Written in Cline’s “sleek, cool style”, “The Guest” is a “smouldering thriller” about desire, deception and class envy.

Cline is a writer of “unmistakeable talent”, but I found this book a big disappointment, said Ann Manov in The Daily Telegraph . In essence, it’s a “15-page character sketch stretched to novel length”. The dialogue is “painful”, the “psychology heavy-handed”, and even Cline seems bored at times: many scenes peter out “more by exhaustion than design”. I disagree, said Rob Doyle in The Guardian . “The Guest”, for me, is a “gorgeously smart affair whose deceptive lightness conceals strange depths and an arresting originality”. It can be read on many levels: as a “treatise on neoliberal precariousness”; as a study of “metaphysical estrangement”; or simply as an “elevated beach read”.

Faber 256pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

Claire Kilroy is best known for her savage satires on contemporary Ireland, said Rosemary Goring in Literary Review . “Soldier Sailor”, her first novel in more than a decade, could hardly be more different: its subject is first-time motherhood. Narrated by an unnamed woman who describes her “earliest days” left alone with her son while her self-obsessed husband focuses on his work, this is a story of “wet wipes, teething and collapsing buggies”. If that sounds unappealing, “fear not”: Kilroy spins a “compelling tale”, one that “plumbs the depths of her narrator’s soul” while being liberally laced with humour. The novel “reads as easily as a postcard”, but manages to be “profound”.

The pleasure of this novel lies in the way Kilroy makes us see “familiar things for the first time”, said John Self in The Times . Putting a dummy in a screaming baby’s mouth is “like putting a pin back into a grenade”; a dishwasher opened mid-cycle has a “dripping metal maw, like part of a ship winched from the seabed”. Observant, witty and even “pretty pacey”, “Soldier Sailor” is “exceptionally good”.

Hamish Hamilton 256pp £18.99; The Week Bookshop £14.99

“From Dostoevsky to Hitchcock’s ‘Vertigo’, the doppelgänger is among the delights of literature and film alike,” said Olivia Laing in The Observer . And it’s a theme that Deborah Levy explores to striking effect in her “deeply Freudian” ninth novel. Elsa M. Anderson is a concert pianist who has recently lost her nerve and “walked off stage mid-performance” in Vienna. In the wake of this “unforgivable act”, she is “drifting around Europe”, teaching piano to the children of the wealthy. One day, in an Athens market, she spots a stranger wearing the same coat as her, and is “compelled by the sense that she is looking at herself”. Over the pages that follow, the doppelgänger reappears, as she pursues Elsa “from Athens to London to Paris”.

Levy uses the device of the doppelgänger to explore her protagonist’s self-fracturing, said M. John Harrison in The Guardian . An orphan raised by an overbearing piano teacher, Elsa has little idea who she is. Written in Levy’s trademark “quick and bare” prose, and poised “between comedy and darkness”, “August Blue” is a thrilling performance.

Chatto & Windus 352pp £18.99; The Week Bookshop £14.99

“Diana Evans’s last novel, ‘Ordinary People’, followed two black middle-class couples in contemporary London” as they “navigated the disillusionments of midlife”, said Elizabeth Lowry in The Daily Telegraph . Her new novel alights on the same four characters a few years later, all now unhappily divorced. One man, Michael, has taken up with a “sexy singer”, but still spends much of his time “yearning” for his ex, Melissa. The other man, Damian, is pursuing an “exciting single existence”, but leaves “anger and confusion in his wake”. The two women, meanwhile, are both made “distraught” by their teenage children’s problems. The message of this “compassionate and sharp” novel is that it’s dangerous to disassociate yourself from the past.

Evans occasionally strives too hard to hitch her drama to “real-life events”, said Lucy Bannerman in The Times : there are lots of “clunky” references to the Grenfell fire, Brexit and the like. “Be reassured”, however: such interruptions don’t spoil the fun. Big-hearted and often extremely funny, “A House for Alice” is a “beautifully observed” novel.

Hutchinson Heinemann 320pp £14.99; The Week Bookshop £11.99

It’s unusual to come across “a novel about the 1% that isn’t a satire or an insane potboiler”, said India Knight in The Sunday Times . But Jenny Jackson’s “blissfully enjoyable” debut is neither. Instead, it’s a story about a “family of New York property squillionaires” who happen to be “nice people”. The Stocktons are an “exceptionally tightly knit” family of five who have lived for decades in the same Brooklyn Heights brownstone. But when Chip and Tilda, the parents, decide to downsize, it triggers various family tensions that suck in all three of their adult children. A “very funny” novel about class, money, family and love, “Pineapple Street” is “one to pack for summer, whether you’re headed for the Hamptons or the Norfolk Broads”.

Whether describing the endless games of tennis the Stocktons play, or discussing the intricacies of pre-nups, Jackson chronicles their lives in “granular detail”, said Christobel Kent in The Guardian . “Minutely observed”, and “packed with one-liners”, “Pineapple Street” is a novel that largely justifies its author’s insistence that “we give the super-rich a chance”.

Faber 128pp £12.99; The Week Bookshop £9.99

Max Porter’s fourth book, set in the mid-1990s, is a “virtuosic novella that tracks a single day in the life of a troubled boy”, said Michael Delgado in Literary Review . Sixteen-year-old Shy is a resident of Last Chance, a rural home for young offenders. As the novel opens – at 3:13am – the teenager is “sneaking away”, carrying a backpack full of rocks. The narrative follows him as he walks – he’s headed for a pond – assailed by “breathless memories”. Porter’s “jagged” prose is inspired by the music of the era, specifically the drum ‘n’ bass that Shy adores. It makes for a “wonderful, troubling act of empathy”.

Like Porter’s previous books (including his prize-winning debut “Grief is the Thing with Feathers”), this slim novel deploys the “tricks and tropes” of modernism while remaining “hugely readable”, said The Guardian . Porter’s obvious love for his central character is what makes this possible. But in some respects, notably its schmaltzy ending, the novel disappoints. It’s a work of “many patches”: some “brilliantly coloured”, a few rather “bare”.

Doubleday 320pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

Curtis Sittenfeld’s enjoyable new novel is a “love letter to the prototypical romcom”, said Scaachi Koul in The New York Times . Sally Milz, a comedy sketch-writer in her late 30s, has become “embittered by her life’s many little heartbreaks”, and doubts she will ever find love. On the show she works on (which resembles “Saturday Night Live”), “mediocre-looking” male colleagues seem able to “date way out of their league” – while the women remain single. But when an “ageing pop icon” named Noah hosts the show one week, Sally suddenly finds her heart “aflutter”. The novel becomes an exploration of whether “someone like her” (fun and intelligent, but not especially glamorous) can “bag someone like him”.

Sittenfeld’s “command of structure, pace and dialogue is faultless”, said Anthony Cummins in The Observer . This book treads “well-tilled terrain” – Covid-19, modern celebrity, the art of writing – but it does so with “panache”. An “affable and intelligently crafted tale of work and love”, this is a novel that’s refreshingly unafraid to give readers “what they want”.

Fourth Estate 304pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

“The pandemic has prompted a spate of novels, and more no doubt will follow,” said Adrian Turpin in Literary Review . But few are likely to better capture the “strangeness” of that time than Philip Hensher’s “To Battersea Park”. This clever, original work consists of four sections, said Lucy Scholes in The Daily Telegraph . Part one follows a writer with a “striking resemblance to Hensher” who “bakes elaborate cakes” and seethes at joggers in the park. Part two widens the perspective to other characters, before, in part three, Hensher ventures into “postapocalyptic” territory, as he follows a man walking in Kent in the aftermath of a deadly “fifth wave”. The final section returns to the writer, who’s by now struggling with a bout of Covid.

This is a frankly baffling work, said Peter Kemp in The Sunday Times . The early parts are full of “grindingly dull” descriptions of everyday objects, while the futuristic “excursion” in Kent “reads like a re-casting of Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” by Joe Orton on an off day”. It’s “pompous” and “off-putting”, and, by the end, strongly soporific.

Influx 276pp £9.99; The Week Bookshop £7.99

For four decades, Percival Everett has been the “unsung Jonathan Swift of modern American fiction”, churning out a series of “clever, funny and mercilessly satirical” works, said Robert Collins in The Times . His recent success with “The Trees” – a “stupendous novel” about the legacy of slavery, which was shortlisted for last year’s Booker Prize – finally brought him to wider attention. Now, he has published “Dr. No”, an “alchemical” spoof of an Ian Fleming novel that “smuggles into its harebrained pages another sly satire of race in America”.

The central character, Wala Kitu, is a maths professor at Brown University whose “speciality is the idea of nothing”, said Stuart Kelly in The Spectator . His work attracts the attention of a black billionaire called John Sill, who “offers him ludicrous sums of money” to help achieve his goal of becoming a Bond villain. Combining the “zany and the profound” in a novel isn’t easy – but Everett manages to blend ruminations on the “notion of nothingness” with a “hijinks plot”. He is an “astonishing writer” – and “Dr. No” is another “beautifully choreographed” work.

Serpent’s Tail 288pp; £14.99 The Week Bookshop £11.99

Cracking open this “classy” debut will “produce a titillating sensation familiar to viewers of the hit series “The White Lotus”, said Claire Lowdon in The Sunday Times . On page one, we learn there has been a death – and the rest of the novel follows the events leading up to it. Melanie, the narrator, is private tutor to Alex, daughter of Russian billionaires. As she tutors Alex – in the Alps, in Monaco, and on a “mega-yacht in the Maldives” – Melanie learns “a great deal” about her family. Sarah Thomas, a former tutor to the super-rich, has written a “hot holiday read to brighten up the last few weeks of winter”.

Thomas skilfully captures both the “mind-blowing excess” and “existential misery” of those who’ve won “the oligarch lottery”, said Melissa Katsoulis in The Times . Alex’s parents “live a life that most of us can only dream of”, and yet crave the “one thing money can’t buy: acceptance into old-money European society”. Eventually, their “self-hatred implodes” – and Melanie has a “ringside seat” when it does. Having lured you in with its “beach-read vibes”, Queen K ultimately proves “devastating”.

Faber 272pp £18.99; The Week Bookshop £14.99

“Some writers can tell a good story,” said Ian Sansom in The Daily Telegraph . “Some can turn a nice phrase. Some can provoke and some can soothe.” But Sebastian Barry “can seemingly do it all”. Tom Kettle, the protagonist of his latest novel, is a “washed-up” cop who lives on the east coast of Ireland, in a “run-down annexe of an old Victorian castle”. There, he dwells extensively on “memories of his beloved wife June”, until one day he receives a visit from two policemen, who invite him back onto the force for the “cold-case investigation of the murder of a priest many years before”. It sounds a somewhat pulpy set-up – “the grizzled cop back on the beat”. But there are ways “to spin such shopworn tales”, and Barry knows them all. “Old God’s Time” is a “vivid” evocation of Ireland’s recent history, with a love story at its centre and “a cast of superb tragi-comic supporting characters”.

The most striking feature of this “transcendent” novel is Barry’s total immersion in his protagonist’s “imaginative world”, said Melissa Harrison in The Guardian . The “grief-stricken” Kettle is a somewhat unreliable witness – he’s a “survivor of more than one disaster”, including abuse as a boy in a Catholic orphanage – but so masterfully does Barry evoke his “living consciousness” that the effect is “sublime, almost uncanny”. This is a masterpiece, and “I don’t expect to read anything as moving for many years”.

While “Old God’s Time” is “a powerful story”, I found it rather baffling, said Alex Peake-Tomkinson in The Spectator . For instance, various characters are “presented initially as living people”, but in fact turn out to be dead. Barry’s style can be “long-winded”, and “readers will need their wits about them to have any grasp of the plot”.

Hamish Hamilton 192pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

Sophie Mackintosh’s third novel is “inspired by a 1951 mass poisoning in a French commune”, said Claire Allfree in The Daily Telegraph . This event, in the village of Pont-Saint-Esprit, left seven people dead and 50 in asylums, and is thought to have been caused by a local baker. Using these facts as a starting point, Mackintosh crafts a mysterious tale which centres on Elodie, the baker’s wife, and her “voyeuristic obsession” with a glamorous newcomer called Violet. A “shimmering fever-dream of a novel”, “Cursed Bread” is also “refreshing” in its brevity: at less than 200 pages, it “contains more riches than many a novel twice its length”.

The story of the poisoning was “begging to be turned into a novel”, said Jesse Crispin in The Times – but this “dreamy sapphic romp” is a big disappointment. The historical background is “left vague and incompletely rendered”, as Mackintosh focuses relentlessly on Elodie and Violet. It’s a fable, not a historical document, said Jo Hamya in The Guardian . And I thought it was “brilliant”: an “uncanny” and “quietly rich maturation of Mackintosh’s skill”.

Granta 432pp £20; The Week Bookshop £15.99

It’s ten years since, at 28, Eleanor Catton became the youngest ever Booker Prize winner for “The Luminaries”, a historical saga set in her native New Zealand. Now at last she’s back with a second book, said Shahidha Bari in the FT , and it’s quite a surprise – an “explosive” thriller about climate change and the future of humanity. Its protagonists are “eco-warriors” who plant sustainable crops on disused land, and its plot kicks off when they risk their integrity by making a pact with an “enigmatic” American billionaire who is interested in the same neglected swathe of the South Island as they are.

