The 20 Best Books of 2023

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In 2023, we did a lot of hard things at Esquire. We launched our 90th anniversary issue, packed with 90 people and ideas that will shape the future. We built a new physical archive to house 90 years worth of very fragile magazines. We even set Lenny Kravitz’s piano on fire! But in a year of challenges and triumphs, the hardest thing we did might just have been hauling the Esquire books department to a new home.

You see, here at Esquire, our book stacks have book stacks. So when we heard that we’d be moving to new digs seven floors above our old office, one of the first questions was, “But what about the books?” Many, many heavy boxes later, we’re glad we left nothing behind—and honored to bring you these, our 20 favorite books of the year.

Our selections range from debut works by emerging voices to new outings for canonical writers. They delve into everything from prisons to shipwrecks, ghost stories to extraterrestrials, American dreaming to American failures. Whether you’re into novels, short stories, memoirs, or nonfiction, we’ve covered the whole waterfront here with a bumper crop of incredible books. They’re all worth their weight in gold (believe us, we know exactly how much they weigh).

Below, here are Esquire’s 20 best books of the year.

The Vaster Wilds, by Lauren Groff

Groff’s seventh novel begins with a high-octane escape: under the cover of darkness, a young woman flees colonial Jamestown, bound for parts unknown. Pursued by English soldiers and menaced by the brutal New England winter, her frantic flight threatens to kill her at every turn—but to remain in the settlement, riven by plague and famine, would be unbearable. Though the white-knuckled tale of this young woman, known only as “the girl,” Groff enlivens the dark crevices of colonial history. But the ambitions of The Vaster Wilds are loftier than this—in fact, they’re downright cosmic. As the girl heads north on foot, she questions everything she’s been taught about the new world, its Indigenous people, and how to understand God. Deranged with hunger and cold, she receives a hard-won education from the woods. The result is an ecstatic transformation—one that’s a haunting and holy experience to read and behold. Read an interview with the author here at Esquire.

Doppelganger, by Naomi Klein

Doppelgänger began when Naomi Klein, the liberal activist and blockbuster writer, became regularly mistaken for Naomi Wolf, the liberal feminist author turned conspiracy theorist and anti-vaxxer. Amid a decade of defending her own reputation against Wolf’s escalating conservatism, Klein tail-spinned into obsession, tracking Wolf’s right-wing media appearances in a quest to understand her “flight from reality.” But this book’s outlook is far broader than Klein’s own doppelgänger trouble; rather, it opens outward onto a roving survey of how doubling organizes our social and political lives. The concept of the doppelgänger, Klein insists, can help us understand our uncanny political moment, where “millions of people have given themselves over to fantasy.” Doppelgänger is a lucid frame on conspiracy movements and digital doubling, and a powerful implication of the double lives we choose to ignore. Read an interview with the author here at Esquire.

The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History (The Henry Roe Cloud Series on American Indians and Modernity)

America Fantastica, by Tim O'Brien

O’Brien’s first novel in two decades was well worth the wait. In 2019, a “lying infection” has taken hold of the nation, and our narrator Boyd Halverson, a disgraced journalist, now makes a living flooding the internet with “fresh untrue truth content.” Pushed to the brink of despair, he robs a bank, kidnaps the teller, and lights out across America’s highways with his hostage, bound for Mexico. The getaway morphs into a quest for revenge on the man who tanked Boyd’s journalism career, and soon enough, these unlikely bandits are dodging uproarious brushes with danger. In the age of “mythomania,” O’Brien takes aim at the lies that power this country, and how and why they sustain us. America Fantastica peers straight into the dark heart of the American psyche, and it's unafraid of the comedy and tragedy staring back.

Absolution, by Alice McDermott

For four decades now, McDermott has written one exquisite novel after another, but her latest, a poignant tale of women and girls living on the periphery of the Vietnam War, may just be her masterpiece. Absolution takes place in Saigon circa 1963, where a small community of American corporate wives consider their own moral obligations as they live in privileged luxury against a backdrop of unimaginable horrors. As some of the women shrink into their prescribed roles, others break the rules to perform radical acts of altruism for the people of Vietnam. Decades later, one woman’s daughter is left to wonder: did they do good, or not? In this richly imagined novel, packed with unforgettable characters, McDermott soars in a profound quest of moral inquiry.

The Wager, by David Grann

One of our finest nonfiction storytellers returns with a swashbuckling epic about shipwreck, scandal, mutiny, and murder. In 1741, when a British naval vessel was shipwrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia, its crew divided into factions and descended into violence. After five months marooned, some seamen sailed away in makeshift boats, abandoning their captain and his few remaining loyalists. Survivors of this perilous journey back to England were hailed as heroes—until the captain made a miraculous return, accusing his officers of mutiny. What followed was a court martial and a vicious war of words, with each side spinning a narrative to avoid death by hanging. Masterfully structured from a wealth of firsthand accounts, like logbooks, correspondence, and court martial testimony, The Wager is a thrilling voyage about tall tales, at sea and on land. Read an interview with the author here at Esquire.

