BEST BOOKS 2023

Accusatory, libellous, or just bizarre, Penning Poison unveils the history of anonymous letter-writing. 'er at number 14 is dirty Receiving an unexpected and unsigned note is a disconcerting experience. In Penning Poison, Emily Cockayne traces the stories of such letters to all corners of English society over the period 1760-1939. She uncovers scandal, deception, class enmity, personal tragedy, and great loneliness. Some messages were accusatory,...

"An astonishing novel about a young microbiologist investigating an unfathomable deep vent in the ocean floor, leading her on a journey that will encompass the full trajectory of the cosmos and the passage of a single human life. Leigh grew up in Rotterdam, drawn to the waterfront as an escape from her unhappy home life and volatile father. Enchanted by the undersea world of her childhood, she excels in marine biology, traveling the globe to study...

"Recently retired policeman Tom Kettle is settling into the quiet of his new home, a lean-to annexed to a Victorian castle overlooking the Irish Sea. For months he has barely seen a soul, catching only glimpses of his eccentric landlord and a nervous young mother who has moved in next door. Occasionally, fond memories return, of his family, his beloved wife June and their two children, Winnie and Joe. But when two former colleagues turn up at his...

"Two decades into the twenty-first century, the stagnation of living standards has become the defining trend of American life. Life expectancy has declined, economic inequality has soared, and, after some progress, the Black-white wage gap is once again as large as it was in the 1950s. How did this happen in the world's most powerful country? And what happened to the "American dream"--the promise of a happier, healthier, more prosperous future--which...

"Plunder is a startling investigation into the poorly understood, powerful force of private equity that is reshaping the American economy: raising prices, reducing quality, cutting jobs, increasing inequality, and shifting resources from productive parts of the economy to unproductive ones. Already transformative, private equity is poised to reshape the American economy in this decade the way that big tech did in the last decade, and subprime lenders...

In 1973 Israel, as the Yom Kippur War erupts and a state-of-the-art Soviet MiG fighter makes an unexpected landing, NASA Flight Controller and former U.S. test pilot Kaz Zemeckis is drawn into a high-stakes game of spies, lies and secrets that hold the key to Cold War air and space supremacy.

"Elegy plus comedy is the only way to express how we live in the world today, says a character in Sigrid Nunez's ninth novel. The Vulnerables offers a meditation on our contemporary era, as a solitary female narrator asks what it means to be alive at this complex moment in history and considers how our present reality affects the way a person looks back on her past. Humor, to be sure, is a priceless refuge. Equally vital is connection with others,...

"A sparkling, witchy reimagining of Pride and Prejudice, told from the perspective of the troublesome and-according to her-much-maligned youngest Bennet sister, Lydia. In this exuberant reimagining of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Lydia Bennet puts pen to paper to relate the real events and aftermath of the classic story from her own perspective. Some facts are well known: Mrs. Bennet suffers from her nerves; Mr. Bennet suffers from Mrs. Bennet,...

"Cal Sounder is a detective working for the police on certain very sensitive cases. So when he's called in to investigate a homicide at a local apartment, he is surprised at first to see that the victim appears to be a rather typical, milquetoast techie. But on closer inspection, he finds the victim is over seven feet tall. And even though he doesn't look a day over thirty, he is actually ninety years old. Clearly, he is a Titan-one of this dystopian,...

"The Pandominion: a political and trading alliance of a million worlds. Except that they're really just one world, Earth, in many different realities. And when an A.I. threat arises that could destroy everything the Pandominion has built, they'll eradicate it by whatever means necessary. Scientist Hadiz Tambuwal is looking for a solution to her own Earth's environmental collapse when she stumbles across the secret of inter-dimensional travel, a secret...