Best Books I Read in 2023

As a writer, I learn something from every book I read. In no particular order, these are the ten best books I read in 2023. Please check the links to the blog archive for a fuller discussion of those I’ve reviewed.

1. Small Things Like These, by Claire Keegan
This short novel at first seems, as the title indicates, quiet and unassuming. Set in an Irish town in 1985, it follows Bill Furlow who has earned a modest but sufficient position in life as a purveyor of wood and coal. Set apart from the town is an orphanage and laundry run by the Magdalen order of nuns. There are many things in today’s world—and in the past as well—that make me despair of humanity. Then comes a book like this that reminds me of the courage and goodness that can be found.

2. Purgatory Road, by Charles Coe
Coe’s superpower in these poems is his generous heart. Small things that strike his attention, such as a truck that won’t start in a grocery store parking lot or a woman talking to herself on a traffic island, lead us to understand what it is like to inhabit someone else’s life. Channeling Forster’s call to “only connect,” Coe’s poems from 2020’s lockdown trace what we’ve lost and our attempts to communicate across the void.

3. The Years, by Annie Ernaux
Ernaux’s genre-bending experiment adds a new dimension to the field of life writing. She goes beyond memoir—a subjective view of events in the author’s personal life—and autofiction—a reexamination and fictionalisation of those events—to create a new form that melds both of these with sociology and history. She has captured the sweep of the lifetime simultaneously with that of a person and a generation.

4. Horse, by Geraldine Brooks
This novel succeeds on so many levels. Brooks weaves together multiple storylines, with different narrators and time periods, ensuring that the story reveals itself smoothly. Yes, this is a story about a horse, beautifully written, with leisurely scenes full of luscious period details. It is also the story of the United States, from the antebellum world to the present. Inevitably it is about what Wendell Berry called the U.S.’s hidden wound. It is the story of us, what we strive for, and the price involved. There’s much to think about here.

5. Wild Girls, by Shirley J. Brewer
There were no maps for those of us who came of age at the beginning of the Second Wave of the Women’s Movement. Or rather, we threw them away and created our own path, our own definition of what it could mean to be a woman. My friend Shirley (full disclosure) discarded her Catholic schoolgirl veil and took on the world in sequins and a feather boa. Breezy and brave, with a heart as big as the Chesapeake, she sends us these letters from her world. A chameleon, she revels in the brightest colors and slips into one woman’s heart after another. She pulls off her magic through humor and compassion and turns that surprise us. She awakens the wild, original, and authentic selves that we know ourselves to be.

6. A Charmed Circle, by Anna Kavan
I’ve long been a fan of Kavan’s work. This, her first novel, is the story of an English family whose life has become so enclosed as to become toxic. A modern town, loud with trams and lorries and motorcycles, has grown up around their walled home, an old vicarage. What is a refuge for the parents has become a prison for the three children, who are now young adults. It’s hard not to care about these characters as they try to assert the freedom to be themselves.

7. Disappearing Earth, by Julia Phillips
In the intense first chapter of this book, sisters Alyona and Sophia, ages 11 and 8, playing alone on a public beach in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, a city on Russia’s Kamchatka peninsula, encounter a stranger and accept a ride home with him. This is not your typical mystery that describes the investigation into the girls’ disappearance. Instead, it is a set of interlocking short stories about various girls and women in the city and surrounding communities, and how they are affected by the girls’ disappearance. We also learn much about the pressures on indigenous and Caucasian women in this distant corner of Putin’s Russia.

8. Sisters of Night and Fog, by Erika Robuck
This absorbing historical novel follows two real women, Violette Szabo and Virginia d’Albert-Lake, who became French Resistance fighters during World War II. Why read yet another book about World War II? One: because this is a story of real people based on Roebuck’s extensive research. Two: because many people don’t realise the role that women played in the war effort, particularly in the Resistance. Three: because it is important to remember the actual horrors of Hitler’s fascist state and the weakness of those who supported and contributed to it.

9. Paradise, by Abdulrazak Gurnah
In this second novel from Gurnah, who was born in Zanzibar—now part of Tanzania—and won the Nobel Prize, we find that important perspective so missing in Western literature. Yusuf, a rural Muslim boy who leaves his home at twelve is given away in payment for his father’s debts. Paradise is set just before the World War I and provides an unforgettable portrait of precolonial East African society.

