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 - 20 of 49  There are a total of 99 valid entries on the list.
Book cover for "After Sappho"
Star rating for After Sappho
Average Rating:
1 stars
Description:
"'The first thing we did was change our names. We were going to be Sappho,' so begins this intrepid...novel, centuries after the Greek poet penned her lyric verse. Ignited by the same muse, a myriad of women break from their small, predetermined lives for seemingly disparate paths: in 1892, Rina Faccio trades her needlepoint for a pen; in 1902, Romaine Brooks sails for Capri with nothing but her clotted paintbrushes; and in 1923, Virginia Woolf writes:...
Book cover for "All the sinners bleed"
Star rating for All the sinners bleed
Author:
Average Rating:
3.7 stars
Description:
"After years of working as an FBI agent, Titus Crown returns home to Charon County, land of moonshine and cornbread, fist fights and honeysuckle. Seeing his hometown struggling with a bigoted police force inspires him to run for sheriff. He wins, and becomes the first Black sheriff in the history of the county. Then a year to the day after his election, a young Black man is fatally shot by Titus's deputies. Titus pledges to follow the truth wherever...
Book cover for "The bee sting"
Star rating for The bee sting
Average Rating:
3.4 stars
Description:
"The Barnes family is in trouble. Dickie's once-lucrative car business is going under--but rather than face the music, he's spending his days in the woods, building an apocalypse-proof bunker with a renegade handyman. His wife Imelda is selling off her jewelry on eBay, while their teenage daughter Cass, formerly top of her class, seems determined to binge-drink her way through her final exams. And twelve-year-old PJ is putting the final touches to...
Book cover for "Biography of X"
Star rating for Biography of X
Description:
"A roaring epic chronicling the life, times, and secrets of a notorious artist"--
Book cover for "Birnam Wood"
Star rating for Birnam Wood
Average Rating:
3.3 stars
Description:
A landslide has closed the Korowai Pass on New Zealand’s South Island, cutting off the town of Thorndike and leaving a sizable farm abandoned. The disaster presents an opportunity for Birnam Wood, an undeclared, unregulated, sometimes-criminal, sometimes-philanthropic guerrilla gardening collective that plants crops wherever no one will notice. For years, the group has struggled to break even. To occupy the farm at Thorndike would mean a shot at...
Book cover for "Blackouts"
Star rating for Blackouts
Average Rating:
2 stars
Description:
"Out in the desert in a place called the Palace, a young man tends to a dying soul, someone he once knew briefly but who has haunted the edges of his life: Juan Gay. Playful raconteur, child lost and found and lost, guardian of the institutionalized, Juan has a project to pass along, one built around a true artifact of a book--Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns--and its devastating history. The book contains accounts collected in the early...
Book cover for "Bright young women"
Star rating for Bright young women
Average Rating:
3.6 stars
Description:
"Masterfully blending elements of psychological suspense and true crime, Jessica Knoll delivers a new and exhilarating thriller in Bright Young Women. The book opens on a Saturday night in 1978, hours before a soon-to-be-infamous murderer descends upon a Florida sorority house with deadly results. The lives of those who survive, including sorority president and key witness, Pamela Schumacher, are forever changed. Across the country, Tina Cannon is...
Book cover for "Chain-gang all-stars"
Star rating for Chain-gang all-stars
Average Rating:
3 stars
Description:
"Loretta Thurwar and Hamara "Hurricane Staxxx" Stacker are the stars of Chain-Gang All-Stars, the cornerstone of CAPE, or Criminal Action Penal Entertainment, a highly-popular, highly-controversial, profit-raising program in America's increasingly dominant private prison industry. It's the return of the gladiators and prisoners are competing for the ultimate prize: their freedom. In CAPE, prisoners travel as Links in Chain-Gangs, competing in death-matches...
Book cover for "The covenant of water"
Star rating for The covenant of water
Average Rating:
4.5 stars
Description:
"Spanning the years 1900 to 1977, The Covenant of Water is set in Kerala, on South India's Malabar Coast, and follows three generations of a family that suffers a peculiar affliction: in every generation, at least one person dies by drowning--and in Kerala, water is everywhere. At the turn of the century, a twelve-year-old girl from Kerala's long-existing Christian community, grieving the death of her father, is sent by boat to her wedding, where...
