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The best books of 2023

This list is part of the best books of 2023.

We've asked 1,627 authors and super readers for their 3 favorite reads of the year.

Shepherd is reader supported. When you buy books, we may earn an affiliate commission.

My favorite read in 2023…

Book cover of Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took On a World at War

Ronald Bruce St John Why did I love this book?

This is one of the best books I have read in many years.

In a time when foreign correspondents always traveled first class, it tells the fascinating story of four reporters, John Gunther, H. R. Knickerbocker, Vincent Sheean, and Dorothy Thompson, correspondents who took on dictators while rewriting the rules of modern journalism. 

Glamorous, gutsy, and irreverent to the bone, they roamed Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, detailing the rise of fascism and its likely impact on the world order.

In the process, they landed interviews with the likes of Hitler, Mussolini, Nehru, and Gandhi and helped shape American views of the wider world.

By Deborah Cohen,

Why should I read it?

3 authors picked Last Call at the Hotel Imperial as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE • A prize-winning historian’s “effervescent” (The New Yorker) account of a close-knit band of wildly famous American reporters who, in the run-up to World War II, took on dictators and rewrote the rules of modern journalism

“High-speed, four-lane storytelling . . . Cohen’s all-action narrative bursts with colour and incident.”—Financial Times

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, NPR, BookPage

They were an astonishing group: glamorous, gutsy, and irreverent to the bone. As cub reporters in the 1920s, they roamed across a war-ravaged world, sometimes perched atop mules on wooden saddles,…


My 2nd favorite read in 2023…

Book cover of The Night Will Have Its Say

Ronald Bruce St John Why did I love this book?

Ibrahim al-Koni is a Libyan novelist little known in the English-speaking world.

Set in the seventh century, Night Will Have Its Say is a retelling of the Muslim wars of conquest in North Africa narrated from the perspective of the conquered peoples.

Written in Al-Koni’s unique and enchanting voice, his lyrical prose speaks to themes that are intensely timely. In detailing conflicts is a distant time and place, he addresses the futility of war, the privilege of the elite at the expense of the many, and the destruction of indigenous cultures and natural habitats.

The book is highly readable and full of wisdom applicable to today’s world.

By Ibrahim al-Koni, Nancy Roberts (translator),

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Night Will Have Its Say as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

International Booker Prize finalist and "one of the Arab world's most innovative novelists" (Roger Allen) delivers a brilliant retelling of the Muslim wars of conquest in North Africa

The year is 693 and a tense exchange, mediated by an interpreter, takes place between Berber warrior queen al-Kahina and an emissary from the Umayyad General Hassan ibn Nu'man. Her predecessor had been captured and killed by the Umayyad forces some years earlier, but she will go on to defeat Ibn Nu'man's forces.

The Night Will Have Its Say is a retelling of the Muslim wars of conquest in North Africa during…


My 3rd favorite read in 2023…

Book cover of You Don't Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War

Ronald Bruce St John Why did I love this book?

Elizabeth Becker tells the story of three largely unknown but extraordinary female journalists who came into their own during the Vietnam War and the related conflict in Cambodia.

Catherine Leroy was a French photojournalist whose of-the-moment battlefield images led to her becoming the first woman to win a prestigious George Polk Award for photography.

Kate Webb was a no-nonsense correspondent from Australia who was erroneously reported captured, killed, and cremated by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, only to emerge from the jungle very much alive.

After paying her own way to Vietnam, Frances FitzGerald’s first article, published in the Village Voice, was an indictment of the chaotic US policy in Vietnam. Later, she published Fire in the Lake, winner of the Bancroft Prize, Pulitzer Prize, and National Book Award.

Leroy, Webb, and Fitzgerald were three women from three different parts of the world who had one thing in common: they arrived in Vietnam at a time when female reporters were not welcome.

By Elizabeth Becker,

Why should I read it?

6 authors picked You Don't Belong Here as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The long buried story of three extraordinary female journalists who permanently shattered the official and cultural barriers to women covering war.

Kate Webb, an Australian iconoclast, Catherine Leroy, a French dare devil photographer, and Frances FitzGerald, a blue-blood American intellectual, arrived in Vietnam with starkly different life experiences but one shared purpose: to report on the most consequential story of the decade.

At a time when women were considered unfit to be foreign reporters, Frankie, Catherine and Kate paid their own way to war, arrived without jobs, challenged the rules imposed on them by the military, ignored the belittlement and…


Plus, check out my book…

Peruvian Foreign Policy in the Modern Era

By Ronald Bruce St John,

Book cover of Peruvian Foreign Policy in the Modern Era

What is my book about?

For 200 years, Peru's foreign policy focused on achieving core objectives central to the well-being of any state, including sovereignty, territorial integrity, economic independence, national security, and continental solidarity. In pursuit of these objectives, the content and direction of Peruvian foreign policy have been heavily influenced by the conflicting demands of independence and interdependence as determined by multiple internal and external forces.

In The Foreign Policy of Peru, the author detailed Peruvian foreign policy from independence in 1824 to 1990. Peruvian Foreign Policy in the Modern Era continues that discussion in a chronological treatment of Peruvian foreign policy from 1990 to the present.

The book focuses on the ongoing impact of domestic politics, economic interests, security concerns, and alliance diplomacy on contemporary Peruvian foreign policy.