Books by Emma Cline, Kelly Link, and Prince Harry are among the best of the year so far, according to Vox senior correspondent Constance Grady.
In a feature for the website, Grady took a look at “the 11 best books I’ve read in the first half of 2023.”
Cline made the list for The Guest, a novel about a woman who wanders Long Island after she’s kicked out of the house of the older man she has been involved with. Grady praised Cline’s “flat, understated sentences” and “precise, elegant prose.”
Also on the list was Link’s collection of updated fairy tales, White Cat, Black Dog. “When you close the book, the world you return to is stranger and, yes, more beautiful than the one you left behind,” Grady wrote.
Other fiction books making the Vox list were Jen Beagin’s Big Swiss and Dan Kois’ Vintage Contemporaries.
Prince Harry’s memoir, Spare, earned a spot on the list, with Grady calling the royal’s book “weird, at times off-putting, and undeniably fascinating.” She also praised David Grann’s The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder, highlighting the author’s “ability to toggle between narrative scales.”
Grady’s other favorite nonfiction books of the year so far were Tamar Adler’s The Everlasting Meal Cookbook: Leftovers A-Z; Patrick Bringley’s All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me; Claire Dederer’s Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma; Martha Hodes’ My Hijacking: A Personal History of Forgetting and Remembering; and Elise Hu’s Flawless: Lessons in Looks and Culture From the K-Beauty Capital.
Michael Schaub, a journalist and regular contributor to NPR, lives near Austin, Texas.
