The Best International Books of 2023

We’re continuing the end of year round up with a selection of some of our favourite new releases of 2023. We already covered the best of India earlier this week, but here is a range of new books from the rest of the world. From across themes, countries and genres, these are novels that have stood out and pushed the envelope in different ways. 

Anne Enright - The Wren, The Wren

In her eighth novel, Anne Enright offers up a portrait of a uniquely unhappy family in Dublin. Intimate and ambiguous, The Wren, The Wren is told in three voices: Carmel, a mother remembering her childhood; Phil, her father and a cliche Irish poet, and Nell, her daughter, free-spirited and risk-taking. Through their tales, Enright navigates art, love and the weight and difficulty of family ties with her trademark honesty, insight and sharp observation.  

Isabella Hammad - Enter Ghost

A book that came out before the current atrocities in the Middle East, Isabella Hammad’s Enter Ghost is a stunning rendering of diaspora and Palestine, a timely, thoughtful work that tells the story of artistry under occupation. Following the story of Sonia, an actor in London who returns to her homeland after a long period, and her involvement with a theater production in the West Bank, the book is about exile, home, conflict and resistance, while also being deeply human and affecting. 

Michele Mari - You, Bleeding Childhood

A new translation and reissue of a beloved Italian author, this book is technically from decades earlier but released in English this year. A look at childhood, fixated on comic books and science fiction as well as coming of age and the boundaries between kids and grownups, Michele Mari’s story story collection is a catalog of loosely connected tales that bring to mind the works of imaginative fantasists like Borges and Kafka. 

Paul Murray - The Bee Sting 
Shortlisted for this year’s Booker and already being acclaimed as a masterpiece, Paul Murray’s novel is a family saga that clocks in at over 650 pages, yet manages to speed by. Depicting the dysfunctional, hapless lives of an Irish family struggling financially from the perspective of four family members, The Bee Sting deftly shifts voices, styles and themes while remaining propulsive, hilarious and heartbreaking in equal measure.

Justin Torres - Blackouts

The winner of this year’s National Book Award in the US, Blackouts is a haunting, dreamlike rumination on memory and erasure, and how stories sustain histories. Justin Torres blends fact with fiction - drawing from historical records, screenplays, testimony and more to salvage a queer history through the generations that lives in his characters and celebrates the resilience of marked bodies. Told through a character on his deathbed and a sociological text discovered by his caretaker, it’s a truly original work that traverses various kinds of text with ease. 

Safiya Sinclair - How to Say Babylon 

How to Say Babylon is a powerful memoir of Sinclair’s struggle to break free of her rigid Rastafarian upbringing, ruled by her father’s strict patriarchal views and repressive control of her childhood. Reckoning with a lesser known culture that initially nourished but ultimately sought to silence her; it is her reckoning with patriarchy and tradition, the legacy of colonialism in Jamaica and growing into herself. Rich in lyricism and language only a poet could evoke, it’s one of this year’s essentials. 

Emma Cline - The Guest

Consuming, intense and powerful, Emma Cline’s latest novel is about Alex, a 22 year old grifter who is staying with an older man in the Hamptons. But one misstep at a dinner party leads to her dismissal, and Alex drifts through the summer in this elite community, detached, impulsive and reckless, using her sensuality and a haze of substances to make bad decisions whose consequences become increasingly dangerous. A gripping and compelling tale of a woman on the edge, The Guest is Emma Cline at her best. 

Benjamin Labatut - The Maniac

One of the most promising new Chilean writers, Benjamin Labatut follows up his debut with another masterful work that profiles the dark foundations of modern computing and AI. Braiding fact and fiction with expertise, The Maniac is largely about Johan von Neumann, a Hungarian prodigy who won the Nobel, invented game theory, designed the world’s first programmable computer and helped create the atomic bomb, among other things. But the book also imagines the inner lives of von Neumann and the other minds behind the dawn of the nuclear age and our modern era with imagination and alacrity.