Best Books of 2023: Adults

"After years of working as an FBI agent, Titus Crown returns home to Charon County, land of moonshine and cornbread, fist fights and honeysuckle. Seeing his hometown struggling with a bigoted police force inspires him to run for sheriff. He wins, and becomes the first Black sheriff in the history of the county. Then a year to the day after his election, a young Black man is fatally shot by Titus's deputies. Titus pledges to follow the truth wherever...

"A tautly paced novel in which a young mother who was cloned and brought back to life following her own murder comes to suspect that there is more to the story of her life and death than anyone is telling her. What if the murder you had to solve was your own? Lou is a happily married mother of an adorable toddler. She's also the clone of the original Louise who, along with four other victims of a local serial killer, has been brought back to life...

"April 5th, 2019: In a cozy brownstone in Brooklyn, the veneer of domestic bliss is beginning to crack. Dan and Isabel, troubled husband and wife, are both a little bit in love with Isabel's younger brother, Robbie. Robbie, wayward soul of the family, who still lives in the attic loft; Robbie, who, trying to get over his most recent boyfriend, has created a glamorous avatar online; Robbie, who now has to move out of the house--and whose departure...

"A tragicomic novel about death and devotion"-- "From 'one of the most acute and lasting writers of her generation' (Caryn James, The New York Times) -- a daring novel, her first in more than a decade, about love and death and what lies before and after. A ghost story set in the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, an elegiac consideration of grief, devotion (filial and romantic), and the vanishing and persistence of all things -- seen and unseen....

"Newly married and with a baby on the way, Jacy and her new husband, Jed, embark on their first road trip together to visit his father, Dr. Ash, in Michigan's far-flung Upper Peninsula. The moment they arrive at the cottage snug within the lush woods, Jacy feels bathed in love by the warm and hospitable Dr. Ash, if less so by his house manager, the enigmatic Mrs. Brandt. But their Edenic first days take a turn when Jacy has a health scare. Swiftly,...

"Rachel is a student working at a bookstore when she meets James, and it's love at first sight. Effervescent and insistently heterosexual, James soon invites Rachel to be his roommate and the two begin a friendship that changes the course of both their lives forever. Together, they run riot through the streets of Cork city, trying to maintain a bohemian existence while the threat of the financial crash looms before them. When Rachel falls in love...

Recalling the past at her daughters' request, Lara tells the story of a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance, which causes her daughters to examine their own lives and reconsider the world and everything they thought they knew. "In the spring of 2020, Lara's three daughters return to the family's orchard in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor...

"Jane Dorner, account manager at a flashy New York public relations firm, has two modes: PR Jane, twenty-five, peppy, chummy and eager to sell you a feminist vibrator or a self-care-slash-bereavement subscription box; and Actual Jane, twenty-nine, drifting through mediocre work days and lackluster dates while paralyzed by her crushing mountain of medical debt. When her job performance is called into question, Jane's last-ditch effort to keep her livelihood...

"Tricia is a shy newlywed, married to a rising attorney on loan to navy intelligence. Charlene is a practiced corporate spouse and mother of three. In Saigon in 1963, the two women form an alliance as they balance the era's mandate to be "helpmeets" to their ambitious husbands with their own impulse to "do good" for the people of Vietnam. Sixty years later, Charlene's daughter, reaches out to Tricia. Together, they look back at their time in Saigon,...

"From the bestselling author of ALL YOU CAN EVER KNOW comes a searing memoir of class, inequality, and grief-a daughter's search to understand the lives her adoptive parents led, the life she forged as an adult, and the lives she's lost. In this country, unless you attain extraordinary wealth, you will likely be unable to help your loved ones in all the ways you'd hoped. You will learn to live with the specific, hollow guilt of those who leave hardship...