The year of 2023 is shaping up to be a lot of fun in the book world—with frothy delights like Jenny Jackson's Pineapple Street, heartfelt family sagas's like Ann Napolitano's Hello Beautiful, and effervescent debuts, like Caroline O'Donoghue The Rachel Incident. ("Hubris!" exclaimed one of our editors when he heard that title's echo of Martin's Amis's *The Rachel Papers—*more like the herald of a literary arrival, we now say!) Worth noting: It's a very good year for works by female authors. We lauded Elenor Catton's Birnam Wood and Allegra Goodman's Sam earlier in the year; we are also eagerly awaiting Zadie Smith's The Fraud, to be published this fall. We hope this list, and many more reading pleasures, continue to surprise and delight. Check back for updates as we read our way through 2023.
The Shards by Brett Easton Ellis (January)
Bret Easton Ellis’s first novel, Less Than Zero, published in 1985, is hard to shake—a drifting, menacing story about Los Angeles private school kids with monosyllabic names (Clay, Blair, Trent, Rip) who go to parties, do drugs, have sex and try to feel something about any of it. The Shards, Ellis’s hypnotic, prodigious and unsettling new novel—his first in 13 years—is a time machine back to that early 80s milieu. It stars none other than Ellis himself, a prep school senior writing a novel called Less Than Zero and surrounded by a pack of rich beautiful friends who are themselves shadowed by a serial killer nicknamed the Trawler. Ellis holds nothing back through these 600 pages: baroque violence, startling eroticism, relentless cataloging of mood-specific song and movie titles. His gothic predilections are not for everyone (the Trawler’s kills are grotesque) but the evocation of a certain kind of vacant privilege—a buried longing overlaid with studied dissociation—is masterful. –Taylor Antrim
Sam by Allegra Goodman (January)
There are books that assail you with their importance, and then there are those, like Allegra Goodman’s Sam (The Dial Press), whose modest-seeming ambitions blossom into sweeping works of emotional resonance. Goodman’s novel tells the deceptively simple story of a girl, Sam, growing into a young woman. Her life has many deprivations and few points of brightness—but from these bare contours a powerful portrait emerges. Goodman’s writing mimics the voice of her subject, with earlier chapters echoing the staccato thought patterns of elementary years and later chapters channeling the tender vulnerabilities of young adulthood. Sam may investigate the most acute of emotional growing pains, but there is nothing awkward here. — Chloe Schama
The Survivalists: A Novel by Kashana Cauley (January)
Community gardeners meet doomsday preppers stockpiling weapons above a trendy coffee shop in The Survivalists (Soft Skull Press), a darkly funny look at how people form communities to care for one another amid institutional failures and scarcity. Set in a mostly Black Central Brooklyn, this debut novel from Kashana Cauley, a former lawyer, Daily Show with Trevor Noah writer, and New York Times contributor, finds humor in our hostile, uncertain present while outlining starkly different visions of the future—and how we might prepare for them. — Lisa Wong Macabasco
Spare by Prince Harry (January)
It's almost unheard for a book to dominate public conversation well before even being published. Yet Prince Harry's memoir, Spare, has done just that after several explosive and intimate claims about his life within the royal family came to light. Of course we haven't read it yet, but the talent of his ghost-writer, J.R. Moehringer, who also wrote the biographies of Nike's Phil Knight an Andre Agassi, has us excited. The Pulitzer Prize-winner has an astonishing ability to plumb the depths of his subjects—crafting a raw, nuanced portrait of a person in the process. “He’s half psychiatrist,” Knight said of Moehringer. “He gets you to say things you really didn’t think you would.” — Elise Taylor
Big Swiss by Jen Beagin (February)
Jen Beagin writes with a zany, overflowing energy, her enthusiasm in stark contrast to the halting, static nature of her protagonist in Big Swiss. Set in a very recognizable Hudson, New York brimming with metropolitan expats and locals who have settled into their roles as the native color, the novel tells the story of a woman running from her past while excavating the emotional travails of others. She is doing this quite literally, as the transcriber for a local sex therapist, ignoring all professional ethics as she does so by falling for one of the clients. She may be privy to the innermost desires of the client—who she nicknames Big Swiss—but that doesn’t make her more sure footed when it comes to affairs of the heart. Big Swiss is a comic novel, but it is one with a very tender core. Already in development as a series set to star Jodie Comer, you are sure to hear more about this one. — C.S.
