Year-End Lists

New Statesman: The 20 Best Books of 2023

Non-fiction

• A Memoir of My Former Self

  A Life in Writing
  Hilary Mantel
• What Is a Doctor?

  A GP's Prescription for the Future
  Phil Whitaker
• Red Memory

  The Afterlives of China's Cultural Revolution
  Tania Branigan
• A Northern Wind

  Britain 1962-65
  David Kynaston
• Quartet

  How Four Women Changed The Musical World
  Leah Broad
• Material World

  The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization
  Ed Conway
• Watford Forever

  How Graham Taylor and Elton John Saved a Football Club, a Town and Each Other
  John Preston and Elton John
• An Uneasy Inheritance

  My Family and Other Radicals
  Polly Toynbee
• Johnson at 10

  The Inside Story
  Anthony Seldon and Raymond Newell
• Matrescence

  On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth and Motherhood
  Lucy Jones
• The Tragic Mind

  Fear, Fate, and the Burden of Power
  Robert D. Kaplan

Fiction

• The Iliad
  Homer, translated by Emily Wilson
• Cuddy
  Benjamin Myers
• Kick the Latch
  Kathryn Scanlan
• Burning Angel and Other Stories
  Lawrence Osborne
• Old God's Time
  Sebastian Barry
• Ordinary Human Failings
  Megan Nolan
• Small Worlds
  Caleb Azumah Nelson
• Forbidden Notebook
  Alba de Céspedes
• Bright Fear
  Mary Jean Chan