The Ten Best Books of 2023 Published by Independent Publishers

GROVE ATLANTIC: This dystopian novel is set in a near future Ireland, where a scientist fights to keep her family together as Ireland slips into totalitarianism following the rise of the rightwing National Alliance party. “A triumph of emotional storytelling, bracing and brave…Readers will find it soul-shattering and true, and will not soon forget its warnings,” remarked judging chair Esi Edugyan.

SPIEGEL & GRAU: This debut memoir about a young woman growing up in the Greenwich Village of the 1990s with two famous but unconventional parents seems to be everywhere right now, receiving love from the likes of Lisa Taddeo, Dani Shapiro, Sarah Jessica Parker, Jennette McCurdy, and Michael Imperioli, who called it an "incredibly honest, raw, soulful, courageous, and articulate work of art."

EUROPA EDITIONS: In this fictionalized French memoir, a family receives a cryptic postcard listing the names of four ancestors who perished in the Holocaust, setting off a suspenseful quest to find out who sent it and why. This new translation was a 2023 Natalie Portman’s book club pick.

GROVE ATLANTIC: Three exquisite short stories that ruminate on relationships from one of Ireland's brightest literary stars and author of the Booker Prize-shortlisted Small Things Like These.

TIN HOUSE: A fantastic gift, this book is filled with foliage-friendly contributions from a diverse range of thinkers and artists from Plato to Radiohead to Zadie Smith to Jorge Luis Borges and more. "More than informative, inspiring; many of its writers merge the lyric with insights that are scientific, intimate and surprising." — The Washington Post

GROVE ATLANTIC: This “intensely personal reflection of the Vietnamese refugee experience” was longlisted for the 2023 National Book Award, with the National Book Foundation praising it as “a complex meditation on Nguyen’s life as a father and a son, and an exploration of the murkiness of memory and necessity of forgiveness."

SJP LIT / ZANDO: Sarah Jessica Parker was taken by this "sweeping yet intimate family saga" that follows two women leaving behind the racism and poverty of the South for New Jersey during the Great Migration. It’s a moving intergenerational story based on historical records and inspired by the author’s own family legend.

ZIBBY BOOKS: A survivor's tale that looks back with a hopeful eye on a difficult childhood marked by poverty, abuse, and instability, this powerful memoir is the “most readable and the most psychologically rigorous book I've read in decades. I needed the reminder that art can do this," exclaimed Kiese Laymon.

MILKWEED EDITIONS: In this pandemic collage told through essays, bits of text, poems and journal entries, a woman and her partner retreat to a remote Irish cottage to embark on a new chapter in life, when lockdown upends their plan. It’s a lyrical meditation on building a family in new surroundings that’s "powerful, unflinching…part hymn to nature, part memoir," according to The Guardian.

TWO LINES PRESS: In this sensuous new translation of the 1982 queer classic, a recently married Surinamese woman escapes her abusive husband and sets off to the bustling city of Paramaribo. The Harvard Review called it “difficult, fragmentary, gorgeous, and at times unpredictable...The novel is saturated with pain, drama, pleasure, and violence, which may rightly invite comparison to classics by Gayl Jones, Toni Morrison and Alice Walker.”