10. The Bay of Angels, by Anita Brookner
When Zoë is sixteen, her widowed mother unexpectedly marries again and moves to Nice. Zoë decides to stay in their old London flat and enjoy her new-found freedom from her drab life alone with her mother. As with all of Brookner’s work, this is an iceberg of a novel: brief and quiet on the surface, with a huge mass of emotions and ideas and insights hidden below. Narrated by Zoë, the story is built on scenes that bring to life both the quiet London dusk and the blazing sun of Nice. With her usual penetrating psychological insights, Brookner provides fascinating portraits of Zoë and the people with whom she interacts.

What were the best books you read in 2023?

Displaced Dolls and Oviducts, by Marigo J. Stathis

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These are some meaty poems from my friend Marigo Stathis! The cover might give you a clue as to what you are in for, but when you dive in you’ll see these are not so much protest poems as heartfelt support for all women on “the female warrior’s path to self-worth and discovery.”

Homeless angels, naked shepherds, broken Barbies will find a welcome here. So will feisty women who defy fortune tellers and speed limits to sport their tattoos and midnight dance moves. They will find acceptance in these poems and, even more important, proof that their voices have been heard.

Many of these poems are packed with details, a feast for the senses. Your mind scrambles to grasp them even as each one lays bare your memories. Here’s the first stanza of “Clarity:”

This night smells of poetry,
amidst cricket cacophony,
with a climate that quavers
of exhaustion, lust,
and crouched cats with
cutting claws to pounce,
in promise:
prey on the way.

Or this description that begins “Mimi:”

On Sunday mornings,
        we woke to light clinks of the prayer string;
as your spotted, once smooth skin
        touched each bead,
with every psalm,
        I wondered how long
        the cross would remain warm in your palm,
that felt like crumpled velvet
        caressing our small faces.

Stathis also uses rhythm to enhance the mood, whether it’s the nostalgic pebbles of memory in “shrewd games of Scrabble. // Pink bubbles, bursting;” the ominous opening “An eclipse was promised that night;” or the “thrashing thoughts, ionic tumble, / altered orbit—stutter, stumble—“ of an “ardent love-storm.”

These poems are full of love, the kind that links arms with you and walks beside you in a world where often justice is missing and others are constantly trying to shape you. Be yourself, these poems urge. I’m with you.

What poetry collection have you read that felt like a feast?

Riding the Earthboy 40, by James Welch

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Reading and rereading this sole collection of poetry by Native American novelist and poet James Welch has been an adventure. Welch is considered to be a founding author of the Native American Renaissance in literature. The book’s title refers to the land he grew up on: forty acres leased by his parents from a family named Earthboy on the Gros Ventre Reservation in Montana. It’s a prosaic explanation for a phrase that conjures so many associations.

Steeped in the Blackfeet and A’aninin cultures of his parents, he attended schools on the Blackfeet and Fort Belknap Reservations before attending high school in Minneapolis. The tension between the Indigenous world and the White world can be found in these poems, but there is so much more.

I don’t pretend to understand all of them. Many of the poems seem like, as James Tate says in his introduction, a kaleidoscope of images. What comes through most clearly to me is the connection to the land, whether we’re talking about the stark power of a butte or the iron cold of winter in the far north. “Thanksgiving at Snake Butte” begins:

In time we rode that trail
up the butte as far as time
would let us. The answer to our time
lay hidden in the long grasses
on the top . . .

Welch moves around in time with the ease of a storyteller, conjuring a memory of three boys who barricaded themselves inside a grocery or finding the truth behind a photo in a hotel lobby. There is much about death and hardship and betrayal, much about violence done to and done by.

But there’s far more about the strength of tradition and community, even if sometimes that legacy must be questioned. He tells stories of individuals like Doris Horseman, Deafy, Eulynda, Bear Child, Lester Lame Bull. In “Blackfeet, Blood and Piegan Hunters” he says “Comfortable we drink and string together stories” of the past, but insists

Let glory go the way of all sad things.
Children need a myth that tells them to be alive . . .

He writes of small moments that take on grandeur of “Such a moment, a life.” And there’s also much about the lonely road to yourself. From “Blue Like Death”

. . . Now you understand:
the way is not your going
but an end. That road awaits
the moon that falls between
the snow and you, your stalking home.