Catton casts a “beady comic eye” on her millennial eco-activists, said James Walton in The Daily Telegraph , with delicious observations of the egotism, puritanism and self-pity behind their ostentatious altruism. And the satire doesn’t let up when she turns to her “shadowy” billionaire, apparently inspired in part by the libertarian PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. But the book is wildly exciting too, a full-blooded thriller complete with gun-toting goons, a “Bond-style” chase and a virtuoso, pulse-racing finale.

Faber 240pp £14.99; The Week Bookshop £11.99

This “astonishing debut” will “burrow under your skin”, said Laura Hackett in The Sunday Times . Written by the London-based, Orlando-raised writer Dizz Tate, it is a tale of “toxic friendship, female rage, sexual abuse and trauma”, set in a decaying Florida housing estate, and narrated by a Greek chorus of 13-year-old girls. As it opens, Sammy – a slightly older girl with whom the chorus is obsessed – has just gone missing. As the adults search for her with torches and metal poles, it appears that the narrators “know more than they admit”.

What unfolds is a story of “grotesque horror” – one which isn’t always an “easy read”, but which is compulsive throughout. Tate is a writer with “talent in spades”, said Madeleine Feeny in The Guardian . The sense of place is “remarkable” – her descriptions of Florida are superb – and her portrait of early adolescence “feels bracingly true”. But too much is crammed into Brutes: not only a “bewildering arsenal of horror clichés”, but an increasingly “frenzied” plot. With her next novel, Tate should remember that “less is more”.

Cape 352pp £22; The Week Bookshop £17.99

Since Salman Rushdie moved to the US in 2000, his novels have fallen into two camps, said Hadley Freeman in The Sunday Times . Some (“Fury”, “Quichotte”) have been “satirical takes on modern America”; the others (such as “Shalimar the Clown”) have been “lyrical narratives about his native India”. Rushdie’s new novel, “Victory City”– his first to be published since the “brutal attack” last August that left him blind in one eye – belongs in that second group. A historical fantasy set in medieval India, it purports to be a modern translation of an epic autobiographical poem, written by a demigod named Pampa Kampana. Although packed with death and destruction, it comes across as “one of Rushdie’s most joyful” novels. It is “a total pleasure to read”.

We first meet Pampa as a (non-divine) nine-year-old, whose mother is one of many widows committing suicide on a “great bonfire along the river”, said Ron Charles in The Washington Post . As Pampa watches her mother burn, she resolves never to “sacrifice her body merely to follow dead men into the afterworld”. Instead, she tells herself, she will live to be “impossibly” old. Impressed by her defiance, a goddess gives her an assortment of magical powers. Aged 18, Pampa grows a “spectacular city” from vegetable seeds, on the spot where her mother died. This, it becomes clear, is an actual city – Bisnaga in southern India – which was the capital of the Vijayanagara empire in the 15th and 16th centuries. Pampa’s initial hope for Bisnaga is that it will become a “kind of feminist utopia” – a place of gender equality and “variegated sexual delight”. Instead, over the next two centuries, she watches her kingdom “grow and stumble” before it is eventually destroyed (as the historical Bisnaga was) by Muslim invaders in 1565.

With its “lashings of wildly imaginative, slightly bonkers storytelling”, “Victory City” is vintage Rushdie, said James Walton in The Spectator . While it has flaws – notably, a rather “repetitive” storyline – there’s something “undeniably stirring” about seeing Rushdie perform his “greatest hits with such undiminished commitment”. The best writing comes near the end, when Pampa is blinded using a hot iron rod, said Michael Gorra in The New York Times . “Victory City” was completed before last August – and so Rushdie could not have known that his own fate would be uncannily similar. It is “not the first time that he has been the Cassandra of his own fate” – and it underlines the fact that he is an author whose “work will always matter”.

Fitzcarraldo Editions 504pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

“Imagine a Stephen King thriller hijacked by Proust,” said Lee Langley in The Spectator . Laurent Mauvignier’s “mesmerising” novel does for terror “what Javier Marías did for the spy story”. Set in rural France, it revolves around a surprise party that farmer Patrice is preparing for his wife’s birthday. Christine, their neighbour, is baking a cake when a stranger knocks on her door, asking to be shown around. She sends him away – but he returns later, no longer alone. What results is a story of “nerve-shredding tension, but related in serpentine, elegant prose”.

This is a novel that “has us reading from behind our hands, as we watch its ensemble cast stumble into catastrophe”, said Anthony Cummins in The Observer . The intruders show up early on; “400 pages of agony remain”. And it all culminates in an “extravagantly choreographed set-piece blow-out of nigh-on unbearable jeopardy”. Mauvignier is lauded in France, but not all that well known in Britain, said Susie Goldsbrough in The Times . This gory, “classy” novel should change that.

Arcadia 400pp £18.99; The Week Bookshop £14.99

Joe Thomas’s “enthralling” thriller is set in east London during the late 1970s and early 1980s, said John Dugdale in The Sunday Times . The period was marked by simmering tensions between the National Front – who’d patrol Brick Lane every Sunday morning – and minority communities and their supporters. Clearly a fan of David Peace’s “Red Riding” quartet, Thomas has followed its example in “mixing real and fictional figures and connecting politics and policing”. Among the book’s large cast are a Hackney police officer investigating a black man’s death in a police station, and Margaret Thatcher, portrayed “scheming in Opposition”.

This novel is an “admirable attempt” to capture an “ugly period of recent British history”, said Colin Grant in The Guardian . The plot is “propulsive”, and there are other good things: the “foreboding atmosphere around anti-fascist marches”; Thatcher’s “quirkily comic dialogue with her husband Denis”. But “White Riot” is let down by thin characters and clunky dialogue. It’s “painted with broad brushstrokes”; it “could have done with another coat”.

Chatto & Windus 384pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

In this “enthralling” debut, Tom Crewe fictionalises the lives of two men who “planted the seeds” of modern sexual freedom, said Johanna Thomas-Corr in The Sunday Times . John Addington Symonds and Henry Havelock Ellis were Victorian academics whose (then) illicit desires (Symonds was homosexual; Ellis liked to watch women urinate) led them, in 1897, to co-author a pioneering textbook, “Sexual Inversion”, which aimed to present gay men as “healthy, well-adjusted individuals”. Crewe’s novelised version of their collaboration “reads a little like a Victorian take on Alan Hollinghurst’s “The Line of Beauty” crossed with E.M. Forster’s ‘Maurice’”. It will surely be “one of the most talked-about debuts of 2023”.

Full of “exquisite” writing, and “moments of furtive queer intimacy”, The New Life is an “intricate and finely crafted” novel, said Peter Kispert in The New York Times – and a “meaningful tribute” to two pioneers. The “total absence of humour” is a drawback, said Rupert Christiansen in The Daily Telegraph . But otherwise, this is a debut of “rare quality”.

Fleet 560pp £20; The Week bookshop £15.99

Deepti Kapoor’s stunning debut is “a rare case of a book bounding as high as its hype”, said Ron Charles in The Washington Post . Touted as an Indian “Godfather” – and already set to be made into a major TV series – it’s a “hypnotic story” of corruption and inequality set in the “broiling nexus” of modern-day Delhi. On page one, a horrific car crash occurs, when a Mercedes speeding through the city careers off the road and kills five people sleeping by the roadside. When the authorities turn up, they find a 22-year-old at the wheel, reeking of whisky.

What follows is a “big dynastic saga of organised crime”, in which “low life and high society” collide, said Jake Arnott in The Guardian . There are three main characters: Ajay (the drunk chauffeur), who grew up in “squalor and privation” in Uttar Pradesh; his employer, Sunny Wadia, the “playboy scion of a major criminal family”; and Neda Kapur, a journalist whose investigations into corruption are compromised when she embarks on an “ill-fated relationship” with Sunny. While the novel excels as a “commercial crime thriller”, it “deserves literary plaudits as well” – for its “lyrical touches”, its characterisation, and its “razor-sharp” social analysis.

I was less convinced, said Susie Goldsbrough in The Times . The “opening gambit” is excellent (if unoriginal), and there are some moving scenes, but overall the novel feels too much like an Indian-set “knock-off” of the “great Mob family epics”, with tinges of the HBO series “Succession”. There are the usual clichés – the over-ambitious son with “daddy issues”; the exploitation of underlings – and the plotting is meandering. “If you want an epic about modern India, read ‘A Suitable Boy’.”

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The best new books released in 2023, as selected by avid readers and critics

It may feel like a long time ago, now that we've reached the halcyon days of the festive season, but August was a big month for books.

Four of the books deemed the best of the year were released in that chilly month — perhaps it's a coincidence, perhaps it was a balm for our seasonal depression. Either way, our critics were here for it.

Among them are this year's Booker Prize winner but also a debut short story collection, which is a perfect demonstration of the breadth of books that took the fancy of Kate Evans, Claire Nichols, Sarah L'Estrange, Declan Fry and Cher Tan this year.

The books that captured them most over the past year take us everywhere from Trinidad in the 40s to the politics of the heavy metal scene, a futuristic (but disturbingly familiar) reality TV show and into the mind of a kind-of ghost from 19th century France.

So, as you sit back and contemplate the year that was (almost), these are the books we recommend you take with you.

Hungry Ghosts by Kevin Jared Hosein

In 40s Trinidad, a rich farmer has disappeared. His glamorous wife, Marlee Changoor, has received a ransom note. But she has no intention of paying. She is finally free.

In Hungry Ghosts, Kevin Jarad Hosein introduces us to an unforgettable cast of complex people. There's Marlee and her employee Hansraj, who she pays to work as a night watchman in her husband's absence. There's Hansraj's disconnected wife Shweta and their angry son, Krishna, living in poverty in the nearby "barrack", crammed into a single room and dreaming of a better life.

With several other families packed into the crumbling barrack house, privacy is non-existent. They hear each other's arguments; they smell each other's vomit. And, as readers, we are also asked to pay attention. Grief, sex and violence are described in unflinching detail.

Hungry Ghosts is a rich and rewarding read, packed with characters you'll love one minute, and be appalled by the next. It's an incredible debut.

— Claire Nichols

Hungry Ghosts appeared in our Best Books of February , check out the full review and other great books from that month here . 

Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton

Birnam Wood takes its name from a forest in Shakespeare's Macbeth, and most readers know that if a story is connected to this tragedy about a Scottish king's downfall, it's not going to be all lollipops and rainbows.

Indeed, Eleanor Catton's follow up to her Booker-winning novel The Luminaries is a fast-paced thriller, and is part of a growing literary trope that we on The Book Show call "bunker and billionaire" fiction.

In the novel, Birnam Wood is the name of a New Zealand guerilla gardening collective, led by the idealistic and driven Mira Bunting. She leads the group to a tract of seemingly abandoned farmland to rehabilitate the property. There she encounters the enigmatic American billionaire Robert Lemoine, who has his own plans for the property (cue the bunker trope).

Read on to find out who will be the victor in this murky battle of ideals versus capitalism.

— Sarah L'Estrange

Birnam Wood appeared in our Best Books of March , read the full review and see other great books from that month here .

Tomás Nevinson by Javier Marías

Hamish Hamilton

The final novel from Spanish novelist Javier Marías, who passed away late last year, offers a catnip-ready premise for spy/thriller fans: coaxed out of retirement to complete one last job, Tomás Nevinson — a half-English, half-Spanish spy — searches for the woman involved in a series of real-life terrorist attacks launched by Basque separatists in Spain.

The novel begins with Nevinson reflecting on the idea of killing Hitler before his rise to power — citing two examples, one fictional, one real — as a way of examining moral philosophy's trolley problem: can death ever be justified if it means preventing greater destruction? (Around the time the novel is set, Bill Clinton was finalising the Good Friday Agreement and losing opportunities to capture or kill Osama bin Laden, fearing collateral damage. Of course, no one knew 9/11 was around the corner.)

Tomás Nevinson offers a reflection on the historical antipathies and the relationship between peoples and nations. From the sorrows of Sarajevo and Rwanda, to Hamas and Israel currently caught in a war of incalculable carnage, Marías asks a perennial question: Where does enmity end?

Nevinson — described by his handlers as an "interpreter of lives" — gives Marías an opportunity to reflect on language, identity and the intractable limitations upon how much we can ever really know of ourselves or the world.

As in much of Marías' work, the writing moves with hypnotic grace. (And recommends itself to being read aloud: check out Ben Cura's wonderful audio recording.) The result is an ample display of Marías' many and various gifts, including a deft sense of humour and his agile ability to turn an aphorism ("You only have to introduce a little truth into a lie for the lie to seem not just credible, but irrefutable.")

Tomás Nevinson also represents a final chapter for one of the great translating partnerships of our time. Thanks to Margaret Jull Costa, anglophone readers may continue to read and reread nearly everything Marías has published since the 80s.

— Declan Fry

Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad

Grove Atlantic

The setting of Enter Ghost is one of colonial occupation and constant unease. Yet things are still required to continue.

