Now you might think that I am being very slack in getting to do my 2023 wrap up when the year is already more than a month old. Would you believe me if I said I was operating on the Chinese calendar so technically my new year doesn’t start for another five days? No?? Well it was worth a try wasn’t it????
I’m now out of creative solutions for my tardiness. The truth is I’ve been procrastinating, dithering and dithering about which books to list as my favourites from 2023. But I’ve given myself a good talking to and concluded that the simplest approach is always the best. Instead of over-analysing whether the setting of Book A was stronger than Book B, or were the themes of Book C more interesting than Book D, I just asked myself one question:
Which books from 2023 have lingered most in my memory?
Here are the answers to that question, in no particular order. Links take you to my reviews in the few instances where they exist.
Fox Fires by Wyl Menmuir
My second experience of Menmuir’s fiction was just as memorable as my first (the Booker-nominated novella The Many. Fox Fires is unsettling because it’s set in a country that is never named, in a city that is never named, where all street names have been removed and no maps exist. I’m guessing it’s Eastern Europe but could be entirely wrong. It’s a superbly atmospheric tale of a girl’s attempt to find the father who walked out on her and her mother many years earlier. As she searches, her every move is watched.
Landlines by Raynor Winn
Winn’s third memoir sees her and her husband Moth embark on a gruelling walk through some of the wildest, most difficult terrain in Scotland. As in her first book The Salt Path, Landlines is a mix of observations about nature and our relationship with the environment with reflections on Moth’s declining health.
Nada by Carmen Laforet
One of the books on my Classics Club list, this 1944 novel oozes atmosphere. Laforet uses elements of her own life in this tale of an orphaned young woman who moves to Barcelona to live in her relatives’ sprawling house while attending university. The house is squalid and the relatives are constantly at each other’s throats and she doesn’t have enough money to feed herself. Despite the bleakness, there are touches of humour.
The Newspaper of Claremont Street by Elizabeth Jolley
My love affair with Elizabeth Jolly’s writing continues!. The title is misleading because this book is neither about a newspaper nor a journalist. The “newspaper” is actually a cleaning lady whose penchant for sharing gossip is well known among her clientele in Claremont Street. What they don’t know is that she only puts up with the cleaning because it brings her one step closer to her dream of her own home.
Nora by Nuala O’Connor
James Joyce doesn’t come out of this fictionalised account of his life very well. Nora is the young girl who fell in love with him in Dublin and stuck with him as he moved from one European city to another. They barely had two pennies to rub together because he could seldom stick at a job for long — any money he did earn, he spent on drink. O’Connor brings Nora to life in a way that’s unforgettable.
The Old Wives‘ Tale by Arnold Bennett
Virginia Woolf wasn’t very kind towards Bennett, describing his novels as overly detailed and laboured. That wasn’t my experience when I read The Old Wives’ Tale however. The first few pages aside, the book is a wonderful portrayal of two sisters who grow up in a small town in Staffordshire. One sister marries and continues running the family draper’s business; the other elopes and ends up running a boarding house/pension in Paris. Despite their vastly different paths in life, they still have much in common when they are reunited decades later.
The Prophet Song by Paul Lynch
Lynch won the 2023 Booker Prize with this disturbing novel about a world in which extremists take control of a country. He brilliantly evokes the effect on one family who try to survive the chaos of power cuts, food shortages and airstrikes, all the while fearful they will be the next target of the secret police.
Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates
There’s a lovely irony about the title of Yates’s novel because Revolutionary Road is the young married couple who move to live there find its really just boring old suburbia. The wife comes up with a plan to get out of the rut she believes they’ve fallen into. In Paris they can be free from all that mundanity and live the life more fitting their true natures. It’s a plan that leads to tragedy.
The Women in Black by Madeleine St John
I’m not a huge fan of clothes shopping — it’s far too exhausting to be enjoyable — but am quite partial to books that feature shops. They don’t have to be huge department stores as seen in The Ladies’ Paradise or The Women in Black , small family run village shops or coffee shops would be just as appealing. In Madeleine St John’s novel, the focus is on the Ladies’ Cocktail Frocks section of Goode’s, an upmarket department store in Sydney. This is where the hopes and dreams of four women converge as they cater to the desires of women who like to be seen in the latest London and Italian designs.
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
I thought this novel would suffer from over familiarity because I’ve watched the film adaptation so many times. But I was delighted to discover it had much more depth than I expected. There are some interesting though puzzling questions in the book about the fragmented identity of woman who is the narrator (she’s never named) and whether her claims about her marriage are true.
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