best biographies books 2023

The Best New Biographies of 2023

CJ Connor is a cozy mystery and romance writer whose main goal in life is to make their dog proud. They are a Pitch Wars alumnus and an Author Mentor Match R9 mentor. Their debut mystery novel BOARD TO DEATH is forthcoming from Kensington Books. Twitter: @cjconnorwrites | cjconnorwrites.com

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Read on to discover nine of the best biographies published within the last year. Included are life stories of singular people, including celebrated artists and significant historical figures, as well as collective biographies.

The books included in this list have all been released as of writing, but biography lovers still have plenty to look forward to before the year is out. A few to keep your eye out for in the coming months:

The World According to Joan Didion by Evelyn McDonnell (HarperOne, September 26)
Einstein in Time and Space by Samuel Graydon (Scribner, November 14)
Overlooked: A Celebration of Remarkable, Underappreciated People Who Broke the Rules and Changed the World by Amisha Padnani (Penguin Random House, November 14).

Without further ado, here are the best biographies of 2023 so far!

Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom by Ilyon Woo

Ellen and William Craft were a Black married couple who freed themselves from slavery in 1848 by disguising themselves as a traveling white man and an enslaved person. Author Ilyon Woo recounts their thousand-mile journey to seek safety in the North and their escape from the United States in the months following the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act.

The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession by Michael Finkel

Written over a period of 11 years with exclusive journalistic access to the subject, author Michael Finkel explores the motivations, heists, and repercussions faced by the notorious and prolific art thief Stéphane Breitwieser. Of special focus is his relationship with his girlfriend and accomplice, Anne-Catherine Kleinklaus.

King: A Life by Jonathan Eig

While recently published, King: A Life is already considered to be the most well-researched biography of Civil Rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. published in decades. New York Times bestselling journalist Jonathan Eig explores the life and legacy of Dr. King through thousands of historical records, including recently declassified FBI documents.

Why Willie Mae Thornton Matters by Lynnée Denise

This biography is part of the Why Music Matters series from the University of Texas. It reflects on the legendary blues singer’s life through an essay collection in which the author (also an accomplished musician) seeks to recreate the feeling of browsing through a box of records.

Young Queens: Three Renaissance Women and the Price of Power by Leah Redmond Chang

Historian Leah Redmond Chang’s latest book release focuses on three aristocratic women in Renaissance Europe: Catherine de’ Medici, Elizabeth de Valois, and Mary, Queen of Scots. As a specific focus, she examines the juxtaposition between the immense power they wielded and yet the ways they remained vulnerable to the patriarchal, misogynistic societies in which they existed.

Daughter of the Dragon: Anna May Wong’s Rendezvous with American History by Yunte Huang

Anna May Wong was a 20th-century actress who found great acclaim while still facing discrimination and typecasting as a Chinese woman. University of California professor Yunte Huang explores her life and impact on the American film industry and challenges racist depictions of her in accounts of Hollywood history in this thought-provoking biography.

Twice as Hard: The Stories of Black Women Who Fought to Become Physicians, from the Civil War to the 21st Century by Jasmine Brown

Written by Rhodes Scholar and University of Pennsylvania medical student Jasmine Brown, this collective biography shares the experiences and accomplishments of nine Black women physicians in U.S. history — including Rebecca Lee Crumpler, the first Black American woman to earn a medical degree in the 1860s, and Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders.

Larry McMurtry: A Life by Tracy Daugherty

Two years after the Pulitzer Prize-winning author’s death, this biography presents a comprehensive history of Larry McMurtry’s life and legacy as one of the most acclaimed Western writers of all time.

The Kneeling Man: My Father’s Life as a Black Spy Who Witnessed the Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. by Leta McCollough Seletzky

Journalist Leta McCollough Seletzky examines her father, Marrell “Mac” McCollough’s complicated legacy as a Black undercover cop and later a member of the CIA. In particular, she shares his account as a witness of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. at the Lorraine Motel.

Are you a history buff looking for more recommendations? Try these.

Best History Books by Era
Books for a More Inclusive Look at American History
Fascinating Food History Books

Tennessee Public School Closes Library in Response to Book Banning Law

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Best Biographies of 2023

MAY 16, 2023

by Jonathan Eig

An extraordinary achievement and an essential life of the iconic warrior for social justice. Full review >

SEPT. 12, 2023

by Tracy Daugherty

A definitive life of the novelist/bookseller/scriptwriter/curmudgeon of interest to any McMurtry fan. Full review >

APRIL 11, 2023

by Robert Greenfield

A masterful look at the wild life of an enigmatic artist that shows how captivating the truth can be. Full review >

AUG. 15, 2023

by Patti Hartigan

An authoritative portrait of a defiant champion of Black theater. Full review >

OCT. 3, 2023

by Will Hermes

An engrossing, fully dimensional portrait of an influential yet elusive performer. Full review >

by Walter Isaacson

Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator. Full review >

by Sally H. Jacobs

An essential book about an incomparably authentic American pioneer and the times in which she lived. Full review >

APRIL 4, 2023

by Robert "Mack" McCormick ; edited by John W. Troutman

A worthwhile investigation into a true legend of the blues. Full review >

MAY 2, 2023

by Jonny Steinberg

A magnificent portrait of two people joined in the throes of making South African history. Full review >

DEC. 5, 2023

by Judith Tick

As masterful and wonderful as its subject. Full review >

OCT. 31, 2023

by Ronald C. White

A revealing portrait of an American hero who deserves even wider recognition. Full review >

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The Best Memoirs of 2023

These ten books explore what it means to be a person..

The beauty of memoir is its resistance to confinement: We contain multitudes, so our methods of introspection must, too. This year’s best memoirs perfectly showcase such variety. Some are sparse, slippery — whole lives pieced together through fragmented memories, letters to loved ones, recipes, mythology, scripture. Some tease the boundary between truth and fiction. Others elevate straightforward narratives by incorporating political theory, philosophy, and history. The authors of each understand that one’s life — and more significantly, one’s self — can’t be contained in facts. After all, the facts as we remember them aren’t really facts. It’s their openness and experimentation that allow, at once, intimacy and universality, provoking some of our biggest questions: How does a person become who they are? What makes up an identity? What are the stories we tell ourselves, and why do they matter? These books might not spell out the answers for you, but they’ll certainly push you toward them.

10. Hijab Butch Blues , by Lamya H

NYC-based organizer Lamya H (a pseudonym) has described her memoir as “unapologetically queer and unapologetically Muslim .” What this looks like is a book that isn’t so much grappling with or reconciling two conflicting identities, but rather lovingly examining the ways each has supported and strengthened the other. Lamya provides close, queer readings of the Quran, drawing connections between its stories and her own experiences of persecution as a brown girl growing up in an (unnamed) Arab country with strict colorist hierarchies. Beginning with her study of the prophet Maryam — whose virgin pregnancy and general rejection of men brings a confused 14-year-old Lamya real relief during Quran class — Lamya draws on various religious figures to track her political, spiritual, and sexual coming of age, jumping back and forth in time as she grows from a struggling child into a vital artist and activist.

9. Better Living Through Birding , by Christian Cooper

On May 25, 2020, birder Christian Cooper was walking the Central Park Ramble when he asked a white woman on the same path to leash her dog. She refused, he started recording, and after both he and his sister posted the video on social media , the whole world saw her call 911 and falsely claim that an African American man was threatening both her and her dog. Cooper quickly found himself at the center of an urgent conversation about weaponized whiteness and police brutality against Black men in the U.S., amplified by another devastating video circulating that same day: George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police. Many will pick up Cooper’s memoir for his account of the interaction that captured international attention and forever changed his life — and it is a powerful, damning examination — but it is far from the main event. By the time it shows up, Cooper has already given us poignant recollections of growing up Black and gay (and in the closet) in 1970s Long Island, a loving analysis of science fiction, a behind-the-scenes look at the comic-book industry as it broke through to the mainstream, and most significantly, an impassioned ode to and accessible education on recreational birding. (The audiobook comes with interstitial birdsong!) Recalling his time at Harvard, Cooper turns repeatedly to his love of his English classes, and this background comes through in his masterful writing. An already prolific writer in the comic-book space, his memoir marks his first (and hopefully not last) foray into the long-form territory.

8. Love and Sex, Death and Money , by McKenzie Wark

McKenzie Wark is one of the sharpest, most exciting voices writing at the intersections of capitalism, community, gender, and sex — more broadly, everything in this title — and she is also criminally underread. In her epistolary memoir Love and Sex … , she looks at a lifetime of transitions — journeys not only through her gender, but also politics, art, relationships, and aging — and reflects on all the ways she has become the woman she is today, in letters to the people who helped shape her. Wark’s first letter is, fittingly, directed to her younger self. She acknowledges their infinite possible futures and that, in this way, this younger Wark on the brink of independence is the one most responsible for setting her on the path to this specific future. In theory, it’s a letter to offer clarity, even guidance, to this younger self, but really it’s a means of listening to and learning from her. Her letters to mothers, lovers, and others are as much, if not more, about Wark as they are about the recipients, but that self-reflection doubles as a testament to the recipients’ power. What comes across most strongly is Wark’s belief in ongoing evolution and education, and it’s hard not to leave inspired by that possibility.

7. A Man of Two Faces , by Viet Thanh Nguyen

Pulitzer Prize winner Viet Thanh Nguyen’s memoir maintains the singular voice of his fiction: audacious, poetic, self-aware. Written in nonlinear second-person stream of consciousness — its disjointedness represented on the page by paragraphs volleying from left to right alignment across the page — A Man of Two Faces recounts his life as a Vietnamese refugee in the U.S. When his family moves from wartime Vietnam to San Jose, California, 4-year-old Nguyen is placed in a different sponsor home than the rest of his family. The separation is brief, but it sets a tone of alienation that continues throughout his life — both from his parents, who left their home in pursuit of safety but landed in a place with its own brand of violence, and from his new home. As he describes his journey into adulthood and academia, Nguyen incorporates literary and cultural criticism, penetrating analyses of political history and propaganda, and poignant insights about memory and trauma.

6. Sure, I’ll Join Your Cult: A Memoir of Mental Illness and the Quest to Belong Anywhere , by Maria Bamford

It’s safe to say alt-comedian Maria Bamford’s voice isn’t for everyone. Those who get her anti-stand-up stand-up get it and those who don’t, don’t. Her absurdist, meta series Lady Dynamite revealed the work of a woman learning to recognize and love her brilliant weirdness, and in Sure, I’ll Join Your Cult , she channels that weirdness into a disarmingly earnest, more accessible account of both fame and mental illness. Centered on Bamford’s desperate pursuit of belonging, and the many, often questionable places it’s led her — church, the comedy scene, self-actualization conferences, 12-step groups, each of which she puts under the umbrella of the titular “cults” — Sure, I’ll Join Your Cult is egoless, eye-opening, uncomfortable, and laugh-out-loud funny. These are among the best qualities — maybe even prerequisites — of an effective mental-illness memoir, and Bamford’s has earned its keep in the top tier. If you’re thinking of skipping it because you haven’t connected with Bamford’s work before: don’t.

