2023 NYT Notable Books - Fiction & Poetry

"The conquest of Mexico is over, and Juan de Toñanes is just one of the many inglorious soldiers eking a small existence on the land he helped conquer. When he receives one last mission, to hunt down a renegade Indian who calls himself the Padre and preaches a dangerous heresy, Juan realizes it may be his last chance to create the future he's always dreamed of. But as he moves deep into the unexplored northern territory, hot on the Padre's trail,...

"The Saint of Bright Doors sets the high drama of divine revolutionaries and transcendent cults against the mundane struggles of modern life, resulting in a novel that is revelatory and resonant. Fetter was raised to kill, honed as a knife to cut down his sainted father. This gave him plenty to talk about in therapy. He walked among invisible powers: devils and anti-gods that mock the mortal form. He learned a lethal catechism, lost his shadow, and...

4 stars

"From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Tinkers, a novel inspired by the true story of Malaga Island, an isolated island off the coast of Maine that became one of the first racially integrated towns in the Northeast. In 1792, formerly enslaved Benjamin Honey and his Irish wife, Patience, discover an island where they can make a life together. Over a century later, the Honeys' descendants and a diverse group of neighbors are desperately poor, isolated,...

5 stars

In the late 1950s--a hostile time for gay men--reporter Nick Russo forms an unlikely friendship with Andy Fleming, the son of a newspaper-tycoon father, and as they work closely together, they fall in love and must decide if, for the first time, they're willing to fight.

"An elegant, stirring, insistent new book bearing out actions taken and not taken, from the acclaimed National Book Award finalist"--

"Surreal, hilarious, and shrewdly poignant--a novel about a Korean American woman living in Berlin whose obsession with a K-pop idol sends her to Seoul on a journey of literary self-destruction."-- The narrator, a Korean American woman living in Berlin, is obsessed with Moon: anything not-Moon in her life fell away when she beheld the K-pop idol in concert. Moon dances as if his movements are creating their own gravitational field. Seized by ineffable...