Season's Readings: A compilation of favorite historical novel lists from 2023

I feel like I've been neglecting this blog over the last week. It's been a busy semester at the library, and I've also been spending a lot of time reading and reviewing novels that won't be published until 2024. These will be appearing here later. For now, I thought I'd post links to the "best books of 2023" roundups I've found that cover historical novels.

The New York Times has their selection of the best historical fiction from 2023. This is a gift article, so you can read it even if you don't subscribe. Unsurprisingly, most of these ten are literary fiction. Paul Harding's This Other Eden and Daniel Mason's North Woods would be on my list too. There are some others on the list that I struggled with. For example, I found The Fraud alternately compelling and confusing, since it's very dense, and the nonlinear structure left me feeling lost at times. But I can understand its appeal, and I'm very glad that the NYT has been covering historical fiction regularly.

The historical fiction category at NPR's Books We Love is a perennial favorite since the books fall across many subgenres and age categories. And there are always novels here I haven't come across before.

The Sunday Times offers a dozen best historical novels of 2023. This is probably paywalled unless you have an account, so I'll give some highlights. Elodie Harper's The Temple of Fortuna, third in her trilogy about a woman from a Pompeii brothel, is on the list.  Book 1, The Wolf Den, was excellent, and I'm looking forward to the next two. There's also Elizabeth Fremantle's Disobedient, about Artemisia Gentileschi, and Laura Shepherd-Robinson's The Square of Sevens, set in Georgian England.

Crimereads has their best historical fiction of 2023. They describe their picks as historical mysteries and thrillers, but their definition seems broad; it encompasses historical fantasy adventure novels, a swashbuckling pirate story (Katherine Howe's A True Account), The Square of Sevens again, and Cheryl A. Head's Time's Undoing, a dual-period story about unearthing racial injustice, which I'd read from a library copy.

The Toronto Star lists just five books, including Emma Donoghue's Learned by Heart, about the young Anne Lister, and Janie Chang's The Porcelain Moon, covering a little-known angle on WWI-era France.

Shepherd.com has been asking authors to name the best books they read this year. They compiled the results, sorted them by category, and came up with a list of the 100 best historical novels of 2023. Many of these are older titles, and it'd be a stretch to call some of them historical fiction. But it is a wide-ranging, diverse list of choices. You can also narrow it down to those titles published this year.

And the Goodreads Choice Awards for 2023 in the historical fiction category. There's some overlap between this list and the ones linked above -- like James McBride's The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store and Isabel Allende's The Wind Knows My Name -- but not much. The overall winner is Emilia Hart's Weyward.

If you have other lists to share, please let me know.

Merry Christmas to all who celebrate!  I'll be back after the holiday with more reviews and historical fiction news.