5. In Vitro: On Longing and Transformation , by Isabel Zapata

In Isabel Zapata’s intimate, entrancing memoir In Vitro , the Mexican poet brazenly breaks what she calls “the first rule of in vitro fertilization”: never talk about it. Originally published in Spanish in 2021, and with original drawings woven throughout, In Vitro is a slim collection of short, discrete pieces. Its fragments not only describe the invasive process and its effects on her mind and body, but also contextualize its lineage, locating the deep-seated draw of motherhood and conception, analyzing the inheritances of womanhood, and speaking directly to her potential child. All together, it becomes something expansive — an insightful personal history but also a brilliant philosophical text about the very nature of sacrifice and autonomy.

4. The Night Parade , by Jami Nakamura Lin

When Jami Nakamura Lin was 17 years old, she checked herself into a psych ward and was diagnosed bipolar. After years experiencing disorienting periods of rage, the diagnosis offers validation — especially for her historically dismissive parents — but it doesn’t provide the closure that mainstream depictions of mental illness promise. In The Night Parade , intriguingly categorized as a speculative memoir, Lin explains that if a story is good, it “collapses time”; in other words, it has no beginning or end. Chasing this idea, Lin turns to the stories of her Japanese, Taiwanese, and Okinawan heritage, using their demons, spirits, and monsters to challenge ideas of recovery and resituate her feelings of otherness. Intertwined in this pursuit is her grappling with the young death of her father and the birth of her daughter after a traumatic miscarriage. Extensively researched — citing not only folklore but also scholars of history, literary, and mythology — and elevated by her sister Cori Nakamura Lin’s lush illustrations, The Night Parade is both an entirely new perspective on bipolar disorder and a fascinating education in mythology by an expert who so clearly loves the material. It might be Lin’s first book, but it possesses the self-assurance, courage, and mastery of a seasoned writer.

3. Doppelganger , by Naomi Klein

After the onset of the COVID pandemic, as the U.S. devolved into frenzied factions, sociopolitical analyst Naomi Klein found herself in the middle of her own bewildering drama: A substantial population, especially online, began to either confuse or merge her with Naomi Wolf, a writer who’d gone from feminist intellectual to anti-vaxx conspiracy theorist. Klein’s initial bemusement becomes real concern verging on obsession as she fixates on her sort-of doppelgänger and starts questioning the stability of her identity. Klein becomes entangled in the world of her opposite, tracing the possible pipelines from leftism to alt-right and poking at the cracks in our convictions. Throughout, she nails the uncanniness of our digital existence, the ways constant performance of life both splinters and constrains the self. What happens when we sacrifice our humanity in the pursuit of a cohesive personal brand? And when we’re this far gone, is there any turning back?

2. The Woman in Me , by Britney Spears

Throughout the yearslong campaign to release Britney Spears from a predatory conservatorship , the lingering conspiracy theories questioning its success , and the ongoing cultural discourse about the ways public scrutiny has harmed her, what has largely been missing is Spears’s own voice. In her highly anticipated memoir, she lays it all out: her upbringing in a family grappling with multiple generations of abuse, the promise and betrayal of stardom, her exploitation and manipulation by loved ones, and the harrowing, dehumanizing realities of her conservatorship . These revelations are tempered by moments of genuine joy she’s found in love, motherhood, and singing, though it’s impossible to read these recollections without anticipating the loss — or at least the complication — of these joys. Most touching are her descriptions of her relationships with her sons; her tone is conversational, but it resonates with deep, undying devotion. It’s an intimate story, and one that forces questions about our treatment of mental illness, the ethics of psychiatric practices, the relationships between public figures and their fans, and the effects of fame — especially on young women. Justice for Britney, forever.

1. Pulling the Chariot of the Sun , by Shane McCrae

When Shane McCrae was 3 years old, his white maternal grandparents told his Black father they were taking Shane on a camping trip. It wasn’t the first time they’d done so, but this time, they never returned. What followed was a life full of instability, abuse, and manipulation, while his grandparents — including a grandfather who had, more than once, trawled cities for Black men to attack — convinced McCrae his father had abandoned him and that his Blackness was a handicap. It’s clear McCrae is first and foremost a poet; the rhythm of his prose and his hypnotic evocation of sensory memory reveals the way a lifetime of lies affected his grasp on his past. Maybe he can’t trust the facts of his past, but he certainly knows what it felt like, what it looked like. As he excavates and untangles muddied memories, contends with ambivalent feelings about his grandmother and mother, and ultimately comes to terms with their unforgivable robbery of a relationship with both his father and his true, full self, McCrae’s pain bleeds through his words — but so too does a gentle sense of acceptance. We are lucky to bear witness.

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10 Best Biographies/Memoirs of 2023

10 best biographies of 2023.

It’s been a big year for biographies, with everything from Prince Harry to Britney Spear delivering their own books. There have been a lot of excellent books in this category this year .

In this curated list, we delve into the best biographies that captivated us this year. As usual, the books below are listed in no particular order but of course, do let us know your favourites in the comments below!

So join us as we celebrate the narratives that have defined 2023, each a unique testament to the enduring power of storytelling.

The Woman in Me – Britney Spears

The Woman in Me is an intimate and courageous memoir that chronicles the remarkable journey for one of pop music’s most iconic figures, Britney Spears. This deeply personal narrative unfolds against the backdrop of her historic June 2021 court testimony, a moment that not only altered Britney’s trajectory in life, but also resonated with people around the globe. Spears’s story is one of resilience and transformation, capturing the essence of freedom, motherhood, and survival.

Spears opens up about her life in this book with honesty and humor that is both refreshing and profound. She shares her experiences in the limelight, detailing the struggles and triumphs that have defined her career and personal life. Her account goes beyond the sensational headlines, offering readers a glimpse into the heart and soul of an artist who has captivated millions.

Spears’s narrative is more than a memoir; it’s a powerful testament to the strength and resilience inherent in her character. “The Woman in Me” is a celebration of the healing power of music and love, and the vital importance of autonomy in storytelling. Britney’s voice—clear, unfiltered, and unapologetic—echoes throughout the pages, emphasizing the significance of a woman taking control of her narrative and speaking her truth.

This book is not only a milestone in Spears’s life but also an inspiring tale of hope and empowerment, making it a must-read for her fans and supporters of women’s rights alike.

A Memoir of My Former Self – Hilary Mantel

A Memoir of My Former Self is a rich collection of Hilary Mantel’s finest journalistic and personal writings, spanning four decades. Known for her distinguished career as a novelist, Mantel brings her keen insight and eloquent prose to a variety of subjects, offering readers a glimpse into both her life and the broader world as she sees it. Embracing her belief that “ink is a generative fluid,” she crafts essays that resonate with intention and depth.

Mantel’s work traverses a wide array of themes. She reflects on nationalism and her own sense of identity, delves into the interplay between our dreams and waking life, and revisits the enduring mythos of Princess Diana.

From her unique childhood to her obsession with Thomas Cromwell, which culminated in the acclaimed Wolf Hall trilogy, this memoir presents the evolution of Hilary Mantel’s life and thoughts. A Memoir of My Former Self is a wonderful book and certainly one of the best released this year.

The Forgotten Girls – Monica Potts

In this poignant and revealing book, an accomplished journalist revisits her roots in a small Arkansas town to unravel the stark contrast between her life and that of her childhood best friend, Darci.

Growing up in the economically declining Ozarks, both Monica and Darci were bright, working-class girls with dreams that stretched far beyond the confines of their troubled community. United by their love for reading and learning, they faced the harsh realities of their town: broken homes, alcoholism, and the gradual decay of local businesses and factories.

While Monica managed to break free, attending college and pursuing her dreams, Darci’s story took a tragically different turn. Years later, as Monica covers poverty and its impacts, she learns of the alarming decrease in life expectancy among women in rural areas like her hometown.

Darci represents a harrowing statistic: a single mother battling meth and prescription drug addiction, struggling with unemployment and near homelessness. Through her narrative, she sheds light on the critical issues affecting poor, rural white women in America, offering an intimate and eye-opening look at the realities often overlooked in national discourse.

Abroad in Japan – Chris Broad

In Abroad in Japan, Chris Broad shares his adventurous journey into Japan in his often humorous journey of adapting to life in rural northern Japan. Arriving with no experience in teaching and little command of the Japanese language, Chris wonders if his stint as an English teacher might be short-lived. Instead, what unfolds is a decade of rich experiences in one of the world’s most intriguing and complex cultures.

This is a captivating narrative that spans all forty-seven prefectures of Japan, from tranquil rice fields to the vibrant streets of Tokyo. Chris recounts a variety of extraordinary experiences, including a nerve-wracking North Korean missile scare, an embarrassing encounter in a love hotel, and an unforgettable week with Japan’s biggest movie star. His stories are not just entertaining; they offer a deep dive into the heart of Japanese culture.

Chris’s journey is a testament to the transformative power of travel and the value of embracing the unknown with an open mind and heart.

Strong Female Character – Fern Brady

Strong Female Character is a ground-breaking memoir by Fern Brady that confronts the intersection of sexism and neurodiversity. Brady, a neurodivergent, working-class woman from Scotland, offers an eye-opening exploration of how societal expectations clash with the realities of being an autistic woman. The book challenges the preconceived notions of both autism and femininity, highlighting the unique struggles and triumphs that come with navigating these identities.

Brady’s narrative is unflinchingly honest, delving into deeply personal experiences such as sex work, abusive relationships, and her time in teenage mental health units. She critically examines the Manic Pixie Dream Girl stereotype, a trope often misleadingly associated with neurodiverse women, and dismantles it with the force of her lived experience.

This memoir is not just a personal account; it’s a powerful statement on the complexities of being a neurodivergent woman in a world that often misunderstands and overlooks such experiences.

Friendaholic – Elizabeth Day

In Friendaholic: Confessions of a Friendship Addict, Elizabeth Day delves into the oft-overlooked yet vital world of friendships, challenging the societal emphasis on romantic love.

Growing up with few friends, Elizabeth equated the number of friendships with being loved and secure. As an adult, she prides herself on being a Good Friend, only to realize that this pursuit sometimes comes at the cost of her own boundaries and mental health.

