## Metadata - Author: [[Literary Hub]] - Full Title: The Best Reviewed Fiction of 2023 - Category: #articles - Summary: The Best Reviewed Fiction of 2023 includes a list of the top ten fiction books that received the highest points based on reviews from various publications. The list includes books by Anne Enright, Ann Patchett, Tessa Hadley, Lorrie Moore, Jenny Erpenbeck, Deborah Levy, Paul Murray, Eleanor Catton, Colson Whitehead, and Zadie Smith. Each book is accompanied by excerpts from the reviews and interviews with the authors. The rankings are based on a scoring system that assigns points to rave, positive, mixed, and pan reviews. - URL: https://lithub.com/the-best-reviewed-fiction-of-2023/ ## Full Document [](http://bookmarks.reviews) The points are tallied, the math is done, and the results are in. Yes, all year long the diligent and endearingly disgruntled Book Marks elves have been mining reviews from every corner of the literary internet. Brows furrowed, stomachs growling, they’ve worked from break of dawn to blink of dusk, seven days a week, scouring the book review sections of over 150 publications—from the *New York Times* to the *Sydney Morning Herald*, the *Toronto Star* to the *London Review of Books*—all so that we can now say with certainty that *these* are the best reviewed fiction titles of 2023. Happy reading! [Anne Enright\_The Wren, the Wren Cover](https://bookmarks.reviews/reviews/the-wren-the-wren/) **1. by Anne Enright (W.W. Norton & Company)** **18 Rave • 2 Positive Read an interview with Anne Enright [here](https://lithub.com/anne-enright-stays-inside-the-work/)** “So convincingly has Ms. Enright conjured the archetype of the wandering Irish bard who leaves behind him a legacy of abandoned women and melodious, honey-tongued verse … Is it possible for poems to be fictitious? In fact, these nostalgic odes to love and Ireland are limpid, lilting, wholly credible stand-alone works … One of Ms. Enright’s remarkable feats is to write believably across three generations, capturing epochal differences but also a buried, or even repressed, continuity. The fullness of Ms. Enright’s talent is reflected as well in her treatment of what has come to be known, a bit glibly, as the ‘art monster.’” [Ann Patchett\_Tom Lake Cover](https://bookmarks.reviews/reviews/tom-lake/) **2. by Ann Patchett (Harper)** **19 Rave • 4 Positive • 1 Mixed Read an interview with Ann Patchett [here](https://lithub.com/ann-patchett-on-grabbing-galleys-and-getting-drafts-done/)** “Not that a heart is not broken at some point, but it breaks without affecting the remarkable warmth of the book, set in summer’s fullest bloom … This generous writer hits the mark again with her ninth novel … Knowing Patchett’s personal history with motherhood makes the fullness of the maternal feelings she imagines for Lara Kenison particularly poignant.” [](https://bookmarks.reviews/reviews/after-the-funeral-and-other-stories/)[Tessa Hadley\_After the Funeral and Other Stories Cover](https://bookmarks.reviews/reviews/after-the-funeral-and-other-stories/) **3. by Tessa Hadley (Knopf)** **15 Rave • 6 Positive Read an interview with Tessa Hadley [here](https://lithub.com/tessa-hadley-on-the-unapologetic-joys-of-rereading/)** “This new collection is a great introduction to her work and for those of us already familiar with Hadley, it’s a great addition. Throughout the collection, Hadley spins out character studies of (mostly) women at odds with themselves, their partners, their families, or life in general … Hadley does a wonderful job of weaving past and present together as the sisters are forced to confront their memories and relationships. And, of course, there are those moments of shining prose … Rife with deft and often beautiful prose, and astute but compassionate characterization, this is a wonderful collection.” [Lorrie Moore\_I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home Cover](https://bookmarks.reviews/reviews/i-am-homeless-if-this-is-not-my-home/) **4. by Lorrie Moore (****Knopf)** **20 Rave • 9 Positive • 6 Mixed • 1 Pan Read an interview with Lorrie Moore [here](https://lithub.com/lorrie-moore-writings-natural-place-is-as-a-passionate-side-hustle/)** “Moore excels in…[the] neurotic but intimate conversations that go nowhere, and the scenes in the hospice are viscerally done … Moore shows that grief and ghosts can be written about persuasively, and wittily, without turning a novel into a horror story … A triumph of tone and, ultimately, of the imagination. For Moore, death doesn’t necessarily mark the end of a story.” Kairos Jenny Erpenbeck **5. by Jenny Erpenbeck (New Directions)** **15 Rave • 9 Positive** **Read an excerpt from [here](https://lithub.com/kairos/)** “A cathartic leak of a novel, a beautiful