I know I’m allowed to recommend books from any year, but I’m going to keep myself to books published in 2023.
It was a tough year for me – my mother died, my husband lost his job, my sister was nearly killed by a drunk driver – and this epic, unforgettable novel reminded me about what outlasts all adversity and allows us to go on living: love. It tells the story of two soldiers in the First World War who escape the front and survive as refugees by their wiles, their humanity, and their solidarity with one another.
This is a novel of mysterious power and staggering beauty that, for a few weeks, allowed me to live a parallel life when I really needed one.
'This life-stuffed novel is Aleksandar Hemon's masterpiece' - David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas
The epic, cross-continental tale of a love so strong it conquers the Great War, revolution, and even death itself.
As the Archduke Franz Ferdinand arrives in Sarajevo one June day in 1914, Rafael Pinto is busy crushing herbs and grinding tablets behind the counter at the pharmacy he inherited from his father. It's not quite the life he had expected during his poetry-filled student days in libertine Vienna, but it's nothing a dash of laudanum, a summer stroll and idle fantasies can't put in perspective.
I’ve been thinking a lot this year about how the world has been transformed in my lifetime through cheap air travel, mass media, and finally social media. They made us all more connected yet somehow more alienated from each other.
This book about people living in isolated, traditional societies in the Andaman Islands and their uneasy relationship with “civilization” shows, like no other book I’ve read, how much we lost in the long twentieth century.
Adam Goodheart (full disclosure – a friend) is a gifted writer who is capable of turning the most humdrum tasks, such as opening a TV screen on a plane, into a wondrous experience while making the strangest encounters seem vividly present. This is an amazing, luminous, fascinating book.
"A deft combination of adventure, history, reportage and elegy."-Washington Post
A journey to the coast of North Sentinel Island, home to a tribe believed to be the most isolated human community on earth. The Sentinelese people want to be left alone and will shoot deadly arrows at anyone who tries to come ashore. As the web of modernity draws ever closer, the island represents the last chapter in the Age of Discovery-the final holdout in a completely connected world.
In November 2018, a zealous American missionary was killed while attempting to visit an island he called "Satan's last stronghold," a…
You need books to get you completely out of your narrow, familiar world, because you have to bring your own imagination to a book in a way that you don’t have to with films or theater.
This brilliant, funny, heart-breaking novel about a family in rural Ethiopia at a time of political persecution and turmoil in the 1970s-80s will put you into a world where your only bearings are love and longing. I was travelling around Ethiopia in October and was reading this book the whole way, and it both enlightened and transcended my experiences. It will for you too, no matter where you are.
“An endearing coming-of-age story. . . . Sharp and witty. . . . A wily and operatic novel. . . . Propulsive.” —The Washington Post
"The History of a Difficult Child is an extraordinary novel." —Maaza Mengiste, Booker Prize-shortlisted author of The Shadow King
“An exhilarating novel by a powerful new writer.” —Elif Batuman, author of Pulitzer-Prize finalist The Idiot and Either/Or
A breathtaking, tragicomic debut novel about the indomitable child of a scorned, formerly land-owning family who must grow up in the wake of Ethiopia’s socialist revolution
Wisecracking, inquisitive, and bombastic, Selam Asmelash is the youngest child in her…
This is an anthology of some of the finest American writing on growing up in the working class. It’s about the triumphs and humiliations of childhood in poverty by writers who experienced them in the flesh. My co-editor, the late Nancy Atwood, and I intended this book as a text for courses in social work, psychology, and creative writing, and it has fulfilled that role. But it has unexpectedly taken a second life as a showcase for all readers on excellence in memoir-writing. If you love memoirs, if you have written a memoir or are thinking of writing one, and especially if you love good non-fiction, this book is for you.