The onset of the global pandemic in 2020 sees Elizabeth re-evaluate her understanding of friendship. Confronted with the reality that her closest friends weren’t necessarily those she spent the most time with, she begins to question the nature of these relationships. This introspection leads to broader inquiries: Is there such a thing as having too many friends? How well does one truly understand the role they play as a friend?

The Strength of Love – Kate Garraway

Kate Garraway’s The Strength of Love offers a profound and moving account of resilience and hope amidst life’s most challenging circumstances. This deeply personal narrative unfolds in the wake of her husband Derek’s battle with the severe impacts of Covid, a struggle that has dramatically altered their family life, requiring 24-hour care and frequent hospitalizations.

Kate’s journey is one of constant uncertainty and daily challenges, testing her strength and that of her family at every turn.

Garraway’s book delves into universal themes that resonate with many: the nature of trauma, the critical role of resilience and adaptability, and the power of staying curious and positive in the face of adversity. She candidly discusses the concepts of identity and purpose, offering insights into how to embrace uncertainty and regain control in times of turmoil. Her experiences and reflections provide solace and wisdom to those grappling with loneliness, loss, or fear of the unknown.

Spare – Prince Harry

Much has been made of Prince Harry and his wife Meghan Markle, with opinion swinging like a pendulum between outright hatred to incredulous disbelief. Following their bombshell interview with Oprah Winfrey and the subsequent fall-out with the Royal Family, Harry and Meghan have attempted to lift the curtain and explain exactly what’s happened and what’s led them to where we are today.

Spare is a revealing and deeply personal memoir in that respect, ghost-written by J.R. Moehringer but written in first-person perspective to authenticate the feel of what’s in here. Prince Harry’s book is split across three parts in this 410 page book. After a brief prologue starting at Prince Philip’s death, we cut back to just before Princess Diana’s death, leading through Harry’s years growing up as the “Spare” to Prince William (the “heir”) along with his time in the military and up to the Queen’s death.

The writing itself is mostly reserved to short and snappy sub-chapters, which are split into three parts, the first focusing on the past and growing up, the second on Harry’s time in the military and the third on Harry’s love life and meeting Meghan Markle.

It’s a book that reveals far more about the underbelly of the Royal Family than you’re likely to see anywhere else. Quite how this story will eventually end is anyone’s guess but for anyone remotely interested in the Royal Family, this is an absolute must-read.

Elon Musk – Walter Isaacson

In his latest biography, the acclaimed author of “Steve Jobs” presents an intimate and compelling portrait of Elon Musk, one of the most enigmatic and influential figures of our time. This book delves deep into Musk’s journey from a bullied child in South Africa to a visionary entrepreneur reshaping the future with electric vehicles, private space exploration, and artificial intelligence. It also explores his dramatic takeover of Twitter, a platform that symbolizes both a personal and professional battleground for him.

Author Isaacson provides an unprecedented look into Musk’s world, having shadowed him for two years, witnessing first-hand the workings of his mind and operations. Through extensive interviews with Musk, as well as those who know him best—family, friends, co-workers, and rivals—the biography paints a vivid picture of a man who is as complex as he is visionary. It raises probing questions: Are the very traits that make Musk a relentless innovator also the sources of his deepest struggles? This biography offers a fascinating exploration of Musk’s life, achievements, and the inner demons that drive him, making it a standout addition to the best biographies of 2023.

Seventeen – Joe Gibson

Seventeen is a shocking and eye-opening memoir, written by Joe Gibson. In this revealing book, we’re whisked back to 1992. Like every other seventeen-year-old boy, Joe has one eye on his studies, the other on his social life. He’s looking ahead to a gap year full of travel and adventure before university. Only, there’s a problem. When Joe’s teacher – attractive, mid-thirties – takes an interest in him, it seems like a fantasy come true.

For his final two years at school, Joe is bound to her, a woman twice his age, in an increasingly tangled web of coercion, sex and lies. Their affair, a product of complex grooming and a shocking abuse of authority, is played out in the corridors of one of Britain’s major private schools, under the noses of people who suspected, even knew, but said nothing.

With a heady dose of nostalgia for the 90’s, and the perfectly captured mood of those final months at school, Joe charts the legacy of deceit and indelibility of decisions made at seventeen.

Closing Thoughts

2023 has been a big year for biography fans. There have been some great selections this year and above our just our favourite picks!

What will 2024 have in store for us? Hopefully more of the same!

So, there we have it, our picks for the best biographies of 2023! Let us know what you think of our choices in the comments below and remind us of any others you enjoyed this year above all others!

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Nonfiction Books » Best Nonfiction Books of 2023

Notable memoirs of 2023, recommended by cal flyn.

Five Books deputy editor Cal Flyn selects the best recent autobiographical writing in this round-up of notable memoirs of 2023—taking in new work from such literary giants as Janet Malcolm and Annie Ernaux, the writer other writers are raving about, and a humorous debut depicting life in a haunted antiquarian bookshop.

Stay True by Hua Hsu

Still Pictures: On Photography and Memory by Janet Malcolm

Pageboy: A Memoir by Elliot Page

The Light Room: On Art and Care by Kate Zambreno

O Brother by John Niven

1 Stay True by Hua Hsu

2 still pictures: on photography and memory by janet malcolm, 3 pageboy: a memoir by elliot page, 4 the light room: on art and care by kate zambreno, 5 o brother by john niven.

Well, usually here I’d have two automatic answers: this year’s winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Memoir and Autobiography, and the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Autobiography or Memoir . But what would you know—in 2023, the same book won both. Bard professor and New Yorker writer Hua Hsu’s Stay True centres upon the death of a Berkeley classmate in a bungled armed robbery. The Pulitzer judges declared it an “elegant and poignant coming of age account that considers intense, youthful friendships but also random violence that can suddenly and permanently alter the presumed logic of our personal narratives.” Stay True has been out in the United States since October 2022, but only reached UK bookshops this month.

Absolutely. The late, great Janet Malcolm’s final book, Still Pictures , was released posthumously at the start of this year. It’s a memoir in essays, inspired by a collection of black and white photographs of her Czech refugee family found in a box (labeled ‘old not good photos’) in her attic. They left Prague in 1939, she writes: “We were among the small number of Jews who escaped the fate of the rest by sheer dumb luck, as a few random insects escape a poison spray.” Malcolm was instinctively leery of autobiography. Memoir was a “novelistic enterprise,” she felt. But these candid images offered her an alternate way in, one befitting the former photography columnist for the New York Times: “Occasionally… like memory itself, one of these inert pictures will suddenly stir and come to life,” she writes, warming to her theme. Still Pictures will not, perhaps, be the work that Malcolm will be best known for, but it will greatly appeal to those who already admire her writing.

I was also very excited to learn about a new book from the French Nobel Prize-winner Annie Ernaux . The Young Man — ably translated from the original French by Alison Strayer—is an exacting account of an affair with a student thirty years her junior. “Perhaps it was the desire to spark the writing of a book—a task I had hesitated to undertake because of its immensity—that prompted me to take A home for a drink after dinner at a restaurant,” she writes, analysing herself after the fact. The affair does not end well, but one does not read Annie Ernaux for happy endings. She has made her name by conducting live dissections of her emotional life, and The Young Man is no different. But it is, even for Ernaux, a very slim book, coming in at only 35 pages.

Have there been notable celebrity memoirs published in 2023?

Otherwise, the celebrity memoir of the year is probably Elliot Page’s Pageboy , which charts—among other things—his Hollywood career, coming out as gay, then his later gender transition. The Juno and Inception actor might be the most famous trans man in the world right now, and this thoughtful, non-linear account is thus not only a glimpse into the Tinseltown lifestyle but a valuable addition to trans literature . In its sensitivity and earnest tone, wrought from first-hand and sometimes painful experience, it is also, as was noted in the i , “a vital antidote to the toxic trans debate.” If you’d like to get a taste of the book before committing, People magazine published an extract from the first chapter here .

Kate Zambreno is a true writers’ writer; her books are always being recommended to me by other authors. (Most recently, the novelist Catherine Lacey told me that Zambreno’s Screen Tests is “a perfect book.”) Her latest, The Light Room , is billed as “a candid chronicle of life as a mother of two young daughters in a moment of profound uncertainty.” Annie Ernaux herself offered an endorsement, enthusing that Zambreno “has invented a new form,” comprising “a kind of absolute present, real life captured in closeup.” That absolute present is a meditation on parenting, on the quiet joys of maintenance, and what Zambreno terms “life inside”—that is, both of being cooped up in the house during the pandemic, and interiority in that other sense. The life of the mind finds intellectual trapdoors that can relieve the tedium. Speaking to Lithub recently, Zambreno explained that she hopes the book will be “a balm for others, a space of joy as well as exhaustion and deep sadness, a space to think with.”

The US poet Maggie Smith—whose bittersweet poem ‘Good Bones’ went viral several years ago, making Smith an overnight sensation—has released a memoir charting the disintegration of her marriage. (Its title, You Could Make This Place Beautiful , is a line from that poem.) Smith’s fans tend towards the devotional, but I do have the sense that this particular book has been unusually polarising. You’ll either love it and find its aphoristic style and motivational tone inspiring, or you’ll find it somewhat trying . Probably that description in itself will be enough to indicate which will be the case in your instance.

Another social media darling, Oliver Darkshire—whose unexpectedly riotous helming of the Sotheran’s antiquarian bookshop Twitter account found an avid online audience—has published Once Upon a Tome: The Misadventures of a Rare Bookseller . Sotheran’s, on London’s Sackville Street, is one of the world’s oldest bookshops, and is by all accounts a charmingly eccentric establishment, with a resident ghost, cursed books, and a byzantine cataloguing system. Darkshire’s whimsical and humorous account of his apprenticeship in this storied, somewhat shadowy, institution is a lot of fun. If you’re on the fence, Lithub has published an extract .

Yes. The Scottish novelist and screenwriter John Niven—perhaps best known for the cult favourite Kill Your Friends — has just released a searing account of his fraught relationship with his charismatic younger brother Gary, who took his own life in 2010. O Brother records how their lives began in tandem but diverged; while John made his way in the music business, and later as a writer, Gary worked manual jobs and dealt drugs in the small town they grew up in. By the end of his life, Gary had alienated most of his friends and family, and was in debt—although not insurmountably so. Looking through his dead brother’s belongings, John tallies up the overdue bills and has the sickening realisation that he could have written a cheque and solved his sibling’s financial crisis instantly. But what might have been a grim story of self-recrimination and despair is, in Niven’s hands, a moving and even exuberant story that reflects the chaotic energy of their brother and the dark humour that he and his sister Linda forge from an otherwise harrowing situation.