Moons slip through these poems and “stars/that fell into their dreams.” There are single phrases that haunt me, even when I cannot grasp the poem as a whole, such as “Man is afraid of his dark” and “No dreamer knows the rain.” “To stay alive this way, it’s hard . . .” and “goodbyes creaking in the pines” both conjure strong memories.

I will keep reading and rereading these poems, letting them sit within my consciousness, within my dreams.

Have you read the work of James Welch or of another poet of the Native American Renaissance?

Purgatory Road, by Charles Coe

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One autumn day when I lived in Massachusetts, we took the children to Purgatory Chasm, a park in Sutton with a playground, nature trails, and the chasm itself. Only some of the adults and older children attempted the difficult path between looming rock walls. There were strange and unworldly formations: deep clefts, overhanging boulders. I found it unsettling.

I remember that feeling whenever I drive past the exit for the chasm, and again when I heard Charles Coe read from his new collection of poems. In the title poem he explores his early understanding of purgatory, summoning with characteristic vibrancy “the dust-covered relics” of his Catholic schooling. As in the best meditative essay, we engage with him as he sorts through these memories and carries them forward into a new understanding of what it means to be us, today, in this damaged world.

Coe’s superpower in these poems is his generous heart. Small things that strike his attention, such as a truck that won’t start in a grocery store parking lot or a woman talking to herself on a traffic island, lead us to understand what it is like to inhabit someone else’s life. Channeling Forster’s call to “only connect,” Coe’s poems from 2020’s lockdown trace what we’ve lost and our attempts to communicate across the void.

In other poems, he invites us to recognise how it feels to be a person of color is our society. He writes feelingly of his father being belittled by a young white drugstore clerk in the 1960s, and what he understands now of the difficult terrain his father had to traverse.

He writes too of his own experiences. He shares with us the everyday things that, unlike the great glacial gush that created Purgatory Chasm, wear away at one. It might be a stink eye from a doorman or an uncurtained window at night. The six-line poem “Things White People Have Said to Me” begins:

You’re so well-spoken.
You don’t seem like you were raised in a ghetto.

In “Blocked” he writes about an encounter in the parking lot. The tone of this poem, as in others, is one I struggle to achieve. Because it is calm, aware, restrained, we reading it are free to feel our own outrage, our own concern about possible consequences, and our own recognition that we are all imperfect beings.

Coe’s sense of humor inflects many of these poems, sometimes wry and subtle, sometimes flat out hilarious, as in “Butt Dialing Jesus” which begins:

There was a time when voices emanating from my pants
would have caused concerns. But now I simply shrugged
and pulled out my phone . . .

It is a joy and a comfort for me to read such poems. Their effect on me is similar to that of Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These, which reminded me of the goodness in this world and its people. While Coe notes the rocks that litter our path and the walls that rise around us, his generous warmth and humor become welcome companions on this journey.

What poems have you read that were both a comfort and a joy?

Lilacs Still Bloom in Ashburnham, by Fred Gerhard

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A new chapbook from my friend Fred Gerhard is subtitled Songs of Spring. Like that season, the poems in this tiny book carry sweetness and renewal.

Some of the poems are about everyday happenings, like children gathering dandelions, infused with a whisper of philosophy. Others are tributes to poets, their ideas and voices carried forward into today.

In some poems, striking imagery or unusual word choice captures the reader’s attention. Here’s the first stanza of “Moss.”

I once loved a woman who loved moss, knew moss,
and why the softest moss lay between the
rain-worn stones of indecipherable lives—

The natural world fuels these poems with its grandeur and generosity, its small gifts and minor delights. The beneficent effect of paying attention to the world around us provides a melody for the collection, as in the title poem where the narrator says: “I blossom / breaking my green walls.”

At a time when every bit of news arouses a mix of fury, despair and determination, these poems are a salve to the spirit.

What books or poems do you turn to when you despair at the state of the world?

Swarm, by Jorie Graham

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When I enter the world of a poem or story, I expect to be entering the author’s mind through the world they have created. Nowhere is this feeling stronger than in reading Graham’s poetry.