It is in these circumstances that Sonia, Isabella Hammad's Palestinian British thespian protagonist, goes to visit her sister in Haifa. There, amid some devastating discoveries, she ends up reconnecting with Mariam, an old family friend, and is reluctantly roped into an Arabic stage adaptation of Hamlet in the West Bank.

Hammad's prose is precise. The world she writes has a dialectical feeling to it — an oozing disquiet is present throughout, even if there are small moments of joy. The Palestinian Hamlet actors turn up late for rehearsals when they encounter Israeli checkpoints that needlessly detain them on account of their identity. In one particularly acute scene, Mariam asks the actor playing Hamlet, Wael, to simulate an altercation with an Israeli soldier to bring out the character's aggression. We're left to interpret how that feels.

Enter Ghost is the rare kind of novel that seeks to reconcile aesthetic and political aims. It is a metafictional narrative of Palestinian resistance and love.

Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

Harvill Secker

There's a new show in town, and it's as bloody as hell. Swinging machetes, chains, axes, knives … and tight, tight close-ups — because this is reality TV on steroids.

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah creates an America in which prisoners might be pardoned — if they agree to fight to the death in techno-filled arenas, while every aspect of their lives is broadcast with the roar and swirl of publicity, music and fanfare.

It's WWE wrestling with real red stuff and extra politics; it's adrenaline to the max; it's heart-pounding commentary.

This is a future fantasy world that is also now. Overwhelmingly, the prisoners fighting for their lives and freedom are black or people of colour. They work together in a group — chains — that reference the history of slavery and racialised incarceration. Speaking out, silencing, resistance, rebellion: it's all there, too.

This is a novel with a thumping pace and plenty of complicated narratives that build and intertwine and come together in a breathless crescendo.

The two women at the heart of it, warriors both, are allies and lovers — but we know they'll end up in the arena together. And the man whose mind has been shattered by surveillance and enforced silence will have a part to play too, won't he?

And what about the viewers/the readers, where do we stand? Adjei-Brenyah makes sure that our position is interrogated, too.

— Kate Evans

Chain-Gang All-Stars appeared in our Best Books of June , check out the full review and other great books from that month here .

Tonight It's a World We Bury by Bill Peel 

Repeater Books

It's almost cursory to associate the black metal genre with the far right. Although it first began as a clarion call against Christianity, the scene became co-opted by figures such as Varg Vikernes and Faust, from whom proliferated right-wing views alongside bands who categorise themselves under the "NSBM" (national socialist black metal) umbrella.

But, as Bill Peel argues in Tonight It's a World We Bury, the genre is ripe for rehabilitation, particularly in this fractious era, to create a scene that holds Marxism as a value system as well as one of its political aims.

Peel's knowledge of the genre is vast. In this way — alongside close readings of philosophers like Mark Fisher and Byung-Chul Han — he manages to tell a compelling story of its past missteps, while also pointing out the bands who are bucking the status quo, preferring instead to visibly align themselves with the left.

What makes this book especially appealing is that, unlike many punters and thinkers of subcultural worlds, Peel doesn't revel in nostalgia.

Instead, he looks forward to possibilities yet unrealised, what could be further imagined. That in itself is part of a communist-minded paradigm — as Marx himself has written: "Reason cannot blossom without hope; hope cannot speak without reason".

Soldier Sailor by Claire Kilroy

Irish writer Claire Kilroy's novel blazes and shines with exhaustion, fury, love and resentment. In it, a woman (Soldier) addresses her baby son (Sailor) with all the weariness and heightened sensibility of someone at the end of their tether. And her tether is more like a frayed, gnawed rope.

Amid resentment of her husband, the humiliation of pram and doorway and buckles and supermarket tears, she is funny and ferocious and battling on and on.

Her writing takes us into the joy and the drag of her body: "My old enemy, the stairs."

Kilroy doesn't overplay the military language of her Soldier and Sailor — it's lighter, more flexible, vernacular.

There's an industrial hum throughout the book as well. Something's coming down the line, on tracks that thrum with power — and her language sparks and is polished with all the energy of life's machinery.

This is a novel where the plot is apparently about the commonplace — just getting through the first few years of a child's life — but she soaks it with tension and beauty and rage and movement and humour, so it's impossible to look away, and impossible to forget.

Soldier Sailor appeared in our Best Books of August , check out the full review and other great books from that month here .

Prophet Song by Paul Lynch

When I first read Prophet Song as one of the six 2023 Booker Prize shortlisted novels, I immediately knew it would win — and indeed it did .

The fifth novel by Irish writer Paul Lynch, it's set in a dystopian Ireland where a populist government has taken control and civil liberties are diminishing by the day. It is lyrical and electrifying, but this novel struck me because of its focus on the domestic rather than the militaristic or political.

Zeroing in on Eilish Stack — a microbiologist with four children and a husband who's been disappeared by the new regime — Prophet Song chronicles her efforts to hold her family together in the face of forces beyond her control. She's implored to escape the encroaching violence but, for Eilish, this prospect is akin to "tearing off your feet".

Paul Lynch told ABC RN's The Book Show that his purpose as a writer was to "get as close to myth" as possible, and in this novel he might just have achieved this coveted goal.

— Sarah L'Estrange

Prophet Song appeared in our Best Books of August , check out the full review and other great books from that month here .

Firelight by John Morrissey

This debut collection of short fiction from John Morrissey offers a sly, teasing narrative voice, elegantly staged dialogue and an eye for the absurdities and indignities of contemporary life.

At times recalling Will Self — both authors share a droll narrative voice, interest in office space and alternative timelines, fabulist narrative and colonisation — there are a number of highlights throughout the collection.

Autoc, a tale of future "alien" contact, invites the reader into all manner of sinister magic: the atmosphere of the 19th-century macabre, the question of imperialism, and an unnerving dreamlike atmosphere reminiscent of the lecture hall scene in Dario Argento's Inferno. Five Minutes is a beautifully executed metafiction examining familial angst, bureaucracy and the probable outcomes of a giant centipede attack. Ivy mixes urban ennui with slacker wit, gradually transforming into a meditation on rapture.

Much of the wonder of these stories lies in their suggestiveness. Morrissey is capable of relating the bizarre with lucidity and a calmly sardonic touch. The narratives are elusive yet vividly realised, leaving their endings and implications to the reader's imagination.

They could be described as speculative fiction but, in truth, they are more firmly anchored to that genre's underlying fabric: ourselves, and our inescapable strangeness.

Tom Lake by Ann Patchett

My copy of Tom Lake is looking increasingly worse-for-wear. Ann Patchett's ninth novel, with its green-blue floral cover, has been borrowed by my ABC colleagues over and over again since its July release.

The popularity makes sense. This is a book about summer love, cherry orchards and family ties, beautifully written by one of America's best-loved writers. It's a big warm hug of a book, with just enough bite to stop it drowning in sweetness.

Tom Lake is the name of a summer stock theatre, where our narrator Lara spent a season as a 20-something actress. It was there that she fell in love with Peter Duke — a magnetic, passionate actor who would go on to become a Hollywood star.

It's no spoiler to say that the romance was short-lived. Lara tells the story years later, as she and her three adult daughters pick cherries on the family farm. Lara didn't make it as an actress, and she married someone else. Her life is quiet, and quietly miraculous.

It's in this quiet contentment that Patchett does something revelatory. Tom Lake celebrates the joy that can be found in an ordinary, imperfect life. And isn't that something we can all aspire to?

Tom Lake appeared in our Best Books of August , check out the full review and other great books from that month here .

The Sitter by Angela O'Keeffe

The Sitter is the second novel by Australian author Angela O'Keeffe that takes the art world as its subject to dazzling effect. The first, Night Blue, anthropomorphised Jackson Pollock's famous painting Blue Poles, so don't expect a straight narrative in this new book.

The Sitter is an inventive conjuring of the post-Impressionist French artist Paul Cezanne's wife and model, Hortense Cezanne.

It's not, however, a straightforward re-writing of her life; instead, long dead Hortense appears as a presence in the French hotel room of an Australian writer who's researching her life for a novel. Hortense is not a ghost. In fact, the best way to think of this presence is as the manifestation of the writer's obsession.

This book is so exciting because Hortense becomes the observer of the writer rather than the perennially observed artist's subject. It's a slender, satisfying read that will send you to the paintings featuring Hortense and lead you to wonder what she's thinking as she looks out from the canvas.

Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood

Allen & Unwin

Grief can linger in your bones or pare you right back to them. Bare, skeletal, stony. Rattling around inside the noise of a busy life.

Accomplished and assured writer Charlotte Wood (The Natural Way of Things, The Weekend, many more) has taken that lonely sound and placed it inside her unnamed narrator — a woman who is searching for respite and heads to a nunnery and retreat in regional New South Wales.

She is not herself religious, and while she's longing for some sort of reflective space, she's scratchy with irritation at the rituals and bad food and seemingly pointless gliding about of the other women. Her irritation is itself a pleasure — funny, eye-rolling, cutting through any earnest piousness as we sink into her inner world.

There's plenty of outer world to be going on with, too: a murder; a celebrity nun; ferocious and difficult memories; sharply worded encounters with this community of nuns — and a mouse plague.

This mouse plague takes those bones of grief and plunges our hero — and us, as readers — back into the body. You can feel the curve of a foot as it encounters a small furry body in a shoe (gah!), or the horrifying wiggle in the small of her back as she gets into a car and then launches out of it again, an entire enmeshed cushion of small bodies writhing against our imagination.

Fine, intelligent writing.

— Kate Evans

Stone Yard Devotional appeared in our Best Books of October , check out the full review and other great books from that month here .

Alien Daughters Walk Into the Sun by Jackie Wang 

Semiotext(e)

Many may know Jackie Wang as the author of Carceral Capitalism (2018), an incisive examination into contemporary incarceration techniques. Few may know of her beginnings as a punky zine writer — her 2009 personal zine On Being Hard Femme provided a fun and expansive provocation on gender that I still stand by today. So I was pleasantly surprised to discover that zine, as well as other early writings, have been collected into something Wang refers to as "an almanac of extreme girlhood".

In the introduction Wang laments her assimilation into so-called respectable institutions: "I no longer know how to live as though the impossible were possible. I only know what I'm supposed to do to lead a successful life. I have a PhD from Harvard now. I put money away into a retirement account while I write from the comfort of a tenure-track job."

Within this volume of collected writing — nudged on by her friend, the poet Bhanu Kapil — is a kind of double-edgedness: while it grieves the loss of a more carefree, reckless and ultimately naïve time (it can also be said that this loss is engendered by how capital has completely permeated our lives), it's similarly a guidebook to possible existences. It's Proust's "retrospective illumination" put into practice.

Alien Daughters Walk into the Sun appeared in our Best Books of November , check out the full review and other great books from that month here .

Women and Children by Tony Birch

It might sound strange to describe a novel centred on violence as "tender". But that's certainly the case with Tony Birch's stunning fifth novel.

The book is set in 1965. Eleven-year-old Joe Cluny lives with his mum, Marion, and his sister, Ruby, in a safe and loving home. He's getting into trouble at his Catholic school and spending long days with his beloved grandfather, Charlie.

Then one night, violence arrives on the family's doorstep. Joe's aunt, Oona, is bruised and bleeding, after being beaten by her partner. And while the wider community has learned to look away from domestic violence — Ruby, while leading her beaten aunt through the street, observes that Oona has become an "invisible woman" — the Cluny family will confront it.

The tenderness is found in a series of small, perfect moments: Joe and Charlie sharing a buttery bacon sandwich; Ruby cleaning her aunt's bruised body. Birch's prose is clear-eyed and unpretentious, taking readers right to the heart of the story. And what a heart it is.

Women and Children appeared in our Best Books of November , check out the full review and other great books from that month here .

What I Saw, Heard, Learned by Giorgio Agamben

Italy's foremost philosopher, Giorgio Agamben, was a friend and collaborator of everyone from Pier Paolo Pasolini and Italo Calvino to Ingeborg Bachmann and Jacques Derrida.

This year, Seagull Books (publishers of great work like Hélène Cixous' Well-Kept Ruins, and Hussein Barghouthi's Among the Almond Trees) offered their latest title from the 81-year-old.

What I Saw, Heard, Learned is a series of startling, wise and often beautiful aphorisms and reflections. One chapter reads: "What water taught me: delight, when our foot no longer finds its hold and our body almost unwillingly gives in and swims." Or how about this? "Writing, I learned that happiness lies not in poetizing, but in being poetized by something or someone we cannot know."

The book is an intellectual and spiritual summa from a thinker who has meant much to many. Remarkable and thrillingly evocative, it closes with a moving account of Agamben being given a page of writing he made at the age of eight or nine by his mother, a piece that foreshadowed "the secret core of my philosophy".

Like the parables of Walter Benjamin or Zhuangzi, the memory approaches a kind of Daoist enlightenment, accepting that every work is only a failed iteration of some more fully realised ambition.

As Agamben writes, if "I really tried to cross the threshold of silence that accompanies every thought, I wouldn't have written a thing."

Tune in to ABC RN at 10am Mondays for The Book Show and 10am Saturdays for The Bookshelf .