Let me slip in a couple more quick ones: naturalist Amy-Jane Beer just won the UK’s Wainwright Prize for The Flow: Rivers, Waters, and Wildness , in which she revisits the waterway that claimed the life of a close friend, and in doing so opens herself again to fluvial beauty; and former Five Books contributor Thea Lenarduzzi ‘s lyrical family memoir Dandelions is currently in contention for the UK’s Ackerley Prize for Autobiography.

And finally, the next thing on my to-be-read pile is The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight by Andrew Leland, a sufferer of retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative condition that will ultimately result in complete blindness. The Millions editor Sophia Stewart raved that it was not only one of the best books she’d read in 2023, but “one of the best books I’ve ever read in my life. No descriptor feels capacious enough: an intellectually rigorous memoir, a moving cultural history, and a brilliant study of blindness, disability, and adaptation.” Sounds good to me.

September 23, 2023

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©Nancy Macdonald

Cal Flyn is a writer, journalist, and the deputy editor of Five Books . Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape , her nonfiction book about how nature rebounds in abandoned places, was shortlisted for numerous awards including the Baillie Gifford Prize, the Ondaatje Prize, and the British Academy Book Prize. She writes regular round-ups of the most notable new fiction, which can be found here . Her Five Books interviews with other authors are here .

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The Best Books of 2023 So Far

These are independent reviews of the products mentioned, but TIME receives a commission when purchases are made through affiliate links at no additional cost to the purchaser.

The best books of the year so far serve as a great reminder to always question the stories we hear. Where do they come from? And who gets to tell them? When we deconstruct history and look at its pieces in a new light, as many of these books do, we see things differently. In his page-turning new biography of Martin Luther King Jr. , Jonathan Eig provides an illuminating window into the activist’s emotional core . In Dyscalculia , Camonghne Felix reconsiders her romantic past to better understand her relationship with love. And in Biography of X , Catherine Lacey reveals how easily the ideas we hold as truths can fall apart through her protagonist’s quest to learn about her wife’s mysterious past. Here, the best books of the year so far.

A Living Remedy , Nicole Chung

In her first memoir, TIME contributor Nicole Chung described her experience growing up as a Korean American adoptee in a predominantly white town. Her follow-up, A Living Remedy , continues her exploration into identity, this time focusing on her grief after losing both of her parents. Chung’s father died of diabetes and kidney disease in 2018. Then, less than a year later, her mother is diagnosed with cancer and later dies during the COVID-19 pandemic. As Chung wrestles with these overwhelming losses in A Living Remedy , she dissects the inequities inherent to American society by recounting the challenges her parents faced in accessing medical care. The result is a moving portrait of a daughter reckoning with her place in a broken world—and making sense of life without her parents in it.

Buy Now : A Living Remedy on Bookshop | Amazon

King: A Life , Jonathan Eig

Jonathan Eig’s book on Martin Luther King Jr. is the first biography of the civil rights icon in decades. It’s a refreshing portrait of King, offering an intimate look inside the life of a man whose massive contributions to American history are known but whose emotional complexities are less so. Eig digs into everything—King’s family origins, his relationship with his wife, the pressures he faced from being so influential so early in his career—to create a portrait of the late activist that captures the dynamic and flawed human that he was. It’s a deftly researched and highly accessible account of a leader, and a new view into the many overlooked parts of King’s story.

Buy Now : King on Bookshop | Amazon

Our Share of Night , Mariana Enriquez

Spanning multiple decades, Argentine author Mariana Enriquez’s weird and wonderful novel, newly translated into English by Megan McDowell, doesn’t fit into just one genre. Oscillating seamlessly between historical fiction and supernatural horror, Our Share of Night centers on Juan and Gaspar, a father and son who are grieving Rosario, the wife and mother they just lost in a car accident. Complicating things is the fact that they are also on the run from the ruthless cult from which Rosario descends. Better known as the Order, the cult will do just about anything to achieve immortality, and Gaspar has developed powers that would make him a valuable asset. Set against a comprehensive backdrop of Argentine history, Our Share of Night offers an absorbing window into a terrifying, fantastical world.

Buy Now : Our Share of Night on Bookshop | Amazon

Dyscalculia , Camonghne Felix

In her debut memoir, poet Camonghne Felix details how a devastating breakup propels her into deep despair, forcing her to confront lingering childhood trauma and struggles with her mental health. Throughout, she returns to the learning disorder she faced as a child, “dyscalculia,” which made it difficult for her to understand math. In holding her dissolved relationship to the light, Felix wonders about the miscalculations she’s made when it comes to love. Her memoir is a striking meditation on pain, heartbreak, and what it takes to truly heal.

Buy Now : Dyscalculia on Bookshop | Amazon

The Wager , David Grann

In 1740, a British vessel called His Majesty’s Ship the Wager departed England on a mission to capture a Spanish galleon. But the Wager wrecked near the coast of Patagonia, and those who survived endured months of starvation and hardship. At least, that’s what the 30 sailors who made it out alive explained when they eventually arrived in Brazil. But months later, when a trio of castaways from another ship land in the same spot, they share a very different version of the events that took place in Patagonia. David Grann, author of Killers of the Flower Moon and The Lost City of Z , peels back the layers of a complex maritime drama in a masterfully drawn work of narrative nonfiction.

Buy Now : The Wager on Bookshop | Amazon

This Other Eden , Paul Harding

Inspired by real-life events that took place on Maine’s Malaga Island, one of the first racially integrated communities in the Northeast, Pulitzer Prize winner Paul Harding tells a grueling tale of isolation and injustice. In 1792, a formerly enslaved man and his Irish wife first arrived on the fictional Apple Island. More than a century later, the couple’s descendants are still there, and while their lives aren’t easy, they are at least far from the dangers happening inland. But any measure of peace they’ve secured is upturned by the presence of a missionary. The residents face eviction—and the threat of being institutionalized on the mainland. Harding follows a cast of characters through this horrifying upheaval as they grapple with what it means to belong.

Buy Now : This Other Eden on Bookshop | Amazon

The Half Known Life , Pico Iyer

Does paradise really exist? The question is at the center of Pico Iyer’s dazzling new work of nonfiction, which examines the many ways different cultures search for purposeful existence, and the paradoxical struggle for peace in a violent and fractured world. From Japan’s mountain temples to the streets of Belfast, Iyer wonders where utopia begins and how we can access it. In doing so, he suggests that paradise may not be a destination, but instead a journey.

Buy Now : The Half Known Life on Bookshop | Amazon

Greek Lessons , Han Kang

After losing her mother and custody of her son, the unnamed narrator of Han Kang’s stirring novel, newly translated into English by Deborah Smith and Emily Yae Won, decides to learn a new language. Then, one day while in her Greek class, she attempts to say something, but no words come out. Her voice is gone. In the same moment, across the room, her teacher is facing a battle against his depreciating vision. As the two bond over their puzzling sensory losses, they form an intense connection. Kang captures their relationship—and the relationships they both have with language and love—in quietly beautiful detail.

Buy Now : Greek Lessons on Bookshop | Amazon

Biography of X , Catherine Lacey

X is one of the most iconic and prolific artists and writers of the 20th century. The world is familiar with her work as a creative visionary—though no one, not even her wife, knows her real name or where she was born. After X suddenly dies, her wife, CM, decides she’s overdue to learn that information, and attempts to find answers to the questions that have been haunting her. X is a fictional character, but Catherine Lacey’s propulsive and kaleidoscopic novel makes her story feel plausible, piecing together the character’s life with an engrossing alternate history of the United States that’s full of references to real-life artists and writers. As CM uncovers more of X’s delectably illustrated past, Lacey unfurls a wholly original celebration of art, identity, and grief.

Buy Now : Biography of X on Bookshop | Amazon

Lone Women , Victor LaValle

It’s 1915 and mystery is swirling around Adelaide Henry, the daughter of Black farmers in California. When Victor LaValle introduces the character in his bruising fifth novel, she’s just set her family’s home ablaze. She’s on her way to Montana as a homesteader to collect on the promise of free land being offered by the government to “lone women” who are able to make it habitable. As Adelaide makes the trek, she brings with her a large trunk containing a secret that threatens to upend her life. Blending magical realism, history, and suspense, LaValle unravels a startling narrative about a woman running away from her troubled past and the horrors she faces as she tries to forge a better future.

Buy Now : Lone Women on Bookshop | Amazon

After Sappho , Selby Wynn Schwartz

Longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize and published in the U.S. this January, After Sappho is a tale of creativity, desire, and sexuality. Though it’s technically a novel, to categorize it as such would undermine Selby Wynn Schwartz’s thrilling reimagination of history and literary criticism, which culminates in a work of fiction that is deeply rooted in reality. In the book, Schwartz revisits the lives of groundbreaking early 20th-century feminists, from writers to actors to dancers, to explore the challenges they faced as queer artists with great contributions to make to the world. Schwartz weaves a tapestry of their voices to create a timeless yet timely narrative.

Buy Now : After Sappho on Bookshop | Amazon

The Covenant of Water , Abraham Verghese

Abraham Verghese, the best-selling author of the 2009 novel Cutting for Stone , returns with another epic tale, this time focusing on the fate of a cursed family in southern India. The Covenant of Water begins in 1900 as a 12-year-old girl marries a 40-year-old widower with a young son. Some years after their wedding, the girl discovers her husband’s son drowned in a ditch. It’s a cruel suffering that the family can’t seem to shake—they keep losing more of their own to the same fate—and they become determined to figure out the source of this strange affliction. Verghese follows the family over the course of nearly 80 years in this powerful and sweeping story about love, loss, and the strength of the human spirit.

Buy Now : The Covenant of Water on Bookshop | Amazon

Y/N , Esther Yi

The unnamed narrator of Esther Yi’s electric debut novel is obsessed with a K-pop idol named Moon. Bored with her life in Berlin, the narrator writes fan fiction about Moon, describing an imagined relationship with one of the most famous musicians in the world. Then the lines of reality start to blur: as the protagonist of her stories travels to Seoul to be with Moon, the narrator decides to make the journey, too. Yi weaves these threads together in sharp prose, offering an inventive novel about the strange and surprising stakes of worshiping a pop idol.

Buy Now : Y/N on Bookshop | Amazon

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The best biographies to read in 2023

Nik Rawlinson

Discover what inspired some of history’s most familiar names with these comprehensive biographies

The best biographies can be inspirational, can provide important life lessons – and can warn us off a dangerous path. They’re also a great way to learn more about important figures in history, politics, business and entertainment. That’s because the best biographies not only reveal what a person did with their life, but what effect it had and, perhaps most importantly, what inspired them to act as they did.

