2023's Literary Gold Medalists
My favorite 15 books I read this year
Welcome to the virtual awards ceremony for 2023’s Literary Gold Medalists. In 2021 I published a list of my top 5 books of the year and in 2022 I expanded the list to my favorite 10. Today I am revealing the best 15 books that I read this year, both because I couldn’t help myself and because I couldn’t narrow the list down. As was the case for my 2023 Literary Silver Medalists, I read these books this year, but they weren’t necessarily published in 2023. I have ranked them for my own entertainment, but the distinctions between them are arbitrary to non-existent. These are the books I can’t stop thinking about, talking about, and recommending. They are all fantastically written, represent a range of genres, and highlight the best of the craft.
What were your favorite books that you read in 2023? Let me know in the comments below. Until then, happy reading!
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15. How to Stay Married - Harrison Scott Key
Memoir
This is a memoir about a southern, Christian, religious man whose wife had an affair. This is a funny memoir about a couple relying on faith and community to save their marriage. Stay with me. In 2017, when Harrison’s wife Lauren told him that she was having an affair with their former neighbor and wanted a divorce, he was blindsided. Lauren, the mother of their three daughters. Lauren, the woman who goes to church nearly every Sunday. But also, Lauren, a woman with a childhood of loss and abandonment. A woman whose life became inundated by the burdens of raising three girls without much help from her husband. A woman who wanted someone to listen to her and help her with her challenges.
How to Stay Married is not a lurid, judgmental tale of a marriage’s implosion. It is a journey of self-discovery, of revealing fissures in their commitment to partnership and unity. It is also an exploration of finding comfort in faith and the role faith had in shaping their understanding of what marriage is meant to accomplish. But don’t worry. While religion, particularly the teachings of the Church of Christ, feature prominently in the narrative, the book is never preachy, dogmatic, or sanctimonious. Also, did I mention that this book is funny? Harrison Scott Key has an eye for detail and a talent for self-effacing humor that caused me to occasionally laugh out loud. I did not expect to love this book as much as I did. On the surface, Key and I don’t have much in common. However, Key has crafted an almost perfect memoir. In writing about his own experience he touches upon the universality of the human condition with humor, wit, patience, and love.
14. Close to Home - Michael Magee
Literary Fiction
Sean grew up in West Belfast in the shadow of the Troubles. Although the conflict is technically over, its vestiges remain in the poverty, alcoholism, joblessness, and PTSD that surround him. A good kid, Sean is the first in his family to leave home and go to college to study English literature in Liverpool. But when he returns home in the early 2010s, he finds limited opportunities for progress. After getting in a fight at a house party and sentenced to 200 hours of community service, any dream that he had of being a writer is put on hold, as Sean must balance his temporary job as a bartender in a nightclub with the demands of staying out of prison.
Close to Home is a beautifully intimate portrait of a young man trying to get by when nearly all the odds are stacked against him. It is a story of broken family, addiction, and patched-together parenthood. It is also a subtle account of the hidden toll of the Troubles, and the unaddressed traumas passed through the generations. It’s hard to believe that this is Michael Magee’s first novel because the clarity of his prose is absolutely breathtaking. Magee writes with honesty and grit from the perspective of Sean, steering readers through a city trying to get by.
13. The Last Karankawas - Kimberly Garza
Literary Fiction
For the residents of Galveston, Texas - those “born on the island” (BOI) and those who were not - storms and hurricanes are as much a part of legend as they are of life. Although residents are trained to remember the 1900 Great Galveston Hurricane with shock and awe, they also like to think of themselves as hearty, which poses a central dilemma when news of Hurricane Ike in 2008 forces the community to make a choice over staying or fleeing.
Garza gives life to this conflict through the voices of a number of Galveston residents from across its disparate communities, but gives a special focus to Carly, the daughter of a Filipino immigrant and Mexican American father who left her to be raised by her grandmother, a BOI, and never came back. As a child who knew nothing but those who leave, Carly chooses to put down roots, taking a job as a nurse in the hospital nearby and eventually marrying her childhood sweetheart, Jess. A series of equally developed and complicated characters orbit their lives, jumping backward and forward in time, to give life to the close knit community.
