13 Best Fiction Books of 2023

In Beyond That, the Sea, Laura Spence-Ash skillfully weaves together friendship, family, love, and loss into a breathtaking tale that spans decades. The sweeping historical fiction novel begins in 1940 London, where working-class parents Millie and Reginald Thompson make the difficult choice to send their 11-year-old daughter Beatrix away to Boston so that she might escape the Blitz. Of course, Bea is devastated to leave home. Yet she becomes accustomed to her new life with her wealthy surrogate family in the States, where the harsh realities of WWII are a world away. When the war in Europe ends, however, Bea’s parents bring her back to London, pulling her between two worlds as she strives to establish a life of her own. A gorgeous meditation on the lifelong search for love and belonging, one that spans the dark days of WWII to the 1970s, Spence-Ash’s acclaimed coming-of-age novel is an exceptional, five-star read. 

A fine line separates comedy from tragedy — and Cat Shook brilliantly dances along that line in her funny family dramedy If We’re Being Honest. Gerry Williams has died. As the patriarch of the large and lively Williams clan, his funeral draws quite a crowd. Tears are flowing, sympathies are exchanged — until Gerry’s longtime best friend delivers a eulogy that stuns the packed congregation with a shocking secret of the heart. In the wake of this disclosure, family and friends scramble to make sense of the man they thought they knew, all while navigating their own complicated relationships. Shook delights readers as she explores all the messy and relatable realities of family — the love, the drama, the heartache, and the joy. 

Tracey Lange, the bestselling author of 2022’s We Are the Brennans, returned this year with The Connellys of County Down, another drama about a dysfunctional but eminently lovable family. Tara Connelly emerges from prison after serving 18 months on a drug offense, ready to start fresh. Unfortunately, with little money and no job, her prospects are slim. So, she moves back in with her siblings, whose lives are far from stable. Indeed, a dark cloud of family secrets hangs over the heads of the Connelly clan. As Tara tries to revive her career and get her life back on track, she must also navigate the family drama while dealing with the surprise return of the police detective who arrested her. Can she help her family — and herself — find a second chance at happiness and love, or will secrecy and regret win out? “A compassionate look at family dynamics and a reminder that it’s never too late to heal” (Kirkus), We Are the Brennans delivers the heartwarming goods.

Stephen Amidon peels back the veneer of a picture-perfect community to expose its shocking secrets in this suspenseful, “behind-closed-doors” mystery. The suburb of Emerson, Massachusetts, radiates affluence and exclusivity. But the peaceful illusion is shattered when a teenager, Eden Perry, is found dead in the big house on Locust Lane. In the wake of Eden’s death, families close ranks and neighbors lock their doors. When the investigation closes in on three local teens who were hanging out with Eden on the night she died, the suspects’ parents will do whatever it takes to protect their own. Someone is going down for this crime — but will true justice prevail? Booklist hails Locust Lane as a “compulsively readable, richly plotted crime novel” (starred review).

Alex North knows how to get under your skin. The bestselling author of The Whisper Man and The Shadows has disquieted readers the world over with his dark and suspenseful thrillers. This year, he returned with The Angel Maker — and the twisted tale kept us reading long into the night. Katie Shaw remains haunted by a violent episode from her childhood: The day a stranger brutally assaulted her little brother, Christopher. She feels guilty, she’s angry, and she still looks for threats at every turn. Then she receives word that her brother has gone missing, propelling her on a desperate quest to save her sibling from further harm. Meanwhile, Detective Laurence Page investigates the gruesome slaying of a professor of fate and free will. As he looks into the murder, strange connections emerge between the attack on young Christopher Shaw and the vile crimes of a serial killer who, if the whispered rumors are to be believed, could see into the future. A multiple timeline thriller that messes with your head until the last page is turned, The Angel Maker is a “delightfully bone-chilling tale” [that’s] “rich with layers and plot twists and perfectly suspenseful pacing” (Kirkus).

Three characters tell the story — or at least their side of it — in this gripping Nordic noir domestic thriller. The question is: Which version will you believe? In the wake of his wife’s unexpected death, grieving Bill Olsson takes in a lodger to make ends meet and help care for his little girl. Enter Karla Larsson, a law school student who seems the ideal tenant: She cleans houses to pay her way through university and hopes to become a judge. Karla’s clients are the Rytters, a wealthy and mysterious couple who live behind closed doors. When the Rytters turn up dead, however, suspicions swirl, and long-buried secrets are revealed that throw everyone into jeopardy. M. T. Edvardsson is the author of the domestic thriller A Nearly Normal Family. Here, he keeps readers on the hook right to the end with a “well-composed chamber drama, where the darkness dwells, the desperation grows between the characters and the walls are closing in until you’re caught in the trap” (bestselling author Lars Kepler).