Where both a biography and an autobiography exist, you might be tempted to plump for the latter, assuming you’d get a more accurate and in-depth telling of the subject’s life story. While that may be true, it isn’t always the case. It’s human nature to be vain, and who could blame a celebrity or politician if they covered up their embarrassments and failures when committing their lives to paper? A biographer, so long as they have the proof to back up their claims, may have less incentive to spare their subject’s blushes, and thus produce a more honest account – warts and all.

That said, we’ve steered clear of the sensational in selecting the best biographies for you. Rather, we’ve focused on authoritative accounts of notable names, in each case written some time after their death, when a measured, sober assessment of their actions and impact can be given.

Best biographies: At a glance

Best literary biography: Agatha Christie: A Very Elusive Woman by Lucy Worsley | £20
Best showbiz biography: Let’s Do It: The Authorised Biography of Victoria Wood | £6.78
Best political biography: Hitler by Ian Kershaw | £14

How to choose the best biography for you

There are so many biographies to choose from that it can be difficult knowing which to choose. This is especially true when there are several competing titles focused on the same subject. Try asking yourself these questions.

Is the author qualified?

Wikipedia contains potted biographies of every notable figure you could ever want to read about. So, if you’re going to spend several hours with a novel-sized profile it must go beyond the basics – and you want to be sure that the author knows what they’re talking about.

That doesn’t mean they need to have been personally acquainted with the subject, as Jasper Rees was with Victoria Wood. Ian Kershaw never met Adolf Hitler (he was, after all, just two years old when Hitler killed himself), but he published his first works on the subject in the late 1980s, has advised on BBC documentaries about the Second World War, and is an acknowledged expert on the Nazi era. It’s no surprise, then, that his biography of the dictator is extensive, comprehensive and acclaimed.

Is there anything new to say?

What inspires someone to write a biography – particularly of someone whose life has already been documented? Sometimes it can be the discovery of new facts, perhaps through the uncovering of previously lost material or the release of papers that had been suppressed on the grounds of national security. But equally, it may be because times have changed so much that the context of previous biographies is no longer relevant. Attitudes, in particular, evolve with time, and what might have been considered appropriate behaviour in the 1950s would today seem discriminatory or shocking. So, an up-to-date biography that places the subject’s actions and motivations within a modern context can make it a worthwhile read, even if you’ve read an earlier work already.

Does it look beyond the subject?

The most comprehensive biographies place their subject in context – and show how that context affected their outlook and actions or is reflected in their work. Lucy Worsley’s new biography of Agatha Christie is a case in point, referencing Christie’s works to show how real life influenced her fiction. Mathew Parker’s Goldeneye does the same for Bond author Ian Fleming – and in doing so, both books enlarge considerably on the biography’s core subject.

READ NEXT: Best reading lights to brighten up your page

1. Let’s Do It: The Authorised Biography of Victoria Wood by Jasper Rees: Best showbiz biography

Price: £6.78 | Buy now from Amazon

It’s hardly surprising Victoria Wood never got around to writing her own autobiography. Originator of countless sketches, songs, comedy series, films, plays, documentaries and a sitcom, she kept pushing back the mammoth job of chronicling her life until it was too late. Wood’s death in 2016 came as a surprise to many, with the entertainer taking her final bow in private at the end of a battle with cancer she had fought away from the public eye.

In the wake of her death, her estate approached journalist Jasper Rees, who had interviewed her on many occasions, with the idea of writing the story that Wood had not got around to writing herself. With their backing, Rees’ own encounters with Wood, and the comic’s tape-recorded notes to go on, the result is a chunky, in-depth, authoritative account of her life. It seems unlikely that Wood could have written it more accurately – nor more fully – herself.

Looking back, it’s easy to forget that Wood wasn’t a constant feature on British TV screens, that whole years went by when her focus would be on writing or performing on stage, or even that her career had a surprisingly slow start after a lonely childhood in which television was a constant companion. This book reminds us of those facts – and that Wood wasn’t just a talented performer, but a hard worker, too, who put in the hours required to deliver the results.

Let’s Do It, which takes its title from a lyric in one of Wood’s best-known songs, The Ballad of Barry & Freda, is a timely reminder that there are two sides to every famous character: one public and one private. It introduces us to the person behind the personality, and shows how the character behind the characters for which she is best remembered came to be.

Key specs – Length: 592 pages; Publisher: Trapeze; ISBN: 978-1409184119

Let's Do It: The Authorised Biography of Victoria Wood

2. the chief: the life of lord northcliffe, britain’s greatest press baron by andrew roberts: best business biography.

Lord Northcliffe wasn’t afraid of taking risks – many of which paid off handsomely. He founded a small paper called Answers to Correspondents, branched out into comics, and bought a handful of newspapers. Then he founded the Daily Mail, and applied what he’d learned in running his smaller papers on a far grander scale. The world of publishing – in Britain and beyond – was never the same again. The Daily Mail was a huge success, which led to the founding of the Daily Mirror, primarily for women, and his acquisition of the Observer, Times and Sunday Times.

By then, Northcliffe controlled almost half of Britain’s daily newspaper circulation. Nobody before him had ever enjoyed such reach – or such influence over the British public – as he did through his titles. This gave him sufficient political clout to sway the direction of government in such fundamental areas as the establishment of the Irish Free State and conscription in the run-up to the First World War. He was appointed to head up Britain’s propaganda operation during the conflict, and in this position he became a target for assassination, with a German warship shelling his home in Broadstairs. Beyond publishing, he was ahead of many contemporaries in understanding the potential of aviation as a force for good, as a result of which he funded several highly valuable prizes for pioneers in the field.

He achieved much in his 57 years, as evidenced by this biography, but suffered both physical and mental ill health towards the end. The empire that he built may have fragmented since his passing, with the Daily Mirror, Observer, Times and Sunday Times having left the group that he founded, but his influence can still be felt. For anyone who wants to understand how and why titles like the Daily Mail became so successful, The Chief is an essential read.

Key specs – Length: 556 pages; Publisher: Simon & Schuster; ISBN: 978-1398508712

The Chief: The Life of Lord Northcliffe Britain's Greatest Press Baron

3. goldeneye by matthew parker: best biography for cinema fans.

The name Goldeneye is synonymous with James Bond. It was the title of both a film and a video game, a fictional super weapon, a real-life Second World War plan devised by author Ian Fleming, and the name of the Jamaican estate where he wrote one Bond book every year between 1952 and his death in 1964. The Bond film makers acknowledged this in 2021’s No Time To Die, making that estate the home to which James Bond retired, just as his creator had done at the end of the war, 75 years earlier.

Fleming had often talked of his plan to write the spy novel to end all spy novels once the conflict was over, and it’s at Goldeneye that he fulfilled that ambition. Unsurprisingly, many of his experiences there found their way into his prose and the subsequent films, making this biography as much a history of Bond itself as it is a focused retelling of Fleming’s life in Jamaica. It’s here, we learn, that Fleming first drinks a Vesper at a neighbour’s house. Vesper later became a character in Casino Royale and, in the story, Bond devises a drink to fit the name. Fleming frequently ate Ackee fish while in residence; the phonetically identical Aki was an important character in You Only Live Twice.

Parker finds more subtle references, too, observing that anyone who kills a bird or owl in any of the Bond stories suffers the spy’s wrath. This could easily be overlooked, but it’s notable, and logical: Fleming had a love of birds, and Bond himself was named after the ornithologist James Bond, whose book was on Fleming’s shelves at Goldeneye.

So this is as much the biography of a famous fictional character as it is of an author, and of the house that he occupied for several weeks every year. So much of Fleming’s life at Goldeneye influenced his work that this is an essential read for any Bond fan – even if you’ve already read widely on the subject and consider yourself an aficionado. Parker’s approach is unusual, but hugely successful, and the result is an authoritative, wide-ranging biography about one of this country’s best-known authors, his central character, an iconic location and a country in the run-up to – and immediately following – its independence from Britain.

Key specs – Length: 416 pages; Publisher: Windmill Books; ISBN: 978-0099591740

Goldeneye: Where Bond was Born: Ian Fleming's Jamaica

4. hitler by ian kershaw: best political biography.

The latter portion of Adolf Hitler’s life, from his coming to power in 1933 to his suicide in 1945, is minutely documented, and known to a greater or lesser degree by anyone who has passed through secondary education. But what of his earlier years? How did this overlooked art student become one of the most powerful and destructive humans ever to have existed? What were his influences? What was he like?

Kershaw has the answers. This door stopper, which runs to more than 1,000 pages, is an abridged compilation of two earlier works: Hitler 1889 – 1936: Hubris, and Hitler 1936 – 1946: Nemesis. Yet, abridged though it may be, it remains extraordinarily detailed, and the research shines through. Kershaw spends no time warming his engines: Hitler is born by page three, to a social-climbing father who had changed the family name to something less rustic than it had been. As Kershaw points out, “Adolf can be believed when he said that nothing his father had done pleased him so much as to drop the coarsely rustic name of Schicklgruber. ‘Heil Schicklgruber’ would have sounded an unlikely salutation to a national hero.”

There’s no skimping on context, either, with each chapter given space to explore the political, economic and social influences on Hitler’s development and eventual emergence as leader. Kershaw pinpoints 1924 as the year that “can be seen as the time when, like a phoenix arising from the ashes, Hitler could begin his emergence from the ruins of the broken and fragmented volkisch movement to become eventually the absolute leader with total mastery over a reformed, organisationally far stronger, and internally more cohesive Nazi Party”. For much of 1924, Hitler was in jail, working on Mein Kampf and, by the point of his release, the movement to which he had attached himself had been marginalised. Few could have believed that it – and he – would rise again and take over first Germany, then much of Europe. Here, you’ll find out how it happened.

If you’re looking for an authoritative, in-depth biography of one of the most significant figures in modern world history, this is it. Don’t be put off by its length: it’s highly readable, and also available as an audiobook which, although it runs to 44 hours, can be sped up to trim the overall running time.

Key specs – Length: 1,072 pages; Publisher: Penguin; ISBN: 978-0141035888

5. Stalin’s Architect: Power and Survival in Moscow by Deyan Sudjic: Best historical biography

Boris Iofan died in 1976, but his influence can still be felt today – in particular, through the architectural influences evident in many mid-century buildings across Eastern Europe. Born in Odessa in 1891, he trained in architecture and, upon returning to Russia after time spent in Western Europe, gained notoriety for designing the House on the Embankment, a monumental block-wide building containing more than 500 flats, plus the shops and other facilities required to service them.

