Mark Abley's 3 favorite reads in 2023

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.

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.

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.