Set aside some time to fall in love with this “powerfully affecting” (People) family saga by Ann Napolitano that traces the loves and losses of the four Padavano sisters. The intimate character study, which draws inspiration from Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, centers on sister Julia Padavano and her relationship with William Waters, a man reckoning with past traumas and a troubled childhood. As their once-joyous romance begins to collapse, it sends ripples through the lives of all four sisters that throw the entire Padavano family off its axis. Is this destiny, or can the family find a way back to contentment?

A fast-paced and cinematic thriller, Age of Vice by Deepti Kapoor delivers an electrifying mix of action, crime, and family drama, all set in present-day India. The novel opens on the scene of a fatal car crash: Five people are dead, and the only survivor is Ajay, a young man found in the Mercedes that caused the collision. With an empty bottle beside him, it looks like an open-and-shut case — except Ajay can’t remember anything about the lead-up to the crash or the accident itself. Kapoor uses multiple timelines and different points of view to show how Ajay’s life as a low-caste man born into poverty intersects with the life of Sunny Wadia, a super-rich playboy from a notorious crime family. Is Ajay’s case hopeless, or can he break free from the tangled web of violence he’s caught up in?

Award-winning author Zadie Smith returned this year with her first novel since 2016’s Swing Time, and we are here for it. Part historical fiction, part satire, The Fraud is based on the real-life Tichborne Trial of 1873, a legendary legal case of imposture that captivated Victorian England. At the center of the case is a butcher from Australia who claims to be Sir Roger Tichborne, the heir to a family fortune, who was presumed drowned. Smith’s kaleidoscopic narrative travels from England to Jamaica as she explores themes of honesty and hypocrisy, fact and fabrication, power and privation. “I would describe The Fraud as I would describe life: It’s complicated, deep, ridiculous, scary, and funny. It took a genius to write it and cements Zadie Smith as the British novelist of our time” (Julia Hass, Lit Hub).

Crime and punishment take on a whole new form in Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s vivid dystopian tale, a finalist for the National Book Award and longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence. In a grim near future, inmates Thurwar and Hamara “Hurricane Staxxx” Stacker must compete for their freedom in a controversial program created by a private prison corporation to entertain sellout crowds. There’s no runner-up medal, though: Prisoners are forced to fight in life-or-death bouts. Thurwar and Stacker are top gladiators on the same team, and they’re also lovers. Adjei-Brenyah deftly skewers the current U.S. prison complex as he shows us his gladiators struggling to beat the system and escape with their lives.

Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence, The Great Reclamation by Rachel Heng is a “deep and powerful love story” (The Today Show) set amid the shifting landscape of 20th-century Singapore. The coming-of-age novel centers on Ah Boon, a boy from a small fishing village in possession of a magical gift, and Siok Mei, his childhood love. As the children grow up together, the world around them changes drastically — from the weakening grip of British colonial rule to the arrival of invading forces from Imperial Japan and the rise of a resistance movement. Heng’s sweeping narrative follows the pair as they come of age in a country that must struggle through conflict as it strives for rebirth. 

New York City in the turbulent 1970s is the backdrop for Colson Whitehead’s bestselling sequel to Harlem Shuffle. Indeed, the gritty city atmosphere of burned-out buildings, sky-high crime rates, deepening racial tensions, and street battles with the police plays a leading role in Crook Manifesto. Ray Carney has dabbled in crime before. Now, however, he’s a small business owner and is determined to avoid trouble. That’s the plan. But of course, Ray knows everyone and they know him, so staying straight might be easier said than done. Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Whitehead pulls no punches chronicling Ray’s (mis)adventures and the rampant violence of the era, though the graphic descriptions of crime are shot through with dark humor — a combination that’s perfect for those high-octane years in New York City.

Once again, Salman Rushdie has crafted an epic and absorbing tale interwoven with fantasy, myth, history, adventure, and love. Victory City begins simply enough, with a young girl, Pampa Kampana, who witnesses her mother’s death and then becomes the mouthpiece for a goddess. Pampa, the goddess explains, is to help build a great city called Bisnaga — the “victory city” of the title. But while Pampa hopes to create a city of equality and peace, wars and political strife complicate her efforts. “Infused with magic, wonder, sorrow, and humor, Victory City explores all of the capital-B big questions of life, like what makes us human” (CNN). Fans will get more from the Booker Prize–winning author in April 2024, when Rushdie’s highly anticipated memoir Knife arrives in bookstores.