Congratulations to the winners of our 2023 End-of-the-Year Contest! One reader received all 44 of Carol Fitzgerald's Bookreporter.com Bets On picks from 2023, while 11 others won four of these titles. You can see all the winners below, along with 2023's Bets On selections.
If you would like to know more about these books, be sure to check out this video and podcast where Carol talks about each of her 44 picks.
Authors June Hayward and Athena Liu were supposed to be twin rising stars. But while Athena is a literary darling, June is literally nobody. When June witnesses Athena’s death in a freak accident, she acts on impulse: she steals Athena’s just-finished masterpiece, an experimental novel about the unsung contributions of Chinese laborers during World War I. So what if June edits Athena’s novel and sends it to her agent as her own work? So what if she lets her new publisher rebrand her as Juniper Song --- complete with an ambiguously ethnic author photo? Doesn’t this piece of history deserve to be told, whoever the teller? But June can’t get away from Athena’s shadow, and emerging evidence threatens to bring June’s (stolen) success down around her.
YELLOWFACE is the first book that I have read by R. F. Kuang (her first name is Rebecca). She has written award-winning fantasy titles, but this is a genre that I rarely dip into. The cover is arresting, and when it arrived at my house, I felt like those eyes were calling to me and saying, “I dare you to read me.”
This is the time of year when “Best Of” lists are everywhere. These annual roundups always seem to spark lively discussions among readers as they reflect on their favorite books of the year. Although we at Bookreporter.com don’t have a “Best Of” list of our own, we’ve compiled a number of them for you here. See which of your top picks appear on these lists and which titles you feel should've been included but weren't. Perhaps you’ll even find some books to add to your reading list as we head into the new year!
Paperback releases for the week of January 6th include YELLOWFACE, a chilling and hilariously cutting novel from R. F. Kuang that grapples with questions of diversity, racism and cultural appropriation, as well as the terrifying alienation of social media; KING: A Life by Jonathan Eig, the first major biography in decades of civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. --- and the first to include recently declassified FBI files; NONE OF THIS IS TRUE, an unputdownable psychological thriller from Lisa Jewell that follows a woman who finds herself the subject of her own popular true crime podcast; Lisa Gardner's STILL SEE YOU EVERYWHERE, a twisty novel of suspense featuring missing persons expert Frankie Elkin, who is tasked with locating the long-lost sister of a female serial killer facing execution in three weeks’ time; and MY FRIENDS by Hisham Matar, a luminous novel of friendship, family and the unthinkable realities of exile.
This is the time of year when “Best Of” lists are everywhere. These annual roundups always seem to spark lively discussions among readers as they reflect on their favorite books of the year. Although we at Bookreporter.com don’t have a “Best Of” list of our own, we’ve compiled a number of them for you here. See which of your top picks appear on these lists and which titles you feel should've been included but weren't. Perhaps you’ll even find some books to add to your reading list as we head into the new year!