“Iofan’s early success was based on a sought-after combination of characteristics: he was a member of the Communist Party who was also an accomplished architect capable of winning international attention,” writes biographer Deyan Sudjic. “He occupied a unique position as a bridge between the pre-revolutionary academicians… and the constructivist radicals whom the party saw as bringing much-needed international attention and prestige but never entirely trusted. His biggest role was to give the party leadership a sense of what Soviet architecture could be – not in a theoretical sense or as a drawing, which they would be unlikely to understand, but as a range of built options that they could actually see.”

Having established himself, much of the rest of his life was spent working on his designs for the Palace of the Soviets, which became grander and less practical with every iteration. This wasn’t entirely Iofan’s fault. He had become a favourite of the party elite, and of Stalin himself, who added to the size and ambition of the intended building over the years. Eventually, the statue of Lenin that was destined to stand atop its central tower would have been over 300ft tall, and would have had an outstretched index finger 14ft long. There was a risk that this would freeze in the winter, and the icicles that dropped from it would have been a significant danger to those going into and out of the building below it.

Although construction work began, the Palace of the Soviets was never completed. Many of Iofan’s other buildings remain, though, and his pavilions for the World Expos in Paris and New York are well documented – in this book as well as elsewhere. Lavishly illustrated, it recounts Iofan’s life and examines his work in various stages, from rough outline, through technical drawing, to photographs of completed buildings – where they exist.

Key specs – Length: 320 pages; Publisher: Thames and Hudson; ISBN: 978-0500343555

Stalin's Architect: Power and Survival in Moscow

6. agatha christie: a very elusive woman by lucy worsley: best literary biography.

Agatha Christie died in 1976 but, with more than 70 novels and 150 short stories to her name, she remains one of the best-selling authors of all time. A new biography from historian Lucy Worsley is therefore undoubtedly of interest. It’s comprehensive and highly readable – and opinionated – with short chapters that make it easy to dip into and out of on a break.

Worsley resists the temptation to skip straight to the books. Poirot doesn’t appear until chapter 11 with publication of The Mysterious Affair at Styles, which Christie wrote while working in a Torquay hospital. Today, Poirot is so well known, not only from the books but from depictions in film and television, that it’s easy to overlook how groundbreaking the character was upon his arrival.

As Worsley explains, “by choosing to make Hercule Poirot a foreigner, and a refugee as well, Agatha created the perfect detective for an age when everyone was growing surfeited with soldiers and action heroes. He’s so physically unimpressive that no-one expects Poirot to steal the show. Rather like a stereotypical woman, Poirot cannot rely upon brawn to solve problems, for he has none. He has to use brains instead… There’s even a joke in his name. Hercules, of course, is a muscular classical hero, but Hercule Poirot has a name like himself: diminutive, fussy, camp, and Agatha would show Poirot working in a different way to [Sherlock] Holmes.” Indeed, where Holmes rolls around on the floor picking up cigar ash in his first published case, Poirot, explains Worsley, does not stoop to gather clues: he needs only his little grey cells. Worsley’s approach is thorough and opinionated, and has resulted not only in a biography of Christie herself, but also her greatest creations, which will appeal all the more to the author’s fans.

As with Matthew Parker’s Goldeneye, there’s great insight here into what influenced Christie’s work, and Worsley frequently draws parallels between real life events and episodes, characters or locations in her novels. As a result of her experiences as a medical volunteer during the First World War, for example, during which a rigid hierarchy persisted and the medics behaved shockingly, doctors became the most common culprit in her books; the names of real people found their way into her fiction; and on one occasion Christie assembled what today might be called a focus group to underpin a particular plot point.

Worsley is refreshingly opinionated and, where events in the author’s life take centre stage, doesn’t merely re-state the facts, but investigates Christie’s motivations to draw her own conclusions. This is particularly the case in the chapters examining Christie’s disappearance in 1926, which many previous biographers have portrayed as an attempt to frame her husband for murder. Worsley’s own investigation leads to alternative conclusions, which seem all the more plausible today, when society has a better understanding of – and is more sympathetic towards – the effects of psychological distress.

Key specs – Length: 432 pages; Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton; ISBN: 978-1529303889

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Best Biographies and Memoirs of 2023

Congratulations to Jonathan Eig on King: A Life , our pick for the best biography and memoir of the year. See the full list below, or browse all of the best books of 2023

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Powerful Memoirs to Read This Summer

Propulsive plots? Check. Unforgettably real stories? Check. Hard-won insights about love, grief, resilience, and self-discovery? Check, check, check.

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Through the Groves, by Anne Hull

In her nearly two decades as a national reporter for The Washington Post, Anne Hull earned a reputation (and a Pulitzer!) for rigor and artistry in capturing some of the most urgent stories of our time. In her debut book, she directs her characteristically incisive gaze at her own history, weaving an atmospheric and aching account of her childhood in the sweltering heat of Central Florida and the tumult of the ’60s. Hull grew up riding shotgun in her father’s Ford truck through orange groves her family had worked—without competition or disturbance—for generations. But in 1967, change was in the air; Walt Disney had just broken ground on a new park, Californian “seedless clementines” had recently hit the market, and her father’s drinking was destabilizing her home. Hull captures a richly ambivalent portrait of a world on the brink of disappearing and a family in the midst of radical transformation: afternoons spent chasing the “marshmallow fluff of DDT,” springtime orange blossoms so pungent they burned their scent into clothes, men’s bodies ravaged by pesticide inhalation, and women bucking convention. Hypnotic and tender, this book reminds us that even if we leave our homes, our homes never leave us.

The Wreck, by Cassandra Jackson

Long before Cassandra Jackson was born, her name was already on a tombstone. In the 1960s, a car accident took the lives of her father’s first wife, his mother, his brother-in-law, his sister, and his three-year-old niece, after whom she was named. Growing up, Jackson was taught to never ask questions about “the wreck” or about the dead family her father only spoke about in his sleep. Only as an adult, facing the possibility of her own infertility, does Jackson finally go in search of definitive answers. In archives and fertility clinics alike, she encounters the specter of generational trauma and medical racism, wondering if her body, like her name, is a “haunted thing.” With mesmerizing lyricism and cutting insight, the author of The Toni Morrison Book Club teaches us that any hope for the future requires an honest confrontation with the past.

Losing Music, by John Cotter

At age 30, John Cotter began to notice a ringing noise, over time, escalated to a deafening roar and a daunting diagnosis: Ménière’s disease, an inner ear disorder for which there is “no reliable treatment and no consensus on its cause.” Over time, Cotter will lose the crisp edges of music, the sound of the ocean, his ability to fully communicate, his sense of balance, and his job as an adjunct professor. Like Anne Boyer’s The Undying and Meghan O’Rourke’s The Invisible Kingdom, Losing Music explodes an individual experience of illness into a cultural and medical reckoning; with a sociologist’s rigor and a poet’s lyricism, Cotter takes readers on an odyssey through the social history of disability, the brutal bureaucracy of the American healthcare system, and the intimate violence of living in a volatile body. But this memoir is just as much a love letter to sound itself as it is a chronicle of loss; your world will sound different after reading it.

Lesbian Love Story, by Amelia Possanza

“Are you a lesbian or something?” a male teammate asked Amelia Possanza on her explicitly queer adult recreational swim team. She was furious at his lack of recognition, but couldn’t really blame him: “If I had yet to find role models who could show me how to live, where would he have seen a lesbian?” Thus began Possanza’s rabid quest to uncover and animate lesbian stories; lesbians, she suspected, “would have something to teach us all about love.” Drawing from intensive archival research, interviews, and her own whimsical imagination, Possanza brings seven lesbians to life on the page; there are the historical heavy-hitters (hello, Sappho!) and the hidden heroes like Rusty Brown, the World War II hero and drag king renegade. At once a yearning search for a mirror in the fogged glass of history and an uproariously funny skewering of modern queer stereotypes, Lesbian Love Story will radically expand your understanding of lesbianism—and of love itself.

Women We Buried, Women We Burned by Rachel Louise Snyder

Today, Rachel Louise Snyder is an award-winning journalist, author, professor, and Guggenheim fellow best known for No Visible Bruises , her groundbreaking exploration of the domestic violence epidemic. But in 1985, she was a homeless high school dropout, surviving off of the scraps of food left by customers, and partying recklessly to keep the ghosts of her past and the gloom of her future at bay. With startling nuance and unexpected bursts of humor, Snyder lays bare the brutalities of her childhood: her mother’s death when she was 8, her father’s turn toward tyrannical evangelisms and abuse, her experimentations with drugs, and her emerging sense of herself as a woman in a violently patriarchal world. As an adult, survival becomes an international investigation rather than a personal struggle as she travels the globe reporting on child marriage, genocide, and gendered violence. For fans of Tara Westover’s Educated , Snyder provides a triumphant story of beating the odds and of radical self-definition—with a punk rock backdrop to boot!

Guinevere Turner When the World Didn’t End, by Guinevere Turner

On January 5, 1975, Guinevere Turner was 6 and the world was going to end. “All of us had been told to choose our favorite toy and put on our favorite clothes and then wait for the spaceship to come,” she writes. The “World People” were to be wiped off the earth, and Melvin Lyman’s loyal followers would be transported to Venus. When that spaceship didn’t come, the explanation was simple and the repercussions, immediate; some of the members’ souls weren’t ready, and daylight saving time must be abolished. Such was life in the Lyman family. Change was constant and arbitrary. Unworthiness was a given. Drawing from years of meticulously kept diaries, Turner resists the urge to let her “adult hindsight interfere or comment,” and allows us to see life inside the cult as she saw it: through the devastatingly innocent eyes of a child. The result is gripping, raw, and deeply human. It will leave you haunted.

Irma, by Terry McDonell

“After Bob goes down, it is just Irma and me.” So begins Terry McDonell’s tender account of his 1950s boyhood as the only son of a single mother. McDonell’s father, Bob, died serving as a fighter pilot in 1945 — before his son could know him. In his father’s absence, McDonell attempts to define his own manhood in opposition to the narrow example presented by his mother’s second husband: “A son hating his stepfather, searching for the character of his true father, is an old story. The center of the story, though, is not one of the fathers or even the son. It is the mother, Irma.” Through compulsively readable vignettes, McDonell assembles a kaleidoscopic view of his mother, his childhood, and his own reckoning with American masculinity.

Charley Burlock is the Associate Books Editor at Oprah Daily where she writes, edits, and assigns stories on all things literary. She holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from NYU, where she also taught undergraduate creative writing. Her work has been featured in the Atlanti c , the Los Angeles Review , Agni , the Apple News Today podcast, and elsewhere . She is currently working on a book about collective grief (but she promises she's really fun at parties).

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The very best books of 2023

From buzzy novels to literary biographies, Vox’s book critic breaks down the year in reading.

