My five favourite books of 2023

The novels I can't stop thinking about this year

What a glorious year it’s been for books! I’ve read a heap of them in 2023 (the highest number I’ve ever read in a year, in fact), so choosing my favourites has been no easy task. In the end, I just about managed to whittle it down to these five…

The Rachel Incident by Caroline O’Donoghue

Rachel, a student in Ireland who also works part time in a bookshop, has fallen someone. The only issue is that the man she is head over heels for is her university professor - and he’s married. So why not ask her friend James to help her seduce him?

The Rachel Incident is an absolute banger. It’s about love and lust, but also about friendship and growing up and the joy, pain and messiness of being in your early twenties. I defy you not to get lost in the heady brilliance of it.

Yellowface by Rebecca F Kuang

June Hayward is an author whose career is going nowhere, while her former university friend Athena Liu is a literary star. So when she witnesses Athena die in a freak accident, June finds herself taking her unfinished manuscript, and submitting it to her agent as her own. Soon she has published it under the name Juniper Song, complete with a new ethnically ambiguous author photo. What’s the worst that could happen?

There are so many reasons I loved this book that it is hard to fit them all in here, but I’ll try. It’s smart, both in its satire of the publishing industry and its nuanced look at cultural appropriation and cancel culture. It is so pacy and there is so much jeopardy it is near-impossible to tear yourself away. Yellowface is also darkly comic, comes with a deliciously unreliable narrator, and is so very entertaining.

We All Want Impossible Things by Catherine Newman

When you describe the premise of this novel - that Ash’s best friend of 40 years is dying of terminal cancer, and the majority of the story takes place in a West Massachusetts hospice - it sounds like an unbearable read. But please trust me when I tell you that We All Want Impossible Things is also one of the most wryly funny and joyous books I have ever come across.

While visiting her lifelong friend Edi, Ash plucks her chin hairs for her, watches Netflix, falls asleep besides her, and flirts with the hospice staff. Her life outside involves co-parenting two (brilliantly drawn) teenage girls with her ex-husband, and sleeping with people she perhaps shouldn’t. Newman is so astute on all the most important things in life - friendship, family, food, love, sex, death - that my copy of the book is filled with underlined paragraphs that I have sent to friends.

Tom Lake by Ann Patchett

Lara’s three grown up daughters come home to their cherry farm in Michigan one spring and beg her to recount the story of the romance she once shared with a now mega-famous actor.

Tom Lake is a story about family, destiny, regret, and roads not taken. The only problem with this novel is that it’s the kind where you want to devour it in a state of giddy delight, while also savouring each page. A typical Ann Patchett, then - and a true diamond of a book.

Good Material by Dolly Alderton

The Everything I Know About Love author has done it again. By which I mean, here is another book which I’m telling you now will be fervently adored, discussed between friends (probably in pubs over a bottle of wine and a packet of crisps), and kept in treasured spots on bookshelves.

Good Material is told from the perspective of Andy, a flailing, 35-year-old comedian whose long-term girlfriend has broken up with him out of the blue. As he reels in the aftermath of heartbreak, he tries to work out what went wrong. This novel is filled with shrewd observations about friendship, ageing, lost love, lost selves, but it also happens to incredibly funny. Good Material already feels like a contemporary classic.

And finally…

This is my last newsletter of the year so I’ll leave you this annual Hidden Books Game, and a huge thank you for being here.