Gayle’s Books of the Year 2023
Selected by the Bookshop
My favourite book of 2023 is Jeremy Cooper’s Brian, a love letter to the BFI and London, to small, quiet lives made expansive by access to film and art, and to friendship and community.
And special mentions to: Tom Crewe’s extraordinary debut The New Life; A.K. Blakemore’s brilliant take on the Great Tarare, The Glutton; Kathryn Scanlan’s thrilling account of life on the American horseracing circuit; the latest from Isabel Waidner and Lorrie Moore; and two wildly inventive novels pretending to other things, Jen Calleja’s Vehicle and Catherine Lacey’s Biography of X.
Recommended by Gayle
‘I can’t tell you how tenderly I – a person who spends much of their time going to the BFI alone – feel about Jeremy Cooper’s Brian, a novel about a man who spends all his time going to the BFI alone. A love letter to the BFI and to London! To small, quiet lives made expansive by access to film and art! To friendship and community!’
From the publisher:
*Shortlist, Debut Fiction, 2023 Nero Book Awards *London, 1894. John and Henry have a vision for a new way of life. But as the Oscar Wilde trial ignites public outcry, everything they long for could be under threat.'Beautifully written'…
From the publisher:
Hester Heller is a traitor.Hester Heller is a translator.A muse. A musiker.Hester Heller is inscrutable, even to herself.In a time when looking into the past has become a socially unacceptable and illegal act in the Nation, a group of…
From the publisher:
Sister Perpetue is not to move. She is not to fall asleep. She is to sit, keeping guard over the patient’s room. She has heard the stories of his hunger, which defy belief: that he has eaten all manner of creatures and objects. A…
From the publisher:
A New Yorker Book of the YearAbout one woman’s fine, hard life at the racetrack, Kick the Latch – with its ruthless concision and artful mysteries – is lightning in a bottleKathryn…
From the publisher:
The radical, joyful follow-up to the Goldsmiths Prize-winning Sterling Karat Gold.This is the story of Corey Fah, a writer on the cusp of a windfall, courtesy of the Social Evils prize committee, for whom the actual gong - and with it…
From the publisher:
When X – an iconoclastic artist, writer and polarizing shape-shifter – dies suddenly, her widow, wild with grief, hurls herself into writing a biography of the woman she deified. Though X was recognised as a crucial creative…
From the publisher:
From one of the most celebrated imaginations in American literature, Lorrie Moore’s new novel is a magic box of longing and surprise.‘A triumph of tone and, ultimately, of the imagination.’ Guardian‘Strange and…
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