20 must-read works of literary fiction in 2023

Best novels and short story collections of 2023, from Jhumpa Lahiri's Roman Stories to Chetna Maroo's Western Lane and JM Coetzee's meditations on desire and remembrance. (Photo by Dom via Pexels)

Recently, the English comedian, actor, and writer Robert Webb spoke about his experiences as a judge for the 2023 Booker Prize. Though it was interesting and fun, he said, it required extreme endurance. The sheer number of books meant that reading all of them was impossible: “You finish as many as you can and the other ones you put to one side after a respectable but undisclosed fraction has been read.”

The person tasked with rounding up the year’s best books faces a similar predicament. It’s clearly a selective endeavour, not definitive in the least. With that off one’s chest, here’s a pick, in no particular order, of 20 memorable works of literary fiction published in 2023.

1. Roman Stories, Jhumpa Lahiri. These nine stories written in Italian and translated by the author and Todd Portnowitz are elegant, ruminative and tinged with melancholia. Simple on the surface, yet anything but simple in their exploration of place and identity.

2. Mansions of the Moon, Shyam Selvadurai. A sensitive, spirited portrayal of the life of Yasodhara, who was married to Siddhartha Gautama, and her reactions to his becoming the Buddha, the Awakened One.

3. House of Doors, Tan Twan Eng. An atmospheric recreation of Somerset Maugham’s visit to Penang, incorporating a doomed love affair, the rise to prominence of Sun Yat Sen, and a very English scandal.

4. For Now It Is Night, Hari Krishna Kaul. A selection of short stories from the work of the noted Kashmiri writer, translated by a team of collaborators including his niece, Kalpana Raina. Contains all of his trademark dry wit and sense of the surreal rooted in the region’s past and present.

5. Loot, Tania James. A historical novel about the afterlife of Tipu Sultan’s automated tiger, Loot is a compact, beguiling take on the nature of plunder and the throttling of potential.

6. Enter Ghost, Isabella Hammad. A haunting, febrile account of a stage actress’s return to her homeland of Palestine and her involvement in an Arabic production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the West Bank. The depiction of preparations and rehearsals captures a larger reality of the region’s unequal, overlapping hierarchies.

7. Hurda, Atharva Pandit. A powerful and ingeniously structured debut novel that goes behind the headlines to explore the disappearance and murder of three young girls in a remote Maharashtrian village.

8. Sakina’s Kiss, Vivek Shanbhag. Translated from the Kannada by Srinath Perur, this unpretentious, revelatory look at the Indian middle-class psyche hinges on a Bengaluru couple’s discovery of their teenage daughter’s exploits, linked to broken promises and usurped family property.

9. History’s Angel, Anjum Hasan. A measured depiction of the milieu of a Muslim history teacher in contemporary Delhi which asks us to consider what is gained and lost in the face of a whirlwind of nativist nationalism.

10. Victory City, Salman Rushdie. A novel about a sorceress dreaming a civilisation into existence, inspired by the real-life history of Vijayanagar. It examines the lust for power and the power of stories in a rich, capacious and typically allusive manner.

11. August Blue, Deborah Levy. A slim novel that follows a former piano prodigy and her doppelganger across Europe. Stuffed with symbols and enigmas that make it, in the words of one critic, “a mistress-piece”.

12. Quarterlife, Devika Rege. A quietly confident and ambitious debut about the amorphous political identities of a group of twenty- and thirty-somethings in Mumbai after the pivotal year of 2014. Narrated in sentences that effortlessly carry the weight of shifting impressions and descriptions.

13. A Practical Guide to Levitation, José Eduardo Agualusa. This collection of puckish, idiosyncratic stories by the Angolan writer, translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn, is presided over by the spirits of Borges and Cortazar. A delightful antidote to the ponderous realism of much literary fiction.

14. Prophet Song, Paul Lynch. Enough has been written about this Booker winner already; suffice to repeat that it’s distinguished by an overlooked aspect of living under a dystopian regime: the daily, deadening effects of repressive circumstances.

15. Couplets, Maggie Millner. Girl meets girl in this ingenious love story of losing illusions and gaining self-knowledge. It’s largely narrated, as you may have guessed, in rhyming couplets.

16. Western Lane, Chetna Maroo. A short, affecting account of a young girl overcoming loss with the help of the game of squash. Portrayed with uncommon restraint and the quiet accrual of revelations over time.

17. Forbidden Notebook, Alba de Céspedes. First published in Italian in 1952 and newly translated by Ann Goldstein, this novel is in the form of secret diary entries by a woman who has to juggle the roles of housewife, mother and office-worker. Her struggles against these social categories continues to resonate.

18. The Most Secret Memory of Men, Mohamed Mbougar Sarr. A layered investigation into the enigma of an fictional author’s novel. Translated from the French by Lara Vergnaud, it grapples with themes of colonialism, racism, and the unequal dynamics between Senegal and the West.

19. The Pole and Other Stories, J.M. Coetzee. Austere, elegant late-period meditations by the 83-year-old writer on mortality and passion. The title story, in particular, is a nuanced investigation of desire and remembrance.

20. Impossible Creatures, Katherine Rundell. It’s billed as a book for children, but don’t let that stop you from being captivated by this richly-imagined tale of adventures in a magical world inhabited by dragons, centaurs, a griffin, and other mythical beasts.