'Was 2023 a vintage year for books? Ask me in 50 years time' – Stuart Kelly

There were some impressive award-winners in 2023, but will their work stand the test of time, wonders Stuart Kelly

There is no question I dread more at this time of year than “So, what’s been your favourite book?” It is certain to put me into a kind of glaikit paralysis. It actually means “What would you recommend for me to buy?” and since I don’t know the recipient any advice would be useless anyway. It ranks alongside “Was 2023 a vintage year for books?” to which the only rational response is “Ask me in 50 years time”. I am likely, if put on the spot, to blurt out the most recent book I have read, which will most likely not be in bookshops for four months; or something that was genuinely memorable, but few people want the magisterial Karl Barth: A Life In Conflict by Christiane Tietz and Victoria Barnett. The look of stupefaction can just be me desperately trying to remember if Zadie Smith’s The Fraud or Jonathan Lethem’s Brooklyn Crime Story or Lauren Beukes’ Bridge were published this year or not (all three were, all three are excellent).There are always the prize-winners. Some years – most, if I am being honest – I look over the gong awarding with a sense of boredom or incomprehension. Checking back over 2023 was a pleasant surprise, in that quite a few books I admired were recognised by the judges. The Booker went to Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song, a novel which managed to be timely and timeless at the same time, depicting an Ireland slowly imploding into reactionary and insular viciousness. Closer to home, I was extremely pleased to see Martin MacInnes winning both the Saltire and the Blackwells Prize for In Ascension. It is a litmus test kind of novel. Personally, a story about interplanetary exploration, time travel, prebiotics, theology and grief is very much my kind of thing, and I am aware that the description will alienate many readers. But please – set aside your prejudices and persist. If it still seems rather daunting, then Samantha Harvey’s Orbital covers some of the same ground in perfect miniature.

The Goldsmiths’ Prize is one that increasingly interests me, and its alumni make a decent roll-call of the properly ambitious contemporary writers: Lucy Ellmann, Nicola Barker, Kevin Barry, Mike McCormack, Eimear McBride, M John Harrison. This year’s winner was Benjamin Myers, for Cuddy, a many-voiced evocation of St Cuthbert with the caveat that he is never alive in the book. I had previously been impressed by Myers’ novels The Perfect Golden Circle, The Gallows Pole and Pig Iron, but had extra-literary reasons as well, since I live on the St Cuthbert’s Way. Proof, perhaps, that persistence is a virtue in writers as well as readers. T

he National Book Award in the States went to another polyphonic novel, Blackouts by Justin Torres; and again, a summary – genre-shifting two-hander about Puerto Rican homosexuals and psychiatric research into “deviance” – will be enough to make up many readers’ minds. Yet it is a compassionate novel, even as it moves between celebration and epitaph. Equally ebullient was the Pulitzer winner, Trust by Hernan Diaz. Although the title refers primarily to the financial sense of the word, it is inevitably about competing narratives and which version of a given story the reader believes. Although panoramic, its analyses of the hallucinatory nature of capitalism and the unreality of wealth seems aimed at the present rather than the past.On closer inspection of my reading and reviewing this year, there were actually a great many which were in different ways accomplished. Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood, like Naomi Alderman’s The Future, dealt with the intersection of the environmental and financial crises. It was encouraging that Catton’s novel was so unlike her Booker-winning previous book, The Luminaries. I did not review it, but the aforementioned M John Harrison’s Wish I Was Here was a memoir in the same spirit as his fiction: unbelievable, teasing, askance and eerie. He is the kind of writer that readers become oddly possessive about: there is almost a note of petulance when a fellow critic finds out you admire Harrison as well. I can imagine that many writers have a similar reaction to Austen on reading Scott – “Mr Scott has no business to write novels, especially good ones” – when they read Francis Spufford. Spufford was already an eminent non-fiction writer, then in swift succession produced the historical novel Golden Hill, then Light Perpetual, imagining lives for those who lost theirs, and now a counterfactual carnivalesque about race, religion, crime and music with the absolutely dazzling Cahokia Jazz.One other way in which years are memorable is in the writers whose pens are stilled. Kenzaburo Oe and Milan Kundera both had an unquantifiable influence on other writers. In terms of British writers, Benjamin Zephaniah will be remembered as a ground-breaking force. I was particularly affected by the deaths of AS Byatt and Martin Amis. When I started university in 1990, two recent novels seemed to polarise us: were you on the side of Martin Amis, who had just published London Fields, or Antonia Byatt, who had just published Possession? I have vacillated between them ever since, but will say that Byatt got better, while Amis got bitter.