Books of the Year
Lunate contributors and friends share their favourite books of 2023
Naomi Booth
This year, I loved Nasser Hussain’s collection of poetry, Love Language. I read it on my birthday, and it made me fall in love with poetry all over-again—playful, laugh-out-loud funny, full of light and linguistic love. My favourite novel of the year looks set to be the one I’m currently reading: A.K. Blakemore’s The Glutton. It tells the story of Tarare, a French peasant living through the tumultuous revolutionary years, who becomes briefly famous for his appetite—supposedly consuming rodents, household objects, even a human infant. Tarare is based on a historical figure, and is also Blakemore’s brilliant and highly original creation: complex, monstrous, queerly tender; the power of his appetite is rendered in gloriously sensuous prose. I also really enjoyed Anne Eekhout’s, Mary: or, The Birth of Frankenstein, which imagines the forbidden desires and queer experiences that might have fuelled Mary Shelley’s writing; and Matt Hill’s Lamb—a gorgeous, fungus-filled work of speculative fiction. I read some exceptional debuts this year: Phoebe Walker’s quietly devastating novel, Temper; Rose Cleary’s compulsive tale of obsession and doomed desire, How to be a French Girl; and Vida Adamczewski’s highly unusual and inventive collection of short stories, Amphibian and Other Bodies. Another favourite was Nicholas Royle’s David Bowie, Enid Blyton and the sun machine—a wild, wonderful, unclassifiable book that explores the narrator’s love of Blyton and Bowie in a series of imaginary lectures, shedding new light, too, on Blyton’s love-affair with the author’s grandmother, the illustrator Lola Onslow.
Joshua Jones
After working on my own book, Local Fires, for so long, I felt like I needed to find myself in literature again - LGBTQ+/Queer literature particularly. Dennis Cooper’s poetry has been extremely present this year, like a hug from behind – especially considering the 2023 republication of his pivotal classic, Closer. This year saw my first encounter with this work, which floored me. In a similar vein, Jamie Stewart’s Anything That Moves. A friend from abroad visited me over the summer, and I practically ignored them the first two days of their visit, while I curled up on the chair in their hotel room to read it. I’ve been a fan of his band, Xiu Xiu, for many years, so I knew what to expect, and I still came out of it as if I was emerging from a sex cinema into the early city morning.
Not everything I read is pure filth, mind. Although, Neon Roses by Rachel Dawson has a bit of a filth to it, a glorious celebration of queer identities, queer bodies, and queer sex. Its depiction of the Dulais valleys near Swansea during the miners’ strike, and of a miner’s daughter attempting to find herself in queer, self-imposed exile in the city feels oh so real. Another novel that dares to feel hope and joy is A Bad Decade for Good People by Joe Bedford. Queerness, the EU referendum, personal & political trauma are all deftly considered by an exceptional debut writer.
Lucie McKnight Hardy
Sophie Mackintosh’s Cursed Bread was one of my favourite books of 2023. The residents of a small town in France – not least the unremarkable and often overlooked baker’s wife who is our narrator – are entranced when the ambassador and his supercilious wife arrive in town. Elodie is mesmerised by the couple, and yearns to be a part of their perceived glamour, enamoured of their wealth, status and mystery. This short, sensual novel is brim-full with heady, illicit sexual urges as it unfolds over a stifling summer, and after sinister incidents occur in the town, it culminates in a terrible event which destroys the community. Shimmering and dreamlike, this is a clever observation of the rituals of small-town life and repressed female desire, with a haunting gothic vein running through it and an undercurrent of sly violence which was unsettling, even as I reveled in the gloriously startling, bold and original prose.
Anne Worthington
One of the most vivid books I read this year was Mother Howl. I was warned that Craig Clevenger’s new novel would grip me straight away, and it did, with its split narrative, melding realism with a horrific surrealism. It’s a visceral read and it introduced me to Clevenger’s other novels that were written almost twenty years ago. I loved the humour and inventiveness of Mammals, I Think We Are Called. In this collection of short stories, Giselle Leeb weaves a commentary about the human disregard for nature with her animal, human and humanoid characters. Fantastical worlds illustrate the catastrophe its human protagonists have created out of delusion and hope. The implicit warning is tempered by humour and compassion. I was hypnotised by God’s Own Country and the writing style of Kerry Hadley Pryce. Her novel does several things at once. It’s a book about place just as much as it’s about character. I was startled by the narration and the way it uncovers the complexity of our motivations, which made for alarming, truthful reading. The presence of the writing took hold, as did the mysterious narrator who seems to know everything but tells you nothing. More food for the soul came from a book of essays David Bowie, Outlaw, by Alex Sharpe. I revelled in the ideas and its hopefulness. This, and Livi Michael’s novel, Reservoir.
