The best (and worst) fiction books of 2023, Eleanor Catton to Zadie Smith

Birnam Wood was Eleanor Catton's first novel since winning the Booker Prize 10 years ago. Photo / Ebony Lamb

Popularity is not a guarantee of quality. Last year’s fiction ­offered ample proof of that: as Claire Allfree wrote here in Nov­em­ber 2022, the big novelists, from Ian McEwan to Jonathan Coe, had let us down, and a generation of less heralded writers had seen the chance – thank goodness – to shoulder past.

In 2023, the trend did not abate. Zadie Smith hasn’t written a bad book yet, but The Fraud (Hamish Hamilton, $37), her first work of historical fiction and the biggest novel of the year, was a disappointment. Set largely in Victorian England, and pivoting on the (real-life) saga of a mysterious man who said he was the vanished aristocrat Roger Tichborne, it sketches a picture of Britain’s imperial pomp through a female abolitionist’s eyes. I defer to our critic Erica Wagner, who found the novel “richly enjoy­able”, but I thought Smith swerved too quickly between psychological depth and satirical snark.

Salman Rushdie’s Victory City (Vintage, $30) was also avowedly feminist. Throughout his entertaining tale of a magical 14th- to 16th-century empire, the only constant is the mistreatment and endurance of the goddess who gave it life. Rushdie’s sheer love of fiction is irrepressible, though he could have done with a calmer editor. Yet the novel dates from what now seems like another era, completed before the attack on its author in August 2022 – and next year’s memoir of that event, Knife, is a different prospect in every way.

The Fraud was Zadie Smith's first work of historical fiction and the biggest novel of the year. Photo / Getty Images

Ignore the obvious disasters – Sebastian Faulks’s The Seventh Son (Penguin, $34.99) is better undiscussed – and you’re left with two big A-list successes, both overdue.

Birnam Wood (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $38), Eleanor Catton’s first novel since winning the Booker Prize 10 years ago, trampled the division between “literary” and “genre” fiction. Part eco-thriller, part satire on millennial angst, it pitches a group of New Zealand activists against the machinations of a billionaire; her ­climax in particular is swift, showy fun.

In a different temper, The Shards (Swift Press, $41) was Bret Easton Ellis’s finest novel in a quarter-century. This autofictional tale of schoolday parties, gussied up with a serial killer, is richly drawn and full of sly self-reference. Trim the odd flabby patch and it’s as good as his breakout 1980s work.

The Shards, published this year, was Bret Easton Ellis’s finest novel in a quarter-century. Photo / Casey Nelson

That need for a trim, however, was another theme of the year. If only the major publishers would ditch their Instagram-friendly merchandise and invest instead in blue pencils and expertise. It’s no coincidence that short-story collections often came out on top. JM Coetzee’s The Pole and Other Stories (Vintage Publishing, $53.40), if you believe the whispers, may be his final work: if so, its blend of languor and heartache was a fittingly warm farewell. With So Late in the Day (Faber & Faber, $23), meanwhile, Faber gambled that a single 64-page tale of a lonely man could hold a book by itself: thanks to Claire Keegan’s crystalline prose, they were right. And in The Coiled Serpent (Atlantic Books, $43.30), Cam­illa Grudova vented what she told us this month was her loathing for “standard” fiction, in an excellent second collection of exultantly gross-out tales.

What of the concerns? The fiction world, in general, seems tired of “cancel culture”, but among the exceptions was The Late Americans (Jonathan Cape, $37). In his second novel, Brandon Taylor tracked a circle of friends and lovers in Iowa City, and dissected, with savvy comedy, what our reviewer Nikhil Krishnan called the “self-deceiving mutual admiration” of university seminars. Catherine ­Lacey’s fourth, Biography of X (Granta, $37), framed as a hap­hazard portrait of a postwar artist, offered both a satire on the self-regard of the artistic and literary worlds, and a rumination on America’s recent conservative turn.

Still, those who think fiction today is crushed under ideology were proven wrong in 2023. Instead, politics came in sidelong, with more cunning than belligerence. Sarah Bernstein’s Study for Obedience (Granta, $36.60), the best novel I read all year, follows a woman who moves to a rural village, where, for all her wish to serve her new community, she meets sinister prejudice. No part of it furnishes a straight­forward moral: it turns threat into an ambience, rather than a chain of thumping events.

Maya Binyam’s Hangman (Faber Factory, $39.99) was similarly elegant, revealing, stage by stage, the harrowing backstory to its protagonist’s eerie – and drily comic – journey across sub-Saharan Africa. And Lauren Aimee Curtis’s magnificent Strangers at the Port (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, $38) flicks through the narrations of three characters, framing and reframing a commun­ity’s exodus from a dying Mediterranean isle. What unites all the novels above is attention to literary form: politics happens obliquely, not in capital letters on a placard.

Several novelists succeeded on a more interior scale. Soldier Sailor (Faber, $45.70), Claire Kilroy’s tale of a woman struggling with new motherhood, became the talk of the town; her insistent rhythms sweep you along just as anxiety can, or love. Megan Nolan’s Ordinary Human Failings (Vintage Publishing, $35) was another standout, the grubby tale of a tabloid reporter in 1990s London who takes the family of an alleged child killer and plies them with booze in order to flush their secrets out. On a grander canvas, but with no loss of intimacy, came Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck (Granta, $46.80), about an age-gap romance in the dying years of East Germany. Even as lust and hope curdle into regret and abuse, its protagonists remain too recognisable.

