Lucienne Boyce's 3 favorite reads in 2023

Celia Fremlin has been my discovery of the year. Her books have been described as “domestic noir” – and The Hours Before Dawn is nothing if not “noir” as the heroine, sleep-deprived mother Louise, is forced to confront the terrible danger that has infiltrated her home.

Fremlin’s writing is elegant, witty, and perceptive, and the book is a real page-turner that kept me reading long into the night.

But what really drew me in was Fremlin’s exposure of the dark side of the domestic with her dissection of the gendered family dynamic – the pressure on Louise to be a good wife and mother, to take on the entire burden, emotional and physical, of running the home. At the same time, no one takes her or her concerns seriously. That’s almost the most terrifying thing – that this is how it was for women – and to a large extent, still is.

Fremlin wrote sixteen novels, and I’ve binge-read every one of them, as well as three short story collections.

I love reading books about creativity and learning from other writers and artists how they approach their work. I didn’t know much about Cave or his music, and I came across this book after reading a newspaper interview he gave to Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury.

I was impressed by the intelligence, passion, and honesty of Cave’s conversation. A man willing to talk about Jesus, the Bible, faith, religion, grace, the sacred, and defy the dreadful silence surrounding bereavement, loss, and grief was someone who was surely worth finding out more about.

He was. Faith, Hope and Carnage is about all those things: about creativity, faith, hope, and love. And I loved it. 

Wuxia. Need I say more? Wesley Chu’s The Art of Prophecy has it all: an intriguing fantasy world, epic struggles between empires, battles, thwarted destinies – and martial arts.

It poses the fascinating question: what happens to the prophesied hero when it turns out the prophecy is wrong, and he isn’t a hero after all?

What I loved most about this book are the female characters: warrior Sali, assassin Qisami, and Taishi. The scene-stealer for me is Taishi. She’s a master of martial arts, she can travel on the wind, she’s harsh, bad-tempered, an exacting teacher to the unfortunate-prophesied-hero-who isn’t (Wen Jiang, a spoiled young man who has to learn the painful lesson that he isn’t the marvel he thought he was), and she’s old.

The story unfolds from their conflicting points of view, and an exciting story it is. I can’t wait to see how it continues in the second in the series, The Art of Destiny.