Linda Mannheim
Two books that shifted my perspective just came out in English, translated from German. Sam is a memoir by Samuel Meffire (written with Lothar Kittstein, tr. Priscilla Layne). The story of how Meffire became the first Black police officer in the GDR, then left law enforcement and became a mob enforcer, then a fugitive, and then a prisoner is told poetically and evocatively during a weekend at home with his young daughters, giving a hint of the peaceful home life he ultimately finds. Max Czolleck’s De-integrate! A Jewish Survival Guide for the 21st Century (tr. Jon Cho-Pollizi) both interrogates Germany’s memory culture and argues against allowing the majority culture to shape your identity; it does this in a way that is powerful, daring, and surprisingly funny. For years, I’d heard people rave about Kelly Link’s fiction. This year, I picked up her collection: White Cat, Black Dog. Each story based on a fairy tale is electrifyingly original. “Prince Hat Underground” in particular beguiled me, a love story that suggests we can never know everything about the person we’re closest to and that’s just fine. Like most people who read R. F. Kuang’s Yellowface, I was lifted by the thriller pace of it and all its serious and humorous explorations. Finally, during a long train journey, I listened to Ocean Vuong reading the audio version of Time is a Mother, his new collection of poetry, while I looked out the window at the passing landscape. I highly advise you all to do the same.
Gregory Norminton
Scientific wonders, memoir, and counterfactual fiction dominate my new books of 2023. Tom Bullough walks along a Roman road that runs the length of Wales in Sarn Helen (Granta), combining history and ecology with impassioned anticipation of the effects of climate change. It’s a poetic plea for sanity from one of Britain’s best writers. Two memoirs captivated me: M. John Harrison’s Wish I Was Here (Serpent’s Tail) is as fascinating and elusive as his fiction, a portrait of a mind that exists at a remove from what we call the self and the world, and Catherine Taylor’s The Stirrings (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) is a vivid account of growing up in Sheffield in the seventies and eighties, combining cultural history with a reflection on the pains of growing up in a society that treats women badly. Two non-fiction books opened my mind to the marvels of our planet and the beings we share it with. Charles Foster in The Cry of The Wild (Doubleday) uses the tools of fiction to pull us into the minds and experiences of various animals, and Caspar Henderson returns from another of his forays into scientific discovery to celebrate the sounds of the universe in A Book of Noises (Granta). Stand-out fiction included Gunflower (Scribe) by Laura Jean McKay – speculative stories as disturbing to contemplate as they are exhilarating to read – and Red Smoking Mirror (Swift) by Nick Hunt, which imagines that the Americas are discovered not by conquistadors but by the Islamic civilisation of Al-Andalus.
Gary Kaill
An absolutely shameful year for reading, and also for writing about that reading. The arrival of baby Alice at Lunate Towers, new jobs, a protracted and stressful house move: all conspired to make time (and mental energy) the rarest commodity. That said, I really loved what I did manage to read. I was beguiled by the deliberate, dialogue-heavy narrative drive of Nicole Flattery's Nothing Special, in which a rootless teenager is re-shaped by her admittance into Warhol's factory entourage in 1960's New York. Jade Fitton's Hermit impressed and rattled me. She writes about domestic abuse with extraordinary candour and insight, and the anxiety that grows inside four walls when you find yourself living with a partner you fear. Her subsequent re-building of her life made for a deeply inspiring read. Aly Fell produced another mesmerising graphic novel, The Kissing Gate. Fell is a born storyteller but it’s his visual style – with roots planted deep in classic British comic art – that I find irresistible.
But my favourite book of the year was Jen Calleja's genre-mashing Vehicle, a portrait of an alternative Europe in which the expansion of UK nationalism has stifled protest, research and political debate. I have a sackful of notes I collated while slowly unpicking its narrative devilry, and reviewing them now reminds me of how satisfying it was to submit to Calleja's complex and artful moral design. It's a book for our current, troubling age and it speaks with great eloquence not just of how we got here but, crucially, of how we yet might change course. A re-read is a must.