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Here’s a dozen books from 2023 you should read, critics say

As the year comes to a close, we’re sitting down with book critics to discuss some of the best books released in 2023. NPR’s Fresh Air book critic Maureen Corrigan and New York Times books editor Gilbert Cruz share their favorite fiction and nonfiction picks with Jeffrey Brown.

”Absolution” by Alice McDermott

– Maureen Corrigan

“The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store” by James McBride

“The Bee Sting” by Paul Murray

– Gilbert Cruz

“North Woods” by Daniel Mason

“The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder” by David Grann

“How to Say Babylon” by Safiya Sinclair

“Master Slave Husband Wife” by Ilyon Woo

“Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World” by John Vaillant

“Beware the Woman” by Megan Abbott

And more personal favorites…

Maureen Corrigan recommended “Tom Lake” by Ann Patchett and Gilbert Cruz suggested “Fourth Wing” and “Iron Flame” by Rebecca Yarros.

In his more than 30-year career with the NewsHour, Brown has served as co-anchor, studio moderator, and field reporter on a wide range of national and international issues, with work taking him around the country and to many parts of the globe. As arts correspondent he has profiled many of the world's leading writers, musicians, actors and other artists. Among his signature works at the NewsHour: a multi-year series, “Culture at Risk,” about threatened cultural heritage in the United States and abroad; the creation of the NewsHour’s online “Art Beat”; and hosting the monthly book club, “Now Read This,” a collaboration with The New York Times.

Anne Azzi Davenport is the Senior Producer of CANVAS at PBS NewsHour.

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42 standout books from 2023, from romances to wrenching historical novels

2023 came and went, and we read all year long. We’re looking back on a few of our favorite books from this year.

The year kicked off with Prince Harry’s anticipated memoir “Spare ,” the first of many headline-making memoirs. From there came romances by the likes of Emily Henry and Carley Fortune; memoirs from memoirs from Latinx authors ; uplifting literary novels and ones that were unforgettably daring. Plus, there were all of those Read With Jenna picks. 

Here are a few of the standout books from 2023.

'We Must Not Think of Ourselves' by Lauren Grodstein

'We Must Not Think of Ourselves'

The wrenching final Read With Jenna pick of the year is set in the Warsaw Ghetto during WWII, and follows the real-life efforts of residents to archive their lives there.

'The Sun Sets in Singapore' by Kehinde Fadipe

'The Sun Sets in Singapore'

Think of it as “Sex and the City” but in Singapore. Actor and novelist Kehinde Fadipe’s debut centers on three Nigerian expats who help each other through career crossroads and dating challenges, all in a different country.

'How to Say Babylon' by Safiya Sinclair

'How to Say Babylon'

Raised by an authoritarian Rastafari father, Safiya Sinclair details her unique coming-of-age story, and how she learned to find her own voice.

'The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store' by James McBride

"The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store"

'amazing grace adams' by fran littlewood.

'Amazing Grace Adams'

Grace Adams doesn’t feel all that amazing. Her daughter won’t speak to her and her marriage has fallen apart. This voicey, hilarious book is her attempt at a redemption. She looks back at her past and tries to find the key to fixing the future.

'Banyan Moon' by Thao Thai

'Banyan Moon'

A mom. A daughter. A ghost grandmother, watching them both. “Banyan Moon” isn’t a ghost story so much as it is a story about how decisions ripple through generations, as does trauma — in this case, the trauma of the Vietnam War.

'Tom Lake' by Ann Patchett

'Tom Lake'

Ann Patchett’s latest is a love song to mothers and daughters; to the way the past can remain present; and to summers by a lake (or a cherry orchard). In it, a mother tells the defining story of her youth to her daughters: Her love story with a man who would go on to become very, very famous.

'Absolution' by Alice McDermott

'Absolution'

Alice McDermott’s new book focuses on a part of history not often covered: The women of the Vietnam War. Absolution is about four wives who were in Saigon in the ‘70s.

'Sam' by Allegra Goodman

Sam by Allegra Goodman

The first Read With Jenna pick of the year , "Sam" is a coming-of-age story with language that reflects its protagonist's growing up, evolving as Sam does. Describing the book to TODAY.com, Jenna Bush Hager says, "It explores what happens when one girl loses the wonder of childhood — the innocence of her early years only to reclaim her power and hope."

'Age of Vice' by Deepti Kapoor

Age of Vice

An epic in every sense of the world, "Age of Vice" will take you on a years-long whirlwind in a character's life ... and then back again, to show the same events from a different character's perspective. As the picture comes into focus, and all the elements of greed, loss, pleasure and love fueling the New Delhi-set story, you'll feel heartbreak for the characters and thrill at the capacity of Kapoor's mind.

'The Survivalists' by Kashana Cauley

The Survivalists

Aretha knows she can't prepare for every tragedy, especially in the wake of her mother's death. But there are some she can plan for "The Survivalists" follows one lawyer's detour into an underground world of people who believe the apocalypse is coming and are trying to get ahead of it.

'Spare' by Prince Harry

Prince Harry's anticipated memoir is billed as being an "honest and captivated personal portrait " of a person the public has seen grown up, but is only recently getting to know on an intimate level. Poised to tell his story "at last," the memoir is expected to cover the death of his mother, Diana, and why he left royal life behind with his wife Meghan Markle.

'Hell Bent' by Leigh Bardugo

The second installment in her Alex Stern series, "Hell Bent" returns to a magic-infused Yale University campus, where secret societies cast magic and unleash monsters. Alex Stern was brought from California to the cloistered Ivy League school to keep a watchful eye on them. And in book two, she has to venture to hell to rescue her partner. Read a preview here .

The Faraway World' by Patricia Engel

The Faraway World: Stories

In 2021, "Infinite Country," Engel’s latest novel, hit the New York Times bestseller list and took a strong hold over book clubs everywhere. Any fan of Engel’s work will tell you to prepare yourself for unique and intimate layered storytelling. You'll find that and so much more in this new short story collection exploring themes of community, regret and migration.

— Lupita Aquino

'Central Places' by Delia Cai

Central Places: A Novel

It's "Meet the Parents" for a new generation. Since moving away from the central Illinois town she grew up in, Audrey Zhou has gotten a high-powered job and found the perfect man. Now, she's bringing her fiancé back to meet her Chinese immigrant parents. There, her past and present collide, as do her parents' expectations for her and her hopes for herself.

'Love, Pamela' by Pamela Anderson

Love, Pamela

After a life in the headlines, you might think you know Pamela Anderson. In this revealing memoir, Anderson describes what it was like to be in her shoes during her ascent to fame and scrutiny, and how she found herself.

'Maame' by Jessica George

"Maame" is a coming-of-adulthood with an unforgettable narrative voice. By page one, you'll be invested in Maame's journey as she navigates caring for her ailing father and living at home in her mid 20s; her mother's nosy phone calls from Ghana that can't make up for her absence; her friendships; disappointing work interactions; and more.

'The People Who Report More Stress' by Alejandro Valero

The People Who Report More Stress: Stories

Valero's debut novel "The Town of Babylon" came out in 2022, and this forthcoming short story collection, full of memorable personalities, explores similar themes: community, relationships, modern queer life, racism and parenthood.

'I Have Some Questions for You' by Rebecca Makkai

I Have Some Questions for You

Imagine if your life was the stuff of a true crime documentary. Bodie Kane has tried to move on past the 1995 murder of her boarding school roommate. When she returns to the boarding school as an adult, Bodie realizes there are still lingering mysteries about how the case was wrapped up and justice was served.

'Black Candle Women' by Diana Marie Brown

Black Candle Women (Original)

If you watched "True Blood" or "Practical Magic," you're sure to enjoy this family saga about a group of women with magic in their blood and secrets in their past. Augusta, the family matriarch, can't speak due to aphasia, but her daughter, grand-daughters and great-granddaughter are living with the ramifications of a decision she made and the powers she passed onto them.

'What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez' by Claire Jimenez

What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez

The Ramirez sisters were a tight-knit trio until the sudden disappearance of Ruthy, the middle child, shattered the family. Years after her disappearance, Ruthy seems to reappear in a reality TV show using the name Ruby. This debut novel is a funny and heartbreaking examination of sisterhood, generational trauma and the bonds that hold families together.

'The Mimicking of Known Successes' by Malka Older

The Mimicking of Known Successes

Exploring communities in conflict and the loss of ecosystems, this science fiction novella — part sapphic romance, part murder mystery — imagines what life would be like in a human colony on Jupiter.

'Hello Beautiful' by Ann Napolitano

Hello Beautiful

Read With Jenna author Ann Napolitano's follow-up to "Dear Edward " is centered on a lonely basketball player and the warm family of four sisters (think "Little Women") that he marries into. Read a preview of the redemptive novel here .

'Take What You Need' by Idra Novey

Take What You Need: A Novel

Leah returns to her home in the Allegheny Mountains to clean house after her estranged stepmother's death. Upon arriving, Leah learns that her stepmother had a secret: an inner artist who left behind large, mysterious sculptures out of scrap material. Idra Novey created the portrait of an artist, seen through the eyes of someone who only knew her as a flawed stepmother.

'The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter and Other Essential Ghosts' by Soraya Palmer

The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter and Other Essential Ghosts

This debut coming-of-age story weaves in folktales and spirits through the lens of two Jamaican-Trinidad sisters who struggle to understand each other, exploring the power of storytelling and complexities of sisterhood.

' White Cat, Black Dog' by Kelly Link

White Cat, Black Dog: Stories

Kelly Link is the master of the modern fairy tale. This collection of short stories is deceptively easy to read – you'll be turning the pages of strange events quickly, but the stories and their strange events are liable to linger in your mind.

'Above Ground: Poems' by Clint Smith

Above Ground

In this new collection of poems, Smith examines the ways in which parenthood has altered his view on life. He now tries to see the world through his children's eyes. Expressive and intimate, this collection flawlessly captures the vulnerability of the human experience on the page.

'Camp Zero' by Michelle Min Sterling

The climate apocalypse happens — and people keep going. This inventive novel follows the people after the world as we know it has been changed irrevocably, living in the far north.

'Carmen and Grace' by Melissa Coss Aquino

Carmen and Grace

Cousins Carmen and Grace share a traumatic childhood that has bonded them together tightly. That is, until they meet a sisterhood of women known as the D.O.D, who are guided by a leader of an underground drug empire, Doña Durka. This plot-driven novel explores the bonds of found family and the ways into which power and ambition can sever relationships.

'Homecoming' by Kate Morton

The author of "The Clockmaker's Daughter" returns with her first book in four years. Another epic, "Homecoming" follows the decades-long reverberations of a crime in South Australia for one family.

'Chain Gang All Stars' by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

"Chain-Gang All Stars"

Jenna Bush Hager says her May 2023 book club pick is "not like anything I’ve read before."

Two women prisoners become gladiators, battling each other for their lives and their freedom, in this dystopian novel.

'A Living Remedy' by Nicole Chung

A Living Remedy: A Memoir

This riveting and tender memoir is a stunning meditation on grief and guilt, driven by the ways in which the U.S. healthcare system, one of the highest costs of healthcare in the world, fails those that cannot afford it. Detailing her father's inability to access healthcare and his premature death, Chung illuminates the hardships many Americans face caring for aging parents and loved ones in a broken system.

— L.A.— L.A.

'Meet Me at the Lake' by Carley Fortune

Meet Me at the Lake

Like Carley Fortune's hit debut novel "Every Summer After", "Meet Me at the Lake" is a lake-set romance. After an intense, 24-hour meeting a decade ago, Fern and Will meet up again in the lakeside town where she inherited her mother's inn. Read a preview here .

'In Vitro: On Longing and Transformation' by Isabel Zapata

In Vitro: On Longing and Transformation

In this essay-like collection, Zapata examines in vitro fertilization and the narratives that drive societal expectations and pressures in conception and pregnancy. Unveiling a nuanced view of motherhood and fertility treatment, "In Vitro" will illuminate aspects of pregnancy not often discussed.

'Quietly Hostile: Essays' by Samantha Irby

Quietly Hostile: Essays

Blogger-turned-bestselling author Samantha Irby is back with a new and hilariously relatable essay collection. The essays depict what it's like to balance writing for hit shows like HBO’s reboot of "Sex and City" with the reality of living in a human body. Irby will have you crying and laughing as she writes about exploring therapy, reiki and much more.

'Yellowface' by R. F. Kuang

R. F. Kuang is the creator of intricate fantasy novels like "Babel" and the Poppy War series. In "Yellowface," she tells the story of two competitive authors, Athena Liu and June Hayward, whose careers take off at the same time — but only one's star rises. When Athena dies in a freak accident, June takes her chance to steal her manuscript about Chinese laborers during WWII and pass it off as her own.

'The Late Americans' by Brandon Taylor

The Late Americans

Previously listed as a nominee for the Booker Prize longlist with his debut novel, "Real Life", Taylor’s sophomore novel "The Late Americans" follows a group of friends as they challenge each other to find themselves.

'The Celebrants' by Steven Rowley

The Celebrants

The author of "The Guncle" is back with a big-hearted saga about friendship and what makes a life worth living. A group of college friends decide to throw funerals for each other.