Pat in the City by Patricia Field (February)
Patricia Field’s memoir covers the territory you’d expect it to cover: how she got her gig as the costume designer for Sex In the City (including a charming anecdote about how she convinced showrunner Darren Star that a tutu was far superior to a shift dress for Carrie’s ensemble in the opening credits), her more recent exploits as the force behind the eyeball-scorching outfits on Emily In Paris. But it also covers her more tender years growing up in New York City and Long Island, how her early store, Pants Pub, ignited a small revolution in downtown fashion, and how subsequent boutiques became a refuge for fantastic misfits of all stripes. You didn’t need to have a lot of retail experience to work for Patricia Field, it seems, but you did need to have a whole lot of the right kind of attitude. This is a book for the SATC superfans, but it is also for anyone curious about the lived experience of downtons culture in the 70s, 80s, and beyond. — C.S
Cold People by Tom Rob Smith (February)
What is the author of a trilogy of elegant historical espionage novels (the bestselling Child 44 books) doing writing a sci-fi monster novel set in Antarctica? I read the summary of Tom Rob Smith’s Cold People (Scribner)–an alien invasion wipes out Earth’s population driving the lone survivors to Antarctica to set up a new society–with bemusement. Had Smith who pivoted into TV writing with The Assassination of Gianni Versace and other shows lost his way? Nope. Cold People is a zany, wildly gripping, dark futuristic fantasy that never remotely achieves plausibility but achieves escapist lift-off nonetheless. The alien invasion that begins the book and prompts a desperate evacuation to Antarctica–the only place the aliens will let humans live–is bizarrely cursory, but Smith is getting it out of the way. The bulk of the book, set in the resulting society of human survivalists on the icy continent tells a story of genetic experimentation that recalls H.P. Lovecraft and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. I loved this wild, imaginative, fast moving book and can’t wait to see the inevitable screen adaptation. –Taylor Antrim
The Everlasting Meal Cookbook: Leftovers A-Z by Tamar Adler (March)
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Vogue contributing editor Tamar Adler’s new cookbook is a comprehensive, beautifully illustrated and gracefully written resource for what to do with basically anything in your fridge, larder, or on your chopping board. A kind of spiritual sequel to her 2011 volume, An Everlasting Meal, this hefty, companionable resource suggests new life for, say, overcooked beans, or undercooked ones, discarded crab shells, leftover ramen soup, uneaten waffles (or flat beer, or broken aioli, or pickle brine…seriously, nothing is left unconsidered). There are recipes and strategies for everything you can imagine, and a no-waste ethos permeates these many pages with goodwill, humor, and hope. As with all things Adler, the writing is fantastic: expert and unfailingly elegant. —T.A.
Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano (March)
Ann Napolitano's Hello Beautiful is a tribute to Little Women, telling the story of four sister and the man who enters their orbit when he marries the oldest daughter. So far so similar. But William Waters's tragic past is rendered, on the first page of this novel, with such heartbreaking specificity—his three year old sister died in her crib the week he was born, plunging his parents into a state of mourning they never escape—that readers will be forewarned that they have a distinct experience ahead of them. In college William becomes involved with Julia Padavano, a relentlessly ambitious young women from a boisterous Chicago family, and is quickly subsumed by her desires and trajectory. Napolitano has an uncanny ability to pack her paragraphs with rich detail, painting entire landscapes—interior and exterior—with startling emotional economy. This is a warm blanket of a book, one that reminds you of the enveloping power of literature and leaves you very grateful to have encountered it. —C.S.
Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton (March)
Set in modern-day New Zealand, Birnam Wood (Macmillan) is a multi-layered book that reads, at times like a far-left anti-capitalist manifesto, at times like a techno-futurist manual, at times like suburban ennui-driven domestic fiction—in short it’s a book of contemporary ideas, somehow woven together into a thriller that is subtly poking fun at the absolutism all those perspectives entail. No matter how assured the characters are that they possess the most righteous framework through which to understand the world, their blindspots lead them into sometimes criminal entanglements that they can’t philosophize their way out of. Catton is not just a master at spinning a web of competing philosophies, though; her characters are deeply flawed but you can’t help but root for them. I was one of the few who missed this young New Zealand novelist’s best-selling and critically acclaimed 2013 novel, The Luminaries, but this new book has convinced me that I won’t let that happen again. — C.S.
Pineapple Street by Jenny Jackson (March)
Jenny Jackson’s new novel Pineapple Street (Pamela Dornan) is a delicious new Gilded Age family drama—almost a satire—set in the leafy enclaves of Brooklyn Heights. The book follows three women in the Stockton family, a clan that made their money in real estate and left subsequent generations to alternately indulge in and wring their hands over it, their angst inflected with a very New York 1% class consciousness. Family members make their way from their non-profit jobs and school fundraisers to tennis clubs and private planes. It’s a lighthearted book that captures a slice of New York society, a guilty pleasure that also feels like a sociological text, punctuated with very particular references to restaurants, preschools, nightclubs, and other pillars of urban life in 2023. — C.S.
The Kingdom of Prep: The Inside Story of the Rise and (Near) Fall of J.Crew by Maggie Bullock (March)
Maggie Bullock's cultural history is nominally the story of the rise and fall of one of America's most iconic retailers, but it's also a sociological text and a personal one, charting the brand's influence in popular, commercial, and deeply individual terms. Bullock, who has spent a large part of her career working in fashion magazines, is intimately acquainted with this terrain, not just as an editor, but as a former boarding school novice, transplanted to the Northeast from a decidedly unpreppy family in the South, forced to navigate the choppy social dynamics among her rollneck-sweater-wearing peers. Most everyone is familiar with the Jenna Lyon's era J. Crew aesthetic, which extended its influence to no less prominent spheres than The White House, but fewer people are familiar with the ups and downs of the brand before its hot pink, sequined phase. Bullock unravels it all in this lively, entertaining book. — C.S.
Independence Square by Martin Cruz Smith (May)
Martin Cruz Smith has been writing highly diverting detective novels starring the Moscow based investigator Arkady Renko since his 1981 breakthrough Gorky Park. Each is fast paced enough to read on a beach towel, but so full of detail about Russian life and politics that you leave equally edified and entertained. His tenth Renko mystery, the highly enjoyable Independence Square is set inside the tumultuous months leading up to the invasion of Ukraine. Renko takes on the case of a missing dissident girl, leading him from Moscow to Kyiv to the Crimean peninsula where menacing revanchist biker gangs dream of a return to Soviet times. Smith keeps his plot ticking along but makes room for affecting character work too. In Indepence Square the intrepid Renko must face a Parkinson’s diagnosis (Smith has lived with the disease since the ‘90s) along with a rising body count. —T.A.
The Half Moon by Mary Beth Keane (May)
Keane’s 2019 novel Ask Again, Yes was a breakthrough: a best-selling portrait of a pair of hard-working Irish-American families in suburban New York whose lives intersect and fall apart. Her deft, satisfying fourth novel The Half Moon returns to a similar milieu and tells a more concentrated story: of Malcolm Gephardt, bar owner, forty-something, as personable as he is emotionally hapless, struggling to save his business and marriage—to an attorney wife who justifiably wants more. Keane writes in a sturdily realist vein–the vivid, domesticated world of Anne Tyler, of William Trevor, of Elizabeth Strout—but her insights into matters of the heart, longing and restlessness especially, have astonishing delicacy. —T.A.
