SEVEN WRITERS SHARE THE TITLES THEY COULDN’T STOP READING IN 2023
ZADIE SMITH,
I loved the doomed romance in Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos and the philosophical wanderings in Teju Cole’s Tremor. It’s been such a good year for fiction: I feel like we’re in the middle of a renaissance of the novel – a ‘remembering why novels are good’ sort of a moment.
DAVID NICHOLLS
Cecile Pin’s Wandering Souls tells the story of a family fleeing Vietnam by boat in 1979 and beginning an uncertain, sometimes frightening life as refugees. An original and ambitious debut, it’s an epic stor y spanning generations but Pin’s writing is precise and economical, and the stor y is moving without ever succumbing to melodrama or sentimentalit y. I loved it.
PANDORA SYKES
I haven’t been able to stop waxing lyrical about Soldier Sailor by the Irish writer Claire Kilroy – her first book in a decade (and the first I’ve read by her) – about early parenthood and the post-partum identity shift. It so beautifully describes the complexity of matrescence in a way non-fiction cannot – tender and visceral, delicate and violent, and not remotely trite or preachy.
ELEANOR CATTON
I loved Western Lane by Chetna Maroo, a novel that dares to work in miniature and yet somehow never feels small. Following the death of their mother, Gopi and her sisters learn to play squash, coached by their grieving father. As well as the deep satisfaction of mastering a skill, it explores the strange paradox whereby we both lose ourselves
