Amazon reveals the 10 best books of 2023, and No. 1 is a unanimous winner
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Once a year, the Amazon books editorial team gathers in Seattle for a literary battle royale.
They assemble from home bases across the country with a single mission: whittle down a list of best books of the year from the hundreds of titles each editor has read.
The arena is a corporate meeting room equipped with sticky notes and whiteboards. Editors come prepared with books they want to champion. The stories they just can't get out of their heads. The characters they're sure you'll love.
"We discuss, fight, talk about the ones we like the most," says senior manager Al Woodworth. "It's the best day of the year. We get to do what we do best which is advocate for these books and these authors. It's such an honor and we take it very seriously."
The culmination of their debate is a list of the best books of the year. On Wednesday, USA TODAY exclusively reveals the first 10.
The list is deliberately diverse, says Sarah Gelman, editorial director of Amazon Books. You'll find fiction and nonfiction, stories of romance and murder. What each book has in common is the ability to pull in the reader and not let go until the end.
This year, the book that took the top spot was a unanimous victor. James McBride's "The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store" is an instant classic and among the "great American novels of our time," says Woodworth.
Here's a look at the Top 10 and more about why they were crowned. You can find the top 100 list, as well as lists by genre, on amazon.com/bestbooks2023.
1. 'The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store' by James McBride
What it's about: From the National Book Award winner of "Deacon King Kong," this novel is rooted in small-town secrets. In 1972 Pottstown, Pennsylvania, workers digging the foundation for a development find a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there are secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the run-down neighborhood where Jews and Black people live with compassion on society's margins.
What Woodworth said: "What resonated with us about this book is a wild and teaming cast of characters. That McBride can hold all of these different characters … you're invested in their lives. You’re part of this neighborhood. As a reader, you feel like you live in this neighborhood. You know the characters' hopes, dreams and secrets. I think to be able to do that as a writer takes exceptional ability."
2. 'The Berry Pickers' by Amanda Peters
What it's about: In 1962, a 4-year-old Mi'kmaq girl vanishes after traveling with her family from Nova Scotia to Maine to pick blueberries. Her brother Joe, 6 at the time she disappears, is the last to see her and is haunted by her disappearance for years to come. In Maine, a girl named Norma is raised in an affluent home with an emotionally distant father and an overprotective mother. She has dreams that feel like memories and spends decades unraveling what that means.
What Gelman said: "This really reminded me of Celeste Ng's first book 'Everything I Never Told You.' Not in theme, but in feeling. It’s a very quiet and beautifully written book. It's about what happens when there's a lie that fractures a family, that fractures people and the repercussions of that lie. The book is sad, but the end is hopeful and happy. It's so exciting, and I want to see what else Peters is going to do."
3. 'The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession' by Michael Finkel
What it's about: This true story of French master thief Stéphane Breitwieser is brought to the page spectacularly by the author of "The Stranger in the Woods." In less than a decade, Breitwieser carried out more than 200 heists in European museums and cathedrals with the help of his girlfriend. The riveting story examines not only how Breitwieser pulled off his crimes, but why he never tried to sell any of the loot, instead keeping his treasures in a single room where he could admire them.
What Woodworth said: "This book reads like fiction. It is the wild and crazy true story of this man who stole $2 billion worth of art. He was doing it in a really basic way. He would chuck art out the window, or put it in his girlfriend's purse. He is a complete character and he got away with it for so long. You're riding shotgun with this conman."
"The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession" at Bookshop.org for $26
"The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession" at Amazon for $15
4. 'Fourth Wing' by Rebecca Yarros
What it's about: Twenty-year-old Violet Sorrengail's world is turned upside down after she's denied a life in the quiet Scribe Quadrant and forced into being a candidate dragon rider. Despite her fragile disposition, her mother, an elite commanding general, pushes her into Basgiath War College, where she uses her wit to battle fellow cadets, dragons and secretive leaders. A TV series based on the novel, part of Yarros' "The Empyrean" books from Entangled Publishing, is in the works at Amazon MGM Studios, according to Variety.
What Gelman said: "It’s ‘Hunger Games' meets 'Game of Thrones' meets '50 Shades of Grey.' You get the life and death element where young people are killing each other to survive, with the dragons and the fantasy … and plenty of steamy sex. Throughout the story, there are plenty of cliffhangers. It's very unexpected. I finished that book not fully trusting where the characters were at the end and who was on the side of good and evil."
5. 'King: A Life' by Jonathan Eig
What it's about: Nominated for the National Book Award (the winners for which will be announced Nov. 15, after this story went to press), Eig's biography of America's modern-day founding father is the first major work to include recently declassified FBI files. Through exhaustive research, Eig paints a portrait of a man who "demanded peaceful protest for his movement but was rarely at peace with himself," according to its publisher. Universal Pictures optioned the rights to adapt Eig's biography of King, with Steven Spielberg producing the biopic and Chris Rock in talks to direct.