Garza writes in beautiful detail, shining a spotlight on the resilience of everyday struggle and survival. With nearly each chapter spotlighting a different character, I loved watching the connections be revealed while appreciating the complicated puzzle Garza was crafting. This is a book to enjoy and savor. It is not just an impressive debut, but an impressive feat of literature.
12. Landslide - Susan Conley
Literary Fiction
In this beautiful book, the Maine setting is as omnipresent as its inhabitants. Fishing is the lifeblood on the coast of Penobscot Bay. What used to be a thriving industry, however, has declined in recent years as both climate change and overfishing changes the population of the surrounding waters and the people on the land. In an attempt to offset the scarcity back home, Kit Archer accepts a months-long job on a fishing boat off the coast of Nova Scotia, where he is caught in the blast of an engine explosion and breaks his femur. Stuck in a hospital across the border in Canada, his wife Jill is left to take care of their volatile teenage boys, Sam and Charlie, as well as newfound complications in her marriage. As winter sets in, Jill and the boys hunker down in their small house on a small island better suited for summer, surrounded by water and the constant reminder of how much their fortunes are out of their control.
Although this might not sound like a good thing, I indescribably found myself on the verge of tears for much of this book. I think this speaks to Conley’s capacity to write about the minutiae of this family’s life with reverent detail and heart. I was amazed at Conley’s capacity to create such nuanced portraits of teenage angst and longing, particularly in connection to a mother’s anxiety about her family’s well-being. Every detail was accounted for, fully immersing me as the reader in the mind of Jill, in the Archer family, and in the economic challenges of the town. When determining the difference between a great book and a truly superb one, it sometimes comes down to the little things. Obviously the writing has to be excellent and draw me in, but at the end of the day will I remember the story in the months to come? How did the book make me feel while I was reading it? Did it move me? Landslide meets all of these criteria with a resounding yes.
11. In Memoriam - Alice Winn
Historical Fiction
In Memoriam is both a war story and a love story centered around two young men who fall in love at British boarding school before being sent to fight in the trenches of World War I. Sidney Ellwood and Henry Gaunt come from privileged, aristocratic backgrounds. They have different opinions on the principles of the war, but in 1914 one’s honor is tied to one’s commitment to his country. Their social status guarantees an officer rank after they enlist, and they are almost immediately sent to the Belgian trenches where any remaining idealism about the heroics of war are quickly shattered by the brutality all around them. The men they are tasked with leading die in droves and boys with whom they grew up are constantly added to their school’s in memoriam list. The two rely on one another throughout it all, until an ill-fated scouting trip ends in Gaunt with a bullet hole in his chest, leaving Ellwood without a friend and partner to continue fighting for.
In Memoriam is a remarkable debut novel with gravitas befitting a much more experienced writer. I felt completely immersed in the world that Alice Winn built, from the schoolboy idealism, to the horrors of the trenches, to the escapades in a POW camp. While In Memoriam is fast-paced and driven by the current of the war, it is also an intimate character study of boys forced to grow into men too quickly. It is a statement about boys who loved each other without the words to always define what they were feeling within a society that criminalized anything even remotely resembling their relationship. It is also a commentary on class and privilege, on patriotism and duty, and the fragility of hundreds of thousands of lives within a long and incomprehensible battle. I was moved and elated by this beautiful story, drawn in from the very first page and committed until the last.
10. All That’s Left Unsaid - Tracey Lien
Literary Fiction
As soon as she’s able, Ky Tran leaves the Sydney suburb of Cabramatta to go college and become a journalist. 1990s Cabramatta, home to thousands of Vietnamese refugees like members of her family, is devastated by violent gangs and a heroin epidemic. After Ky receives a call that her beloved younger brother Denny has been brutally assaulted and murdered while celebrating his high school graduation with classmates at a restaurant, she is shocked. Denny was a good kid, was never in trouble, and had excellent grades. The police appear indifferent to Ky’s pleas for answers, overwhelmed by the scourge of violence facing the city, and accepting as true the dubious claim that none of the dozen customers at the restaurant saw anything. Home for Denny’s funeral, Ky takes it upon herself to investigate what actually happened, hoping that she, a member of this community, can convince people to talk.
All That’s Left Unsaid is a beautiful book. Lien has created a superb debut that transcends the thriller genre and places itself squarely within the category of excellent literary fiction. Alternating between Ky’s perspective and the perspectives of the people at the restaurant that night, readers are exposed not only to the story of Denny and Ky, but also to the lingering impacts of the war in Vietnam, colonialism, poverty, addiction, and the struggle to survive in an unfamiliar place. I was captivated by the very first sentence of this haunting story and urge everyone to pick it up.
