It’s that time of year again, where I’m rounding up the best things that I’ve read this year, and I’m starting with the new fiction because it has been a really good year for it.
As I’ve said already, in contemporary romance 2023 has been the year of the celebrity and normal person romance in my reading life. I’m still not sure if it’s an actual trend or if it’s just what the algorithm has been feeding me but I’ve really enjoyed it and the hardest part is how do I pick just one for this list? Well the answer is I’m not. I’m picking two: Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld and Once More with Feeling by Elissa Sussman. Yes, they are two of the books that were on my half year favourites list, but I really did love them and they’re two of the books that I’ve recommended the most this year. Romantic Comedy is still the only book with the quarantimes in it that I’ve enjoyed and Once More with Feeling made me so happy for some bookish revenge on a Justin Timberlake type figure.
Also in contemporary romance is Lucy Parker’s Codename Charming – this was one of my most anticipated books of the year, and it lived up to my internal hype for it when it finally arrived in the autumn. Also excellent was Christina Lauren’s True Love Experiment and Role Playing by Cathy Yardley, the latter of which has an older pairing than you usually see which was fun.
And finally it wouldn’t be one of my end of year lists without a Rich People Problems novel, and this year it is Pineapple Street, which was also on the mid year list.
I realise now that there’s no crime on this list, which is a slight surprise to me given how much mystery I have read, but a lot of it was either not new or from long running series and you know my policy on that. I wonder what 2024’s fiction list will look like?
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 
1 thought on “Books of the Year: New Fiction”