We recently received The Times’ predictions of 2023 book prizewinners in our inbox, and they sound too good to miss. Have a read through potential reads, and make sure you order where you can and are inspired to so you have some good, relaxing times with a book to look forward to over the coming months.
As we approach the year’s halfway point, the books team has become contemplative. Looking back over the past five and a bit months, we’ve been thinking about our favourite novels so far — and which ones we think are in with the biggest chance of nabbing a prize. Here are our predictions:
Johanna Thomas-Corr: The New Life by Tom Crewe
I adored Tom Crewe’s novel about forbidden desires in Victorian London so much that we made it the lead review in my first week at The Sunday Times, which almost never happens with a debut novel. Back in those cold, miserable January days, I said I was fairly confident I had read “one of the most beautifully crafted, lavishly imagined novels of 2023”. I’m happy to double down on that claim. It’s an enthralling story about two real-life pioneers who tried to make a case for homosexuality in 19th-century Britain. Both are writers and family men who chafe against social constraints, but also feel excited by a new age of possibilities. Crewe (pictured above), a 34-year-old editor at the London Review of Books, brings this era pungently to life and I compared his prose to one of my favourite novelists, Alan Hollinghurst. Since we ran our rave review, he has been named one of Granta’s 40 best novelists under 40 and he has also just been nominated for the Orwell Prize for political fiction. Truly a writer of rare promise!
Robbie Millen: The Hero of This Book by Elizabeth McCracken
If literary prize judges want to go a bit offbeat, then look no further than this novel (or is it a memoir?). The elevator pitch for it doesn’t sound particularly compelling: a middle-aged American writer wanders around London thinking about her dead mother. Who cares? Well, Elizabeth McCracken is such a witty writer, full of sharp observations about life, writing, relationships and the people she meets. By the end of it, her dynamo of a mother (or is just the fictional unnamed narrator’s mother?) emerges, fully formed on the page. You know and love her. John Self wrote a very persuasive review.
Susie Goldsbrough: Soldier Sailor by Claire Kilroy
Yes I have already wanged on about the brilliance of this novel, but repetition is a lesser crime than neglect. And I will not have Soldier Sailor neglected. You could heat a small family home with the paper wasted on mediocre writing about motherhood, so what a pleasure it is to read Kilroy on the subject – an Irish novelist who hasn’t published for a decade – like stepping into a cool, skin-tingling breeze. It’s a psychological horror story cum love letter about a new mother stuck at home with her monster of a toddler, while her useless husband (or is he? Sleepless, bleeding and desperate doesn’t make for the most reliable narrator) comes home from work and says things like: “What’s for dinner?”
Laura Hackett: Close to Home by Michael Magee
A confession: I grew up in Northern Ireland, so Belfast-born Michael Magee’s debut novel hit a little close to home (sorry) for me. But I am reliably informed by English friends that this coming-of-age story is just as gripping if you’ve never set foot on the Emerald Isle. I hope this year’s crop of literary judges feel the same way. The book is about Sean, a young man who was brought up in a republican housing estate in Belfast. He thought he had escaped when he got away to Liverpool to study English at university, but he has ended up back where he started: working in nightclubs, getting into fights, taking drugs. “You’re stuck in this hole with the same three or four faces for the rest of your life, drinking, taking gear, hanging around the local until there’s no one left to talk to,” he complains. Things get worse when he’s charged with assault. It sounds bleak but Close to Home is so vivid and alive, with every character fleshy, every street buzzing, that you forget how sad it is. Magee turns desolation into a kind of stark beauty. Not to mention the moments of genuine hilarity, and the brilliant, pacey plot.