Best of

The votes are all in and we’re ready to celebrate the consensus very best books of 2023, based on a broad collection of lists. James McBride’s The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store was both novel of the year and overall book of the year, followed in the voting by Safiya Sinclair’s How to Say Babylon and David Grann’s The Wager, which tied for nonfiction book of the year.  Farrar, Straus outperformed this year with five titles among the top 20. Independent publishers were represented by newcomers Red Tower and Yale University Press, as well as Grove/Atlantic. Sinclair’s memoir was first […]

Right on schedule as usual, with many more listmakers weighing in, the favorites have separated into two pretty clear lists of top fiction and nonfiction. At the top of the lists, novels by James McBride and R.F. Kuang are vying for book of the year honors, with a number of other titles tightly packed and right behind them. In nonfiction the competition at the top is equally close between Safiya Sinclair’s memoir and David Grann’s latest. (Kuang’s Babel was tied for No. 9 on last year’s fiction list, while McBride’s Deacon King Kong was tied for No. 6 on the […]