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 - 15 of 15  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 "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 "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 "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 "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 "Lone women"
Star rating for Lone women
Average Rating:
2.6 stars
Description:
"Adelaide Henry carries an enormous steamer trunk with her wherever she goes. It's locked at all times. Because when the trunk is opened, people around her start to disappear... The year is 1915, and Adelaide is in trouble. Her secret sin killed her parents, and forced her to flee her hometown of Redondo, California, in a hellfire rush, ready to make her way to Montana as a homesteader. Dragging the trunk with her at every stop, she will be one of...
Book cover for "North woods"
Star rating for North woods
Average Rating:
3.6 stars
Description:
"When a pair of young lovers abscond from a Puritan colony, little do they know that their humble cabin in the woods will become the home of an extraordinary succession of human and nonhuman characters alike. An English soldier, destined for glory, abandons the battlefields of the New World to devote himself to apples. A pair of spinster twins navigate war and famine, envy and desire. A crime reporter unearths a mass grave--only to discover that the...
Book cover for "Not even the dead"
Star rating for Not even the dead
Average Rating:
2 stars
Description:
"The conquest of Mexico is over, and Juan de T̜oanes is just one of the many inglorious soldiers eking a small existence on the land he helped conquer. When he receives one last mission, to hunt down a renegade Indian who calls himself the Padre and preaches a dangerous heresy, Juan realizes it may be his last chance to create the future he's always dreamed of. But as he moves deep into the unexplored northern territory, hot on the Padre's trail,...
Book cover for "The reformatory"
Star rating for The reformatory
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
"A gripping, page-turning novel set in Jim Crow Florida that follows Robert Stephens Jr. as he's sent to a segregated reform school that is a chamber of terrors where he sees the horrors of racism and injustice, for the living, and the dead."--Publisher's description.
Book cover for "This other Eden"
Star rating for This other Eden
Average Rating:
5 stars
Description:
"formerly enslaved Benjamin Honey and his Irish wife, Patience, discover an island where they can make a life together. Over a century later, the Honeys' descendants and a diverse group of neighbors are desperately poor, isolated, and often hungry, but nevertheless protected from the hostility awaiting them on the mainland. During the tumultuous summer of 1912, Matthew Diamond, a retired, idealistic but prejudiced schoolteacher-turned-missionary,...
Book cover for "The unsettled"
Star rating for The unsettled
Description:
"From the moment Ava Carson and her ten-year-old son, Toussaint, arrive at the Glenn Avenue Family Shelter in Philadelphia, Ava is already plotting a way out. She is repulsed by the shelter's squalid conditions: the filthy bathrooms, the barely edible food, and the shifty night security guard. She is determined to rescue her son from the perils and indignities of that place, and to save herself from the complicated past that led them there."--cover....
Book cover for "Victory city"
Star rating for Victory city
Average Rating:
3.5 stars
Description:
"In the wake of an insignificant battle between two long-forgotten kingdoms in fourteenth-century southern India, a nine-year-old girl has a divine encounter that will change the course of history. After witnessing the death of her mother, the grief-stricken Pampa Kampana becomes a vessel for the goddess Parvati, who begins to speak out of the girl's mouth. Granting her powers beyond Pampa Kampana's comprehension, the goddess tells her that she will...
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....