Reading List · Lisanne Swart
Best Books of 2023
2023 was a year that produced several books I have returned to in my thinking long after finishing them. A Booker Prize winner that read like a nightmare you could not wake from. A satirical novel about race and authorship that was sharp enough to draw blood. A nonfiction book about creativity that I have recommended to more people than almost anything else I read that year. This list is not an attempt to be comprehensive — there were hundreds of good books published in 2023. It is a selection of the eight that, in my reading, most deserved the attention they received — and, in a few cases, more attention than they got.
By Lisanne Swart · 8 books · Fiction · Nonfiction · Memoir · Published 2023
Prophet Song
Prophet Song won the Booker Prize in November 2023 and is the most formally relentless novel on this list. Ireland is tipping into totalitarianism — a new secret police force has been established, trade unionists are disappearing, and Eilish Stack stands at the centre of the novel watching her country unmake itself. The entire book is written as a continuous block of text without paragraph breaks, in long, cascading sentences that create the experience of a mind unable to stop moving forward even as the world contracts around it. Comparisons to Cormac McCarthy are accurate and insufficient. This is its own thing: a novel about the refugee crisis told from the inside of a country that is becoming the thing people flee from.
The chair of the Booker Prize judges called it a “triumph of emotional storytelling, bracing and brave.” What I would add is that it is the most effective argument I have read for why political disasters happen the way they do — not in a single dramatic moment, but in a series of small adjustments, each of which seems survivable on its own. Eilish keeps making the reasonable choice. The novel shows, with terrible precision, where reasonable choices lead when the ground keeps shifting. Not an easy read. An essential one.
Yellowface
When Chinese-American novelist Athena Liu dies in a freak accident, June Hayward — a white writer with one failed novel to her name — steals the manuscript Athena was working on, publishes it under a vaguely ethnic pseudonym, and watches it become a bestseller. What follows is a satirical novel about race, authorship, the publishing industry, and the way systems designed to look like meritocracies produce the same hierarchies they claim to dismantle. Kuang won the Goodreads Choice Award for Fiction in 2023. The novel is written in June’s first-person voice — unreliable, self-justifying, compulsively readable — and it is the most uncomfortable reading experience of the year precisely because June’s rationalizations are so recognisable.
Yellowface belongs on this list for the same reason Lolita belongs on a list about love: it makes you hold two things simultaneously. You understand exactly how June thinks. You recognise the logic of each of her decisions. And you see, clearly, what she does not: that the logic itself is the problem. Kuang uses the conventions of the thriller — compulsive pacing, rising stakes, a narrator you cannot quite trust — to do something genuinely literary: to make legible the experience of a system that produces harm without requiring anyone to intend it.
→ More on fiction that uses obsession to reveal something true: my books about obsession list
The Bee Sting
The Barnes family in rural Ireland: Dickie, who runs a failing car dealership and has been keeping secrets for years; Imelda, who married Dickie after her first love died in a car accident and has never fully arrived in her own life; their daughter Cass, who has been accepted to university and does not know how to want something that takes her away from home; and their son PJ, who plays video games in his room and watches the family from a distance. The Bee Sting covers a single year in the life of this family, told from each of their perspectives in turn, and the effect is of watching a house you already know is on fire from every window simultaneously. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2023 and widely described as the funniest sad novel of the year.
Paul Murray is doing something that Jonathan Franzen does well and Murray does even better: using a family in crisis as a kind of seismograph for everything that is wrong with a particular moment and place. The Bee Sting is about financial collapse, about the gap between the life a family presents and the one it is actually living, about the specific way that secrets keep until they do not. Every character is seen with complete clarity and complete sympathy. That combination — clarity and sympathy together — is the hardest thing in fiction to achieve.
Hello Beautiful
Hello Beautiful won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2023 — the first Oprah’s Book Club selection to do so. It is a multigenerational family saga set in Chicago, covering four generations of the Padavano family from the early twentieth century to the present, and it is built around the central wound of a man who cannot love his daughter because she reminds him of the loss of his wife. That wound — the refusal of love, and what it costs every generation downstream — is what the novel traces with patience and precision across a hundred years of a family’s life. Napolitano’s prose is clean and emotionally exact, and the structure — each generation getting its own section — allows the reader to understand what the characters cannot: how much of what they are doing to each other is inherited.
