The 50 best books of the year 2023

 

Liberation Day by George Saunders

Known as a modern master of the form, this is George Saunders' first short story collection since 2013's Tenth of December, which was a National Book Award finalist. Liberation Day's nine stories consider human connection, power, enslavement and oppression with Saunders' trademark deadpan humour and compassion. "These stories are not only perfectly pitched; they come with enough comedy to have you grinning and enough empathy to suddenly stop you in your tracks," writes The Guardian, while according to the Sydney Morning Herald, "Saunders is masterful, he illuminates with a fierce flame". (RL)

The Kingdom of Sand by Andrew Holleran

Set in a drought-hit backwater of rural Florida, The Kingdom of Sand tells the story of a nameless narrator's existence of semi-solitude, as the memories of his other, previous life come and go. The Guardian said: "Holleran renders an elegiac and very funny contemplation of not just ageing but an age... A wistful, witty meditation on a gay man's twilight years and the twilight of America." The  novel is "all the more affecting and engaging", Colm Toíbín writes in the New York Times, because, in 1978, Holleran wrote the "quintessential novel of gay abandon", Dancer from the Dance. "Now at almost 80 years of age, he has produced a novel remarkable for its integrity, for its readiness to embrace difficult truths and for its complex way of paying homage to the passing of time." (LB)

Bournville by Jonathan Coe

An avid Europhile and chronicler of modern Britain, Jonathan Coe's latest spans 75 years of British history through the lives of one family living on the outskirts of Birmingham near a famous chocolate factory. The novel's events and characters cross paths with those from Coe's trilogy that began with 2001's The Rotters' Club and ended with the acclaimed Middle England (2018), and, like the latter, Bournville is "a state of the nation novel," writes the Observer, one that explores the personal and the political, and the relationship between Britain and Europe with "prose of enduring beauty". The FT writes that Coe has, "with considerable humour, satire – and at times, acute anger – established himself as the voice of England's political conscience". (RL)

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

Barbara Kingsolver's modern reimagining of David Copperfield is a "powerful reworking" of Charles Dickens's most celebrated and personal novel, writes The Guardian, calling it "the book she was born to write". Set in Kingsolver's home region of Appalachia, it transposes Dickens's critique of the injustices of Victorian Britain to contemporary America, where Copperhead lives in near-destitution amid the US opioid crisis. "This serious subject matter belies the sheer fun that Kingsolver has with her endlessly inventive adaptation," writes the TLS, praising the novel's "sharp social observation and moments of great descriptive beauty." (RL)

Trespasses by Louise Kennedy

In 1970s Belfast, a young Catholic teacher, Cushla, meets an older, married Protestant man in the pub owned by her family, an encounter that changes both of their lives for ever. As an affair between the two progresses, the daily news of the Troubles unfolds, and tensions in the town escalate. Previously the author of short stories, in Trespasses, says the Washington Post, "Kennedy has more room to flesh out her characters and dramatise their predicaments. She does so masterfully, convincing her reader of all that unfolds". Meanwhile, The Spectator says: "This cleverly crafted love story about ordinary lives ravaged by violence tears at your heart without succumbing to sentimentality." (LB)