2023 NYT Notable Books - Fiction & Poetry


Showing 21 - 37 of 37  There are a total of 48 valid entries on the list.
Book cover for "Land of milk and honey"
Star rating for Land of milk and honey
Author:
Average Rating:
4.5 stars
Description:
"About a Chinese American chef who, lured to a decadent, enigmatic colony of the superrich in a near future in which food is disappearing, discovers the meaning of pleasure and the ethics of who gets to enjoy it, altering her life and, indirectly, the world"--
Book cover for "Lone women"
Star rating for Lone women
Average Rating:
5 stars
Description:
"Adelaide Henry carries an enormous steamer trunk with her wherever she goes. It's locked at all times. Because when the trunk is opened, people around her start to disappear... The year is 1915, and Adelaide is in trouble. Her secret sin killed her parents, and forced her to flee her hometown of Redondo, California, in a hellfire rush, ready to make her way to Montana as a homesteader. Dragging the trunk with her at every stop, she will be one of...
Book cover for "The most secret memory of men"
Star rating for The most secret memory of men
Description:
"An impressive coming-of-age novel and a gripping investigation into the life of a mysterious author. A prolific novel and a true ode to literature in the vein of Roberto Bolaño's Savage Detectives, written by one of the most prominent figures in contemporary literature. In 2018, Diaegane Latyr Faye, a young Senegalese writer, discovers a legendary book in Paris, published in 1938 and entitled Le labyrinthe de l'inhumain (The Maze of Inhumanity)....
Book cover for "The new naturals"
Star rating for The new naturals
Description:
"After losing her child and seeing the world as an increasingly dangerous place, a young Black woman from Boston decides to construct a separate society at an abandoned restaurant in Western Massachusetts. She locates a benefactor and soon it all begins to take shape, but it doesn't take long for problems to develop"-- "An abandoned restaurant on a hill off the highway in Western Massachusetts doesn't look like much. But to Rio, a young Black woman...
Book cover for "North woods"
Star rating for North woods
Average Rating:
4.1 stars
Description:
"When a pair of young lovers abscond from a Puritan colony, little do they know that their humble cabin in the woods will become the home of an extraordinary succession of human and nonhuman characters alike. An English soldier, destined for glory, abandons the battlefields of the New World to devote himself to apples. A pair of spinster twins navigate war and famine, envy and desire. A crime reporter unearths a mass grave--only to discover that the...
Book cover for "The nursery"
Star rating for The nursery
Description:
"The Nursery details a new mother's spiraling descent into a state of complete disaffection. Following the birth of her baby, "Button," she has a difficult time identifying with her post-pregnancy body, Button "itself," and finding comfort in her relationships-with the exception of her elderly upstairs neighbor, whom she strikes up a tentative friendship with. Plagued by intrusive thoughts and paranoia, she withers in the self-imposed prison of her...
Book cover for "Our share of night"
Star rating for Our share of night
Description:
"In 1981, a young father and son set out on a road trip across Argentina, devastated by the mysterious death of the wife and mother they both loved. United in grief, the pair travels to her family home near Iguazau Falls, where they must confront the horrific legacy she has bequeathed. For the woman they are grieving came from a family like no other--a centuries-old secret society called the Order that pursues eternal life through ghastly rituals....
Book cover for "Pineapple Street"
Star rating for Pineapple Street
Average Rating:
3.4 stars
Description:
"A deliciously funny, sharply observed novel of family, wealth, love and tennis, this zeitgeisty debut follows three women in an old Brooklyn Heights clan: one who was born with money, one who married into it, and one, the millennial conscience of the family, who wants to give it all away. Darley, the eldest daughter in the Stockton family, has never worried about money. The product of generational wealth and capitalist success, Darley renounced her...
Book cover for "The reformatory"
Star rating for The reformatory
Average Rating:
2.5 stars
Description:
In the Jim Crow South, twelve-year-old Robbie Stephens, Jr., who can see ghosts, is sent to The Reformatory where boys forced to work to remediate their so-called crimes have gone missing, while his sister Gloria rallies everyone in Florida to get him out before it's too late.
Book cover for "Take what you need"
Star rating for Take what you need
Author:
Average Rating:
5 stars
Description:
"From award-winning novelist Idra Novey comes a "deft and surprising novel" with two unforgettable female voices. (Rumaan Alam) Set in the Allegheny Mountains of Pennsylvania, Take What You Need follows the estrangement and reconciliation of stepmother and daughter, Jean and Leah. Leah always felt her path diverged from Jean's and left her hometown without looking back, making a life for herself in the city as a young mother and academic. Now that...
Book cover for "Tom Lake"
Star rating for Tom Lake
Average Rating:
4.2 stars
Description:
Recalling the past at her daughters' request, Lara tells the story of a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance, which causes her daughters to examine their own lives and reconsider the world and everything they thought they knew.
Book cover for "The unsettled"
Star rating for The unsettled
Description:
"Set in the 1980s in racially and politically turbulent Philadelphia and in the tiny town of Bonaparte, Alabama-about a mother fighting for her sanity and survival"--
Book cover for "Victory city"
Star rating for Victory city
Average Rating:
3 stars
Description:
"In the wake of an insignificant battle between two long-forgotten kingdoms in fourteenth-century southern India, a nine-year-old girl has a divine encounter that will change the course of history. After witnessing the death of her mother, the grief-stricken Pampa Kampana becomes a vessel for the goddess Parvati, who begins to speak out of the girl's mouth. Granting her powers beyond Pampa Kampana's comprehension, the goddess tells her that she will...
Book cover for "We could be so good"
Star rating for We could be so good
Average Rating:
5 stars
Description:
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.
Book cover for "Western lane"
Star rating for Western lane
Description:
After the death of her mother, eleven-year-old Gopi, who has been playing squash since she was a small child, is enlisted in a quietly brutal training regimen by her father, and soon the game becomes her world as she slowly distances herself from her sisters in hopes of becoming the best.
Book cover for "Yellowface"
Star rating for Yellowface
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
What's the harm in a pseudonym? Bestselling sensation Juniper Song is not who she says she is, she didn't write the book she claims she wrote, and she is most certainly not Asian American--in this chilling and hilariously cutting novel from the #1 New York Times bestselling author R. F. Kuang in the vein of White Ivy and The Other Black Girl. Authors June Hayward and Athena Liu were supposed to be twin rising stars: same year at Yale, same debut year...
Book cover for "Y/N"
Star rating for Y/N
Author:
Description:
"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...