9. The Sullivanians - Alexander Stille
Non-Fiction/Sociology/Cults
From the late 1950s through the early 1990s, hundreds of people participated in a psychotherapy cult on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The Sullivan Institute for Research promoted sexual liberation, the destruction of the traditional nuclear family, rebellion against parents, and relentless psychoanalysis. Many of the therapists had little training outside of the Institute itself, and yet every member of the group religiously attended weekly sessions to learn about how their parents had ruined them and how they would ruin their children after them. As the group evolved, the Institute organized communal single-sex homes in the area, ranging from apartment units to, eventually, an entire building that could accommodate their nearly 400 members at its peak. Participants were immediately inducted into a close-knit social scene, full of parties and dates every night. Not only were a litany of famous people attracted to the group, including Jackson Pollock, Clement Greenberg, and Judy Collins, but most of the Sullivanians were highly educated, high functioning professional adults sucked into the promises of a counterrevolution.
But, like any good cult, as the group grew and deviated from its original offering of pure, unregulated therapy (particularly in the 1960s, therapy was not governed by any formal standards. It’s legal to pay another person to tear one’s life apart!), fissures widened and harm ensued. Children born to group members were almost immediately taken from their biological parents to be raised by other Sullivanians, and, at the first opportunity, were sent to boarding school. People were actively discouraged from settling into monogamous relationships, and members were required to do odd jobs for the Institute for free on top of their full-time professions. On two separate occasions, they took over a theater by force and vandalized a neighboring apartment full of college students. All of this took place, in plain sight, just blocks from where I live now.
Alexander Stille interviews former members and their children to piece together the story of the Sullivanians, and the result is nothing short of astonishing. This is a work of non-fiction that reads like fiction. I’d pick up the book and not want to put it down, drawn into the complexities of this cult-like group and trying to figure out what made it tick and survive for as long as it did. My one piece of advice is to not listen to this book on audio; there might be too many players to keep track of unless you’re fully focused on the narration. Otherwise, this is an incredibly well-crafted and well-written story with staying power.
8. The Rachel Incident - Caroline O’Donoghue
Literary Fiction
While working at a bookstore in Cork, Ireland, Rachel, a student finishing her final year of university, meets James, a closeted high school graduate. The 2010 Recession is in full swing, Ireland having been hit particularly hard, and Rachel is unsure what she will do with her English degree after she graduates. Rachel and James develop a quick and tight-night friendship, choosing to move in together when James admits that he is need of a roommate. They tell each other everything and are unfailingly loyal to one another, including and until Rachel tells James about a crush on her married professor. Intending to facilitate their relationship, James organizes a scheme for Rachel to seduce him, but instead ends up in a relationship with the professor himself. Their secret romance sets off a cascade of intertwined events between Rachel, James, the professor, and his well-connected wife as Rachel and James try to figure out the next steps for their future.
This is a beautifully written, expertly crafted, character-driven novel filled with humor. It is the story of friendship, hardship, young adulthood, and discovery. It is an exploration of power dynamics and their fragility. It is filled to the brim with dysfunction but also tenderness, and I loved every second of it.
7. Crossing to Safety - Wallace Stegner
Literary Fiction
Crossing to Safety, published in 1987, is loosely based on the life of the author, who won the 1972 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The main couple, Larry and Sally Morgan, are modeled on Stegner and his wife Mary, while their counterpart couple, Sid and Charity Lang, are based on their friends. Crossing to Safety is a quintessential character-focused book. The story is almost exclusively about marriage, adult friendship, and the evolution of both over the course of fifty years. There is neither drama nor betrayal. The story’s intrigue comes from the intimately detailed depictions of the ordinary lives of two couples making their way out of the Depression in the world of literature and academia.
The Langs come from money and remain fairly insulated from the economic catastrophe of the 1930s. Despite this, Charity is desperate for Sid to achieve tenure as a professor at the University of Wisconsin even though Sid would rather spend his days writing poetry. On the flip side, Larry and Sally Morgan have little family and even less money when they arrive in Madison. They are forever indebted to the generosity of the Langs who usher them into their world, becoming nearly inseparable in the process. As the years continue their paths inevitably diverge - through the birth of children, a polio diagnosis, and tenure denial - and yet, the couples remain like family.
