The best fiction of 2023

From Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting to Zadie Smith’s The Fraud, and a companion to Nineteen Eighty-Four – this year’s fiction highlights

The book I’ve recommended most this year – and had the most enthusiastic feedback about, a whopping 656 pages later – is without doubt Paul Murray’s Booker-shortlisted tragicomedy, The Bee Sting (Hamish Hamilton). This story of an Irish family’s tribulations told from four points of view combines freewheeling hilarity with savage irony, surprise reveals and generations-deep sadness; it offers the immersive pleasures that perhaps only a fat family saga can bring. It lost out on the night to Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song, a harrowing portrait of a totalitarian Ireland with an urgent message for a world of rising political violence.

There was another long-awaited return to fiction from 2013’s Booker winner Eleanor Catton. In Birnam Wood (Granta), idealistic guerrilla gardeners in New Zealand run up against a ruthless billionaire. This is a propulsive thriller responding to the climate crisis, apocalyptic thinking and political ideology, and as stylishly written as you’d expect. Zadie Smith also took on a new genre with her first historical novel, The Fraud (Hamish Hamilton), which sets a gently comic portrait of 19th-century literary London, and a real-life trial which stirred up passionate emotions around class and identity, against harrowing testimony from a slave plantation. It expertly links Jamaican and British history, and offers a timely, quizzical reflection of our current age of globalisation and hypocrisy. Nigerian-American author Teju Cole’s Tremor (Faber) is deeply engaged with the horrors of colonialism, using autofiction for a subtle and up-to-the-minute study of how ideas around art, value and trauma are inflected by historical knowledge.