110 books in 2023! alongside the mania of the women’s prize longlist (read more here), i cried, giggled, seethed, plodded, and raced through a moveable feast of treats this year, in both paper and audiobook form. here are my highlights.
warning! spoilers ahead.
t.w. conflict, trauma, opioid and alcohol addiction, dementia, loss, domestic abuse, child abuse.
The Years, Annie Erneux
One of my final books of 2023, my first Erneux, and just – wow. It is about collective memory, which in today’s world feels painfully pertinent. Its merging of the collective with the individual experience of the author through the emission of the first-person pronoun makes you feel like this is a life you have led too, and that we are all a part of what came before us. Its evocation of Paris through the years ofc didn’t do it any harm either!!
Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver
The (rightful) winner of the Women’s Prize, I am totally behind Demon‘s popularity. A bleak, bleak magnifying glass on the Appalachian working class and the opioid crisis, the book did leave me feeling worse about the world. It’s been compared to A Little Life: however, it’s saved from the latter’s trauma porn-rap by its main character, Demon, who remains hopeful and determined to survive, despite devastating adverse circumstances. At its heart, it is a classic Bildungsroman in which you are rooting for the loving, lovable boy who sustains it.
The Bandit Queens, Parini Shroff
Another Women’s Prize contender (although I cannot understand why it didn’t make the shortlist). I wrote more about this in my Women’s Prize longlist review, but in short: if you’d enjoy a book about female rage that manages to simultaneously cover a series of very serious topics and give you a good, knowing giggle, then this is for you.
This Ragged Grace, Octavia Bright
A gentle, almost haunting account of a life, centred around the author’s struggle with alcohol addiction and her father’s descent into dementia. References to art, French writers, and the natural world are dotted amongst very serious moments, as well as those of great clarity, sensitivity, and humour. Bright’s insight into herself and the longings and fragilities of life is like nothing I’ve read before.
Hello Beautiful, Ann Napolitano
This book gave me ALL the feels. It made me livid, it devastated me, I sobbed, I nodded vigorously. A book about sisters, about loyalty and betrayal, about character and its basis in childhood and family. A book that can make you feel the characters’ interior lives so strongly cannot be anything other than wonderful imo. It’s a tribute to Little Women too, so even better.
See you for the next installment, whenever that shall be. x
hollyhamiltonwrites 