I know that each poem is carefully crafted, yet I feel a rare immediacy. I am in the presence of a mind in conversation with itself, breathlessly carried from one thought to another, whether the flow is tumultuous or a slow stream or even stuttering drops, a trickle that comes and goes.

This collection, more than the others I’ve read or tried to read, is something to absorb all at once, a perhaps-coherent whole. Yet for all the time I have sat with it, I cannot give you a thumbnail description.

It describes not so much an epiphany—Graham has long stood out against poems that offer such a moment, such a resolution—as a grappling with a moment of profound change. In some poems she takes on a persona such as Agamemnon, Calypso, Eurydice; others read like journal entries, while still others are prayers or explorations of what it means to live a life or to lose it.

Graham’s poems can be difficult to read. A Modernist, she treats narrative and even language itself as suspect, constantly doubling back on herself, doubting herself, exposing herself. Crusty critic William Logan says, “Graham makes you wish stream of consciousness had never been invented.” Yet even he praises her “sprezzatura.”

It is her daring that thrills me, her going all out even if it means discarding forms and traditions and the poetic line itself.

I also appreciate how she attaches value to the moments of our lives, how she finds joy in small things. The poem “2/18/97” begins:

Of my life which I am supposed to give back.
Afterwards.
Having taken part in it.

She goes on to name some of the things to give back.

. . .the gentle lawns of this earth.
A sudden rain sweeping the petals along.
And pebbles the rain won’t move.
And these bodies . . .

The poem is more than these moments. It is an argument with the “soil that brightens and darkens,” that demands we live and later that we die. It is a holding close of our treasures even as they slip away:

children playing music on their knuckles,
feet skipping, dirt tossed round and then resettling on
                        their prints
where dance steps are
for just a moment longer
        visible—

It is a vision of a god, a breath, a giving up, and that which will not be given up.

Yes, her poems can be difficult to read. But if you sit with them for a while, you may find the words—mistrusted as they are—opening. You may find new ways of being in the world.

Have you been reading any poetry lately? Share in the comments.

Negative Space, by Luljeta Lleshanaku

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The title of this collection of poems by Albanian poet Lleshanaku intrigued me. The title poem, itself long and complex, about her childhood and the Cultural Revolution of 1968, a result of Communist Prime Minister Hoxha’s anti-religious policy of Enver Hoxha, Albania’s leader from the end of WWII until his death in 1985.

But I found a different perspective in the poem “Menelaus” where she writes using as a persona the Spartan leader who fought in the Trojan War under his brother Agamemnon and eventually married Helen after the sack of Troy. In Lleshanaku’s telling, not only is his ship becalmed on the voyage home, but actually never arrives in Sparta:

I continued to wander on open seas, forgotten,
on history’s waters . . .

Patris now doesn’t exist.
Not because of a curse from the gods,
but because with revenge
everything ends. The curtain falls.
And peace is never a motif.

“Patris” is the Greek word for homeland and of course also reminds us of Paris who started the war by stealing Helen. What I see here, though, is the enduring legacy of Albania’s civil wars, dictatorships, occupations, massacres, followed by four decades of communism and the empiness left after its defeat. How do you write about the traumas that shaped your life when they are over? In “The Deal” she talks about going home and all that has changed:

“I’ve come to write,” I explain.
“Is that so? And what do you speak of in your writing?”
asks my uncle, skeptically . . .

Only my eyes haven’t aged, the eyes of witness,
useless now that peace has been dealt.

What’s left in that negative space are the small, human things of life, beautifully rendered in other poems here, with a turn that lifts them out of the ordinary. For example, in “Small-Town Stations” she pulls us in with the first line: “Trains approach them like ghosts.” Then come the details, rousing our own memories of train journeys and what we see looking out at these stations. She ends, though, with a twist that makes us rethink the entire poem and the person narrating it.

This book is Ani Gjika’s 2018 translation of Lleshanaku’s 2012 and 2015 collections. As always, I wish I could hear the poems read in the original as well, since I’m curious about the musicality of the author’s poetic voice and am never sure how well it translates.

Regardless, I’m grateful for these translations that have given me access to these poems with their images upon images. They’ve stirred me into, not only remembering my own moments and reviewing what I know of Albania’s history, but also making me think further about the long-term effects of trauma, whether it’s systemic racism or the wars and dictators who are driving the many people deciding to try the difficult journey to another country.

