Best reviewed novel of 2023

Fraud By Zadie Smith

“It is a Dickensian delight… That the entire tapestry flows seamlessly across decades, weaving in shared intimacies, enormous crowd scenes and dusty literary gossip, is a testament to Smith’s craft… Indeed, there is nothing musty or ‘historical’ about the arc Touchet is the timeless voice or display of literary and political foolishness that animates the novel.

— Carolyn Kellogg, Los Angeles Times

Croc statement By Colson Whitehead

“Croc statement It is a dazzling treatise, a glorious and complex dissection of theft, deception and the slow game… Here he uses crime fiction as a lens to investigate the mechanics of a single neighborhood at a particular turning point in time. He’s right: the music, the energy, and the painful calculus of loss.

—Walter Mosley, New York Times Book Review

Birnam Wood By Eleanor Catton

“Greatly enjoyable…a masterful literary tale about the collision of environmental idealism and astonishing wealth…Catton taps into a sense very much of our moment.”

— John Powers, NPR

Bee sting By Paul Murray

“Murray shows off his enormous range, immersing us in worlds so distinct and coherent that they seem to erase each other – subjectivity and how its remarkable thickness can lead people astray being one of this author’s preoccupations.”

—Katie Waldman, The New Yorker

I’m homeless if this isn’t my home By Lori Moore

“Moore shows that grief and ghosts can be written about convincingly and intelligently, without turning the novel into a horror story…a triumph of tone and, ultimately, of imagination. For Moore, death does not necessarily mark the end of the story.”

— Aparajyoti Chakraborty, Watchman