NYT's 100 Notable Books of 2023

Each year, NYT staff pore over thousands of new books, seeking out the best novels, memoirs, biographies, poetry collections, stories and more. Here are the 2023 standouts, selected by the staff of The New York Times Book Review.

Showing 1 - 6 of 6  There are a total of 99 valid entries on the list.
Book cover for "The great escape"
Star rating for The great escape
Description:
In 2007, Saket Soni received an anonymous phone call from an Indian migrant worker inside a Mississippi labor camp. He and 500 other men were living in squalor in Gulf Coast "man camps," surrounded by barbed wire, watched by armed guards, crammed into cold trailers with putrid portable toilets, forced to eat moldy bread and frozen rice. Worse, lured by the promise of good work and green cards, the men had desperately scraped together up to 20,000...
Book cover for "Holly"
Star rating for Holly
Average Rating:
4.2 stars
Description:
"When Penny Dahl calls the Finders Keepers detective agency hoping for help locating her missing daughter, Holly is reluctant to accept the case. Her own mother has just died, and Holly is supposed to be taking time off. But something in Penny Dahl's desperate voice makes it impossible for Holly to turn her down. Mere blocks from where Bonnie Dahl disappeared live Professors Rodney and Emily Harris. They are the picture of bourgeois respectability:...
Book cover for "Ink blood sister scribe"
Star rating for Ink blood sister scribe
Average Rating:
5 stars
Description:
"Two estranged half-sisters tasked with guarding their family's library of magical books must work together to unravel a deadly secret at the heart of their collection--a tale of familial loyalty and betrayal, and the pursuit of magic and power."--
Book cover for "Lives of the wives"
Star rating for Lives of the wives
Description:
A witty look at the complex and fascinating but tumultuous marriages of five well-known figures in the literary world, including British theater critic Kenneth Tynan, and authors Roald Dahl and Kingsley Amis.
Book cover for "Tom Lake"
Star rating for Tom Lake
Average Rating:
4.4 stars
Description:
In the spring of 2020, Lara’s three daughters return to the family's orchard in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake. As Lara recalls the past, her daughters examine their own lives and relationship with their mother, and are forced to reconsider the world and everything...
Book cover for "We could be so good"
Star rating for We could be so good
Average Rating:
5 stars
Description:
Nick Russo has worked his way from a rough Brooklyn neighborhood to a reporting job at one of the city’s biggest newspapers. But the late 1950s are a hostile time for gay men, and Nick knows that he can’t let anyone into his life. He just never counted on meeting someone as impossible to say no to as Andy. Andy Fleming’s newspaper-tycoon father wants him to take over the family business. Andy, though, has no intention of running the paper....