bummer, and the floodgates open early … If *Kairos* were only a tear-jerker, there might not be much more to say about it. But Erpenbeck, a German writer born in 1967 whose work has come sharply to the attention of English-language readers over the past decade, is among the most sophisticated and powerful novelists we have. Clinging to the undercarriage of her sentences, like fugitives, are intimations of Germany’s politics, history and cultural memory … She is writing more closely to her own unconscious … I don’t generally read the books I review twice, but this one I did … Profound and moving.” [](https://bookmarks.reviews/reviews/august-blue/)[Deborah Levy\_August Blue Cover](https://bookmarks.reviews/reviews/august-blue/) **6. by Deborah Levy** **(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)** **13 Rave • 8 Positive • 2 Mixed** “Ms. Levy rewards close readers by packing her sardine-can-slim novels with tight connections … *August Blue,*which builds to a moving climax, is more emotionally accessible than Ms. Levy’s previous novels. But it too encompasses the cerebral and the sentimental, realism and surrealism, love and loss, the drive to create art—and the ambiguities of human relations.” Paul Murray\_The Bee Sting Cover **7. by Paul Murray (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)** **18 Rave • 5 Positive • 5 Mixed Read an excerpt from [here](https://lithub.com/the-bee-sting/)** “*The Bee Sting*…ought to cement Murray’s already high standing. Another changeup, it’s a triumph of realist fiction, a big, sprawling social novel in the vein of Jonathan Franzen’s *Freedom*. The agility with which Murray structures the narrative around the family at its heart is virtuosic and sure-footed, evidence of a writer at the height of his power deftly shifting perspectives, style and syntax to maximize emotional impact. Hilarious and sardonic, heartbreaking and beautiful—there’s just no other way to put it: *The Bee Sting* is a masterpiece.” Birnam Wood **8. by Eleanor Catton (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)** **21 Rave • 7 Positive • 3 Mixed • 1 Pan Read an excerpt from [here](https://lithub.com/birnam-wood/)** “Bold, ambitious … A grand, chilling thriller tightly bound by inescapable concerns … *Birnam Wood* moves at a faster clip with arguably higher stakes. Make no mistake: It’s a book that grips you by the throat until its final paragraph. Catton successfully scorches the earth with her prose … Little feels certain or safe. The literary novel binds itself with a genre thriller in Catton’s hands … Free to play with form, Catton winds methodically through the minds of her characters … I’ll unabashedly state that *Birnam Wood* is a brash, unforgettable novel.” [Colson Whitehead\_Crook Manifesto Cover](https://bookmarks.reviews/reviews/crook-manifesto/) **9. by Colson Whitehead (Doubleday)** **15 Rave • 10 Positive • 4 Mixed • 1 Pan Read an interview with Colson Whitehead [here](https://lithub.com/colson-whitehead-on-blaxploitation-cinema-sidney-lumets-new-york-and-his-own-harlem-trilogy/)** “Both deceptively substantive and sneakily funny, a wise journey through Harlem days and nights as lived by Ray Carney, a conscientious furniture salesman and family man who happens to run a little crooked … Whitehead has always had a sharp instinct for the workings of culture … Whitehead’s New York of the ‘70s is a fully realized universe down to the most meticulous details, from the constant sirens and bodega drug fronts to a sweltering, abandoned biscuit factory … A…reminder, as if we still needed one, that crime fiction can be great literature. These books are as resonant and finely observed as anything Whitehead has written.” [Zadie Smith\_The Fraud Cover](https://bookmarks.reviews/reviews/the-fraud/) **10. by Zadie Smith (Penguin Press)** **20 Rave • 6 Positive • 9 Mixed • 1 Pan** “It offers a vast, acute panoply of London and the English countryside, and successfully locates the social controversies of an era in a handful of characters … Touchet is the most morally intelligent character Smith has written … The book’s structure is uneven. One wishes, for instance, that the chapters would signal their time jumps more consistently … But these infelicities stop mattering when we are deep into the trial and the book turns into a portrait of people with thwarted ambitions, of people who, like Ainsworth, become frauds without knowing … As always, it is a pleasure to be in Zadie Smith’s mind, which, as time goes on, is becoming contiguous with London itself. Dickens may be dead, but Smith, thankfully, is alive.” **Our System:** **RAVE = 5 points • POSITIVE = 3 points • MIXED = 1 point • PAN = -5 points The ten books with the highest points totals are then ranked by weighted average**