The New York Times’ Notable Fiction Books of 2023

The two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and bestselling author of Harlem Shuffle continues his Harlem saga in a powerful and hugely-entertaining novel that summons 1970s New York in all its seedy glory.

With a foreword by Jhumpa Lahiri, Forbidden Notebook is a classic domestic novel by the Italian-Cuban feminist writer Alba de Céspedes, whose work inspired contemporary writers like Elena Ferrante. An exquisitely crafted portrayal of domestic life, Forbidden Notebook recognizes the universality of human aspirations.

From acclaimed and bestselling novelist Zadie Smith, a kaleidoscopic work of historical fiction set against the legal trial that divided Victorian England, about who gets to tell their story — and who gets to be believed.

From James McBride, author of the bestselling Oprah’s Book Club pick Deacon King Kong and the National Book Award-winning The Good Lord Bird, a novel about small-town secrets and the people who keep them.

From the author of Dear Edward comes a “powerfully affecting” (People) family story that asks: Can love make a broken person whole? An exquisite homage to Louisa May Alcott’s timeless classic, Little Women, Hello Beautiful is a profoundly moving portrait of what is possible when we choose to love someone not in spite of who they are, but because of it.

A sweeping and beautifully rendered exploration of home and yearning, following the fracturing of a family upon the demise of its patriarch.

The award-winning author of How Much of These Hills Is Gold returns with a rapturous and revelatory novel about a young chef whose discovery of pleasure alters her life and, indirectly, the world.

Blue skies, empty land — and enough wide-open space to hide a horrifying secret. A woman with a past, a mysterious trunk, a town on the edge of nowhere, and an “absorbing, powerful” (BuzzFeed) new vision of the American West, from the award-winning author of The Changeling.

A gripping literary mystery in the vein of Bolaño’s Savage Detectives, this coming-of-age novel unravels the fascinating life of a maligned Black author, based on Yambo Ouologuem.

A sweeping novel about a single house in the woods of New England, told through the lives of those who inhabit it across the centuries — “a time-spanning, genre-blurring work of storytelling magic” (The Washington Post) from the Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of The Piano Tuner and The Winter Soldier.

A “brilliant … essential and surprisingly thrilling book about motherhood” (The New York Times) and the early postpartum days, following a woman struggling with maternal fear and its looming madness and showing how difficult and fragile those days can be — and how vital love is to pull anyone out from the dark.

A woman’s mysterious death puts her husband and son on a collision course with her demonic family in her first novel to be translated into English by the International Booker Prize-shortlisted author of The Dangers of Smoking in Bed — “the most exciting discovery I’ve made in fiction for some time” (Kazuo Ishiguro).

A deliciously funny, sharply observed debut of family, love, and class, this zeitgeisty novel follows three women in one wealthy Brooklyn clan.

A wild, sweeping novel that imagines an alternate secret history of Korea and the traces it leaves on the present — loaded with assassins and mad poets, RPGs and slasher films, pop bands and the perils of social media.

From “one of the finest and bravest novelists at work today,” (Vulture) award-winning writer Idra Novey has conjured a novel of “astonishing and singular” honesty (Rumaan Alam) with two determined, unforgettable female voices.

From the bestselling author of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, a searing multi-generational novel — set in the 1980s in racially and politically turbulent Philadelphia and in the tiny town of Bonaparte, Alabama — about a mother fighting for her sanity and survival.

The epic tale of a woman who breathes a fantastical empire into existence, only to be consumed by it over the centuries — from the transcendent imagination of Booker Prize-winning, internationally bestselling author Salman Rushdie.

Surreal, hilarious, and shrewdly poignant, Y/N is a provocative literary debut about the universal longing for transcendence and the tragic struggle to assert one’s singular story amidst the amnesiac effects of globalization. Esther Yi’s prose unsettles the boundary between high and mass art, exploding our expectations of a novel about “identity” and offering in its place a sui generis picture of the loneliness that afflicts modern life.