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 Small Things Like These

Eve Joseph Why did I love this book?

1.     I love this book for so many reasons. First off, the language is exquisite. Each sentence is crafted beautifully and with utter simplicity.

You know from the first pages that you are in the hands of a gifted storyteller and that, much like Coleridge’s wedding guest, you will be unable to turn from the tale once it begins. Without giving anything away I think the ending of this 114-page novella is perhaps the most moving thing I have ever read. I couldn’t believe the writer was going to go where she went. It left me reeling. 

By Claire Keegan,

Why should I read it?

19 authors picked Small Things Like These as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize

"A hypnotic and electrifying Irish tale that transcends country, transcends time." —Lily King, New York Times bestselling author of Writers & Lovers

Small Things Like These is award-winning author Claire Keegan's landmark new novel, a tale of one man's courage and a remarkable portrait of love and family

It is 1985 in a small Irish town. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a coal merchant and family man faces into his busiest season. Early one morning, while delivering an order to the local convent, Bill makes a discovery which forces him…


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My 2nd favorite read in 2023…

Book cover of A Grandmother Begins the Story

Eve Joseph Why did I love this book?

This book, by the Indigenous storyteller Michelle Porter, is one that I savoured for its beauty and audacity.

The book does not arbitrarily differentiate between the human world and the animal world. Everything is invited in and has a voice. It is a beautifully told, magical story. I am finding great pleasure in reading new Indigenous voices and am grateful that there is growing diversity in who is being published these days.

Voices we rarely hear from are now inviting people into worlds that have always existed but have not always been accessible.

By Michelle Porter,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked A Grandmother Begins the Story as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Written like a crooked Metis jig, A Grandmother Begins the Story follows five generations of women and bison as they reach for the stories that could remake their worlds and rebuild their futures.

Carter is a young mother, recently separated. She is curious, angry, and on a quest to find out what the heritage she only learned of in her teens truly means.

Allie, Carter's mother, is trying to make up for the lost years with her first born, and to protect Carter from the hurt she herself suffered from her own mother. Lucie wants the granddaughter she's never met…


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My 3rd favorite read in 2023…

Book cover of A Cluster of Noisy Planets

Eve Joseph Why did I love this book?

My third favorite book was a book of prose poetry that delighted, inspired, and awed me with its astonishing leaps and playfulness.

I write prose poetry so the joy of finding a poet who excels in this form and from whom I have much to learn was a true pleasure. I keep this book close to me in the way you keep a loved one close. The poems literally reveal the world in new ways and make me want to write. Perhaps a marker of any good book is how it inspires the reader.

This small book of poetry inspired me deeply. 

By Charles Rafferty,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked A Cluster of Noisy Planets as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Charles Rafferty's latest collection of prose poems turns philosophical. In A Cluster of Noisy Planets, Rafferty captures the rhythms and patterns of life as a lover, father, and poet, distilling each moment to its essence and grounding them collectively in the wider perspective of a changing world, the constant turning of the stars and the changing seasons of the New England countryside. With a knowing nod to the passage of time-day to day, year to year, epoch to epoch-these lyrical poems form a record of the profound, ephemeral joys, losses, and echoes of commonplace moments.


Don‘t forget about my book 😀

In the Slender Margin: The Intimate Strangeness of Death and Dying

By Eve Joseph,

Book cover of In the Slender Margin: The Intimate Strangeness of Death and Dying

What is my book about?

Using the threads of her brother's early death and her twenty years of work in hospice care, Eve Joseph utilizes history, religion, philosophy, literature, personal anecdote, mythology, poetry, and pop culture to discern the unknowable and illuminate her travels through the land of the dying. This is neither an academic text nor a self-help manual; rather, it is a foray into the land of death and dying as seen through the lens of art and the imagination.

Rather than relying solely on narrative, In the Slender Margin gains momentum from a build-up of thematic resonances. Joseph writes toward thinking about death and in the process finds the brother she lost as a young girl. She wrote the book as a way to understand what she had seen: the mysterious and the horrific.