With so much new fiction to choose from, it's not easy to find novels that are really worth spending your time reading. To help, we'll be collecting all our book recommendations relating to the best fiction of 2023 here. This includes novels picked by our deputy editor, Scotland-based author Cal Flyn, as well as books shortlisted for prestigious prizes, like the Booker Prize and the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
We also enjoy genre fiction. We'll be keeping a running list of the best mystery books of 2023, and adding interviews about prize-winning historical fiction and science fiction books as they're announced by juries.
Our best fiction of 2023 list is part of our best books of 2023 series
Victory City
by Salman Rushdie
"There's...a new book from Salman Rushdie, Victory City, his fifteenth novel. It's a fantastical epic, which opens in 14th-century India and features a nine-year-old orphan selected by the goddess Parvati to be her human vessel. The Times has described it as "a total pleasure to read, a bright burst of colour in a grey winter season," full of "lush, romantic language." (Rushdie, who is still recovering from a brutal knife attack last summer, is reported to be in daily contact with Hanif Kureishi, the acclaimed British writer who suffered a serious spinal injury in December and remains in hospital in Rome)."
“Looks like it could be her best yet. In it, the widow of a subversive artist digs into the history of her late partner, against a backdrop of an alternate America, in which the South split from the North in the wake of World War II, before coming back together in uneasy reunification. Sometimes it’s easier to look at the tensions of the present day through a speculative prism.” Read more...
The Notable Novels of Spring 2023
Cal Flyn, Journalist
“One of the biggest books of the season must be Eleanor Catton’s hotly anticipated third novel Birnam Wood. Pitched (somewhat unexpectedly) as a psychological thriller, it follows the members of a guerilla gardening group as they take over an abandoned farm in cautious partnership with a paranoid American billionaire with plans to build his own survivalist bunker.” Read more...
The Notable Novels of Spring 2023
Cal Flyn, Journalist
“Max Porter, the brilliant British author of experimental novels Grief is the Thing With Feathers, Lanny, and The Death of Francis Bacon, will return with Shy, the story of a troubled teenager escaping from a home for ‘very disturbed young men.’ Porter consistently breaks new and interesting ground in his formally inventive, emotionally vibrant novels. Unmissable.” Read more...
The Notable Novels of Spring 2023
Cal Flyn, Journalist
Cursed Bread: A Novel
by Sophie Mackintosh
A new novel from Sophie Mackintosh, author of eerie feminist dystopias The Water Cure and Blue Ticket. Cursed Bread is an unsettling tale of infatuation and tainted love based loosely on the real-life case of the mass poisoning in the French village of Pont-Saint-Esprit in 1951.
Greek Lessons: A Novel
by Han Kang, translated by Deborah Smith and Emily Yae Won
We are eagerly awaiting the latest novel from Han Kang, author of The Vegetarian, which won the International Booker Prize. In Greek Lessons, a Greek language instructor finds himself drawn to one of his pupils, who is losing her ability to speak. He too is losing his sight. Two people are brought together by private anguish. Katie Kitamura has described the novel as "sinuous and sublime... an extraordinary meditation on language, violence, loss, and intimacy."
The Notable Novels of Spring 2023, recommended by Cal Flyn
Spring is always an excellent time for literary fiction releases, and 2023 is no exception. Here, Five Books deputy editor Cal Flyn offers a round-up of the notable new novels of the season, from buzzy debuts to hotly anticipated new releases from internationally acclaimed authors like Eleanor Catton, Han Kang, and Salman Rushdie.
