2023 has been a great year for literary fiction, but there’s so many more releases gearing up to hit the shelves towards the latter end of the year. Explore a highly anticipated list that we’re really looking forward to reading.
Terrace Story by Hilary Leichter
Coming on: August 29th, 2023
Terrace Story follows characters who suffer repercussions and reverberations: the little family of three, their future now deeply uncertain, and those who orbit their fragile universe. The distance and love between these characters expands limitlessly, across generations. “How far can the mind travel when it’s looking for something that is gone? Where do we put our loneliness, longing, and desire? What do we do with the emotions that seem to stretch beyond the body, beyond the boundaries of life and death?”
The Wren, the Wren by Anne Enright
Coming on: August 31st, 2023
The Wren, the Wren brings to life three generations of women who contend with inheritances—of abandonment and of sustaining love that is “more than a strand of DNA, but a rope thrown from the past, a fat twisted rope, full of blood.” In sharp prose studded with crystalline poetry, Anne Enright masterfully braids a family story of longing, betrayal, and hope.
The Fraud by Zadie Smith
Coming on: September 5th 2023
Penguin Press recently announced that they will be publishing Zadie Smith’s next novel, The Fraud, on September 5, 2023. “From acclaimed and bestselling novelist Zadie Smith, The Fraud is a kaleidoscopic work of historical fiction set against the legal trial that divided Victorian England, about who deserves to tell their story—and who deserves to be believed.” This is Smith’s first novel since Swing Time.
Holly by Stephen King
Coming on: September 5th, 2023
Stephen King’s Holly marks the triumphant return of beloved King character Holly Gibney. Readers have witnessed Holly’s gradual transformation from a shy (but also brave and ethical) recluse in Mr. Mercedes to Bill Hodges’s partner in Finders Keepers to a full-fledged, smart, and occasionally tough private detective in The Outsider. In King’s new novel, Holly is on her own, and up against a pair of unimaginably depraved and brilliantly disguised adversaries.
This Is Salvaged: Stories by Vauhini Vara
Coming on 26th September, 2023
Pushing intimacy to its limits in prose of unearthly beauty, Vauhini Vara explores the nature of being a child, parent, friend, sibling, neighbor, or lover, and the relationships between self and others. In the title story, an experimental artist takes on his most ambitious project yet: constructing a life-size ark according to the Bible’s specifications. “In a world defined by estrangement, where is communion to be found?”, is the question the book raises.The characters in This Is Salvaged, unmoored in turbulence, are searching fervently for meaning, through one another.
Let Us Descend by Jesmyn Ward
Coming on 3rd October, 2023
Let Us Descend is a reimagining of American slavery, as beautifully rendered as it is heart-wrenching. Searching, harrowing, replete with transcendent love, the novel is a journey from the rice fields of the Carolinas to the slave markets of New Orleans and into the fearsome heart of a Louisiana sugar plantation. “From one of the most singularly brilliant and beloved writers of her generation, this novel inscribes Black American grief and joy into the very land—the rich but unforgiving forests, swamps, and rivers of the American South.”
Words Neeraja Srinivasan
Date 15.08.2023