Hello Beautiful belongs on this list alongside any reading you do about family secrets and what gets passed down — the silence as much as the pain. It is a Pulitzer winner that deserved its prize: formally accomplished, emotionally serious, and built around the insight that the refusal to love is itself a form of harm that travels. If you have read and loved Pachinko by Min Jin Lee, this is the closest American equivalent.
→ Hello Beautiful connects directly to my books about family secrets list
The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder
In 1741, a British naval vessel called the Wager wrecked on a remote island off the coast of Patagonia. The survivors — starving, freezing, having turned on each other in ways that ended lives — eventually made it back to England by different routes, and each group told a completely different story about what had happened. David Grann — the author of Killers of the Flower Moon — reconstructs the disaster from historical documents, and what emerges is not just a tale of survival but an account of how power, hierarchy, and narrative shape what gets called truth. The Wager was a New York Times number one bestseller and one of Barack Obama’s favourite books of 2023.
If you read Killers of the Flower Moon for the way Grann uses a historical event to open up something much larger about power and injustice, The Wager does the same thing at sea, in the eighteenth century, with stakes that are simultaneously life-and-death and deeply philosophical. Who decides which account is true? Whose story gets believed? The questions are old. The answers are not reassuring. Grann’s prose, as always, moves like a thriller while carrying the weight of something much more serious.
→ Killers of the Flower Moon — David Grann’s earlier book is on my bookshelf
The Creative Act: A Way of Being
Rick Rubin has produced albums for Johnny Cash, the Beastie Boys, Jay-Z, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Adele — a range so wide that the obvious question is what on earth these artists have in common. The Creative Act is his answer: not a how-to book, not a memoir, but a meditation on the nature of creativity itself, written in short chapters that can be read in sequence or opened at random. Rubin argues that creativity is not a talent but an orientation — a way of attending to the world — and that everyone is capable of it. The book sold millions of copies and generated one of the most sustained conversations about creative work of 2023.
I have this on my bookshelf and return to it because it does something unusual for a book about creativity: it does not reduce the subject to productivity tips or morning routines. Rubin is interested in the conditions under which good work becomes possible — and those conditions are mostly internal, mostly about how you pay attention and what you allow yourself to notice. It is a book about art that is also, quietly, a book about how to live. I recommend it to anyone who makes things, which is everyone.
Build the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier
Arthur Brooks is a Harvard professor who has spent decades researching what actually produces lasting wellbeing — not the transient satisfaction of achievements and acquisitions, but the deep, durable happiness that people report in old age. His collaboration with Oprah Winfrey translates that research into something practical: specific habits, orientations, and behaviours that build the kind of life that holds together over time. The central finding, consistent across decades of research, is both obvious and underutilised: the quality of your close relationships is the most reliable predictor of how happy you will be. Everything else is secondary.
I recommend this book regularly because it makes the research-based case — not the sentimental one — for love as the thing a good life is actually made of. Brooks does not argue this emotionally; he argues it empirically, and then he describes what it actually requires, which is more demanding than most people expect. It also appears on my books about love list for exactly that reason: it is the best available argument that love is not just a feeling but a practice, and one that requires sustained, deliberate attention.
→ More on the science and practice of love: my books about love list
Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity
Peter Attia is a physician whose clinical practice focuses on longevity — not just living longer, but extending the period of life in which you are physically and cognitively able to do the things that matter to you. Outlive argues that conventional medicine is optimised for treating disease after it has already arrived, and that the most important interventions happen decades earlier. The book covers exercise, nutrition, sleep, emotional health, and the specific metabolic and cardiovascular risks that most people do not address until it is too late. It was one of the bestselling nonfiction books of 2023 and generated sustained conversation among readers interested in health, science, and how to make better long-term decisions about their bodies.