Did I have issues with the depiction of Charity as too controlling, manipulative, and uptight as a central conflict in the book? Absolutely. Wallace Stegner, born in 1909, was not a man known for espousing ideas beyond his time. However, this depiction was also an unfiltered view into the mind of a major contributor to American literature in the 20th century and the world that he represented. His technical writing abilities are unimpeachably stellar and his ability to make me care so deeply about his characters made me embrace this great work of literature.
6. An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination - Elizabeth McCracken
Memoir
McCracken’s first pregnancy was spent in Bordeaux with her husband and was, by her account, easy and idyllic. The decision to forgo a fancy doctor in Paris and instead choose a midwife for the birth seemed neither hard nor exceptional, but later, McCracken will wonder if it was fateful. 40 weeks into the pregnancy, McCracken goes to the midwife because she can’t feel the baby kick. A heartbeat is detected, but the baby fails a non-stress test. Instead of being sent to the hospital immediately, McCracken is told to rest. A few hours later, after choosing to go to the hospital, she learns that her baby, affectionately named “Pudding” by her and her husband while they decided on the permanent name, was pronounced dead.
An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination is a reflection on love, loss, mourning, pregnancy, and motherhood. Shortly after the loss of her child, McCracken and her husband attempt to move back to the United States - a decision that was pre-planned, but one that they anticipated would be done with a healthy baby. A few months later, the couple learns that McCracken is pregnant again, making the memoir just as much a contemplation of the second pregnancy as the first. McCracken explores the indelible conundrum of experiencing pregnancy, creation, and life in the wake of unexpected disaster. Not only was this book moving - indeed certain details near the end brought me to tears - but the writing was exquisite. McCracken has an eye for beautiful detail, and her ability to write about personal tragedy is a gorgeous attempt to heal and remember.
5. Olive Kitteridge - Elizabeth Strout
Literary Fiction/Connected Short Stories, 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction Winner
Although I have enjoyed practically every Pulitzer winner that I have read, Olive Kitteridge, the 2009 winner, felt particularly exceptional. Already a big fan of Elizabeth Strout and her Lucy Barton books, I was blown away by the world of Olive Kitteridge, who might just be one of my favorite literary characters of all time. Olive, a retired schoolteacher, is married to a retired pharmacist named Henry, who is kind to a fault until a traumatic event exposes their marriage’s flaws. The two struggle with the growing distance between themselves and their son, particularly after Henry’s debilitating stroke. A cast of characters who live in the Kitteridge’s Maine hometown exist on the periphery of Olive’s life, and readers are introduced to them through a series of interlocking stories. Olive is brash, opinionated, and not afraid to let others know it. Strout’s ability to craft people in such intimate detail, shedding light on the most basic of human conditions, is truly a feat to be admired and appreciated.
4. The Stone Diaries - Carol Shields
Literary Fiction, 1995 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction Winner
The Stone Diaries is an exceptional book that follows the life of Daisy Goodwill Flett from birth to death. Born at the beginning of the 20th century in a Manitoba quarry town, Daisy is sent to live with her former neighbor in Winnipeg after her mother’s death in childbirth proves to be too much for her father. Nearly a decade later, after her father gets a job to set up a new quarry in Indiana, Daisy leaves Canada to be reacquainted with her father for the first time since birth. What follows is the story of Daisy’s unremarkable life in Indiana, Ottawa, and finally Florida. It is a tale of independence, motherhood, and friendship that stretches across the many developments of the 20th century. The beauty of this book comes from Carol Shields’ ability to depict Daisy’s life in such stark detail, transforming her ordinary existence into something extraordinary. Each chapter tackles a different stretch of time and fleshes out the lives of those relevant to Daisy during that period, providing important color as she grows. I’m still thinking about the ending of the story, not because there was anything explosive or shocking, but because of its recognition of the tragedy of mundanity before transforming it into something profound.