'Girls and Their Horses' by Eliza Jane Brazier

Girls and Their Horses

The author of "Good Rich People" returns with a novel set in the cloistered world of the wealthy — this time, among competitive show jumpers, where big wallets tend to outweigh talent. After coming into a fortune, Heather Parker wants her daughters to have the chances she didn't to become horse-riding stars. Someone winds up dead in the barn — but who?

'When The Hibiscus Falls' by M. Evelina Galang

When the Hibiscus Falls

Centering the lives of Filipino American women in seventeen stories, Galanga explores the complexities of ancestry, identity, and community, resulting in a collection that honors the deep connections that exist between descendants and ancestors.

'Save What's Left' by Elizabeth Castellano

Save What's Left: A Novel

When her husband Tom leaves her without warning to go on an around-the-world cruise, Kathleen is left with a gaping hole — and a chance to reinvent herself. So she decides to move to a small beachside town across the country and becomes pulled into its ecosystem. Laugh-out-loud funny, "Save What's Left" is a novel about life in a town that makes the perfect escape.

'Rivermouth: A Chronicle of Language, Faith, and Migration' by Alejandra Oliva

Rivermouth: A Chronicle of Language, Faith, and Migration

Alejandra Oliva, a translator and advocate for Latin American migrants seeking asylum and citizenship, reflects on the different physical spaces migrants encounter as they navigate the immigration system. Illuminating the difficulties and gaps within the system, she poses crucial questions about American citizenship and the need for radical empathy.

'Family Lore: A Novel' by Elizabeth Acevedo

Family lore.

In 2018, Acevedo received the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature for her novel-in-verse "The Poet X," which also became a New York Times bestseller. "Family Lore" is Acevedo's first novel for adults and it tells the story of a Dominican-American family exploring their shared history as they approach the wake of one of its members.

Elena Nicolaou is a senior entertainment editor at Today.com, where she covers the latest in TV, pop culture, movies and all things streaming. Previously, she covered culture at Refinery29 and Oprah Daily. Her superpower is matching people up with the perfect book, which she does on her podcast, Blind Date With a Book.

Booklover Book Reviews

New Books Released 2023: Best books this month

Looking for the best books to read in 2023? Browsing the countless new book releases lists can be fun, but it does not leave much time for reading them. So, this bonafide book lover will scour the web for the newest books in 2023 and share with you what I think are the best books each month. And, since I am a diverse reader, the new books featured will span a broad range of fiction genre.

You might like this article: New Book Releases 2024: Our top fiction picks by month

Links and cover images in this article will take you to more detail about each new book, and when I have been lucky enough to read it, open up my full review in a new tab.

Disclosure: If you click a link in this post and make a purchase, I may earn a small commission.

So without further ado, read on to see which  2023 book releases  have caught my attention so far… 

November & December 2023: New release fiction

The publishing year is coming to a close, but there are still some great new book releases to look forward to.

After loving Nita Prose’s breakout cozy mystery with unexpected depth The Maid , I was hoping we would get to spend more time with Molly. And now here is the sequel, The Mystery Guest .

Molly, now Head Maid at the Grand Regency, has her now perfect world turned upside down when world-renowned mystery author, J. D. Grimthorpe drops dead on the hotel’s tearoom floor. As the high-profile death threatens the hotel’s reputation, Molly knows she alone holds the key to unlocking the killer’s identity, as she and her be-loved Gran had known the victim long ago. Read our review >>

I do enjoy rom coms with male leads, and Dolly Alderton’s new release Good Material has been described as ‘wickedly funny and, at turns, both cynical and sincere’.

Andy loves Jen. Jen loved Andy. And he can’t work out why she stopped. Set adrift on the sea of heartbreak, Andy clings to the idea of solving the puzzle of his ruined relationship. Because if he can find the answer to that, then maybe Jen can find her way back to him. But Andy still has a lot to learn, not least his ex-girlfriend’s side of the story… Find out more >>

Ilaria Tuti’s The Sleeping Nymph was an intoxicating, uniquely captivating crime thriller in translation starring the indomitable Superintendent Teresa Battaglia.

In new novel Daughter of Ashes (the final in the trilogy) with her worsening Alzheimer’s still a secret, Teresa’s plans for retirement are shelved when menacing serial killer Giacomo Mainardi refuses to speak to anyone but her. She’d put him in maximum security prison 27 years prior. Now somebody is after him, and only Teresa holds the key to keeping everyone, including herself, safe. Read our Daughter of Ashes review>>

Lauren E Rico’s sweeping family drama and mystery, Familia is receiving high praise pre-release.

What if your most basic beliefs about your life were suddenly revealed to be a lie? An old crime, unsuspecting victims and beloved parents deceased. Against the bold beauty of San Juan, a baffling genealogy test connects two twenty-something women across cultures and class in this emotional yet refreshing story about sisterhood and self-discovery for fans of Julia Alvarez and Diane Chamberlain. Find out more >>

Same Bed Different Dreams sounds like a Christmas gift for literary and speculative fiction lovers. It’s been described as a ‘ Gravity’s Rainbow for another unfinished war’, and a raucously funny feat of imagination and a thrilling meld of history and fiction. Publishers Weekly featured it in their Ten Best Books of 2023. Ed Park weaves together three distinct narrative voices with an archive of mysterious images and twists reality like a kaleidoscope. Korean history, American pop culture, and our tech-fraught lives come together in this extraordinary and unforgettable novel. Find out more >>

September & October 2023 Book Releases

Most of the big-name authors have new book releases in 2023 and September and October are the months you will find many of them in bookstores. That said, there is still a fabulous debut and a title or two from some lesser-known authors to this diverse best new releases list.

You, Again follows Ari and Josh, two enemies-turned-friends-turned-lovers, over the a decade in New York City. According to USA Today, “It’s raunchy and lovable and laugh-out-loud funny,” and Publishers Weekly have said, “The influence of  When Harry Met Sally  is clear, with Goldbeck updating the classic for the modern day. The result is witty, emotional, and deeply romantic.”

With sharp observations and sizzling chemistry, Kate Goldbeck’s debut novel You, Again  explores the dynamics of co-ed friendship in this sparkling romantic comedy of modern love in all its forms. Find out more >>

If like me, you are a big fan of Mick Herron’s writing , but are not quite up-to-date with his iconic Slough House series, then his 2023 new release The Secret Hours could be perfect for you.

This standalone spy thriller centres on Griselda Fleet and Malcolm Kyle, two civil servants seconded to the Monochrome Inquiry investigating “historical over-reaching” by the British Secret Service, and the unravelling of the buried history of a classified operation in 1994 Cold War Berlin–an operation that ended in tragedy and scandal, whose cover-up has rewritten thirty years of Service history. Read our The Secret Hours review and book club discussion questions.

A new novel from one of my favourite crime writers Chris Hammer is always something to look forward to, and that’s particularly the case when it features homicide detectives Ivan Lucic and Nell Buchanan ( Treasure & Dirt , Tilt/Dead Man’s Creek ).

In this third outing for the pair, The Seven ( Cover the Bones in the UK) they are investigating the murder of one of the seven rich and powerful founding families of Yuwonderie. Could the murder be connected to the execution of the victim’s friend thirty years ago – another member of The Seven – or even the long-forgotten story of a servant girl on the brink of the Great War? What are the secrets these families are so desperate to keep hidden? Read our full review >>

What the River Knows is the first title in a planned ‘Secrets of the Nile’ duology from Isabel Ibanez. Filled with adventure, a rivals-to-lovers romance, and a dangerous race, this new novel has been described as The Mummy meets Death on the Nile . After her globe-trotting parent’s tragic deaths, Inez Olivera inherits their massive fortune and a mysterious guardian, an archeologist. Yearning for answers, Inez sails to Cairo, Egypt. With her guardian’s infuriatingly handsome assistant thwarting her at every turn, Inez must rely on ancient magic to uncover the truth about her parent’s disappearance–or risk becoming a pawn in a larger game that will kill her.  Read my full review >>

Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone  by Benjamin Stevenson was an impressively original, clever and entertaining meta-crime mystery. In this sequel, Everyone on this Train is a Suspect , Ernest Cunningham finds himself in the midst of another witty locked room mystery.

When the Australian Mystery Writers’ Society invited me to their crime-writing festival aboard the Ghan, the famous train between Darwin and Adelaide, I was hoping for some inspiration for my second book. Fiction, this time: I needed a break from real people killing each other. Obviously, that didn’t pan out. Find out more >>

Kathryn Darkling, imprisoned in Holloway, is facing death by hanging for her vengeance killing. Haunted by a spirit, she still hopes to perform the ancient black magic that will free her soul, or her struggle to punish the mighty will have been in vain. Will the love of her life come to her aid? Or can she find a way to escape her fate?

Winner of The Virginia Prize for Fiction, Natalie Bayley’s new release Bone Rites   is a dark, literary tale of love, loss and one woman’s obsessive fight for justice and redemption within a ruthless world. Read our Bone Rites review >>

More noteworthy new book releases 2023 – September & October:

US readers – Browse this September & October 2023 New Book Releases List directly on Bookshop.org where profits support local independent bookstores.

July & August 2023 Book Releases

In this batch of new release books we have a vast range of mystery — classic homage, scientific, psychic, historical, mystical and gothic — plus a fun sounding adult rom-com.

Yes, the full title of this new book from Denise Mina is The Second Murderer, A Philip Marlowe Novel . Few would dare to go there, but as a massive fan of her writing ( The Long Drop , Conviction ) am sure she will do Raymond Chandler’s infamous detective justice and add her own clever dark wit.

Beverley Hills, LA. Marlowe is called to investigate the disappearance of wealthy socialite Chrissie Montgomery. This young, naïve heiress is a walking target and her dying father and his girlfriend want her found. To make sure, they’ve got Anne Riordan–now head of her own all-female detective agency–on the case, too. Who will get to Chrissie first? Find out more >>

The Woman in the Castello , Kelsey James new novel, has been compared to the wonderful Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walters and recommended for fans of gothic storytellers Kate Morton and Silvia Moreno-Garcia, so my expectations are high.

Set in 1960s Italy, this stylish, atmospheric debut spins a bewitching web of ruthless ambition, family secrets, and the consequences of forbidden love, as an ambitious American actress snags the starring role in a mysterious horror movie shooting on location in a crumbling medieval castle outside Rome… Read my full review >>

Shannon Morgan’s new release debut Her Little Flowers , is more gothic fiction. But, this is a modern ghost story set in a rambling Elizabethan manor in the lush hills of England’s Lake District.

Francine Thwaite has lived all her life in her family’s ancestral home, Thwaite Manor, amongst ghosts — harmless and familiar. Most beloved is Bree, the mischievous ghost girl who has been Francine’s companion since childhood. But, shen Francine’s estranged sister, Madeleine, returns to the manor after years away, she brings with her a story that threatens everything Francine has always believed.  Find out more >>

To Catch a Storm is the first book in a new series from bestselling author Mindy Mejia featuring physicist Eve Roth and psychic detective Jonah Kendrick.

When her husband’s car is found abandoned and on fire–in the middle of a rainstorm– Eve becomes the police’s number one suspect. Her husband had been suspended from the University of Iowa for inappropriate conduct with a student, and who else but an atmospheric physicist could incinerate a car in a downpour? But she’s desperate to find him. Then Jonah appears on their doorstep saying he’s seen Eve’s husband, bound and bleeding in a barn. Read our review >>

Kathy Reichs’ annual Temperance Brennan novels (most recently The Bone Code and Cold Cold Bones ) are a staple for many readers. Her 2023 new release The Bone Hacker , is the 22nd title in the series.

Called in to investigate after a series of bizarre disappearances involving young male tourist on the islands of Turks and Caicos, Tempe uncovers a sinister labyrinth in which a new technology may wreak worldwide havoc. It isn’t long before the sound of a ticking clock grows menacingly loud and Tempe herself becomes a target.  Find out more >>

I adored the whip-smart banter in Mhairi McFarlane’s Last Night so am keen to see what she has in store for rom-com fans in her latest release Between Us .

When Roisin and Joe join their friends for a weekend at a country house, it’s a triple celebration–a birthday, an engagement, and the launch of Joe’s new TV drama. But as the weekend unfolds, tensions flair and Roisin begins to question her own relationship. And as they watch the first episode of Joe’s show, she realizes that the private things she told him are right there on the screen. Find out more >>

The Invisible Hour is the upcoming release from literary drama bestseller Alice Hoffman ( Everything My Mother Taught Me ).

One brilliant June day when Mia Jacob can no longer see a way to survive, the power of words saves her.  The Scarlet Letter  was written almost 200 years earlier, but it seems to tell the story of Mia’s mother, Ivy, and their life inside the Community. Now as a young woman she falls in love with a brilliant writer as she makes her way back in time. But what if Nathaniel Hawthorne never wrote  The Scarlet Letter ? And what if Mia Jacob never found it on the day she planned to die? Find out more >>

US readers – Browse this July & August 2023 New Book Releases List directly on Bookshop.org where profits support local independent bookstores.

New Books 2023 – May & June

In this batch of new release books you will find new fiction that puts books and book lovers centre stage, blockbuster thrillers, moving historical fiction from some of the biggest names in the genre and rom-coms with a fun sci-fi twist.

