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 2023 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
Time Shelter: A Novel
by Angela Rodel (translator) & Georgi Gospodinov
🏆 Winner of the 2023 International Booker Prize
A 'clinic for the past' offers a promising treatment for Alzheimer's sufferers: nostalgia. Each floor of the clinic reproduces a decade in minute detail, transporting patients back to their preferred time and the reader into European history. Time Shelter, translated by Angela Rodel, is the Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov's third novel, and the first Bulgarian book to be nominated for the International Booker Prize. The judging panel said it was "an inventive, subversive and morbidly humorous novel about national identities and the seductive dangers of memory and nostalgia." Time Shelter was first published in Bulgaria in 2020.
Ancestry: A Novel
by Simon Mawer
Shortlisted for the 2023 Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction
Mawer won the 2016 Walter Scott Prize for his novel Tightrope—the story of a female secret agent for the British during World War II. He returns to the shortlist with a new historical novel that delves into the stories from the author's own family tree. As the 2023 Walter Scott Prize judges observed: "he refuses to choose between fiction and fact," melding his archival research with imagined elements that takes us from poverty-stricken London to the Crimean War. It's an "ambitious novel" and a "memorable family odyssey that takes the reader into a fictional realm."
The Sun Walks Down
by Fiona McFarlane
Shortlisted for the 2023 Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction
In The Sun Walks Down, a historical novel set in 1883 Australia, the disappearance of a six-year-old boy during a duststorm electrifies an outback community of farmers, artists, servants, cameleers and Aboriginal peoples, and forces a broader reckoning in this uneasy colonial society. This is a slowburn mystery of literary merit, with a complex, multi-layered plot and intense atmospheric effect. The 2023 Walter Scott Prize judges described it as a "rich and empathetic novel" which offered the reader the keys to understanding Australia, summoning its landscape—"at once beautiful and alien"—and its "burning sun" directly onto the page.
“Set at the end of a long hot summer on Long Island, we follow a manipulative 20-something as she infiltrates the social circles of the American elite. Cline is an able storyteller and a master narrator of the inner lives of amoral young women. Another hazy, intriguing tale from the author of The Girls, her bestselling 2016 novel of cult-motivated murders in 1960s California.” Read more...
Cal Flyn, Journalist
Notes on an Execution
by Danya Kukafka
***Winner of the 2023 Edgar Allan Poe Awards ***
Notes on an Execution is not so much a mystery as a sad, hard-to-put-down story about a serial killer and the women in his life. The book opens as he sits on Death Row, awaiting his execution, plotting his escape using his powers of manipulation.
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)."
Exiles
by Jane Harper
***AudioFile magazine Earphones Award for an exceptional audiobook***
Exiles is by Jane Harper, one of our favourite writers of mystery novels. All have been set in Australia in a genre some refer to as 'Outback noir.' Her last book was The Survivors, set by the ocean in Tasmania, her best book (according to two of our interviewees) is The Lost Man. This book, Exiles, is set in South Australia's wine country. It features Aaron Falk as the investigator, who also featured in The Dry and Force of Nature.
Act of Oblivion
by Robert Harris
Shortlisted for the 2023 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction
New historical novels by British writer Robert Harris are always worth looking out for so don't let the blitz of marketing surrounding his latest, Act of Oblivion, put you off. It's set at an interesting point in English history: the immediate aftermath of the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660. Through the reflections of one of the main characters, we see the events leading up to the execution of Charles I more than a decade previously, in 1649, as well as the battles of the English Civil War and Oliver Cromwell's New Model Army. Puritan America is also an important part of the setting. If you're interested in history and don't know the details of this period, it's an interesting book, not least because you can't help but reflect on what it takes to tip a country into civil war.
“Set in South London among its Ghanaian diaspora, this—like his first novel Open Water—is a lushly-written love story set to a powerful musical soundtrack; Small Worlds also digs deep into the immigrant experience and intergenerational trauma. “ Read more...
Cal Flyn, Journalist
“The influential American comedian Steven Wright, known for his deadpan one-liners, has also ventured into fiction for the first time with Harold, an absurdist, stream-of-consciousness novel set over a single day in a third-grade classroom, as thoughts flit through the mind of an eight-year-old boy.” Read more...
Cal Flyn, Journalist
In Memoriam
by Alice Winn
“In Memoriam is set in an idyllic boarding school in the English countryside. The protagonists are Henry Gaunt and Sidney Ellwood. Gaunt is half-German, and has always been a bit out of step with his peers. He’s against the outbreak of war; he’s not actually a pacifist, but he thinks this particular war is going to be bad for the empire. His closest, maybe his only, friend at school is this incredibly popular boy, Ellwood, who is ethnically Jewish but culturally Christian, and is the opposite. He’s romantic and excited about the war. When I was describing the children from Edwardian school books, who can’t wait to go and fight when they grow up? He’s like that.
So there’s this conflict between them in their friendship, where they completely disagree about what this war means for their future. The rest of the school agrees with Ellwood. They’re very excited when this war breaks out.
The other major plot point is that they are in love with each other, but neither of them realises; they think it’s unrequited. And they aren’t able to communicate how they feel because it’s 1914. Anyway, they both end up at the front together, where the love story comes to a head because everything becomes so raw and intense. The question becomes not whether they love each other, but whether they will both survive.”
“The book I’ve been jabbering about to anyone who will listen is Catherine Lacey’s new novel Biography of X, which is a tricksy, intriguing book comprising a faux biography set in a contemporary, but counterfactual United States. It’s at once moving and bewildering, and terribly clever—quite extraordinary. It’s the book novelists are pressing into other novelists’ hands.” Read more...
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."
Notable Novels of Summer 2023, recommended by Cal Flyn
New novels are piling up ready for summer 2023—but which of them should go straight to the top of your reading list? Five Books deputy editor Cal Flyn offers a round-up of some of the most notable fiction titles of the season, including eagerly anticipated novels from Emma Cline and Naoise Dolan, plus a fictionalised account of the making of a blockbuster movie by Tom Hanks.
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.
