Here we GO! My favorites from 2023. Strangely, many of these are set in the wilds or centered around nature this year, but lots of variety, too. (Blurbs mostly attributed to Goodreads and/or Amazon!)
Literary Fiction
The Bee Sting — Paul Murray (longlisted for Booker Prize 2023) *This is a long one!
The Barnes family is in trouble. Dickie's once-lucrative car business is going under—but rather than face the music, he's spending his days in the woods, building an apocalypse-proof bunker with a renegade handyman. His wife Imelda is selling off her jewelry on eBay, while their teenage daughter Cass seems determined to binge-drink her way through her final exams. And twelve-year-old PJ is putting the final touches to his grand plan to run away from home.
The North Woods — Daniel Mason
A sweeping novel about a single house in the woods of New England, told through the lives of those who inhabit it across the centuries. Traversing cycles of history, nature, and even literature, North Woods shows the myriad, magical ways in which we're connected to our environment and to one another, across time, language and space.
The Bird Hotel — Joyce Maynard
After a childhood filled with heartbreak, Irene, a talented artist, finds herself in a small Central American village where she checks into a beautiful but decaying lakefront hotel called La Llorona at the base of a volcano. With a mystery at its center and filled with warmth, drama, romance, humor, and a little magic realism.
The Vaster Wilds — Lauren Groff
A servant girl escapes from a colonial settlement in the wilderness. She carries nothing with her but her wits, a few possessions, and the spark of god that burns hot within her. A work of raw and prophetic power.
Demon Copperhead — Barbara Kingsolver *This is a long one!
Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer. He braves foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses—reckoning with his own invisibility in a popular culture where even the superheroes have abandoned rural people in favor of cities.
The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store — James McBride
In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. McBride shows us that even in dark times, it is love and community—heaven and earth—that sustain us.
Wish You Were Here — Jodi Picoult
Diana O'Toole is perfectly on track—until a virus that felt worlds away appears in the city, and her dream Galápagos vacation becomes an indefinite quarantine.
Starling House — Alix E. Harrow
Eden, Kentucky, is just another dying, bad-luck town, known only for the legend of E. Starling, the reclusive nineteenth-century author who wrote The Underland—and disappeared. Opal knows better than to mess with haunted houses or brooding men.
Bright Young Women — Jessica Knoll
The story of two women from opposite sides of the country who become sisters in their fervent pursuit of the truth. It proposes a new narrative—that it was the women whose lives were cut short who were the exceptional ones.
Happiness for Beginners — Katherine Center
A year after getting divorced, Helen Carpenter, thirty-two, lets her annoying younger brother talk her into signing up for a wilderness survival course. Three weeks in the remotest wilderness of Wyoming.
The River We Remember — William Kent Krueger
On Memorial Day in Jewel, Minnesota, the body of wealthy landowner Jimmy Quinn is found floating in the Alabaster River. Sheriff Brody Dern struggles to find the truth while putting to rest the demons from his own past.
Tom Lake — Ann Patchett
In the spring of 2020, Lara's three daughters return to the family's orchard in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake.
Fantasy / Science Fiction
Fairy Tale — Stephen King (I'll say it again…I am a Stephen King fan!)
Charlie Reade looks like a regular high school kid, but he carries a heavy load. When he meets Howard Bowditch, a recluse with a big dog in a big house at the top of a big hill, he inherits a locked shed containing a portal to another world.
Fourth Wing — Rebecca Yarros (plus Book #2, Iron Flame)
Twenty-year-old Violet Sorrengail was supposed to enter the Scribe Quadrant. Now her tough-as-talons mother has ordered her to join the candidates striving to become dragon riders—where dragons don't bond to "fragile" humans. They incinerate them.
A Court of Thorns and Roses — Sarah J. Maas (#2 A Court of Mist and Fury, #3 A Court of Wings and Ruin)
When nineteen-year-old huntress Feyre kills a wolf in the woods, a terrifying creature arrives to demand retribution. Dragged to a treacherous magical land, Feyre discovers that her captor is one of the lethal, immortal faeries who once ruled her world.
Good Romantic Happy-Place Reading
The Seven Year Slip — Ashley Poston
Anything by Emily Henry
Anything by Katherine Center (just discovered her this year! Awesome story-teller):
Hello Stranger · The Bodyguard · Things You Save in a Fire · How to Walk Away · The Bright Side of Disaster · Happiness for Beginners
Anything by Abby Jimenez:
Part of Your World · Yours Truly · The Friend Zone · The Happily-Ever After Playlist