Top 5 Fiction Book Recommendation

Here are 5 fiction books to consider reading in 2023:

1. "The Mirror and the Light" by Hilary Mantel - the final book in the trilogy about Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII's court.

The Mirror & the Light is generously self-sufficient – to read this alone would hardly be skimping it is four or five books in itself. But it also continues, deepens, and revises its forebears, negotiating with its past as does Cromwell with his. A spring lightly touched opens corridors into earlier books. Unlock the “room called Christmas” now and its past leaps out: this is where the doomed lutenist Mark Smeaton shrieked through the night among festive decorations that appeared, in his terror, as implements of torture. We know our way around Cromwell’s home Austin Friars and what these walls have seen. “My past pads after me, paws on the flagstones,” thinks Cromwell, who builds new houses and watches old ghosts enter. He knows the power of palimpsests. His Reformation involves the whitewashing of walls, but he sees how old faces show through from underneath. The Mirror & the Light is startlingly fresh in every moment, a new-made story with predecessors close enough to bleed through the pages. ( Review by The Guardian)

2. "The Great Circle" by Maggie Shipstead - a historical epic following the lives of two female pilots, separated by time and circumstance.

Great Circle is a daringly ambitious novel, traversing in Marian’s story the history of early-20th-century aviation, Prohibition, the Great Depression and the second world war. Threaded through it is a parallel contemporary narrative, recounted by disgraced Hollywood starlet Hadley Baxter, who is trying to revive her career by playing Marian in a biopic. Hadley’s drily cynical voice has more than a touch of Fleabag about it, offering a knowing and prematurely jaded insider’s view of the movie industry (“my career is no longer a blow job-based barter economy,” she remarks). She is positioned as a counterpoint to Marian, whose pure and single-minded determination to fly contrasts sharply with Hadley’s tendency to drift through life with occasional bouts of self-sabotage. “I needed the relief of being someone who wasn’t afraid,” Hadley confesses. But both women, in their separate ways, are pursuing freedom in a male world that wants to confine them within preconceived ideas about who and what they should be. “We’re celebrated for marrying,” Marian writes to her twin brother, Jamie, “but after that we must cede all territory and answer to a new authority like a vanquished nation. (Review by The Guardian).

3. "The Paper Palace" by Miranda Cowley Heller - a family drama set over the course of one day at a Cape Cod summer house.

Heller’s outstanding debut follows Elle Bishop, on holiday at her family’s lakeside home in Cape Cod, contemplating the status of her marriage after a brief moment of passion with a former lover. As the narrative spins between the present and the past, cataloguing a series of decisive moments in Elle’s life, Heller deftly builds up a portrait of her and the dilemma she faces. In captivating prose and with deep emotional insight, Heller creates a vivid and arresting novel about the complexity and frailty of love and marriage. ( The Guardian).

4. "The Prophets" by Robert Jones Jr. - a historical novel about two enslaved men on a plantation in the Deep South who fall in love.

The Prophets is indeed an outstanding novel, delivering tender, close-up intimacy, but also a great sweep of history. The novel names chapters after books of the Bible, but what really frames it are poetic sections written in the mysterious, eternal voices of seven ancestors, speaking out from the darkness. And while the bulk of the narrative takes place on the plantation, told from multiple characters’ perspectives, it is also interwoven with scenes set within a matriarchal African tribe. Their brutal enslavement and transportation to America grimly follows. (The Guardian).

5. "Harlem Shuffle" by Colson Whitehead - a crime novel set in Harlem in the 1960s, following a furniture dealer who gets involved in a heist.

Harlem Shuffle is built like a classic three-act tragedy. Jeopardy lingers in the shadows throughout for Ray. Can he ever escape a life framed by the dead-end airshafts and “the screech of metal” of the elevated trains? Part of the book’s pleasure is that it keeps you guessing. By the end, as Ray does of Harlem: “Its effect was unmeasurable until it was gone.” (Review by The Guardian)