The best books of 2023

This list is part of the best books of 2023.

Join 1,707 readers and share your 3 favorite reads of the year.

My favorite read in 2023

Book cover of Yield: The Journal of an Artist

Ellen Prentiss Campbell Why did I love this book?

Truitt’s last journal, published after her death, harvests a sculptor’s long lifetime, paying attention to the experience of living: working, creating, family and friendship, loving and losing, and aging and death.

A renowned sculptor, although increasingly frail as she ages, she never stops creating. Instead, she adjusts the scale of her work, yielding, and accepting the limits of her aging body. As a young woman, she chose to be a sculptor rather than a writer but is a close observer and exquisite describer of everything she encounters, including weather, great art, history, family dynamics, and personalities.

I live just blocks from her former home and studio. It is inspiring to be able to walk to the alley behind her house and imagine her at work in her backyard studio.  

By Anne Truitt,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Yield as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Named by the New Yorker as one of the best books of 2022, this posthumously published work serves as the fourth and final volume in Anne Truitt's remarkable series of journals

"Impressive. . . . Truitt lyrically looks back on 80 years of life. . . . [T]hese daily entries . . . offer a version of Truitt free of artifice as she meditates on the sacred and mundane. . . . This sparks with intelligence."-Publishers Weekly

"Truitt wrote as she sculpted, returning to the past again and again to find fresh truths. . . . A model of discipline…


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My 2nd favorite read in 2023

Book cover of Kristin Lavransdatter

Ellen Prentiss Campbell Why did I love this book?

Exploring Oslo this summer, we stumbled upon an intriguing statue of Sigrid Undset, a Nobel Laureate in Literature. Her epic family trilogy of medieval Norway has never been out of print.

I began reading it on our flight back to the States. The flight flew by. The book casts a spell, transporting the reader back in time. Undset weaves a vivid tapestry of Medieval Norway as she tells the story. The historical detail is specific and beautifully realized but never reads like “research,” which I admired as a novelist as well as a reader. The characters’ circumstances are determined by the times, but their passions, yearnings, joys, and sorrows are universal.

I became lost in the book and hated to finish it.

By Sigrid Undsett,

Why should I read it?

3 authors picked Kristin Lavransdatter as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

'[Sigrid Undset] should be the next Elena Ferrante' -Slate

The Nobel Prize-winning masterpiece by Norway's literary master

Kristin Lavransdatter is the epic story of one woman's life in fourteenth-century Norway, from childhood to death. Sensitive and rebellious Kristin is sent to a convent as a girl, where she meets the charming but irresponsible Erlend. Defying her parents' wishes to pursue her own desires, she marries and raises seven sons. However, her husband's political ambitions threaten catastrophe for the family, and the couple become increasingly estranged as the world around them tumbles into uncertainty.

With its captivating heroine and emotional potency,…


My 3rd favorite read in 2023

Book cover of Never

Ellen Prentiss Campbell Why did I love this book?

A review copy of Joel F. Johnson’s debut novel, came to me this spring in advance of publication. Sadly, I did not have time to read it. Months later, I rediscovered it in my book basket. A lucky find! 

Johnson tells a retrospective coming-of-age story set in a fictional Southern town during the Civil Rights movement. The narrator, now elderly and living in Boston, flashes back to the transformative summer when he first began to recognize his own privilege and unthinking prejudice, his father’s racism, and his mother’s quiet defiance.

This novel is a subtle, nuanced story. The characters are unique, and the issues they wrestle with are timely and relevant. Book groups seeking an engaging novel to provoke meaningful discussion should add this book to their schedule.  

By Joel F. Johnson,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Never as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

“Those were just the times.” That’s how Morris “Little” Nickerson has always chosen to describe the incongruities of his childhood in the segregated south. But when a call from his older sister prompts Little, who is now in his seventies, to return to his hometown of LaSalle, Georgia, he finds himself having to reexamine the childhood he's kept encased in glass all these years.

As he tries to make sense of the events of one particularly eventful summer, Little tells of Reverend Robert McAllister, the father of his best friend, who speaks the high-flown language of social change but preaches…


Don‘t forget about my book 😀

Frieda's Song

By Ellen Prentiss Campbell,

Book cover of Frieda's Song

What is my book about?

My novel is inspired by renowned psychiatrist Frieda Fromm-Reichmann and her custom-built cottage on the grounds of the Chestnut Lodge Sanatorium.

Fleeing Nazi Germany in 1935, Frieda came to the Lodge in Rockville, Maryland. She established the Lodge’s reputation for innovative treatment of mental illness, dying in her cottage under mysterious circumstances in 1957. Decades later, psychotherapist Eliza Kline and her teenage son Nick live in Frieda’s Cottage, next to the closed and abandoned hospital. Eliza feels Frieda’s lingering influence and develops a relationship with her ghostly mentor. 

Frieda’s Song explores how the work, the people, and the homes we love shape our lives. The abandoned hospital burned, but Frieda’s Cottage next door remained, and I, a psychotherapist and author, began this novel.

Book cover of Yield: The Journal of an Artist
Book cover of Kristin Lavransdatter
Book cover of Never

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