Erica Bauermeister’s latest novel No Two Persons is a ‘haunting love letter to the redemptive power of stories and the impressive mark it leaves on readers’.

Long aspiring author Alice finally pens her breakout debut after a devastating event breaks open her heart. Her words find their way to readers — a teenager hiding her homelessness, a free diver pushing himself beyond endurance, an artist furious at the world around her, a bookseller in search of love, a widower rent by grief. As each is drawn into Alice’s novel, they each discover something different that alters their perspective and presents new pathways forward. Find out more >>

Bestselling fantasy author Mark Lawrence ( Prince of Thorns ) launches his new Library Trilogy with Book 1 The Book That Wouldn’t Burn . Book 2 The Lie That Broke the World is already scheduled for release in 2024.

Evar has lived his whole life trapped within a vast library, older than empires and larger than cities. Livira has spent hers in a tiny settlement out on the Dust where nightmares stalk and no one goes. The world has never noticed them. That’s about to change. As their stories spiral around each other, across worlds and time, each will unlock vast secrets about the world and themselves. Read our 5 star review >>

Bestselling historical fiction author Patti Callahan Henry’s new novel The Secret Book of Flora Lea is about heartbreaking loss and love, described as a captivating and poignant celebration of sisterhood and the magic of storytelling perfect for fans of Kate Morton and Belinda Alexandra.

Involving sisters, a childhood fairytale, an unsolved disappearance, dual time periods, and a picture book clue found in a rare bookshop twenty years later, this sounds tailored-made for book lovers. Find out more >>

Rarely does an action thriller earn my elusive 5-star rating, but Newman’s debut novel Falling did just that. So I cannot wait to read her new release Drowning .

Six minutes after takeoff, Flight 1421 crashes into the Pacific Ocean. During the evacuation an engine explodes, and the plane sinks with twelve passengers trapped inside, landing on the edge of an undersea cliff, more than 200-feet below the surface. Will Kent and his 11-year-old daughter Shannon are waist-deep in water and fighting for their lives. Their only chance at survival is an elite rescue team led by professional diver Chris Kent– Shannon’s mother and Will’s soon-to-be ex-wife. Read my Drowning review >>

Catherine McKenzie’s new thriller Have You Seen Her is about three women with dark secrets whose lives intersect in the picturesque and perilous Yosemite National Park. Cassie Peters has left her hectic and secretive life in New York City for the refuge of her hometown of Mammoth Lakes, California. There, she begins working again with Yosemite Search and Rescue, where a case she worked a decade ago continues to haunt her. She meets Petal, a young woman living in a trailer with her much older wife, keeping a detailed diary of the goings on in the park, and Jada, a recent college graduate on a cross-country road trip with her boyfriend, documenting their journey on Instagram. Find out more >>

Lady Tan’s Circle of Women , the latest release from bestselling historical fiction author Lisa See ( Snow Flower and the Secret Fan ) is inspired by the true story of a remarkable woman physician from 15th-century China. According to Confucius, “an educated woman is a worthless woman,” but Tan Yunxian is being raised by her grandparents to be of use. Her grandmother, one of only a handful of female doctors in China, teaches her the pillars of Chinese medicine. She learns about women’s illnesses, many relate to childbearing, alongside a young midwife-in-training, Meiling. The two girls find fast friendship and a mutual purpose. But when Yunxian is sent into an arranged marriage, her mother-in-law forbids her from using her talents. Find out more >>

Ashley Poston ( The Dead Romantics ) is behind one of the most anticipated new releases of the northern summer. In The Seven Year Slip , overworked book publicist Clementine has a perfectly planned future but that hits a snag when she falls in love with her temporary roommate, a man with kind eyes and a Southern drawl and a taste for lemon pies, in her late aunt’s apartment… only to discover he lives seven years in the past. Her aunt always said the apartment was a pinch in time, a place where moments blended together like watercolors. Described as ‘off-kilter, romantic and irresistable’, this witty and wise novel is getting lots of love from early readers. Read my full review >>

Related reading: Books About Time Travel, Parallel Worlds & Alternate Universes

I have a soft spot for Connie Willis’ romantic comedy novels — two fabulous examples Bellwether and To Say Nothing of the Dog — so am excited to get my hands on her latest offering, The Road to Roswell . When level-headed Francie arrives in Roswell, New Mexico, for her college roommate’s UFO-themed wedding — she can’t help but roll her eyes at all the wide-eyed talk of aliens, which obviously don’t exist. Imagine her surprise, then, when she is abducted by one. Part alien-abduction adventure, part road trip saga, part romantic comedy, this novel is packed full of Men in Black, Elvis impersonators, tourist traps, rattlesnakes, chemtrails, and Close Encounters of the Third, Fourth, and Fifth kind. Find out more >>

More noteworthy new book releases in May & June 2023

• Cutting for Stone author Abraham Verghese’s literary epic The Covenant of Water would have to be one of the most anticipated books published in 2023. ‘A stunning and magisterial new epic of love, faith, and medicine’, it is receiving rave early reviews.
• Fans of author Kylie Chan ( White Tiger ) will be pleased to know her new book Minds of Sand and Light is the first title in a brand new dystopic near future trilogy, The Council of Ais .
• More big-name authors releasing new novels for the northern summer holidays:

US readers – Browse this May & June 2023 New Book Releases List directly on Bookshop.org where profits support local independent bookstores.

New Books 2023 – March & April

Lots of fan favourite authors releasing new books during March and April, including new historical fiction from Pip Williams and Kate Morton, a new thriller from Helen Fields and Emily Henry’s latest romance release.

The Institution is Helen Fields’ ( One For Sorrow , The Last Girl to Die ) new edge-of-your-seat thriller release. While technically a standalone, this novel stars forensic profiler Dr Connie Woolwine, a fantastic ancillary character I first met in One for Sorrow .

On a locked ward in the world’s highest-security prison hospital, a scream shatters the night. A nurse’s body is found and her daughter has been taken. A ransom must be paid, and the clock is ticking. Connie must go deep undercover among the most deranged and dangerous men on earth and use her unique skills to find the girl – before it’s too late. Find out more >>

Birnam Wood is the intriguing new book release from Booker Prize-winning author Eleanor Catton ( The Luminaries ). This literary psychological thriller is being described as ‘Shakespearean in its wit, drama and immersion in character’.

Birnam Wood is a guerrilla gardening group — an unregulated, sometimes-criminal, sometimes-philanthropic gathering of friends, this activist collective plants crops wherever no one will notice, on the sides of roads, in forgotten parks, and neglected backyards. But the group has struggled to break even. So when a landslide leaves a sizable farm seemingly abandoned, group founder Mira’s entrepreneurial spirit leads to them partnering with enigmatic American billionaire, Robert Lemoine. But can they trust him? Find out more >>

Shelley Read’s debut historical fiction novel Go As A River is already being compared to Where the Crawdads Sing .

Set in rural Colorado in 1948, this heart wrenching coming-of-age story centres on young woman Victoria Nash and a chance meeting with a dishevelled stranger that propels her away from the only home she has ever known and towards a reckoning with loss, hope and her own untapped strength. This story of survival is being described as a drama of enthralling power that combines unforgettable characters and a breathtaking natural setting. Read my Go As A River review >>

The London Seance Society is the new novel from Sarah Penner ( The Lost Apothecary ). 1873 Paris. Spiritualist Vaudeline D’Allaire is known worldwide for her talent in conjuring the spirits of murder victims to ascertain the identities of the people who killed them. Lenna Wickes has come to Paris to find answers about her sister’s death, but to do so she must overcome her own logic-driven bias against the occult. When Vaudeline is beckoned to England to solve a high-profile murder, Lenna accompanies her as an understudy. The women team up with the powerful men of London’s exclusive Séance Society to solve the mystery, but begin to suspect that they are not merely out to solve a crime, but perhaps entangled in one themselves. Read my The London Seance Society review >>

Red Queen by Juan Gómez-Jurado — the first title in a multi-million copy selling trilogy in Spain that’s now been translated into English by Nick Caistor with a Prime Video TV-adaptation also coming soon — reportedly stars the most compelling and original detective since  Stieg Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander . 

Antonia Scott is special. She is not a policewoman or a lawyer, yet she has solved dozens of crimes. But it’s been awhile since she left her attic in Madrid. The things she has lost much more important to her than the things awaiting her outside. She also doesn’t receive visitors. That’s why she really, really doesn’t like it when she hears unknown footsteps coming up the stairs. Find out more >>

The Bookbinder of Jericho is the long awaited new book release from Pip Williams, bestselling author of The Dictionary of Lost Words (one of the most popular book reviews on this site). Once again she explores another little-known slice of history seen through women’s eyes. 

In 1914, the war draws the men away to fight, and it is the women who must keep things running. Twin sisters Peggy and Maude work in the bindery at Oxford University Press in Jericho. Peggy is intelligent, ambitious and dreams of going to Oxford University, but she has always been told her job is to bind the books, not read them. But she sees opportunity in the word changing around her… Read my The Bookbinder of Jericho review >>

After a few years hiatus, bestselling historical fiction author Kate Morton ( The Forgotten Garden ) has a new worldwide book release, a multi-generation epic called Homecoming , involving a shocking crime whose effects are felt across continents.

Adelaide Hills, Christmas Eve, 1959. At the end of a scorching hot day, beside a creek in the grounds of a grand and mysterious mansion, a local delivery man makes a terrible discovery. In London sixty years later, Jess is an out-of-work journalist in search of a story. A phone call out of nowhere summons her back to Sydney, where her beloved grandmother, Nora, who raised Jess when her mother could not, has suffered a fall and been raced to the hospital. Find out more >>

Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers is the new standalone cozy-crime mystery from Jesse Sutanto, author of the very popular Dial A for Aunties and Four Aunties and a Wedding . It’s being described as Knives Out  meets  Kim’s Convenience , and for fans of novels by Richard Osman and Janice Hallett .

Sixty-year-old self-proclaimed tea expert Vera Wong enjoys nothing more than sipping a good cup of Wulong and doing some healthy ‘detective’ work on the internet (aka sleuthing on her son). But when Vera wakes up one morning to find a dead man in the middle of her tea shop, it’s going to take more than a strong Longjing to fix things. Read our review of the audiobook >>

More noteworthy new book releases in March & April 2023

• April 2023 is a veritable rom-com feast with the release of Emily Henry’s Happy Place , Abby Jimenez’s Yours Truly and Curtis Sittenfeld’s Romantic Comedy .
• Two fabulous Australian authors are releasing new books that will be must-reads for fellow fans — Toni Jordan’s Prettier If She Smiled More (our review) and Kim Lock’s The Fancies .
• Alison Booth is a reliably great storyteller ( The Philosopher’s Daughters , The Painting ) so her latest historical fiction novel Bellevue is unlikely to disappoint.

US readers – Browse this March & April 2023 New Book Releases List directly on Bookshop.org where profits support local independent bookstores.

New Books – January & February 2023

After the festive season shopping frenzy, January and February are typically quieter months in book publishing. But this year, I am very pleased to share there are several fantastic new novels coming out to kick our reading year off with a bang.

New year, brand new author. Parini Shroff’s debut novel The Bandit Queens is receiving high praise in early reviews.

In a remote village in India, rumours swirl after Geeta’s no-good husband walks out on her. But people think she killed him. That kind of notoriety has its perks, but it does lead to all the other ‘would-be widows’ in the village wanting her help to make their husbands disappear also. Inevitably though, even the best-laid plans go away… Filled with clever criminals, second chances, and wry and witty women. Find out more >>

Hell Bent , the sequel to Leigh Bardugo’s blockbuster adult novel novel Ninth House (Alex Stern #1) is one of the most highly anticipated book releases in January. And yes, after absolutely loving Book 1 ( read my review ) I pre-ordered this one.

Hard to describe this without spoiling for those who have not read Book 1, but let’s just say the Ivy League college of Yale is in for a shake-up. Hell Bent features an audaciously ambitious rescue plan, dubious allies, and faculty members dying off. And of course, more closely guarded secrets, a maze of arcane texts and bizarre artifacts, magic, violence, and all too real monsters. Read my Hell Bent review >>

After adoring her 2020 novel The Museum of Forgotten Memories ( read my review ) Anstey Harris went on my “must-read author” list. It was deeply moving and uplifting fiction.

Her new 2023 book release, When I First Held You , about a woman forced to enter an unmarried mothers’ home and give up her baby in 1960s Glasgow, delivers another emotional gut-punch. Now more than 50 years later, Judith’s Mending Shop restores broken treasures, just as Judith herself has been bound back together by her late, missed partner, Catherine. But her tranquillity is shattered when the baby’s father reappears, wanting to unpick the painful past. Read my When I First Held You review >>

I am not an avid reader of vampire fiction, but the author’s debut novel Here and Now and Then ( my review ) was something special. In that, he injected humanity and heart into time travel, and so he has likely done something similar in this new book.