Among the subgenres to continue thriving was the “feminist retelling”. Those shelves have often leant towards the classical – Mad­el­ine Miller’s Circe, Pat Barker’s The Women of Troy – but this year’s high­light retold a tale no older than many of those who are reading this. Sandra Newman’s Julia (Granta, $58.50) takes Nineteen Eighty-Four and recasts it through ­Win­ston’s lover’s eyes. “I wanted to know more,” Newman told us ­dis­armingly this autumn, “about her time writing pornography for the Party.”

Between the novels and the short stories came several books that smeared the chalk line between the two forms. Jonathan Escoffery’s If I Survive You (4th Estate, $32.99), which follows the queasily comic trib­ulations of a young Jamaican man, can be viewed as a single novel or a chain of linked stories. Since Esc­offery’s material is the flaky ­con­nections of familial strife, it was clever to make that his formal crux. The same could be said of Kathryn Scanlan’s Kick the Latch (Daunt Books, $23), a pithy presentation of real-life interviews with a Midwestern horse-trainer. In calling her book “a novel”, Scanlan makes you look with a beadier eye at the craft of story­telling itself – manoeuvres she describes as “the liberties of fiction”.

Scanlan’s success points to another rule of 2023: look past the big beasts and imprints if you want some truly unusual triumphs. Daunt Books, Scanlan’s publisher, spent valuable time in the archives and hunting abroad. One highlight, of the former type, was Lord Jim at Home (Faber Factory, $35.20) by Dinah Brooke, a one-time enfant terrible of British fiction who vanished from the scene in the late 1970s. A black comedy of manners, it has “the unhinged realism of a fairground mirror”, according to Claire Allfree, whom we sent to interview Brooke, now 88, about her extraordinary life.

Elsewhere, Faber’s “Editions” line impressed, reanimating books from Sven Holm’s Termush (Faber, $29.50), a 1967 tale of a luxury resort bunkered against an apocalypse, to Jean Stafford’s The Mountain Lion (Faber, $32.20), a 1947 story of two vicious children who bond over their mother’s waning love. Galley Beggar Press, meanwhile, was on the post-Orwell beat, offering Adam Biles’s Beasts of England (Galley Beggar Press, $35.90), a chaotic sequel that brings Manor Farm into the post-Brexit and “post-truth” age. Its square political bites were fitting in the year Martin Amis died.

An author published in Britain by Fitzcarraldo Editions again won the Nobel Prize: the Norwegian dramatist and novelist Jon Fosse. His ­latest, A Shining (Fitzcarraldo Editions, $24.99), appeared soon after, and its vision of strange apparitions in a night-bound forest proved to be magisterially, intensely spiritual. As with the late Cormac McCarthy, who also died this year – and had been, for my money, the greatest living novelist – Fosse is a writer unlike almost any other. If you’ve never read him, do. Fitz­carraldo also continued to translate Annie Ernaux, Fosse’s predecessor as Nobel laureate: her slim auto­fictional books – this year, The Young Man (Fitzcarraldo Editions, $24) and Shame (Fitzcarraldo Editions, $27.99) – were praised by Sally Rooney, in a chat we published in the summer, as “attempts to intervene in the passage of time”. (On the literary scene, Ernaux’s status remains unimpeachable, though as a sceptic, I was pleased that Lucy Ellmann gave us some acerbic dissent, writing that Ernaux “never delivers. She’s holding out on us, obscuring subjective experience with silly details.”)

But the gem has been Verso, the UK’s closest thing to a mainstream radical publisher. It’s building one of Britain’s most interesting fiction lists: two highlights were Hit Parade of Tears (Verso, $38.90), a collection of fascinatingly skewy stories by the late writer and model Izumi Suzuki, and Bluebeard’s Castle (Verso Books, $42.60), by the film director Anna Biller, a stylised retelling of the old fable that mixes self-reference and gaudy excess. Its ­heroine, Judith, a gothic-romance novelist, shacks up in a crumbling castle with a brooding husband; the sex, death and pricey cognac are of a wildly enjoyable piece.

Jilly Cooper's latest novel, Tackle, was released this year. Photo / Getty Images

Biller’s novel wasn’t alone in that. A whole seam of fiction prioritised pleasure and campy fun. Leading the pack was Jilly Cooper, whose Tackle! (Transworld Publishers, $26) saw Rupert Campbell-Black swap the polo fields for the Premier League. Luxuriating in libido on our behalf, Cleo Watson declared it “splendidly exaggerated”, and she would know: a former Downing Street adviser, her own erotic novel, Whips (Little, Brown Book Group, $61.40), appeared this summer. A riot of Westminster bed-hopping, full of oddly familiar characters, it seemed tailor-made to be read – with interest or terror – by everyone in British politics.

Finally, the gongs. This year’s Booker, announced on November 23, went to Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song (Bloomsbury, $42). Elsewhere, the Goldsmiths Prize went to Cuddy (Bloomsbury, $29.59) by Benjamin Myers, a ­diz­zy­­ingly inventive retelling of St Cuthbert’s life. The Orwell Prize for Pol­it­i­cal Fiction was given to Tom Crewe’s debut The New Life (Penguin Random House, $37), about two gay men trying to overturn prejudice in the dying Victorian years; while the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fic­tion was won by Lucy Caldwell’s These Days (Faber, $40.70), the story of four days in Belfast during the Blitz.

The latter, in truth, appeared last year, yet its harrowing richness, its fidelity to historical trauma, came to mind when reading Lynch’s Prophet Song, a shallow tale of a war-torn near-future Ireland. So here’s one last heartening trend: in the past few years, we’ve had too many dystopian novels, but it seems that they’re on the wane. Fiction should offer more than real life with the names changed and the politics simplified. After all, the novels of the year, in various ways, give us exactly what fiction should – something sly or strange that you couldn’t possibly expect.