Thomas McMullan
I enjoyed Jen Calleja’s freewheeling Vehicle (Prototype), which tells its story through an assemblage of testimony, recorded telephone conversations, academic research, poetry and other texts that circle an enigmatic spy-cum-punk, Hester Heller. It made me think of Karel Čapek’s 1936 satire, War with the Newts, in how it questions the solidity of documents and the transmission of fact. Kristina Carlson’s Eunuch (Lolli Editions) came out in the author’s native Finland in 2020, but in English this year in a translation by Mikko Alapuro. Set in 12th-century China, the slim novel gives us Wang Wei, a seventy-year old eunuch who has retired from court life. It is a masterwork in voice, or perhaps the relationship between voice and body. Wang Wei’s measured, at times child-like manner, manages to seem both a product of- and a resistance against- the mutilations he has suffered. Finally, the most fun I had with a book this year was Daisy Lafarge’s Lovebug (Peninsula Press). A series of meditations on love and infection, carombing across pathology, literary theory, religion and evolution, the book throws so much spaghetti against the wall, in the best possible way, that it’s impossible not to come away with your head tangled on sex and parasites and the oh-so-porous limits of the self.
Trahearne Falvey
In need of hope this year I returned to Ursula Le Guin, whose ability to imagine utopia is matched by a critique of its contradictions. Space Crone (Silver Press), a new selection of Le Guin’s essays, lectures and stories on gender, edited by So Mayer and Sarah Shin, reiterates her curiosity, her willingness to think and think again – rare qualities in today’s discourse. Continuing with science fiction, I read Yuri Herrera’s Ten Planets, transl. Lisa Dillman (& Other Stories) – a vibrant collection which plays with the history of Spanish-language writing (Borges, Cortazar, Cervantes) to imagine futures that are weird, funny and unnerving. As Daniel Soar writes in the LRB, Herrera ‘distrusts character’ – much like Catherine Lacey, whose 2021’s Pew stripped its protagonist of identifying characteristics and whose Biography of X (Granta) from this year sees a journalist trying to grasp the life of her shape-shifting artist of an ex-wife. Set against a counterfactual history of the United States, in which Bernie Sanders becomes president and Frank O’Hara survives the accident on Fire Island, the novel is further evidence of Lacey’s drive to reinvent with each book. Finally, I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home (Granta) is a book by Lorrie Moore, which means two things: it is about joking and grieving, and I loved it.
Gary Grace
Having spent some time in a psychiatric hospital in my twenties, Molly Hennigan’s The Celestial Realm (Eriu) resonated with me in a big way. This memoir explores Hennigan’s experiences of visiting her grandmother Phil, who spent time in psychiatric institutions, much like Phil’s own mother, Sissy. The memoir traces an often painful seam of generational parallels, but also presents Phil as a source of truth and knowledge for the author. Hennigan’s memoir is a beautiful depiction of the moments of clarity that can occur from an untypical mind.
Since reading Clemency Browne Dreams of Gin (Arlen House) Órfhlaith Foyle has become one of my favourite short story writers. Her new book Three Houses in Rome (Doire Press) is a fascinating collection, which explores isolation, loss and love in Foyle’s singular strange style. Another collection that I have been enjoying is Local Fires (Parthian) by Joshua Jones. This masterful collection of stories is set in Jones’ hometown of Llanelli in South Wales. Jones depicts the complex vulnerability and brutality of small-town life, with a particular focus on the experiences of young men, in stories which contain pathos and humour in equal measure.
Kate Vine
It’s a rare year for me when a work of nonfiction dominates, but Julie Phillips’ The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood, and the Mind-Baby Problem was my 2023 highlight. Journeying far past procreation, Phillips examines both the exhilaration and sacrifice of the creative drive, and the unique ways women build their lives around it – dismantling endless inequalities as they go.
Art was a theme in my fiction reading too. In Aysegül Savas’s White on White, her eerily passive narrator rents a room from a painter whose own life is in turmoil. Savas is brilliant in navigating the tug of war between artist and subject, seeing and being seen; her prose conceals as much as it discloses. Meanwhile, in Vigdis Hjorth’s Is Mother Dead, translated by Charlotte Barslund, an artist returns home to Norway, estranged from her family after exhibiting some controversial work. Seeking to reunite, Hjorth’s protagonist is brilliantly desperate; I relished this fevered take on familial relationships and the madness they inspire.
I was also drawn to fresh perspectives on the intersections of love and power. Louise Kennedy’s Trespasses took me to a different place and time with enviable ease through a relationship wrought with discomfort. Other favourites include Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos, translated by Michael Hoffman, and Lillian Fishman’s Acts of Service which, while very different from each other, both contain brilliantly vicious investigations of sexual power dynamics and the political dangers they expose.