Being a vampire is far from glamorous…but it can be pretty punk rock. Early reviews indicate with Vampire Weekend , Mike Chen has risen well above traditional vampire tropes. Publishers Weekly calling it ‘a love letter to the power of music’ and a ‘thoughtful, humorous exploration of what constitutes living’. Find out more >>

Meet Maddie Wright. All her life, she’s been told who she is. To her Ghanaian parents, she’s Maame: the one who takes care of the family. Her mum’s stand-in. The primary carer for her father, who suffers from Parkinson’s. The one who keeps the peace – and the secrets. But it’s time for her to speak up, and live her own life… her way.

Jessica George’s reportedly pitch-perfect debut Maame is earning early rave reviews — a blisteringly funny, heartbreaking coming-of-age novel about identity, love, loss, and becoming the woman you want to be. Read my Maame review >>

Firstly, can this new book release be any more beautiful? The AU/UK cover art is stunning also. Thankfully, according to one of my most respected authors Joanna Cannon , the story within is “relevant, empowering and brilliantly written” also.

Emilia Hart’s debut novel Weyward weaves together the stories of three women across five centuries — Altha (1619) is on trial for witchcraft, Violet (1942) is more interested in collecting insects and climbing trees than in becoming a proper young lady, and Kate (2019) flees London for Cumbria and Weyward Cottage, inherited from her great-aunt. There, a secret lurks in the bones of the house, hidden ever since the witch-hunts. Find out more >>

I have always found Jojo Moyes ‘ dramas and mysteries entertaining reads, and her 2023 new release Someone Else’s Shoes sounds like no exception.

Who are you when you are forced to walk in someone else’s shoes? Nisha Cantor lives a wealthy globetrotting lifestyle until her husband announces a divorce and cuts her off. She is determined to hang onto her glamorous life. But in the meantime, she must scramble to cope because she doesn’t even have the shoes she was, until a moment ago, standing in. That’s because Sam Kemp – in the bleakest point of her life – has accidentally taken Nisha’s gym bag. Find out more >>

Kerryn Mayne’s debut novel Lenny Marks Gets Away with Murder has earned her lots of pre-release buzz in Australia but unclear whether overseas rights have been sold yet.

37-year-old Lenny Marks is good at not remembering. Her mother left her when she was a child, and her stepfather’s parting words, were – ‘You did this.’ Now Lenny fills her days teaching at a primary school, and her nights playing Scrabble with her pretend housemate. Recently though, if only to appease her beloved foster-mum, Lenny has set herself the goal of ‘getting a life’. Then, out of the blue, a letter arrives from the Adult Parole Board. And when her desperate attempts to ignore it fail, Lenny starts to unravel. Worse, she starts to remember. Find out more >>

More noteworthy new book releases in January & February 2023

• Benjamin Stevenson’s 2022 breakout bestseller (Australia & UK) Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone finally gets its US and Canadian release.
• Stuart MacBride is releasing a standalone novel, The Dead of Winter , which sounds gripping.
• Bestselling historical fiction author Marie Benedict tackles The Mitford Affair in her new novel.

US readers – Browse this January & February 2023 New Book Releases List directly on Bookshop.org where profits support local independent bookstores.

How many of these new book releases will you be adding to your reading pile?

I will be routinely updating this list. Pin it for later and check back in when more new release books are added as we move through 2023.

Related Book Lists:

• Best Books of 2022: My top-rated fiction
• New Books Released 2022: Best new fiction each month
• My Best Books of 2021 list
• New Books Released in 2021: Top picks of the new fiction
• Books of 2020: My favourite reads of the year

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Books We Love

Here are the nonfiction books npr staffers have loved so far this year.

June 17, 2024 • We asked around the newsroom to find favorite nonfiction from the first half of 2024. We've got biography and memoir, health and science, history, sports and much more.

NPR staffers pick their favorite fiction reads of 2024

June 17, 2024 • At work: hardworking news journalists. At home: omnivorous fiction readers. We asked our colleagues what they've enjoyed most this year and here are the titles they shared.

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'Horror Movie' questions the motivation behind evil acts

June 12, 2024 • Paul Tremblay's latest tale is dark, surprisingly violent, and incredibly multilayered — a superb addition to his already impressive oeuvre showing he can deliver for fans and also push the envelope.

In the episode "From Virgin to Vixen,” Queenie is in peak fun mode, until her demons begin to catch up with her. Latoya Okuneye/Lionsgate hide caption

Queenie's second life on screen gives her more room to grow

June 11, 2024 • An irresistible new Hulu series follows the quarter-life growing pains of a lonely South Londoner. It's based on a 2019 novel by showrunner Candice Carty-Williams.

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In 'Consent,' an author asks: 'Me too? Did I have the agency to consent?'

June 10, 2024 • Jill Ciment wrote about a relationship she had with a teacher when she was very young – that turned into a marriage – in Half a Life . Now, eight years after his death at 93, she reconsiders their relationship in light of the #MToo movement.

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'Forgotten on Sunday' evokes the heartwarming whimsy of the movie 'Amélie'

June 8, 2024 • Like her other books, French writer Valérie Perrin's third novel to be translated into English, centers on the life-changing magic of friendships across generations.

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In 'Fire Exit,' a father grapples with connection and the meaning of belonging

June 6, 2024 • Morgan Talty's debut novel is a touching narrative about family in which the past and present are constantly on the page as we follow a man's life, while also entertaining what that life could have been.

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'The Last Murder at the End of the World' is a story of survival and memory

May 24, 2024 • Stuart Turton’s bizarre whodunit also works as a science fiction allegory full of mystery that contemplates the end of the world and what it means to be human.

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'Rednecks' chronicles the largest labor uprising in American history

May 23, 2024 • Taylor Brown's Rednecks is a superb historical drama full of violence and larger-than-life characters that chronicles the events of leading to the Battle of Blair Mountain.

What's it like to live in a vacation spot when tourists leave? 'Wait' offers a window

May 22, 2024 • Set during a uniquely stressful summer for one Nantucket family, Gabriella Burnham's second novel highlights the strong bonds between a mom and her daughters.

Prize-winning Bulgarian writer brings 'The Physics of Sorrow' to U.S. readers

May 21, 2024 • Writer Georgi Gospodinov won the 2023 International Booker Prize for his book Time Shelter. The Physics of Sorrow , an earlier novel, now has an English translation by Angela Rodel.

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20 new books hitting shelves this summer that our critics can't wait to read

May 21, 2024 • We asked our book critics what titles they are most looking forward to this summer. Their picks range from memoirs to sci-fi and fantasy to translations, love stories and everything in between.

'Whale Fall' centers the push-and-pull between dreams and responsibilities

May 16, 2024 • Elizabeth O'Connor's spare and bracing debut novel provides a stark reckoning with what it means to be seen from the outside, both as a person and as a people.

Two new novels investigate what makes magic, what is real and imagined

May 15, 2024 • Both of these novels, Pages of Mourning and The Cemetery of Untold Stories, from an emerging writer and a long-celebrated one, respectively, walk an open road of remembering love, grief, and fate.

What are 'the kids' thinking these days? Honor Levy aims to tell in 'My First Book'

May 14, 2024 • Social media discourse and the inevitable backlash aside, the 26-year-old writer's first book is an amusing, if uneven, take on growing up white, privileged, and Gen Z.

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Claire Messud's sweeping novel borrows from her own 'Strange Eventful History'

May 13, 2024 • Messud draws from her grandfather's handwritten memoir as she tells a cosmopolitan, multigenerational story about a family forced to move from Algeria to Europe to South and North America.

My Octopus Teacher's Craig Foster dives into the ocean again in 'Amphibious Soul'

May 13, 2024 • Nature's healing power is an immensely personal focus for Foster. He made his film after being burned out from long, grinding hours at work. After the release of the film, he suffered from insomnia.

'Women and Children First' is a tale about how actions and choices affect others

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A 19th-century bookbinder struggles with race and identity in 'The Library Thief'

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'Long Island' renders bare the universality of longing

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'Real Americans' asks: What could we change about our lives?

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As National Poetry Month comes to a close, 2 new retrospectives to savor

April 29, 2024 • April always brings some of the years' biggest poetry collections. So as it wraps up, we wanted to bring you two favorites — retrospective collections from Marie Howe and Jean Valentine.

Swedish Book Review

Some of the Swedish and Finland-Swedish books published in English translation in 2023

compiled by Alice E. Olsson

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New Books 2023

Published on 30 March 2022

Updated: 30 August 2023

Authored by Anonymous

You Will Never Be Found

by Tove Alsterdal, translated by Alice Menzies

Faber & Faber, February 2023

Harper Collins (US), January 2023

A man is locked inside an abandoned house – but he’s not the only one. This atmospheric, edge-of-your-seat rural crime starring local detective Eira Sjödin will keep you guessing till the end.

Fire From the Sky

by Moa Backe Åstot, translated by Eva Apelqvist

LevineQuerido, September 2023

Ánte’s life has been defined by Sámi traditions, and he loves working with the reindeer. But when his feelings for his best friend Erik change, it feels impossible to combine reindeer husbandry with the life that he wants.

Sixty-Four Minutes with Rebecka (bilingual English/French edition)

by Ingmar Bergman, translated by Deborah Bragan-Turner (English) & Jean-Baptiste Bardin (French)

Editions Belloni in collaboration with Cinematograph, March 2023

Bergman’s view of the political turmoil and sexual liberation of the late 1960s. A missing link in Bergman’s oeuvre, this script was written in 1969 as part of an omnibus film collaboration with Kurosawa and Fellini that was never made.

The Man Who Organized Nature

by Gunnar Broberg, translated by Anna Paterson

Princeton University Press, September 2023 (UK) and July 2023 (US)

A new biography of Carl Linnaeus, Sweden’s perhaps most famous man of science, based on extensive research into primary sources and offering a vivid, engaging portrait of Linnaeus’s life and work.

More Numbers Every Day

by Micael Dahlen & Helge Thorbjørnsen, translated by Paul Norlen

Hachette, March 2023

An entertaining and informative look at how numbers and data of all kinds increasingly guide and control our lives, and what we can do about it.

The Scaler of Peaks

by Karin Erlandsson, translated by Annie Prime

Dedalus Books, March 2023

Feminist fantasy adventure novel for young adults. Third in The Song of the Eye Stone series.

Dedalus Books, 2023

Feminist fantasy adventure novel for young adults. Fourth in The Song of the Eye Stone series.

Questions I Am Asked About the Holocaust: Young Readers’ Edition

by Hédi Fried, translated by Alice E. Olsson

Scribe, April 2023

A young readers’ edition of the bestselling book from Auschwitz survivor Hédi Fried that answers lasting questions about the Holocaust.

The Details

by Ia Genberg, translated by Kira Josefsson

Wildfire, August 2023

HarperVia (US), August 2023

August Prize-winner The Details is a novel of four portraits and a  thousand details, about beat-up softcovers, psychedelic dancing, and paralyzing  anxiety. What’s the perfect Y2K dress? Can a loved one really disappear? And  who is that in the portrait – the person depicted, or she who holds the brush?

by Carin Gerhardsen, translated by Ian Giles

Head of Zeus, January 2023

In the snow-covered silence of Swedish midwinter, a terrible accident and a deadly secret draws several strangers together...

The Attention Fix

by Dr Anders Hansen, translated by Alice E. Olsson

Vermilion Books, August 2023

In The Attention Fix , Hansen shares an informative guide to what unrestricted social media use is actually doing to our brains, and the practical steps we can take to break the addiction cycle.

The Happiness Cure

by Dr Anders Hansen, translated by Alex Fleming

Vermilion Books, February 2023

Blending neuroscientific research with stories of ordinary individuals, leading psychiatrist and viral TedX speaker Dr Anders Hansen explores how an evolutionary take on life can help us to re-set our perspective on happiness to find longer-term meaning and lasting contentment.

Billie and Bean at the Beach

by Julia Hansson, translated by B.J. Woodstein

Orca, February 2023

Billie isn't sure whether she dares to swim at the beach, but with some help from her dog Bean, she learns there is peace and beauty in the water.

by Lars Kepler, translated by Alice Menzies

Zaffre, May 2023

Knopf (US), July 2023

A killer is spinning a sinister web and the police are caught dead center.

Rhubarb Lemonade

by Oskar Kroon, translated by Annie Prime

Hot Key Books, June 2023

Poignant coming-of-age drama about a young girl dealing with young love and her parents’ divorce.

Even if Everything Ends

by Jens Liljestrand, translated by Alice Menzies

Weidenfeld & Nicolson, June 2023

Gallery/Scout Press (US), May 2023

Life goes on in the face of a climate crisis in this astonishing and unforgettable debut novel that follows four characters as they struggle to survive in a burning world.

Most Beloved Sister & Mirabelle

by Astrid Lindgren, translated by Linda Schenck

Novellix, April 2023

A new translation of two early short stories by Sweden’s classic children’s author of the late 1900s, Astrid Lindgren.

by Eva Lindström, translated by Annie Prime

Astra Young Readers (US), August 2023

Charming picture book by classic children’s author.

by Camilla Läckberg & Henrik Fexeus, translated by Ian Giles

Harper Collins, May 2023

A young child is snatched in broad daylight outside his nursery. Nobody in charge sees a thing, but the other children say a woman is the culprit…

We Are Lions!

by Jens Mattsson & Jenny Lucander, translated by B.J. Woodstein

Groundwood Books, March 2023

One sibling gets seriously ill, leaving his brother alone and worried in this moving picture book.