The Possibility of Life: Science, Imagination, and Our Quest for Kinship in the Cosmos

A Living Remedy, by Nicole Chung

In this gutting memoir, an adopted daughter wrestles with grief, loss, and regret. Growing up in rural Oregon, Chung often felt “racial isolation” as the Korean-American daughter of white parents, who lived paycheck to paycheck. Many years later, after finding a community and a home on the East Coast, Chung suffered two devastating blows: within the span of two years, she lost her father to kidney disease and her mother to cancer. A Living Remedy recounts the agony of watching them grapple with their health amid financial instability and a dysfunctional healthcare system. Chung describes her father’s death as “negligent homicide, facilitated and sped by the state’s failure to fulfill its most basic responsibilities to him and others like him.” Keep the tissues close for this visceral and wrenching memoir—you’ll need them. Read an essay by the author here at Esquire.

Chain-Gang All-Stars, by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

Ever since his breakout debut, Friday Black, we’ve been eagerly awaiting Adjei-Brenyah’s sophomore outing. Nearly five years later, it’s finally here, and it surpasses all expectations. In a dystopian United States, the prison-industrial complex has gone private, leaving incarcerated people with no choice but to compete for their freedom in the Criminal Action Penal Entertainment system. Loretta Thurwar and Hamara “Hurricane Staxxx” Stacker have traveled together for years as Links in the same Chain-Gang, but as Thurwar nears her freedom, she contemplates how to bring dignity to her multi-racial and multi-gendered coalition of fellow gladiators. Reading Chain-Gang All-Stars in a nation addicted to violent sports that brutalize athletes of color, Adjei-Brenyah’s acerbic vision lands like a lightning bolt of truth. Read an exclusive excerpt here at Esquire.

Yellowface: A Reese's Book Club Pick

Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma, by Claire Dederer

What should we do when we love the art, but hate the artist? In Monsters, one of our sharpest critics delivers a bracing meditation on the thorniest questions of the #MeToo era. Can we ethically consume the art of monstrous artists? Do we hold monstrous women to different standards than monstrous men? In the age of parasocial relationships, how much does fandom define us, and what’s a fan to do when our favorite artist betrays us? Dederer contends that these contradictions are baked into the endeavor of making and loving art. Lucid and fierce, generous and unflinching, Monsters is the most exhilarating study on this topic to date. Read an interview with the author here at Esquire.

Wednesday's Child: Stories

Wrong Way

The Late Americans: A Novel

Crook Manifesto: A Novel

Land of Milk and Honey: A Novel

Saving Time, by Jenny Odell

The visionary author of How to Do Nothing returns to challenge the notion that “time is money.” In this hopeful and subversive cultural history, Odell traces the origins of our market-based understanding of time, arguing that how we organize our days has always been “a history of extraction, whether of resources from the earth or of labor time from people.” Odell’s research is rigorous, but Saving Time’s real triumph lies in her road map for experiencing time outside the capitalist clock. Instead of “hoarding” time, we should “garden” it, attuning ourselves to the natural world and prioritizing meaningful human connections. Expect to feel changed by this radical way of seeing.

Poverty, by America, by Matthew Desmond

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Evicted returns with another paradigm-shifting inquiry into America’s dark heart. This time, Desmond asks: how does the United States, the world’s richest nation, have more poverty than any other advanced democracy? Poverty, by America argues that poverty persists because the financially secure benefit from it, with landlords, banks, corporations, and politicians all reaping staggering gains from overcharging and under-serving Americans in need. Desmond advances a fierce argument: that alongside “aggressive, uncompromising antipoverty reforms,” it would take just $177 billion to end hunger and homelessness in America. As always, Desmond delivers a radical vision: a book that urges us to abandon old ways of thinking and dream a new path forward.

Lone Women, by Victor LaValle

Violent delights abound in this historical horror tale from one of the genre’s most exciting voices. In 1914, Adelaide Henry sets fire to her childhood home and flees eastward, carrying only a locked steamer trunk containing a mysterious secret. She hopes to outrun her past and start a new life in Montana, where “lone women” can stand on their own two feet as homesteaders. But as the sole Black woman in a too-white town, Adelaide isn’t welcomed with open arms—and when the lock on her steamer trunk is broken, all hell breaks loose. Rich in secrets, suspense, and dread, LaValle’s latest is a gripping and heartfelt thriller about how lone women survive a harsh world.

Biography of X, by Catherine Lacey

If Pew, Lacey’s visionary 2020 novel, seemed like the height of her ambition, think again. Now, she’s back with an even more staggering achievement: Biography of X, an alternate history of the United States told through the eyes of a grieving widow unraveling her late wife’s secrets. Determined to write an accurate biography of her wife, the famous performance artist X, crime reporter C.M. Lucca goes in search of X’s mysterious past. The quest sends her into the dark heart of a post-war America split into two territories, and deep into the inconsistencies of X’s shapeshifting past. All roads lead to one final destination: the truth about their marriage, which isn’t what it seems. In this masterpiece about the slippery nature of art, identity, and truth, Lacey contemplates a question that haunts us all: can we ever truly know the people we love?

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