What do you know about Albania? Have you read Lleshanaku’s poetry?

Wild Girls, by Shirley J. Brewer

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There were no maps for those of us who came of age at the beginning of the Second Wave of the Women’s Movement. Or rather, we threw them away, the ones that told us we could only work as a nurse, teacher, secretary, or domestic servant. The ones that said we had to find a man, marry, have children, and then confine our labors to kids and kitchens.

We were left having to create our own path, our own definition of what it could mean to be a woman. I read biographies of women artists, writers, and scientists looking for models.

My friend Shirley (full disclosure) discarded her Catholic schoolgirl veil and took on the world in sequins and a feather boa. Breezy and brave, with a heart as big as the Chesapeake, she sends us these letters from her world.

A chameleon, she revels in the brightest colors and slips into one woman’s heart after another: Libbie Custer (George Armstrong), Betsy Patterson Bonaparte (Jerome), Agnes Lake Hitchcock (Wild Bill), Annie Oakley, and others. She writes praise poems for Annette Funicello, her Aunt Alvina, and a clerk at Home Depot.

Imagination runs wild as she writes poems about having tea with Queen Elizabeth, a date with Richard Gere, and dancing with a museum guard. She even writes an “it” poem from the point of view of Marilyn Monroe’s lipstick.

Her ekphrastic poems—referencing the paintings that inspired them—remind us that the women depicted on these old canvases were real people, women who perhaps might like to exchange their ruffs and heavy skirts for a fuchsia gown with spaghetti straps. Daring, courageous, Shirley even does a takeoff on Rilke’s most famous poem.

She is a master at using humor in poetry. Many of these poems will make you chuckle and snort. But her passion is not only for glitz and glamour. Her elegies to people we know and those we didn’t until now hurt our hearts and remind us that we mourn together. Her empathy will not surprise anyone who has read her collection After Words, a series of poems on the 2010 stabbing death of Stephen Pitcairn, an aspiring doctor.

The brave poems in this collection define one woman’s way of being in the world. It is a way we can all appreciate and applaud and find ourselves in. She pulls off her magic through humor and compassion and turns that surprise us. She awakens the wild, original, and authentic selves that we know ourselves to be.

What poet’s work have you read recently that ignited your imagination?

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a copy of this book free from the author. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

This Earth, This Body, by Arlene Iris Distler

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This new collection of poems embodies a way of being in this world. Bursting with generosity of spirit, Distler’s poems call us to appreciate even the smallest of joys and to have courage in dark times. (Full disclosure: The author is a friend and colleague of mine). She reminds us of “Rain . . . beating jazz on my roof” and of the “imperfect fruit” of an old apple tree near where a loved one’s ashes are scattered.

Distler does not shy away from the big questions, starting with a brilliant poem entitled “Remember dying.” Upon the untimely death of her husband, Distler must find a way to comprehend that eternal mystery.

We are not this flesh we call ourselves . . .
this seeming solid self only the sounding bell.

Yet the world’s beauty is ours
to bear, and the austere does not call.

Her poems call to all our senses and all our philosophies, urging us to grasp life and to let it go.

She explores the uses of memory. There are poems about a childhood charm bracelet, an old yearbook, and a grandmother, only now seeing that the elderly woman may have been lost in “the long ago passage/between old world and new.” In one poem Distler revisits the early home shared with her husband, “where the seeds of my children were sown/among clover and high grass.” With powerful imagery she reveals what remains:

there’s only a burnt and bruised shell
yellow jackets in the cellar hole
chimney the only thing standing.
And the sky, as usual
brooding and hallowed.

The New England landscape is here, with its stone walls, blueberries, and pond peepers. In her hands, the natural world with its splendor and cruelty yields startling insights such as this when an owl “haughty as ice” seems to speak:

. . . Remember your nest
that spot you tend with bits of wood,
tufts of straw, feathers
you pluck from your breast.

There are sacrifices we make and stands we take. We experience love and loss, and—if we’re lucky—learn to see with new eyes. This collection brings together the moments of human experience in poems that surprise us on every page.

Whose poetry are you reading these days?