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by Constance Grady

A brightly colored photo illustration showing the covers of the 13 featured books

Every year, I recommend the best books out of the hundreds that have crossed my desk in my work as Vox’s book critic. These are the books I can’t stop thinking about months after I’ve read them, the books I’ve pressed on my friends along with demands that they tell me all their thoughts and especially let me know if they burst out laughing/burst into tears/threw the book across the room at that one part .

I’ve already recommended the best books from the first half of the year . These are the books that wowed me in the second half of the year, when publishers rush to release their most exciting novels and buzziest memoirs for the one-two punch of the National Book Awards and the holiday book tables.

In this batch: An action-packed allegory of the failures of America’s prison system. A philosophical literary biography about the paradoxes of marriage. A surprising amount of excellent historical fiction, a trend I’m choosing to blame on Hilary Mantel . Domestic novels and satire and an extended tribute to Nabokov.

Let’s get into it. In no order but alphabetical, here are the 13 best books from the second half of 2023.

A scythe striking the letter C of “Chain” in the title.

Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

Imagine a version of The Hunger Games with the original’s alchemical combination of scathing social criticism and adrenaline-pumping action. Now fix its biggest flaws by adding to the mix beautiful sentences and coherent racial politics. You have just created a near-perfect book. You have also invented Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah ’s debut novel, Chain-Gang All-Stars .

Chain-Gang All-Stars takes place in a near-future US where prisoners have the option of leaving jail to fight to the death in nationally televised gladiatorial games. If they live through three years on the circuit, the prisoners are free, sentence served. Almost no one ever lives that long.

Across three acts in this taut novel, Adjei-Brenyah kaleidoscopes into the minds of people at all levels of complicity and victimization from the Chain-Gang All-Stars fights. A white spectator goes from justifying her fascination with the games as cultural anthropology to rooting for the villains to get their throats cut. A prisoner tortured in solitary confinement opts for the circuit over another day at the mercy of his brutal guards. A board member working for a private prison company strategizes the best way to increase audience investment in the games. And two veteran fighters struggle to find love and forgiveness within their brutal, bloody world.

Glossing the text with periodic footnotes, Adjei-Brenyah makes it clear that the atrocities of his world are only slightly removed from the atrocities of our own. His most admirable characters declare that they are opposed not just to the Chain-Gang All-Stars fights but to the whole system: the games, the death penalty, and the prisons themselves. They dare us to ask whether we can be so brave.

Read alongside : The Hunger Games , The New Jim Crow , Are Prisons Obsolete?

All of this year’s National Book Award finalists, reviewed by Vox

In thick oil pastel lines, an older woman in a red sweater sits next to a toddler in a white gown, both against a blue background.

Loved and Missed by Susie Boyt

Loved and Missed , the seventh book by UK author Susie Boyt and her first to be published in the US, is a deceptively simple novel. On a first read through, this tale of a grandmother building a life with her granddaughter is so charming that you almost don’t notice how technically difficult the book is. It is hard to write a book that is warm without being sentimental. Yet Loved and Missed is full of heart but never saccharine; it is warm, and it shows you the effort and strain it takes to become so warm.

Ruth, prone to sardonic observations yet also deeply earnest, is the narrator of this slight book. She’s a part-time schoolteacher and a single mother. At school she is a triumph — her students have been known to call her “Mum” — but her own daughter, Eleanor, ran away from home at 15. As the novel opens, the pair are partially estranged, and Eleanor is addicted to drugs. Ruth, desperate to care for someone who will have to love her back and certain that Eleanor is incapable of caring for anyone, more or less kidnaps Eleanor’s daughter, Lily, to come and live with her.

The domestic routine between Ruth and Lily fills this novel with its pleasing cozy rhythms. “It was so civilized,” Ruth marvels, recounting the ritual of their days. “The evenings settled on us gently and we read our books side by side on the sofa, a saucer of biscuits balanced on a cushion, until six, when we put the television on.” The pleasure of this small-scale household bliss is all the more intense because we know how hard-won it is, and how easily it can be disrupted.

Read accompanied by : very hot toast sliced very thin, butter and marmalade dripping off the sides, and a pot full of good strong tea ready next to it.

The upper body of a human being faces away from the viewer. Their neck and back are made up of the word “blue” repeated over and over in blue type. Their head is the word orange in orange type, and their hair is the word green in green type.

The Last Language by Jennifer duBois

In 2014 and 2015, a startling court case gripped the nation . Anna Stubblefield, a professor of ethics at Rutgers, was accused of raping a nonverbal man named D.J., who had a developmental disability. Stubblefield argued that D.J., who had cerebral palsy, consented to everything that had happened and that they were in love. They had communicated, she explained, through a speech therapy method called facilitated communication, in which she held D.J.’s arm to steady it and he typed on a keyboard.

Stubblefield said D.J. was brilliant and that facilitated communication had unleashed his true self. Skeptics said facilitated communication wasn’t real, that it was barely more than a Ouija board party game. The court found D.J. legally incapable of either communication or consent and Stubblefield guilty of rape. In the end, she served 22 months in jail .

In The Last Language , Jennifer duBois uses the story of Stubblefield and D.J. as the basis for a fictional, Lolita -inflected story, and the results are sharp enough to cut. Here, Angela is a Harvard-educated linguist who ends up working as a facilitated communication speech therapist out of sheer desperation for a job. She’s in a rough spot: In rapid succession, her husband died by suicide, she was kicked out of her graduate program, and then she miscarried. (This beginning, Angela notes, “casts me as an extremely sympathetic figure.”)

At first it’s enough for Angela that she’s managed to find an employer willing to hire someone with a master’s in linguistics. But then, she meets a patient, Sam, determines that he is a savant, and falls in love with him.

“I see how it all looks,” Angela admits. She’s a crafty and Nabokovian narrator, fond of linguistic games and literary references. As she walks us through what she continues to insist is a love story, it remains a mystery how much of what she’s saying even she believes to be true.

Read if you : are a sucker for an unreliable narrator and have opinions on linguistic determinism.

On a lavender field, a green plant stem and an orange plant stem intersect.

The Marriage Question: George Eliot’s Double Life by Clare Carlisle

In this richly compelling biography of George Eliot, philosophy professor Clare Carlisle builds her story around the issue that gave Eliot both her life and her scandal: marriage. It’s a surprisingly effective organizing principle.

Eliot famously spent most of her life living with George Henry Lewes, a man she called her husband but to whom she was not legally married. (Lewes’s first wife was still alive.) Their partnership scandalized polite Victorian society and cost Eliot some of her dearest friendships. Eliot demanded to be known socially as Mrs. Lewes; her acquaintances only sometimes acquiesced.

Meanwhile, Eliot’s books are haunted by the specter of marriage gone wrong. The most devastating portrait arrives in Middlemarch , in which blazingly idealistic teenager Dorothea marries herself off to dry, dull, middle-aged Casaubon under the mistaken apprehension that he is a great man. It’s an awful moment to read, which is why Middlemarch is a great book.

Carlisle argues that marriage is one of the great philosophical problems of modern life: “that leap into the open-endedness of another human being.” For her, Eliot is a brilliant investigator of that problem, one who “pursued her marriage question with the tenacity of a great philosopher, as well as the delicacy of a great artist.”

Eliot sacrificed her reputation for a marriage. She publicly performed her scandalous marriage as a union of near-religious bliss. She wrote great novels of marriage as a destroyer of dreams. This lovely, rigorous biography explores all Eliot’s contradictions to bring her to life, both in her cramped, anxious human mind and in her expansive literary genius.

Read alongside : Middlemarch , of course. It’s always a good time to read Middlemarch .

A black-and-white photo depicts a midcentury New York street scene. A man in a trench coat and tie stands with his hands in his pockets in the doorway of Blossom Restaurant, with a chalkboard menu scrawled over the doorway.

The Upstairs Delicatessen: On Eating, Reading, Reading About Eating, and Eating While Reading by Dwight Garner

Somewhere between a memoir and a commonplace book , The Upstairs Delicatessen is a sweet and witty ode to two of life’s great pleasures. (Three, if you consider reading while eating to be sensually distinct from reading and eating on their own.) New York Times book critic Dwight Garner is in full raconteur mode as he talks through his life in food and books, liberally salt-and-peppering the pages with his favorite quotes about food.

Garner describes himself as a kind of omnivore of both food and words from his earliest days. Every day after school, he writes, he would “gather an armload of newspapers and magazines and library books and paperback novels,” then pile a plate with sandwiches and potato chips and pretzels and cookies, not neglecting a glass of cold red juice (from powder) and a glass of milk for the cookies. He’d fling the reading material onto the living room floor and read on his stomach. “I’d tattoo the pages with greasy fingerprints,” Garner writes. Don’t you want to flop down on the floor yourself with a big snacking plate and an absorbing book and join him?

Read accompanied by : a dry martini and richly buttered anchovy toast.

A woman in a medieval cloak with long, flowing red hair stands in the middle of the cover, holding a staff. Superimposed around her are images of a knight on horseback, flaming arrows, flags showing a red boar, and a mountain lion.

Menewood by Nicola Griffith

A friend recommended Nicola Griffith’s Hild trilogy, about the life of seventh-century British St. Hilda of Whitby, as being a cross between Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and Tamora Pierce’s Alanna quartet. She’s entirely right: The Hild books marry the detailed historical past of Wolf Hall , all smelly wool and oiled knife blades, with the joyous feminine coming of age of the Alanna books.

Menewood , this fall’s release, is the second in a planned trilogy; the first volume, Hild , came out in 2013. Both follow Hild, our heroine, a political operator in the body of a very young girl. In volume one, Hild’s mother presents her to the king as a seer, and Hild, drawing on her ability to read people and animals in ways others cannot, pulls off the scam. She’s 3 as the book opens and 7 years old when she makes her debut in the royal court. Over the next 11 years, she develops into a fearsome kingmaker within the political landscape of early Britain.

Menewood , which picks up shortly after the queasy, unsettling ending of Hild , is a more compressed and more traumatic novel. It covers a bare four years of Hild’s life, with a war at either end. Most compelling, though, is the central third of the novel, which Griffith gives over to the process of restoration. Hild’s unindustrialized country must rebuild itself and its infrastructure after the massive destruction of war, and she must rebuild herself after enormous personal tragedy. The results are redemptive, absorbing, and deeply satisfying.

Read equipped with : a notepad and pen to help you keep track of the many identical-sounding medieval names, so you can tell Oswald from Osric.

A tree stands at the far right on a white background, leaning off the edge of the book cover.

The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff

There’s a stark purity to The Vaster Wilds that makes it stand out from the other books I’ve read this year, a viciousness and a precision of language that isn’t quite like anything in the other books on this list.