What Woodworth said: "There’s a line at the end of this book that talks about in hallowing Martin Luther King Jr. we've also hollowed him out as a society. What this book does is shows you the man and how he actually was: A human being with flaws; with his own kind of vices; with radical ideas. It's definitive, too, in looking at all these FBI documents and how Hoover was really going after him and what that did to his psyche."
6. 'Wellness' by Nathan Hill
What it's about: The bestselling author of "The Nix," Hill returns with a novel about reconciling who we hope to become with the reality of adulthood. Jack and Elizabeth meet as college students in the '90s Chicago art scene, two kindred spirits brought together in the gritty underground. Twenty years later, with kids and a home in the suburbs, they struggle to recognize themselves and each other. Can they find their way back to each other, or will their love be collateral damage to unfulfilled ambitions and dysfunctional families?
What Gelman said: "The first half of the book, I was laughing out loud. Then in the second half, I was crying. The book just has so many emotional strings. I saw myself in the zillennial (people on the cusp of millennials and Gen Z) overparenting … like going to farmers markets and making sure you get the right croissant. That part made me laugh. But there's so much history and sadness behind the people and how they get to where they are. And so many people can relate to relationships and how they change over time."
7. 'The Covenant of Water' by Abraham Verghese
What it's about: Bestselling author Verghese ("Cutting for Stone") returns with a generation-spanning story set in Kerala, located on South India's Malabar Coast, between 1900 and 1977. At its center is a family where at least one person dies by drowning in every generation – and in Kerala, water is everywhere. At the center of the family is matriarch Big Ammachi, literally "Big Mother," who, at age 12 while grieving the death of her father, is sent to marry a 40-year-old man. Her life is full of joy and triumph, hardship and loss, faith and love.
What Woodworth said: "Verghese is so good at getting into the nitty gritty of his characters, of their hopes and dreams. As with 'Cutting for Stone,' there's such a medical element of this book. He renders all of his characters with such delicate nuance as to who they are and what they're striving for. It's 700 pages or something like that, but you don't want to leave it. If that book went on and on, I would be so happy."
More: Ann Napolitano’s 'Hello Beautiful' tops Amazon’s 10 best books of the year so far
8. 'Holly' by Stephen King
What it's about: The master of horror's latest detective outing sees fan-favorite private eye Holly take center stage. But "Holly" isn't exactly a normal whodunit because the villains are introduced in the first chapter: Rodney and Emily Harris are elderly semi-retired academics and what they’ve been doing in their basement in secret for several years is downright hellish. In his review, USA TODAY's Brian Truitt wrote, that the book "satisfies as a fitfully freaky thriller, a solid exploration of the title character as a soulful beacon of hope, and a reminder of how important it is to answer that call when it comes."
What Gelman said: "I think people kind of pigeonhole (King) into horror, but he really works through different genres. Holly is really a hero. What the older couple does is horrific, but it is also incredibly entertaining. The storytelling is just so good. He's so good and so versatile. It’s amazing."
9. 'Elon Musk' by Walter Isaacson
What it's about: Isaacson, who wrote the "Steve Jobs" biography that was adapted into a 2015 biopic starring Michael Fassbender as the Apple co-founder, is back with an in-depth study of another billionaire tech visionary. He followed Musk for two years, going to meetings and talking to his family, friends, co-workers and adversaries. The result aims to answer the question: Are the demons that drive Musk essential to driving innovation? A big-screen adaptation of Isaacson's latest is rumored to be in the works from director Darren Aronofsky ("The Whale") and indie studio A24, according to Puck news company.
What Woodworth said: "Walter Isaacson is one of the best biographers working today. His ability to present these titans of industry, their nuance, genius and their wild ways. He did that so well in this book. It offered a really balanced portrait of this, in some ways, maniacal person. To present figures in history as the people who they are, and not just who they are on X or in the news. There's so much more to the making of these people and the way they're viewed."
10. 'Small Mercies' by Dennis Lehane
What it's about: In Boston in the summer of 1974, amid a wave of violence set off by the city's desegregation of its public schools, a white teen girl disappears, and a young Black man is found dead. The girl's mother, Mary Pat Fennessy, embarks on a desperate search for her daughter in the housing projects of "Southie," an Irish American enclave, and gets on the wrong side of Marty Butler, chieftain of the Irish mob.
What Gelman said: "Dennis Lehane is well known as this Irish crime thriller writer. In this book, he takes a moment in history and inserts a story into it. It takes place at the beginning of the busing of Black and white students into high schools in the Boston area. There's a murder mystery at the center, and it's surrounded by this thing that's going on in America. The mom … is hellbent on finding out what happened and getting revenge."
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Amazon best books 2023: 'Heaven & Earth Grocery Store,' 'Fourth Wing'