Best Books I Read in 2022

As a writer, I learn something from every book I read. In no particular order, these are the ten best books I read in 2022. Please check the links to the blog archive for a fuller discussion of those I’ve reviewed.

1. The Wall, by Marlen Haushofer
The narrator wakes from a nap to find herself alone. She’s visiting family members at their hunting lodge on the edge of the Alps, and they have gone into town, leaving her with their dog Lynx. She walks down the road to meet them, but both she and the dog run into an invisible wall that separates them from the rest of the world. This journal of her solitary life in the years that follow is stunning.

2. Hamnet, by Maggie O’Farrell
O’Farrell’s tour de force focuses on Agnes, Hamnet’s mother, Shakespeare’s wife, and in so doing immerses us in the day-to-day experience of raising children and managing a household in Elizabethan England. What makes this novel so stunning is the author’s evocation of the details of each scene. It is a powerful reading experience that gives us insight into Shakespeare’s work, but even more into the lives of the many women who loved, married, and bore children in obscurity.

3. Generations: A Memoir, by Lucille Clifton
Lucille Clifton is one of my favorite poets and a huge influence on my writing. In this memoir, originally published in 1976 and now a new edition from New York Review Books, she brings a poet’s sensibility to crafting her story. The chapters, while prose, in their brevity exhibit the conciseness of poetry; anything not absolutely necessary is pared away, leaving the kernel. And you, the reader, bring your own understanding and experience to fill in the spaces.

4. Memorial Drive, by Natasha Trethewey
Trethewey is another of my favorite poets, so I looked forward to reading her memoir. Not needing to know anything more than the author’s name, I plunged in, only to emerge finally, astonished and awed. With a poet’s concision and musicality, she conjures her rural Southern childhood. Trethewey’s voice is quiet—quiet as Black women’s voices have had to be. Yet with all that, her voice carries the emotions held in check by her composure, a tribute to the author’s exquisite use of language. She has created a moving exploration of memory and of how we manage, or fail to manage, our painful past.

5. Migrations, by Charlotte McConaghy
Arriving in Greenland with only her research gear, Franny Stone is determined to study the last of the Arctic terns. She says that even though her expedition has been canceled, she intends to follow the terns on what will be their final migration to Antarctica. The book is set in the near future when climate change has wiped out most birds, fish, and animals. Although disapointing at times, this profound story is worth your attention.

6. The Tradition, by Jericho Brown
I am astonished by these poems, the power and sheer artistry of them. They are personal and political, specific and universal. Brown deploys the tools of poetry—enjambment, white space, personification—boldly. Some of the poems take up hardly any space, lines only two or three words long. Yet even with that limitation they are remarkable, the fragmentation creating a rhythm in counterpoint to and with the rhythm of the words. He also creates his own tools, complex forms that defy gravity.

7. The Crane Wife, by CJ Hauser
This book of essays, anchored by the superb title essay, is about the stories we tell ourselves about our lives and about who we are. Hauser balances personal stories with those of others, sometimes her friends, sometimes writers or their characters, sometimes the natural world.

8. The Warmth of Other Suns, by Isabel Wilkerson
From 1915 to 1970 almost six million Black citizens left the south for northern and western cities looking for better lives. For the first time Wilkerson’s monumental book gives us a history of the Great Migration. The book is long but eminently readable, due to Wilkerson’s approach. By closely following stories of three individuals, she captures the reader’s attention and sympathy and keeps us turning pages.

9. Parable of the Sower, by Octavia E. Butler
This 1993 novel begins in the then-distant future of 2024, which startled me at first. Due to her mother’s drug abuse while pregnant, teenager Lauren Olamina actually feels all the sensations she witnesses in others. She calls it “sharing” and finds it a liability in her world, a dreadful world that is only too likely how things will turn out here, given the trends already present in the 1990s and only worse today. A brilliant story of one woman’s journey.

10. Miss Benson’s Beetle, by Rachel Joyce
London in 1950 is still recovering from World War II, with food rationed, ruined buildings being cleared, another generation of men wiped out, and women chucked out of their wartime jobs. Middle-aged spinster Margery Benson finally cracks and quits her job teaching domestic science in an elementary school with out-of-control children. She decides to set out on the adventure of a lifetime: an expedition to New Caledonia to find a mythical golden beetle. So much fun!

What were the best books you read in 2022?