Year-End Lists

Shelf Awareness: Best Books of 2023, limited to books for adults, although they also post lists of children's and young adult books

[see also 2018 • 2017]

Fiction

• America Fantastica
  Tim O'Brien
• Chain-Gang All-Stars
  Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
• Good Night, Irene
  Luis Alberto Urrea
• In Memoriam
  Alice Winn
• The Laughter
  Sonora Jha
• Let Us Descend
  Jesmyn Ward
• Murder Your Employer

  The McMasters Guide to Homicide
  Rupert Holmes
• Prophet
  Sin Blaché and Helen Macdonald
• Shark Heart
  Emily Habeck
• Whalefall
  Daniel Kraus

Nonfiction

• Better Living Through Birding

  Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World
  Christian Cooper
• The Comfort of Crows

  A Backyard Year
  Margaret Renkl
• Enlightened Transsexual Comix
  Sam Szabo
• The Exceptions

  Nancy Hopkins, MIT, and the Fight for Women in Science
  Kate Zernike
• How to Say Babylon

  A Memoir
  Safiya Sinclair
• Lesbian Love Story

  A Memoir In Archives
  Amelia Possanza
• The Quickening

  Creation and Community at the Ends of the Earth
  Elizabeth Rush
• The Talk
  Darrin Bell
• You Could Make This Place Beautiful

  A Memoir
  Maggie Smith
• Zero at the Bone

  Fifty Entries Against Despair
  Christian Wiman