Book cover for "Crook manifesto"
Star rating for Crook manifesto
Description:
It's 1971. Trash piles up on the streets, crime is at an all-time high, the city is careening towards bankruptcy, and a shooting war has broken out between the NYPD and the Black Liberation Army. Amidst this collective nervous breakdown furniture store owner and ex-fence, Ray Carney tries to keep his head down and his business thriving. His days moving stolen goods around the city are over. It's strictly the straight-and-narrow for him until he needs...
Book cover for "The deluge"
Star rating for The deluge
Description:
In the early 21st century, the world is convulsing, its governments mired in gridlock while a patient but unrelenting ecological crisis looms. America is in upheaval, battered by violent weather and extreme politics. In California in 2013, Tony Pietrus, a scientist studying deposits of undersea methane, receives a death threat. His fate will become bound to a stunning cast of characters—a broken drug addict, a star advertising strategist, a neurodivergent...
Book cover for "Eastbound"
Star rating for Eastbound
Description:
"In this swirling, gripping tale, a young Russian conscript and a French woman come together in a crowded compartment of the Trans-Siberian railroad, each of them fleeing to the east for their own reasons"--
Book cover for "Emily Wilde's encyclopaedia of faeries"
Star rating for Emily Wilde's encyclopaedia of faeries
Series:
Emily Wilde volume 1.
Average Rating:
4.3 stars
Description:
"In the early 1900s, a curmudgeonly professor journeys to a small town to study faerie folklore, where she discovers dark fae magic, friendship, and love. Cambridge professor Emily Wilde is good at many things: She is the foremost expert on dryadology, the study of faeries. She is a genius scholar and a meticulous researcher who is writing the world's first encylopedia of faerie lore. But Emily Wilde is not good at people. She could never make small...
Book cover for "Enter ghost"
Star rating for Enter ghost
Description:
A stage actress returns to Palestine to visit her older sister and becomes unwittingly involved with a local group who wants to put on a production of Hamlet in the West Bank using all Palestinian actors.
Book cover for "Forbidden notebook"
Star rating for Forbidden notebook
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
In this modern translation and portrayal of domestic life, Forbidden Notebook centers on the inner life of a dissatisfied housewife, Valeria Cossati, living in postwar Rome.--
Book cover for "The fraud"
Star rating for The fraud
Author:
Average Rating:
2.2 stars
Description:
"It is 1873. Mrs. Eliza Touchet is the Scottish housekeeper–and cousin by marriage–of a once-famous novelist, now in decline, William Ainsworth, with whom she has lived for thirty years. Mrs. Touchet is a woman of many interests: literature, justice, abolitionism, class, her cousin, his wives, this life and the next. But she is also sceptical. She suspects her cousin of having no talent; his successful friend, Mr. Charles Dickens, of being a bully...
Book cover for "From from"
Star rating for From from
Author:
Description:
“Where are you from . . . ? No―where are you from from?” It’s a question every Asian American gets asked as part of an incessant chorus saying you’ll never belong here, you’re a perpetual foreigner, you’ll always be seen as an alien, an object, or a threat. Monica Youn’s From From brilliantly evokes the conflicted consciousness of deracination. If you have no core of 'authenticity,' no experience of your so-called homeland, how do...
Book cover for "The Heaven & Earth grocery store"
Star rating for The Heaven & Earth grocery store
Average Rating:
3.9 stars
Description:
"In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows"--
Book cover for "Hello beautiful"
Star rating for Hello beautiful
Average Rating:
4.2 stars
Description:
"William Waters grew up in a house silenced by tragedy, where his parents could hardly bear to look at him, much less love him. So it's a relief when his skill on the basketball court earns him a scholarship to college, far away from his childhood home. He soon meets Julia Padavano, a spirited and ambitious young woman who surprises William with her appreciation of his quiet steadiness. With Julia comes her family; she is inseparable from her three...
Book cover for "A history of burning"
Star rating for A history of burning
Author:
Description:
"At the turn of the twentieth century, Pirbhai, a teenage boy looking for work, is taken from his village in India to labor on the East African Railway for the British. One day Pirbhai commits an act to ensure his survival that will haunt him forever and reverberate across his family's future for years to come. Pirbhai's children are born and raised under the jacaranda trees and searing sun of Kampala during the waning days of British colonial rule....