3. Birnam Wood - Eleanor Catton
Literary Fiction
After hearing about a devastating landslide on New Zealand’s South Island, Mira decides to assess the now cut-off and abandoned land as a potential location for a new outpost of Birnam Wood, the guerrilla gardening group that she leads. Birnam Wood’s mission is to plant crops, sometimes by permission and other times through trespass, on abandoned or underused stretches of land throughout New Zealand as a way to send a message about our capitalist society’s waste and inefficiency. As the book opens, the group is struggling to make ends meet financially and retain its membership. The landslide has created a massive opportunity for growth and publicity, which Mira is determined to take advantage of. When she arrives, she is surprised to find the quirky American billionaire Robert Lemoine already there, who offers the land and a sizable quantity of startup money to Birnam Wood. Lemoine is the CEO of a large company that specializes in surveillance drones, and it is almost immediately obvious to the reader that Lemoine has darker motivations attached to his gift, which are largely unknown to Mira and the group.
This book is gripping from start to finish and is probably best described as a slow burn with a fantastic structure. The book is told in alternating perspectives and as a result, readers know about the idiosyncrasies and motivations of each of the main characters - including Birnam Wood’s second-in-command, a disgruntled former member, and the true owner of the land - as the book unfolds. However, all of this internal plotting is not known to the other characters, leading to intrigue and peril. Things are not as they seem in this unique, psychological story written by a Booker Prize winning author with immense, glorious talent.
2. Tom Lake - Ann Patchett
Literary Fiction
The cherry harvest season in Northern Michigan is always stressful, connected to the calendar, weather, and ability to get the fruit to market. This is especially true in the late spring and early summer of 2020, with the pandemic limiting the Nelson’s labor supply and leaving much of the harvest to the family to complete, including Lara, our narrator, her husband Joe, and their three adult daughters who have returned home to quarantine. To pass the time as they pick cherries, Lara tells her daughters the story of one summer in her early twenties when she was acting in a northern Michigan summer stock production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town alongside the soon to be famous actor, Peter Duke. The daughters, who know vaguely of their mother and Duke’s brief romantic relationship, listen raptly as Lara reveals hitherto unknown details about her youth, brief acting career, and path that led her to the orchard. The story unfolds on a parallel track to their own young lives, in which they face similar quandaries of love, youth, and the charting of one’s future.
Tom Lake is an incredible feat of writing. In many ways three stories are happening all at once - the Our Town play, Lara’s youth, and the pandemic present. They are perfectly paced and weaved together, creating a magnificent structural feat. I swear I’m not raving about Tom Lake only because I love Ann Patchett (although it’s true, I do love Ann Patchett and am in constant amazement over the depth of her writing). I felt moved by every character, drawn to every detail of the story, and comforted by Lara’s cadence. Tom Lake is as heartfelt as it is heart-wrenching, written by an author who has honed her craft and deserves every heap of praise she is given. Also, make sure you have cherries nearby while you read. You’re going to crave them.
1. The Slowworm’s Song - Andrew Miller
Literary Fiction
In The Slowworm’s Song, Andrew Miller tells the story of Stephen Rose, a middle-aged man reflecting on his life in the form of a very long letter to his daughter. As the novel begins, Stephen receives a letter from a truth and reconciliation commission in Belfast, inviting him to come and testify about an unnamed atrocity that he was involved in when he was a twenty-year-old soldier in the British Armed Forces. While Stephen initially attempts to ignore the invitation and its implications, he is subconsciously aware that sooner or later he will have to atone for his sins, of which he has spent the remainder of his life attempting to reconcile. Before responding to the commission, Stephen decides to write down his story to give to his somewhat estranged daughter, whose life he was absent from when she was growing up, but who he desperately wants to know now. His letter to her is quiet, meandering, and delicate, starting with his Quaker upbringing in the small town of Somerset, England, what led him to the military, and the unexpected trajectory of his life afterward.
This is such a beautiful book about difficult subjects. It is written with poise and provides a sliver of humanity in a time period marked by oppression. Although Stephen committed a terrible act of violence - and there is no attempt to deny or paper over this fact - the method by which he chooses to tell his story reminds the reader that the majority of people in times of conflict, regardless of the side they are on, are ordinary people who love other ordinary people living in an otherwise ordinary world.
All of the books written about above are available on my 2023 Literary Gold Medalists Bookshop Page, or you can click on the title of the book itself to be routed to the shop. Every book I’ve ever recommended, sorted by post, is also available on the general shop page.
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Ooh, added a couple of these to my 2024 TBR!!
I’m so happy to find a list with several titles I’ve never heard of, and they sound amazing.