Erna Buffie's 3 favorite reads in 2023

At times, Groff's book's pace and intensity left me gasping for air, but at others, I was comforted and lulled by its achingly beautiful descriptions of the natural world as seen through the eyes of its central character, a young woman known simply as “the girl.” 

Leaving behind famine, disease, and indentured servitude at a colonial settlement modeled on Jamestown, the girl escapes into what was then a dangerous and vast wilderness only to discover that while she may now be free, she is still a slave to the forces of Nature. 

Visceral, dark, and transcendent, it’s a compelling book about the natural world's power and its capacity to subdue and obliterate mere humans if we fail to adapt.

I’m usually not a fan of what I refer to as “fat books,” but this one was well worth the 715 pages. Set in Kerala, a small Christian community on the southern tip of India, it follows the lives of Big Amichee—a 12-year-old child bride—and her descendants through colonial rule and into the early days of Indian independence.

At the heart of the novel is a family curse, with each generation plagued by the inexplicable drowning of a child. Part of the book is centered on unraveling that medical mystery, but the broader plot is driven by a family saga—the calamities that afflict them and the love that binds them together.

I loved its larger-than-life, often deeply flawed characters and the author’s richly detailed descriptions of ordinary lives in an extraordinary time and place. 

I loved Tim Pears’ novel because, like Groff’s book, it’s as much the story of a lost landscape as it is about the lives of two young lovers trying to escape the masters that oppress them. Set during the Roman occupation of Britain, those two central characters are on the run - Quintus, a young man enslaved by the Romans, and Olwen, daughter of a Celtic chief who has been given as a peace offering to the Roman general who has just defeated her tribe.

But if Quintus and Olwen’s love affair and escape are central to the novel, a third character—Nature—plays a pivotal role in their journey. 

Lush and meditative, Pear’s book reimagines the lives of ordinary people, those who left no written records of their own, and the beautiful, often deadly world they inhabited. It is a gem of a book.