The Vaster Wilds tells the story of an unnamed girl fleeing the Jamestown colony in the midst of the Starving Time . Outside the walls of the settlement is winter wilderness, but the girl, who possesses a scrappy survivor’s cunning, has determined that her odds are better outside than in. The result is a girl-versus-nature story that’s all the more compelling for being so unforgiving.

Read if you : still think you could probably survive in a hollow tree trunk for a few years à la My Side of the Mountain .

The book of the year so far is Lauren Groff’s The Vaster Wilds

A faceless Black figure stands against a green background, wearing a newsboy cap and carrying a red abstract object under one arm.

The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride

The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store is a shaggy-dog tale, a deeply charming yarn of a book that ambles its way slowly from tales of two-bit vaudeville theaters to horrific murders. At its core, it’s a novel of solidarity between the Black and Jewish communities of Chicken Hill, Pennsylvania, in the 1920s.

Moshe Ludlow owns the local dance hall, which mostly plays Black musical acts because they’re the most popular. His wife, Chona, runs the titular Heaven and Earth Grocery Store. The dance hall more or less subsidizes the store, which keeps losing money because Chona lets poor neighbors shop on credit and never collects. At their neighbors’ behest, the pair agree to take in and hide an orphaned deaf Black child named Dodo, whom the state has threatened to place in a dangerous mental asylum.

The great pleasure of this book is watching McBride swing between the patterns of Jewish American and Black American speech with an easy, virtuosic rhythm. This is a voicey novel in the truest sense of the term, and a pure joy from start to finish.

Read alongside : Troubling the Waters: Black-Jewish Relations in the American Century .

The End of Drum-Time by Hanna Pylväinen

Hanna Pylväinen’s The End of Drum-Time deals with a 19th-century preacher’s daughter who ruins her reputation because she is in love with an animal herder, like something out of a lost Hardy novel. But this preacher’s daughter lives in the tiny village of Garasavvon, along the borders of Finland and the federated powers of Sweden and Norway, and the man she is in love with is a Samí reindeer herder.

The Samí are the native people of Sápmi, historically known in English as Lapland. Their economy and social structures are all built around reindeer: keeping them, tending them, following their migrations. Yet as the nationalist powers of Scandinavia keep redrawing their political boundaries, the reindeer migration is becoming an ever-more perilous expedition — as that heartsore preacher’s daughter is soon to learn.

Pylväinen’s prose is rich with physical detail. You can smell the grass with which the Samí stuff their reindeer-hide shoes and see the ghostly twilight of a land where the sun never quite sets in the summer. Most of all, her sparse, precise sentences are as beautiful and merciless as the snow itself.

Read somewhere close to : a sauna and cold plunge, so you can warm up and cool down with the Samí.

The book’s title appears on a gradient background shading from yellow on top to green on the bottom, with the British royal crest appearing at the top.

The Fraud by Zadie Smith

In this year of historical novels, Zadie Smith has written a historical novel about why books in this genre are so often very bad. The Fraud takes place primarily in the house of one William Ainsworth, a Victorian author who spends most of his career writing sentimental romances in tin-eared dialect.

Early in his career, Ainsworth attempts a contemporary novel. When it is pronounced morally corrupting, he flees, ”off into the distant, storied past — where he felt safest — or up and away into the ether, the supernatural, where nothing is real and nothing matters.” The novels that result are torpid and dull, but they also make a great deal of money.

It’s the money that’s of chief importance to Smith’s protagonist, Eliza Touchet, Ainsworth’s cousin and housekeeper. Touchet watches Ainsworth work with a sardonic eye, quietly convinced that all novels are morally suspect. She , meanwhile, becomes enmeshed in a tabloid case of the era and the racial politics that have set Victorian London ablaze. Smith’s historical novel, it’s clear, takes place in a world where a great deal is real, and all of it matters today.

Read accompanied by : a cappuccino and a scone that you can eat slowly, mouthful by mouthful, crunching the sugar grains on top of the pastry between your teeth, over the course of an hour as you read.

Zadie Smith on the problem of the good white woman

Three pairs of eyes appear on a red background. The top pair is blue. The bottom pair is brown. The middle pair is winking, and in the open eye, the iris has been replaced by a Nobel Prize medal.

How I Won a Nobel Prize by Julius Taranto

Helen, the narrator of Julius Taranto’s witty and provocative new novel How I Won a Nobel Prize , doesn’t consider herself a natural for the Rubin Institute Plymouth, also known as RIP, also known as Cancel U, also known as Rape Island. Built on a fictional island off the coast of New Haven, the Rubin Institute is a university that specializes in hiring the canceled. Helen’s just a physics grad student who wants to solve climate change .

All the professors at Rubin were fired from their home institutions for sexual harassment , except for the ones that were fired for racism. R. Kelly shows up for soirees where the caterers serve “ostentatiously problematic meat: foie gras, roast suckling pig, octopus, horse.” The whole thing is funded by an anti- woke billionaire who’s committed to giving the students free tuition, as long as they sign a detailed waiver.

Helen finds herself stuck there after her adviser, the only person alive who can understand her research, accepts a job on the faculty. She’s sure that if she just keeps her head down and focuses on her research, she’ll be fine, but things don’t quite work out that easily. Some of Taranto’s most insightful passages come as we see Helen finding herself drawn toward a Philip Roth–like canceled author. Taranto understands the appeal of bad-man geniuses, and he understands their dangers, too. Not for nothing: This book is funny as heck.

Read if you : are tired of reading Woody Allen think pieces.

Against a hazy purple background, two hands reach for each other but do not touch.

Idlewild by James Frankie Thomas

Idlewild is about one of those high school friendships that is all-consuming, that takes over your whole personality and sense of self. Fay and Nell are theater kids at a tony Quaker school in Manhattan in 2002. Nell is the only out lesbian at school; Fay spends her English classes pointing out homosexual subtext in the assigned reading.

They write torrid fanfiction together over AOL Instant Messenger and speculate over which of their classmates is secretly gay. Both of them consider Fay to be the boss, partially because Nell is in unrequited love with her. Fay herself is only interested in the prospect of beautiful evil gay men, but not, exactly, because she wants to have sex with them.

In 2002, Fay and Nell call themselves “we, the F&N unit,” and narrate their days in the second person plural. In 2018, they recall their friendship from separate perspectives as though they’re looking back on a murder. In a way, they are: They’re telling us the story of how they killed their friendship.

Author James Frankie Thomas has said that he sees Idlewild as a novel in conversation with The Secret History and The Talented Mr. Ripley and A Little Life : novels that are widely read by writers “with an attraction to trans masculinity and gay trans masculinity in particular.” The connection is there. Idlewild has a similar aesthetic sensibility to those novels, a nostalgia for a past that was always corrupted, a kind of lushness to the atmosphere that is heavy with unspoken yearnings. When Thomas at last allows his characters to speak those yearnings aloud, the results will break your heart.

Read accompanied by : the most luscious slice of cheesecake you can find.

A wilted yellow flower tilts to the right at the center of a cream background.

This Is Salvaged: Stories by Vauhini Vara

Vauhini Vara was a Pulitzer finalist for her first novel, The Immortal King Rao . In This Is Salvaged , a short story collection, she returns to the themes of grief and alienation that made that book sing.

Vara’s characters are mourning: the loss of a sister, a brother, a pregnancy, a mother, a job, a marriage. In the title story, an artist running out on his marriage attempts to build a replica of Noah’s Ark, with unhoused men doing the labor. Another story sees a teen girl mourning her brother’s death trying to get a job at a phone sex line. In another, a disgraced alcoholic lawyer tries to hide a pile of vomit from her visiting family.

What’s perhaps most compelling in this book is how physical grief is — it smells. These characters keep finding forgotten egg rolls and apple cores lost in their homes, or building balls of dead skin out of their frustration and rage. You can smell the rot in them. Always, though, there is a possibility of redemption, a glimpse of something human and warm to air out the stale air that grief has brought.

Read if you like : complicated endings, characters with bad habits, stories with some spike.

In The Immortal King Rao, a tech billionaire becomes king of the world

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19 Facts About Tim Walz, Harris’s Pick for Vice President

Mr. Walz, the governor of Minnesota, worked as a high school social studies teacher and football coach, served in the Army National Guard and chooses Diet Mountain Dew over alcohol.

Share full article

Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, in a gray T-shirt and baseball cap, speaks at a Kamala Harris event in St. Paul, Minn., last month.

By Simon J. Levien and Maggie Astor

Published Aug. 6, 2024 Updated Aug. 9, 2024

Until recently, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota was a virtual unknown outside of the Midwest, even among Democrats. But his stock rose fast in the days after President Biden withdrew from the race, clearing a path for Ms. Harris to replace him and pick Mr. Walz as her No. 2.

Here’s a closer look at the Democrats’ new choice for vice president.

1. He is a (very recent) social media darling . Mr. Walz has enjoyed a groundswell of support online from users commenting on his Midwestern “dad vibes” and appealing ordinariness.

2. He started the whole “weird” thing. It was Mr. Walz who labeled former President Donald J. Trump and his running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, “weird” on cable television just a couple of weeks ago. The description soon became a Democratic talking point.

3. He named a highway after Prince and signed the bill in purple ink. “I think we can lay to rest that this is the coolest bill signing we’ll ever do,” he said as he put his name on legislation declaring a stretch of Highway 5 the “Prince Rogers Nelson Memorial Highway” after the musician who had lived in Minnesota.

4. He reminds you of your high school history teacher for a reason. Mr. Walz taught high school social studies and geography — first in Alliance, Neb., and then in Mankato, Minn. — before entering politics.

5. He taught in China in 1989 and speaks some Mandarin. He went to China for a year after graduating from college and taught English there through a program affiliated with Harvard University.

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IMAGES

20 Best New Biography Books To Read In 2023
1,686 authors & readers pick the 100 best biographies of 2023
The Best Books of 2023 So Far
The best biographies to read in 2023
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COMMENTS

The Best New Biographies of 2023
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13 best biographies and memoirs of 2023. All human life is here. Helen Davies and Robbie Millen delve into the lives of Prince Harry, Elizabeth Taylor and Elon Musk. T oo much information, some cried! The most talked-about book of the year was Prince Harry's memoir, Spare. It was like eavesdropping on a particularly intense therapy session.
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Best Biographies and Memoirs of 2023 Congratulations to Jonathan Eig on King: A Life, our pick for the best biography and memoir of the year. See the full list below, or browse all of the best books of 2023
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19 Facts About Tim Walz, Harris's Pick for Vice President
4. He reminds you of your high school history teacher for a reason. Mr. Walz taught high school social studies and geography — first in Alliance, Neb., and then in Mankato, Minn. — before ...