2023 NYT Notable Books - Fiction & Poetry


Showing 21 - 40 of 48  There are a total of 48 valid entries on the list.
Book cover for "A history of burning"
Star rating for A history of burning
Author:
Book cover for "Holly"
Star rating for Holly
Average Rating:
4.4 stars
Description:
"Stephen King's Holly marks the triumphant return of beloved King character Holly Gibney. Readers have witnessed Holly's gradual transformation from a shy and reclusive (but also brave and ethical) homebody in Mr. Mercedes to Bill Hodges's partner in Finders Keepers and End of Watch to a full-fledged, smart and occasionally tough private detective on her own in The Outsider and If It Bleeds. In this new novel, Holly once again claims the spotlight,...
Book cover for "A house for Alice"
Star rating for A house for Alice
Description:
"A sweeping and gorgeously rendered exploration of grief and yearning, following the fracturing of an multinational family in the wake of its patriarch's death. In the early hours of June 14, 2017, the world watches as flames leap up the sides of a residential high-rise in West London, devouring Grenfell Tower and the makeshift lives it houses-those of London's immigrants, its refugees, its working class. At the same time across town, another spark...
Book cover for "The Iliad"
Star rating for The Iliad
Author:
Average Rating:
5 stars
Description:
Homer's Iliad describes the final year of the Trojan War, a legendary conflict between an alliance of Greek cities and the city of Troy in Anatolia.; The greatest literary landmark of classical antiquity masterfully rendered by the most celebrated translator of our time. When Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey appeared in 2017--revealing the ancient poem in a contemporary idiom that "combines intellectual authority with addictive readability"...
Book cover for "Ink blood sister scribe"
Star rating for Ink blood sister scribe
Average Rating:
2.5 stars
Description:
"Two estranged half sisters tasked with guarding their family's library of magical books must work together to unravel a deadly secret at the heart of their collection--a tale of familial loyalty and betrayal, and the pursuit of magic and power"--

26. Kairos

Book cover for "Kairos"
Star rating for Kairos
Average Rating:
3 stars
Description:
"Jenny Erpenbeck (the author of Go, Went, Gone and Visitation) is an epic storyteller and arguably the most powerful voice in contemporary German literature. Erpenbeck's new novel Kairos-an unforgettably compelling masterpiece tells the story of the romance begun in East Berlin at the end of the 1980s when nineteen-year-old Katharina meets by chance a married writer in his fifties named Hans. Their passionate yet difficult long-running affair takes...
Book cover for "Kantika"
Star rating for Kantika
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
"A kaleidoscopic portrait of one family's displacement across four countries, Kantika--"song" in Ladino--follows the joys and losses of Rebecca Cohen, feisty daughter of the Sephardic elite of early 20th-century Istanbul. When the Cohens lose their wealth and are forced to move to Barcelona and start anew, Rebecca fashions a life and self from what comes her way--a failed marriage, the need to earn a living, but also passion, pleasure and motherhood....
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 "Not even the dead"
Star rating for Not even the dead
Description:
"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,...
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 "The saint of bright doors"
Star rating for The saint of bright doors
Description:
"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...
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 "This other Eden"
Star rating for This other Eden
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
"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,...