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 The Colony

Mark Abley Why did I love this book?

For its razor-sharp evocation of land and sea. For its trenchant insights into Irish history. For its elliptical style. But most of all, for its characters.

Magee sets her novel on a small island off Ireland’s west coast in 1979 when the Troubles were at their height in Northern Ireland. The dynamic running through the narrative involves a bitter dispute between two self-important visitors: an English painter and a French academic.

But the islanders themselves provide the emotional heart of the book, especially a teenage boy named James, who is patronized by one of the visitors and betrayed by the other.

When I remember The Colony now, I think first and foremost of that lonely, vulnerable boy.

By Audrey Magee,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked The Colony as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE
LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2022

'Vivid and memorable.' SARAH MOSS
'Luminous.' Observer
'I utterly ADORED it.' MARIAN KEYES

He handed the easel to the boatman, reaching down the pier wall towards the sea.

Mr Lloyd has decided to travel to the island by boat without engine - the authentic experience.

Unbeknownst to him, Mr Masson will also soon be arriving for the summer. Both will strive to encapsulate the truth of this place - one in his paintings, the other by capturing its speech, the language he hopes to preserve.

But the people who…


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My 2nd favorite read in 2023

Book cover of There Is No Blue

Mark Abley Why did I love this book?

The Toronto novelist Martha Baillie has written about her family before – in the guise of fiction, that is.

Now, in a memoir, she strips away the fictional covering and lays her family bare: her artistic, sometimes remote mother; her tender-hearted, professorial father; and her brilliantly gifted sister, Christina, who battled mental illness for decades before taking her own life in the family home in 2019.

Baillie faces up to her own partial responsibility for her sister’s death. But she does so in graceful, chiseled prose, as elegant as it is unflinching.

There Is No Blue shows that elegies, even when written from deep pain, can be profoundly life-affirming.

By Martha Baillie,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked There Is No Blue as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

THE GLOBE AND MAIL: BOOKS TO READ IN FALL 2023

Martha Baillie's richly layered response to her mother's passing, her father's life, and her sister's suicide is an exploration of how the body, the rooms we inhabit, and our languages offer the psyche a home, if only for a time.

Three essays, three deaths. The first is the death of the author's mother, a protracted disappearance, leaving space for thoughtfulness and ritual: the washing of her body, the making of a death mask. The second considers the author's father, his remoteness, his charm, a lacuna at the centre of the…


My 3rd favorite read in 2023

Book cover of Diary of a Young Naturalist

Mark Abley Why did I love this book?

Who could have expected a 14-year-old autistic boy, regularly bullied at school, to write with enthusiasm and eloquence about the natural world? Yet that’s exactly what the Irish teenager Dara McAnulty does.

He has a flair for language and a wild passion for other life forms. Whether he’s writing about dandelions (“A blaze of uplifting yellow to brighten even the greyest of days”), spiders (“They’re such a beguiling sight – it hurts me to think how people so carelessly kill them”), or birds (“Sparrow song, a coven of cackling. A raucous, glorious racket”), he wears his big heart on his sleeve.

Reading this book rekindled my own love of nature. It also taught me many lessons about autism. 

By Dara McAnulty,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked Diary of a Young Naturalist as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

WINNER OF BOOK OF THE YEAR, NARRATIVE NON-FICTION BRITISH BOOK AWARDS 2021

Rediscover the natural world with the multi-award winning phenomenon and youngest ever major literary prize winner in UK history.

'Miraculous memoir . . . profoundly moving' Observer

'Dara is an extraordinary voice and vision: brave, poetic, ethical, lyrical' Robert Macfarlane

'It's a diary but essentially timeless . . . It's really, really special' Chris Packham

ALSO WINNER OF: THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE FOR NATURE WRITING 2020, AN POST IRISH BOOK AWARD FOR NEWCOMER OF THE YEAR 2020, BOOKS ARE MY BAG READERS AWARDS FOR NON-FICTION 2020; SHORTLISTED FOR: WATERSTONES…


Don‘t forget about my book 😀

Strange Bewildering Time: Istanbul to Kathmandu in the Last Year of the Hippie Trail

By Mark Abley,

Book cover of Strange Bewildering Time: Istanbul to Kathmandu in the Last Year of the Hippie Trail

What is my book about?

A literary travel book with a difference: it’s not only a portrait of some astonishing places, it’s a personal journey through time. In 1978, I left Oxford for Istanbul and traveled east with a friend along the ‘hippie trail’: an arduous overland trek on local buses and trains at a turbulent historical moment.

The journals I kept – 120 single-spaced pages – made this book possible. Decades later, I could set off those vivid, day-to-day impressions with some reflections on what has happened in Asia since my student days.

I came down hard on my younger self; like so many other young Westerners, I was privileged, innocent, sometimes thoughtless. But I encountered tremendous generosity, and I hope Strange Bewildering Time honors the people I met.

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