The Highly Sensitive Person and Intuition

by Helen Olausson, translated by B.J. Woodstein

Vulkan, October 2022

In this self-help book, people who are highly sensitive are encouraged to use their sensitivity in ways that bring them more energy and happiness.

Sexuality in the Swedish Police

by Jens Rennstam, translated by B.J. Woodstein

Routledge, January 2023

This academic book is a detailed study of the processes of inclusion and exclusion as they play out in the Swedish police force.

The Night Raven

by Johan Rundberg, translated by Annie Prime

Amazon Crossing Kids, August 2023

Bestselling YA crime thriller set in brutal 19th century Stockholm. First book in The Moonwind Mysteries.

The Queen of Thieves

Amazon Crossing Kids, October 2023

Bestselling YA crime thriller set in brutal 19th century Stockholm. Second book in The Moonwind Mysteries.

Rest in Peace

by Sofie Sarenbrant, translated by Paul Norlen

BookBeat, April 2023

The guests at a luxury spa in Sweden start dying mysteriously, prompting an investigation by Inspector Emma Sköld.

The Girl in the Eagle’s Talons

by Karin Smirnoff, translated by Sarah Death

MacLehose Press, August 2023

The Norrbotten region of Sweden is a magnet to sinister incomers as its rich natural resources start to generate vast flows of money. Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist, each brought to the area by family matters, find themselves at the eye of the storm as people dear to them become targets.

by Erik Svetoft, translated by Melissa Bowers

Fantagraphics Books, February 2023

This nightmarish debut, a biting critique of consumer society and the “wellness” industry, recalls the films of David Lynch and Lars Von Trier and the horror manga of Junji Ito.

The Autists: Women on the Spectrum

by Clara Törnvall, translated by Alice E. Olsson

Scribe, June 2023

An incisive and deeply candid account that explores autistic women in culture, myth, and society through the prism of the author’s own diagnosis.

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The Bikeriders

After a chance encounter, headstrong Kathy is drawn to Benny, member of Midwestern motorcycle club the Vandals. As the club transforms into a dangerous underworld of violence, Benny must cho... Read all After a chance encounter, headstrong Kathy is drawn to Benny, member of Midwestern motorcycle club the Vandals. As the club transforms into a dangerous underworld of violence, Benny must choose between Kathy and his loyalty to the club. After a chance encounter, headstrong Kathy is drawn to Benny, member of Midwestern motorcycle club the Vandals. As the club transforms into a dangerous underworld of violence, Benny must choose between Kathy and his loyalty to the club.

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Johnny : [from trailer] I've been thinking, I can run this club forever. I've built this from nothing. This is our family. You and me kid.

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The state of AI in early 2024: Gen AI adoption spikes and starts to generate value

If 2023 was the year the world discovered generative AI (gen AI) , 2024 is the year organizations truly began using—and deriving business value from—this new technology. In the latest McKinsey Global Survey  on AI, 65 percent of respondents report that their organizations are regularly using gen AI, nearly double the percentage from our previous survey just ten months ago. Respondents’ expectations for gen AI’s impact remain as high as they were last year , with three-quarters predicting that gen AI will lead to significant or disruptive change in their industries in the years ahead.

About the authors

This article is a collaborative effort by Alex Singla , Alexander Sukharevsky , Lareina Yee , and Michael Chui , with Bryce Hall , representing views from QuantumBlack, AI by McKinsey, and McKinsey Digital.

Organizations are already seeing material benefits from gen AI use, reporting both cost decreases and revenue jumps in the business units deploying the technology. The survey also provides insights into the kinds of risks presented by gen AI—most notably, inaccuracy—as well as the emerging practices of top performers to mitigate those challenges and capture value.

AI adoption surges

Interest in generative AI has also brightened the spotlight on a broader set of AI capabilities. For the past six years, AI adoption by respondents’ organizations has hovered at about 50 percent. This year, the survey finds that adoption has jumped to 72 percent (Exhibit 1). And the interest is truly global in scope. Our 2023 survey found that AI adoption did not reach 66 percent in any region; however, this year more than two-thirds of respondents in nearly every region say their organizations are using AI. 1 Organizations based in Central and South America are the exception, with 58 percent of respondents working for organizations based in Central and South America reporting AI adoption. Looking by industry, the biggest increase in adoption can be found in professional services. 2 Includes respondents working for organizations focused on human resources, legal services, management consulting, market research, R&D, tax preparation, and training.

Also, responses suggest that companies are now using AI in more parts of the business. Half of respondents say their organizations have adopted AI in two or more business functions, up from less than a third of respondents in 2023 (Exhibit 2).

Gen AI adoption is most common in the functions where it can create the most value

Most respondents now report that their organizations—and they as individuals—are using gen AI. Sixty-five percent of respondents say their organizations are regularly using gen AI in at least one business function, up from one-third last year. The average organization using gen AI is doing so in two functions, most often in marketing and sales and in product and service development—two functions in which previous research  determined that gen AI adoption could generate the most value 3 “ The economic potential of generative AI: The next productivity frontier ,” McKinsey, June 14, 2023. —as well as in IT (Exhibit 3). The biggest increase from 2023 is found in marketing and sales, where reported adoption has more than doubled. Yet across functions, only two use cases, both within marketing and sales, are reported by 15 percent or more of respondents.

Gen AI also is weaving its way into respondents’ personal lives. Compared with 2023, respondents are much more likely to be using gen AI at work and even more likely to be using gen AI both at work and in their personal lives (Exhibit 4). The survey finds upticks in gen AI use across all regions, with the largest increases in Asia–Pacific and Greater China. Respondents at the highest seniority levels, meanwhile, show larger jumps in the use of gen Al tools for work and outside of work compared with their midlevel-management peers. Looking at specific industries, respondents working in energy and materials and in professional services report the largest increase in gen AI use.

Investments in gen AI and analytical AI are beginning to create value

The latest survey also shows how different industries are budgeting for gen AI. Responses suggest that, in many industries, organizations are about equally as likely to be investing more than 5 percent of their digital budgets in gen AI as they are in nongenerative, analytical-AI solutions (Exhibit 5). Yet in most industries, larger shares of respondents report that their organizations spend more than 20 percent on analytical AI than on gen AI. Looking ahead, most respondents—67 percent—expect their organizations to invest more in AI over the next three years.

Where are those investments paying off? For the first time, our latest survey explored the value created by gen AI use by business function. The function in which the largest share of respondents report seeing cost decreases is human resources. Respondents most commonly report meaningful revenue increases (of more than 5 percent) in supply chain and inventory management (Exhibit 6). For analytical AI, respondents most often report seeing cost benefits in service operations—in line with what we found last year —as well as meaningful revenue increases from AI use in marketing and sales.

Inaccuracy: The most recognized and experienced risk of gen AI use

As businesses begin to see the benefits of gen AI, they’re also recognizing the diverse risks associated with the technology. These can range from data management risks such as data privacy, bias, or intellectual property (IP) infringement to model management risks, which tend to focus on inaccurate output or lack of explainability. A third big risk category is security and incorrect use.

Respondents to the latest survey are more likely than they were last year to say their organizations consider inaccuracy and IP infringement to be relevant to their use of gen AI, and about half continue to view cybersecurity as a risk (Exhibit 7).

Conversely, respondents are less likely than they were last year to say their organizations consider workforce and labor displacement to be relevant risks and are not increasing efforts to mitigate them.

In fact, inaccuracy— which can affect use cases across the gen AI value chain , ranging from customer journeys and summarization to coding and creative content—is the only risk that respondents are significantly more likely than last year to say their organizations are actively working to mitigate.

Some organizations have already experienced negative consequences from the use of gen AI, with 44 percent of respondents saying their organizations have experienced at least one consequence (Exhibit 8). Respondents most often report inaccuracy as a risk that has affected their organizations, followed by cybersecurity and explainability.

Our previous research has found that there are several elements of governance that can help in scaling gen AI use responsibly, yet few respondents report having these risk-related practices in place. 4 “ Implementing generative AI with speed and safety ,” McKinsey Quarterly , March 13, 2024. For example, just 18 percent say their organizations have an enterprise-wide council or board with the authority to make decisions involving responsible AI governance, and only one-third say gen AI risk awareness and risk mitigation controls are required skill sets for technical talent.

Bringing gen AI capabilities to bear

The latest survey also sought to understand how, and how quickly, organizations are deploying these new gen AI tools. We have found three archetypes for implementing gen AI solutions : takers use off-the-shelf, publicly available solutions; shapers customize those tools with proprietary data and systems; and makers develop their own foundation models from scratch. 5 “ Technology’s generational moment with generative AI: A CIO and CTO guide ,” McKinsey, July 11, 2023. Across most industries, the survey results suggest that organizations are finding off-the-shelf offerings applicable to their business needs—though many are pursuing opportunities to customize models or even develop their own (Exhibit 9). About half of reported gen AI uses within respondents’ business functions are utilizing off-the-shelf, publicly available models or tools, with little or no customization. Respondents in energy and materials, technology, and media and telecommunications are more likely to report significant customization or tuning of publicly available models or developing their own proprietary models to address specific business needs.

Respondents most often report that their organizations required one to four months from the start of a project to put gen AI into production, though the time it takes varies by business function (Exhibit 10). It also depends upon the approach for acquiring those capabilities. Not surprisingly, reported uses of highly customized or proprietary models are 1.5 times more likely than off-the-shelf, publicly available models to take five months or more to implement.

Gen AI high performers are excelling despite facing challenges

Gen AI is a new technology, and organizations are still early in the journey of pursuing its opportunities and scaling it across functions. So it’s little surprise that only a small subset of respondents (46 out of 876) report that a meaningful share of their organizations’ EBIT can be attributed to their deployment of gen AI. Still, these gen AI leaders are worth examining closely. These, after all, are the early movers, who already attribute more than 10 percent of their organizations’ EBIT to their use of gen AI. Forty-two percent of these high performers say more than 20 percent of their EBIT is attributable to their use of nongenerative, analytical AI, and they span industries and regions—though most are at organizations with less than $1 billion in annual revenue. The AI-related practices at these organizations can offer guidance to those looking to create value from gen AI adoption at their own organizations.

To start, gen AI high performers are using gen AI in more business functions—an average of three functions, while others average two. They, like other organizations, are most likely to use gen AI in marketing and sales and product or service development, but they’re much more likely than others to use gen AI solutions in risk, legal, and compliance; in strategy and corporate finance; and in supply chain and inventory management. They’re more than three times as likely as others to be using gen AI in activities ranging from processing of accounting documents and risk assessment to R&D testing and pricing and promotions. While, overall, about half of reported gen AI applications within business functions are utilizing publicly available models or tools, gen AI high performers are less likely to use those off-the-shelf options than to either implement significantly customized versions of those tools or to develop their own proprietary foundation models.

What else are these high performers doing differently? For one thing, they are paying more attention to gen-AI-related risks. Perhaps because they are further along on their journeys, they are more likely than others to say their organizations have experienced every negative consequence from gen AI we asked about, from cybersecurity and personal privacy to explainability and IP infringement. Given that, they are more likely than others to report that their organizations consider those risks, as well as regulatory compliance, environmental impacts, and political stability, to be relevant to their gen AI use, and they say they take steps to mitigate more risks than others do.

Gen AI high performers are also much more likely to say their organizations follow a set of risk-related best practices (Exhibit 11). For example, they are nearly twice as likely as others to involve the legal function and embed risk reviews early on in the development of gen AI solutions—that is, to “ shift left .” They’re also much more likely than others to employ a wide range of other best practices, from strategy-related practices to those related to scaling.

In addition to experiencing the risks of gen AI adoption, high performers have encountered other challenges that can serve as warnings to others (Exhibit 12). Seventy percent say they have experienced difficulties with data, including defining processes for data governance, developing the ability to quickly integrate data into AI models, and an insufficient amount of training data, highlighting the essential role that data play in capturing value. High performers are also more likely than others to report experiencing challenges with their operating models, such as implementing agile ways of working and effective sprint performance management.

About the research

The online survey was in the field from February 22 to March 5, 2024, and garnered responses from 1,363 participants representing the full range of regions, industries, company sizes, functional specialties, and tenures. Of those respondents, 981 said their organizations had adopted AI in at least one business function, and 878 said their organizations were regularly using gen AI in at least one function. To adjust for differences in response rates, the data are weighted by the contribution of each respondent’s nation to global GDP.

Alex Singla and Alexander Sukharevsky  are global coleaders of QuantumBlack, AI by McKinsey, and senior partners in McKinsey’s Chicago and London offices, respectively; Lareina Yee  is a senior partner in the Bay Area office, where Michael Chui , a McKinsey Global Institute partner, is a partner; and Bryce Hall  is an associate partner in the Washington, DC, office.

They wish to thank Kaitlin Noe, Larry Kanter, Mallika Jhamb, and Shinjini Srivastava for their contributions to this work.

This article was edited by Heather Hanselman, a senior editor in McKinsey’s Atlanta office.

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