Adam Farrer
These are the best books I’ve managed to finish in 2023. As with every year, I wish I’d read more. Apologies to every book I’ll read in January and curse myself for not having included here. John Niven’s memoir, Oh Brother, tackles the circumstances surrounding the suicide of his younger brother, Gary. It’s one of the most potent studies of grief and sibling love I have ever encountered and spoke to my own experiences with an earthy eloquence that floored me. Richard Smyth’s The Jay, The Beech and the Limpetshell cements his status as one of Britain’s finest nature writers. A warm, funny and moving exploration of the wonders of engaging with the natural world, I’ve no issues with referring to it as an understated masterpiece. Former wrestler Wes Brown’s Breaking Kayfabe uses the principle of truth twisting concept of kayfabe to great effect, creating a wonderfully evasive blend of memoir and fiction, exploring family and masculinity. The first great pro wrestling novel. Noreen Masud’s A Flat Place is an astonishing examination of complex personal trauma via place. It’s truly like nothing else I’ve ever read, and I recommend it so often these days that the words “Have you read A Flat Place?” must have worn a groove in my tongue. Lastly, Karen Powell’s Fifteen Wild Decembers, a bold and lyrical reimagining of the life of Emily Bronte captivates at every turn. Every time I sat down to read it, I felt like I was opening up a jewellery box.'
So Mayer
I programmed a lit festival this year, so first off *all the books* by our amazing speakers at BFDay23. Many panels spoke at the intersection of critical geographies of class and racial displacement and the multifarious survival of worlding (including sexy slugs!), and that’s where my reading brain has been. Fran Lock’s powerful shout Vulgar Errors/Feral Subjects (Out-Spoken) is the radical animal prose diptych of her poetry explosion Hyena! Jackal! Dog!. Gargi Bhattacharya’s We, the Heartbroken (Hajar) is the other radical work of unwriting the essay and (its) neoliberalism that I’ve held close; I’ve been likewise haunted by Nona Fernandez’s Voyager, translated by Natasha Wimmer (Daunt), as melancholically cosmic creative non-fiction. I’m also a fan of big fiction (and of Dan Sinykin’s study Big Fiction [Columbia UP], which puts both the big five & how we do lit hist on blast), and loved falling on my knees to Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Fayne (Tramp), a genderqueer love song to the earth that has become intertwined in my mind with CA Conrad’s work, brought to the UK in 2023 (Penguin). Equally mind-expansive were Vajra Chandrasekera’s The Saint of Bright Doors (Tor), a work of Le Guinian complexity about unbecoming a messiah, and Yu Miri’s intensely beautiful refusal of nationalism in The End of August, translated by Morgan Giles (Tilted Axis). Above all, 2023 has been the year of Mark Hyatt: the posthumous publication of Love, Leda (Peninsula) and So Much for Life (eds. Sam Larkin & Luke Roberts, Nightboat) have changed UK and queer literature forever.
Keith Ridgway
I don't think I've read many new publications this year. I'm still catching up on 1963. But of the ones I have read, certainly Maya Binyam's beautiful and strange Hangman is a highlight. As is Mark O'Connell's unshowy, memorable A Thread of Violence. I really enjoyed Nicole Flattery's Nothing Special. And Yan Ge's ticklish short story collection Elsewhere. I think Kathryn Scanlan's Kick The Latch officially came out this year - it's a subversive little gem. Derek Owusu's Losing The Plot likewise. And finally, a book from 1963 - but NYRB Classics republished it this year so it counts - Dino Buzzati's A Love Affair, translated by Joseph Green. Book of the year 1963 and 2023.
Rónán Hession
Collected Works by Lydia Sandgren, translated by Agnes Broomé, was an impressive debut that explored the complexities of a middle class Swedish family with Franzen-like scope and perceptiveness. Hostages of Memory is an accomplished debut novel by Syrian writer Haitham Hussein, translated by Jona Fras. Set along the Turkish-Syrian border, it is an intergenerational story about lives are lived “on the thin line between death from starvation and famished survival.” While there is certainly lots of hardship in the book, it is a story with lots of personality and insight. You, Bleeding Childhood by Italian writer Michele Mari, translated by Brian Robert Moore, is a colourful and idiosyncratic depiction of a young boy’s life.
From Romania, was the excellent collection of Rabbinical stories The Fate of Yaakov Maggid by Ludovic Bruckstein, translated by Alistair Ian Blyth – full of humour and seasoned wisdom, it anthologises the fables of the author’s own distinguished family lineage of Hassidic rabbis and writers. Charco Press produces consistently high quality novels year after year, but their standout for me was A Little Luck by Argentinian writer Claudia Piñeiro, and translated by Frances Riddle – a superbly constructed novel about motherhood and regret.
The Booker might have overlooked several worthy English contenders, but the independent publishing scene continues to excite. In particular, Let Me Go On, by Paul Griffiths, is a highly inventive virtuoso novel from one of the most interesting writers around.