Best Books of 2023

Prophet Song

Paul Lynch · 2023 · Booker Prize, 2023

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

R.F. Kuang · 2023 · Goodreads Choice Award for Fiction, 2023

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

Paul Murray · 2023 · An Post Irish Book of the Year, 2023

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

Ann Napolitano · 2023

Hello Beautiful was the hundredth selection of Oprah’s Book Club, announced in March 2023. It is a multigenerational family saga set in Chicago, opening with the birth of William Waters in 1960 and following him into the Padavano family he marries into, and it is built around the central wound of a man who cannot love his daughter because of what his own parents withheld from him after his sister died when he was six days old. That wound — the refusal of love, and what it costs every generation downstream — is what the novel traces with patience and precision across decades of a family’s life. Napolitano’s prose is clean and emotionally exact, and the structure — the sisters, William and his daughter each getting their 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 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

David Grann · 2023

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 · 2023

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.

→ Read my full thoughts on The Creative Act on my bookshelf

Build the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier

Arthur C. Brooks & Oprah Winfrey · 2023

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 & Bill Gifford · 2023

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.