Books We’re Looking Forward to in 2023 – Part 1

1. It’s been 12 years since the last time we held fiction by Bret Easton Ellis (Imperial Bedrooms) and 17 years since we’ve held good Bret Easton Ellis fiction in our hands (Lunar Park) – we’ll draw an impolite veil over White and pretend that was a different Bret Easton Ellis all together – but now here we are with The Shards, an almost 600 page beast of a book. We’re okay to be both nervous and excited about this one, right?
2. And while we are talking beasts, here is another 560+ book – Age of Vice by Deepti Kapoor, which promises to be a New Delhi take on Bonfire of the Vanities, with “seductive wealth, startling corruption, and bloodthirsty violence” the backdrop to a car mounting the pavement and taking the lives of five people. Plus it comes feted by both Rumaan Alam and Marlon James, which is recommendation enough in our book.
3. From one calamity to another – White Riot by Joe Thomas, which comes emblazoned with a laudatory quote from Bookmunch favourite David Peace (“One of our very best contemporary crime writers”), as well as whole host of other luminaries (Jake Arnott, Cathy Unsworth and Lucy Caldwell to name but three). Like Peace’s best work, Thomas’ novel “weaves fiction, fact and personal experience” to tell a tale of the National Front in Hackney in the 70s and 80s and “weaponised racial tensions”. Sounds right up our street.
4. The first lavish graphic novel of 2023 has no real competition in the pushing the boat out stakes: Your Wish Is My Command by Deena Mohammed. The book “imagines a fantastical Cairo where wishes really do come true” but also requires you to read from the back to the front, challenging your expectations from the get-go. Look out for our review on 14 Jan 2023.
5. Hard on the heels of last year’s nonfiction work, Souvenir (but less than hard on the heels of his last actual novel, Perfect Tense, which came out in 2001), Michael Bracewell is back with Unfinished Business, a new novel for the inestimable White Rabbit which concerns “an ordinary suburban office worker, fundamentally weak but always keeping his eyes fixed on some horizon where a heightened, romantic, better world must surely exist.” Look out for a review from Valerie O’Riordan in the new year.
6. Nell Zink is back in 2023 with Avalon, a novel which “follows an odd girl named Bran through an untenable love affair”. Or rather (to lift a quote from the New York Times review): “it’s as though Zink glanced at the mundane little formula that recurs throughout her press clippings and filched it for a plot. The novel is about a girl with a weird job in a weird place whose writing talent is overlooked because of her circumstances, but who will eventually (probably) triumph, demonstrating that you can’t judge a person by her credentials.”
7. Before many of us have got from one side to the other with his last book, The Burning Boy, Paul Auster is back with a much slimmer title (clocking in at 160 pages rather than 800+), Bloodbath Nation, another work of nonfiction, is “an intimate and powerful rumination on American gun violence” which also features photographs from Spencer Ostrander.
8. Those lovely people at Blue Moose Books will be unleashing I Am Not Your Eve by Devika Ponnambalam on us in March, “a polyphonic novel of Teha’amana, Tahitian muse and child-bride to Paul Gaugin, from her point of view conveyed through the myths and legends of the islands.” We can’t wait.
9. Opening in 14^th century India and concerning a young girl called Pampa Kampana who becomes a vessel for the goddess Parvati, Salman Rushdie’s latest novel Victory City is going to be seen as much as for being a victory for free speech after the attack which took place in August 2022, as it will be viewed a novel in its own right. Here’s wishing Rushdie rude health to enjoy the success of the book.
10. If you got as much of a kick out of Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s debut, Fleishman is in Trouble, as we did, then you’ve no doubt been restlessly waiting for the follow-up, Long Island Compromise, a tale of kidnap and redemption, spanning decades.

Look out for part two of our Books We’re Looking Forward to in 2023 tomorrow, which will feature new books from the likes of Max Porter, Eleanor Catton, Percival Everett and Han Kang