The Postcard by Anne Berest (May)
Anne Berest’s novel, The Postcard (Europa), falls loosely into the category of what we might call, in this country, autofiction. (The French probably have another term!) The protagonist, a Paris-based writer named Anne, receives a postcard from an anonymous sender inscribed only with the names of four relatives who died in Auschwitz. All this happened as well to the author. But what transpires after is a testament to the power of imagination and an investigation of empathy—because far from haunting her, Berest’s murdered relatives were largely absent from her life, in part because she had never fully considered her Jewish heritage. The Postcard goes on to spin a full and textured rendering of these relatives’ lives before they were cruelly killed, rendering the horrors of the Holocaust horrifically fresh. Once the novel has covered this ground, however, it becomes almost a modern-day thriller, circling in on the mysterious mail at its center. The Postcard is a somewhat strange book, not without the occasional infelicity of translation, almost experimental in its form. But even with all its layered complication, it is undeniably compelling. —C.S.
Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral by Ben Smith (May)
I devoured this gimlet-eyed account of painfully recent history–the dizzy rise of digital media rivals such as Buzzfeed and Gawker, companies fueled on human attention, rapacious for virality and traffic, a word that has totemic power in this well paced narrative. Smith, former Politico star, former Buzzfeed News Editor, former New York Times media columnist and now the editor in chief of Semafor, is well placed to tell the stories of ambitious, restless characters such as Buzzfeed’s Jonah Peretti and Gawker’s Nick Denton and the Faustian bargains they made on the way to enormous valuations, and equally precipitous turnabouts in fortune. Smith, of course, is a protagonist here too, having controversially decided to publish the notorious Steele dossier about President Trump at Buzzfeed when other outlets would not (an episode he recounts and reflects on here). I am not sure I wholly bought Smith’s conclusion—that the harnessing of virality by the likes of Buzzfeed led to the ubiquity of an increasingly remorseless right wing populism. And yet the argument is made with force and gives this book the shape of a (irresistibly readable) tragedy. —T.A.
The Guest by Emma Cline (May)
Emma Cline's new novel—her first since her breakthrough debut 2016, The Girls—is a grifter tale for the post Anna Delvey era, a spellbinding literary rendering told from the perspective of the deceiver herself. Exiled from her quasi-boyfriend's Hampton's home, she convinces herself that all will be forgiven if she can simply hang on for the week and make an unbidden appearance at his weekend party. Like The Girls, and several of the stories in Cline's short story collection, Daddy, Cline is here investigating the power and peril of being female and young, telling a story in which who is being used, and for what, is slippery and ill-defined. Cline is a master of depicting the nefarious and atmospheric menace that often lurks adjacent to our most glittery environments, and she does so here with subdued but no less cutting aplomb. — C.S.
The Rachel Incident by Caroline O’Donohue (June)
Caroline O’Donohue’s delightful novel, The Rachel Incident, is set in the Irish city of Cork in the earlyish 2010s, and is narrated by a woman looking back at her university years a decade later. But The Rachel Incident is as much an investigation of how the events of early adulthood shape us as it is about the events themselves; this is a sneakily philosophical book about growing up that offers its insights with charming, effervescent ease. And about those events—one can’t help but feel a bit bad for O’Donohue whose characters and plot will inevitably be compared to Sally Rooney. (One setup involving two college-age students and an older, glamorously intellectual couple bears uncanny resemblance to the set up of Rooney’s Conversations With Friends.) But O’Donohue is a unique and exciting talent, allowing her characters to puncture their solipsistic preoccupations with humor and self awareness, even if it arrives after their glittering self-involved young adulthood has faded into the past. I galloped through this book, enchanted by its characters and it full-hearted vision of friendship. This is a book full of love, and it is extremely easy to love reading it. — C.S.
The Quiet Tenant by Clémence Michallon (June)
Clémence Michalon’s dark and juicy thriller is set in upstate New York. More precisely, it’s set mainly within the confines of a rural house where a serial killer is keeping a victim he has mysteriously decided to keep instead of kill—fun stuff! And yet, like Emma Donohue’s Room, the novel takes this creepy and claustrophobic premise and spins a paradoxically expansive plot from it, told from the perspective of his victim, his daughter, and a local restaurant owner. The killer is presented not just as a monster but as a member of polite society—something of a stretch, but in Michalon’s assured telling, a compelling one. —C.S.
