Books of the year I: a choice of reading in 2023

Andrew Motion

Something old made new: The Iliad in Emily Wilson’s muscular and moving new translation, the first by a woman, is truly what it claims to be – a version for our time (Norton, £30). And something new made immediate: Hannah Sullivan’s second collection of poems, Was It For This (Faber, £12.99), ambitiously extends the already considerable range of her first book, Three Poems. She’s the cleverest poet of her generation and also one of the most deep-feeling.

Clare Mulley

Vulnerability, strength and defiance this year, starting with Daniel Finkelstein’s Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad (William Collins, £25), which caught me up in its humanity as it testified to the importance of bearing witness to extremism. Frank McDonough provides an authoritative and immensely readable guide to the fractured Weimar Republic, along with a lesson on the vulnerability of democracies, in The Weimar Years (Apollo, £35), the prequel to his two-volume The Hitler Years. In Forgotten Warriors (John Murray, £25), Sarah Percy explores the history of women in combat and tackles their exclusion from the historical record. Honourable mentions also to Thomas Harding’s The Maverick (Orion, £25), Roger Moorhouse’s The Forgers (Vintage, £25) and –a rare novel for me – Elizabeth Fremantle’s Disobedient (Michael Joseph, £18.99), which brilliantly reimagines Artemisia Gentileschi.

Philip Hensher

The book I most enjoyed this year is a Bengali classic, now translated by Rebecca Whittington. The glorious poet Jibanananda Das also wrote novels, and Malloban (Penguin India, £12) is an exquisite, small-scale account of the adventures of a bickering married couple in 1920s Calcutta.

Other novels I liked were Mick Herron’s splendid The Secret Hours (Baskerville, £22) and Eleanor Catton’s garrulous, precise, boisterous satire Birnam Wood (Granta, £20). Martin McInnes, a superb, adventurous writer, does something altogether new in In Ascension (Atlantic, £16.99).