Gary Blackwood's 3 favorite reads in 2023

This was a real outlier for me. I seldom read bestsellers, and I almost never read mysteries, but for some reason The Maid intrigued me and I picked it up at the library.

Though novels often disappoint me (when it comes to books, I’m very picky!) this one certainly did not. I read it, maybe not in a single sitting, but in the course of a single day.

It was very well written and cleverly plotted, but what really made it shine was the protagonist, Molly. Because she’s socially awkward, she misreads people’s actions and what they say, which makes her a different sort of unreliable narrator—a delightful and memorable one.

I look forward to the sequel.  

Fearnoch is about as different from The Maid as it is possible to be—except that, again, it didn’t seem to be my sort of book at first glance or even second.

I tend to shy away from books in which the dialogue has no quotation marks and those with scads of central characters, each of whom offers their particular point of view, sometimes a mere paragraph at a time. But McEwan’s prose was so compelling that I soldiered on, and was so glad I did.

The characters are almost all seriously flawed, yet you end up empathizing with them. And the book’s portrait of life in a small town on the skids rings sadly true. This one isn’t a bestseller—it’s published by Breakwater, a smallish Newfoundland press—but it deserves to be.   

This one was recommended to me by a friend (who is also one of our local library’s staff) whose opinion I trust.

But I didn’t get around to picking it up (not an easy task, since it runs to over 700 pages) until I went to the laundromat and discovered Fayne lurking on the shelves of giveaway books (okay, it’s too hefty to actually lurk). We ignore such signs at our peril.

It proved, for a change, to be exactly the sort of book I tend to like: one that draws you inexorably into another world—in this case, Victorian England/Scotland—one that reeks of strangeness and mystery (not the Agatha Christie sort) The characters—particularly Charlotte, the protagonist, who is brilliant but even more socially awkward than Prose’s Molly—are a bit strange as well, but likable. At least for the first third or so of the novel.

But the author frequently drops hints that they may conceal mysteries of their own. And they certainly do—mysteries that are nearly impossible to foresee.