Little Monsters by Adrienne Brodeur (June)
Adrienne Brodeur knows her way around a family drama; in her first book, 2019’s Wild Game, she recalled abetting her own mother’s long affair with the married man who later became her stepfather. Now, with the novel Little Monsters (Avid Reader Press), Brodeur weaves a story dense with stinging secrets and simmering resentments, rooted in another context that she knows well: the manicured towns and wild fringes of Cape Cod. (Brodeur divides her time between the Cape and Cambridge, Massachusetts.) Unfolding between April and October of 2016—with that year’s looming election offering its own grim disquiet—the book centers on the Gardner clan, anchored by patriarch Adam, a formerly esteemed, now dangerously flailing marine biologist staring down the barrel of 70; son Ken, a tightly wound aspiring politician concealing great depths of childhood trauma; and daughter Abby, an oddball artist slowly emerging from her father and brother’s towering shadows. (Rounding out the central cast are Jenny—Abby’s best friend from RISD and Ken’s wife—and Steph, a police officer from Boston lingering on the periphery.) Set against the island’s rippling dune grasses and scrub pines, their narrative is as elegantly rendered as it is compulsively readable. —M.M.
The Imposters by Tom Rachman (June)
Tom Rachman’s bustling, globe-trotting new novel manages to be about a writer’s life ending, quietly, lonesomely–even as it bursts with characters, plots, humor and drama. The writer is Dora Frenhofer, a prickly Dutch novelist in her seventies, living alone in London, who is determined to write another novel, a final act of creation in the face of the literary world’s indifference. The Imposters is that manuscript, a novel-in-stories interrupted by diary entries from Frenhofer herself, who can’t quite find her subject so she tries many—like a young man adrift in India (inspired by Dora’s lost brother), a linguist who lost her children in a horrific crime (a double of a London friend), a comedy writer in L.A. who longing for affection and company (Dora’s estranged daughter). Rachman, a former A.P. foreign-news editor, has a far-and-wide imagination, and his novel is ingenious: investing a protagonist at the twilight of her life with grand, restless vision. —T.A.
Young and Restless: The Girls Who Sparked America’s Revolutions by Mattie Kahn (June)
Mattie Kahn's Young and Restless feels born of the current moment: a book about the Gretas and the Xiyes of the world, and the outsized role they seem to play in fixing our broken world. But it is also an interrogation into why we pay these captivating young women such attention—are young women seemingly over-represented in the climate fight because that cause is generally associated with the need to make altruistic sacrifice and women have traditionally been more associated with those tendencies? The book is also a look at why and how girls have been sidelined by history in the past—turned into objects cultural fascination while simultaneously being denied agency and power, especially in the historical record. —C.S.
Holding Pattern By Jenny Xie (June)
In Jenny Xie’s Holding Pattern, Kathleen Cheng has moved back home to Oakland, reeling from a devastating breakup and having dropped out of a graduate program. There she finds her Chinese immigrant mother somehow newly engaged to a tech entrepreneur. Signing up to be a cuddle therapist at a curious start-up moves Cheng to reconsider the relationships in her life. Driven by Xie’s irresistible voice, this is a warm and funny debut about longing and belonging, the mother-
daughter bond, and finding intimacy in an increasingly alienated world.—LWM
The Quickening: Creation and Community at the Ends of the Earth by Elizabeth Rush (August)
Elizabeth Rush’s The Quickening is one part memoir, one part reporting from the edge—think Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction—a book that feels as though it was written from the brink. In this case the extreme scenario is literal: Rush, a journalist, joins a crew of scientists aboard a ship headed for a glacier in Antarctica that is, like much of the poles, rapidly disappearing. The book brings the environmental crisis into a personal sphere, asking what it means to have a child in the face of such catastrophic change. Threaded throughout this intimate investigation are the stories of the scientists and crew, each with their own take on the challenges they are facing. Rush writes with clarity and precision, giving a visceral sense of everything from the gear required to traverse an arctic landscape to the interior landscape of a woman facing change both global and immediate. — C.S.