Outlive is on this list because it is the rare popular science book that actually changes how you act rather than just how you think. Attia is rigorous without being inaccessible, and his central argument — that the goal is not to live longer in decline but to compress morbidity, to stay functional and capable for as long as possible — reframes the entire question of health. The chapter on emotional health, which Attia did not originally plan to include, is the most honest and unexpected section of the book: he applies the same rigorous questioning to his own psychological patterns that he applies to blood panels and VO2 max scores.
Where to begin with the best of 2023
If you want the novel that was the most urgent and most technically ambitious
→ Prophet Song by Paul Lynch. The Booker Prize winner. Told in one unbroken block of prose, about a country unmaking itself. Not comfortable — but essential.
If you want the novel that was the most compulsively readable and the most socially sharp
→ Yellowface by R.F. Kuang. A thriller built around the question of who gets to tell whose story — and why the answer is never as simple as intention.
If you want nonfiction that changes how you actually live, rather than just how you think
→ Outlive by Peter Attia for the science of longevity, or Build the Life You Want by Arthur Brooks and Oprah for the research-backed case that relationships are the only thing that actually matters.
If you want literary fiction about a family carrying damage down through generations
→ Hello Beautiful (Pulitzer winner, multigenerational) or The Bee Sting (Booker shortlist, Irish family in crisis). Both ask what gets inherited and what gets passed down without anyone choosing to.
If you want a book about creativity that is actually worth your time
→ The Creative Act by Rick Rubin. I have it on my shelf. It is a book about making things that is also, quietly, a book about how to pay attention — which is the same thing.
Frequently asked questions about the best books of 2023
What were the best books of 2023?
The most celebrated books of 2023 include Prophet Song by Paul Lynch (Booker Prize winner), Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano (Pulitzer Prize winner), Yellowface by R.F. Kuang (Goodreads Choice Award, Fiction), The Wager by David Grann (bestselling nonfiction), The Creative Act by Rick Rubin, and Build the Life You Want by Arthur Brooks and Oprah Winfrey. The Bee Sting by Paul Murray was widely considered the best Booker shortlist novel that did not win. For a full picture: this list covers the titles that, in my reading, best rewarded the time spent with them.
What won the Booker Prize in 2023?
Prophet Song by Paul Lynch won the Booker Prize in 2023. The chair of judges described it as a “triumph of emotional storytelling, bracing and brave.” It is a dystopian novel set in an Ireland descending into totalitarianism, told in continuous prose without paragraph breaks. The shortlist also included The Bee Sting by Paul Murray, Western Lane by Chetna Maroo, This Other Eden by Paul Harding, If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery, and Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein.
What won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2023?
Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2023 — notably, it was the first Oprah’s Book Club selection to win the prize. It is a multigenerational family saga set in Chicago, covering four generations of the Padavano family, and is built around the inherited damage of a father’s inability to love his daughter. It is one of the finest American novels of the year.
Is The Creative Act by Rick Rubin worth reading?
Yes — and I say this as someone who is usually sceptical of books about creativity. The Creative Act is not a productivity manual or a memoir: it is a meditation on the nature of creative attention, written in short chapters that can be read in sequence or opened at random. Rubin’s argument — that creativity is a way of paying attention rather than a talent — is one of the most useful reframes I know. I have it on my bookshelf and return to it regularly. You can read my full thoughts on The Creative Act there.
How does The Wager compare to Killers of the Flower Moon?
David Grann uses the same method in both books: a historical event, reconstructed from documents, that reveals something much larger about power, narrative, and injustice. Killers of the Flower Moon is about the systematic murder of the Osage Nation in 1920s Oklahoma. The Wager is about an eighteenth-century naval shipwreck and the competing accounts survivors gave of what happened. The Wager is slightly more contained — it is, at its core, a story about who gets believed — and it is arguably more formally elegant. If you loved Killers of the Flower Moon, The Wager is essential.
More from the shelf
From the bookshelf
“The most important things are the hardest things to say.” — Stephen King
More hand-picked recommendations on my personal bookshelf — books from every year that stay with you long after the last page.
