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 21 - 40 of 99  There are a total of 99 valid entries on the list.
Book cover for "Doppelganger"
Star rating for Doppelganger
Average Rating:
3 stars
Description:
"What if you woke up one morning and found you’d acquired another self -- a double who was almost you and yet not you at all? What if that double shared many of your preoccupations but, in a twisted, upside-down way, furthered the very causes you’d devoted your life to fighting against? Not long ago, the celebrated activist and public intellectual Naomi Klein had just such an experience -- she was confronted with a doppelganger whose views she...
Book cover for "Easily slip into another world"
Star rating for Easily slip into another world
Description:
"An autobiography of one of the towering figures of contemporary American music and a powerful meditation on history, race, capitalism and art"--
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 "The exceptions"
Star rating for The exceptions
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
In 1999, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology admitted to discriminating against women on its faculty, forcing institutions across the country to confront a problem they had long ignored: the need for more women at the top levels of science. This is the untold story of how sixteen highly accomplished women on the MIT faculty came together to do the work that triggered the historic admission. centers on the life of Nancy Hopkins, a reluctant feminist...
Book cover for "Fire weather"
Star rating for Fire weather
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
In May 2016, the city of Fort McMurray in Alberta, Canada, burned to the ground, forcing 88,000 people to flee their homes. It was the largest evacuation ever of a city in the face of a forest fire, raising the curtain on a new age of increasingly destructive wildfires. Through the lens of this apocalyptic conflagration -- the wildfire equivalent of Hurricane Katrina -- John Vaillant warns that this was not a unique event, but a shocking preview of...
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 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 "The half known life"
Star rating for The half known life
Author:
Average Rating:
1 stars
Description:
Paradise: that elusive place where the anxieties, struggles, and burdens of life fall away. Most of us dream of it, but each of us has very different ideas about where it is to be found. For some it can be enjoyed only after death; for others, it’s in our midst—or just across the ocean—if only we can find eyes to see it. Traveling from Iran to North Korea, from the Dalai Lama’s Himalayas to the ghostly temples of Japan, Pico Iyer brings together...
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....
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 "A house for Alice"
Star rating for A house for Alice
Description:
"In the early hours of June 14, 2017, the world watches as flames leap up the sides of a residential high-rise in West London, devouring Grenfell Tower and the makeshift lives it houses--those of London's immigrants, its refugees, its working class. At the same time across town, another spark catches. A cigarette left burning in an ashtray. A table strewn with post-it reminders and old newspapers. And one Cornelius Winston Pitt--estranged husband,...
Book cover for "How to say Babylon"
Star rating for How to say Babylon
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
"[This] is Sinclair’s reckoning with the culture that initially nourished but ultimately sought to silence her; it is her reckoning with patriarchy and tradition, and the legacy of colonialism in Jamaica. [It] is both a universal story of a woman finding her own power and a unique glimpse into a rarefied world we may know how to name, Rastafari, but one we know little about." --Publisher.
Book cover for "Humanly possible"
Star rating for Humanly possible
Average Rating:
2 stars
Description:
"Humanism is an expansive tradition of thought that places shared humanity, cultural vibrancy, and moral responsibility at the center of our lives. The humanistic worldview—as clear-eyed and enlightening as it is kaleidoscopic and richly ambiguous—has inspired people for centuries to make their choices by principles of freethinking, intellectual inquiry, fellow feeling, and optimism. In this sweeping new history, Sarah Bakewell, herself a lifelong...
Book cover for "The Iliad"
Star rating for The Iliad
Author:
Average Rating:
3.7 stars
Description:
The greatest literary landmark of classical antiquity masterfully rendered by the most celebrated translator of our time. When Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey appeared in 2017-revealing the ancient poem in a contemporary idiom that "combines intellectual authority with addictive readability" (Edith Hall, The Sunday Telegraph)-critics lauded it as "a revelation" (Susan Chira, The New York Times) and "a cultural landmark" (Charlotte Higgins,...