OBD Publishers Weekly Best Books of 2023 - Adult

"A witty, winning, and revelatory personal narrative of the author's transition from sightedness to blindness and his quest to learn all he can about blindness as a distinct and rich culture all its own. We meet Andrew Leland as he's suspended in the strange liminal state of the soon-to-be blind: He's midway through his life with retinitis pigmentosa, a condition that ushers those who live with it from complete sightedness to complete blindness over...

"After giving birth, Anna is utterly lost. She and her family move to the unfamiliar, snowy city of Stockholm. Anxiety threatens to completely engulf the new mother, who obsessively devours online news and compulsively buys clothes she can't afford. To avoid sinking deeper into her depression, Anna forces herself to read and write. My Work is a novel about the unique and fundamental experience of giving birth, mixing different literary forms-fiction,...

Winner of the NAACP Image Award in Outstanding Graphic Novels
Winner of an Alex Award from the American Library Association
Winner of the Libby Award for Best Comic/Graphic Novel of the Year
Finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize in Nonfiction
Nominated for an Eisner Award for Best Graphic Memoir
Nominated for an Ignatz Award for Outstanding Graphic Novel
Named The Year's Best Graphic

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"This is the age of vice, where money, pleasure, and power are everything, and the family ties that bind can also kill. New Delhi, 3 a.m. A speeding Mercedes jumps the curb and in the blink of an eye, five people are dead. It's a rich man's car, but when the dust settles there is no rich man at all, just a shell-shocked servant who cannot explain the strange series of events that led to this crime. Nor can he foresee the dark drama that is about to...

"When a pair of young lovers abscond from a Puritan colony, little do they know that their humble cabin in the woods will become the home of an extraordinary succession of human and nonhuman characters alike. An English soldier, destined for glory, abandons the battlefields of the New World to devote himself to apples. A pair of spinster twins navigate war and famine, envy and desire. A crime reporter unearths a mass grave--only to discover that the...

"From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Tinkers, a novel inspired by the true story of Malaga Island, an isolated island off the coast of Maine that became one of the first racially integrated towns in the Northeast. In 1792, formerly enslaved Benjamin Honey and his Irish wife, Patience, discover an island where they can make a life together. Over a century later, the Honeys' descendants and a diverse group of neighbors are desperately poor, isolated,...

"After years of working as an FBI agent, Titus Crown returns home to Charon County, land of moonshine and cornbread, fist fights and honeysuckle. Seeing his hometown struggling with a bigoted police force inspires him to run for sheriff. He wins, and becomes the first Black sheriff in the history of the county. Then a year to the day after his election, a young Black man is fatally shot by Titus's deputies. Titus pledges to follow the truth wherever...

"Seven Days. Seven Questions. Forever Changed. That's how The Eden Test, a week-long getaway, advertises itself for couples in trouble. And that's what Daisy, a talented actress, has signed up for, in the hopes of saving her marriage. It's a tall order, seeing as her husband Craig plans on leaving her for another woman. In fact, his bags are packed in the back of the car as he drives to the cabin in the woods in upstate New York. But spending time...

"From The Lady's Guide to Swampshire, Volume 1. Acceptable topics of conversation: the weather, hats. Unacceptable topics of conversation: gossip, France, missing person cases. Feisty, passionate Beatrice Steele has never fit the definition of a true lady, according to the strict code of conduct that reigns in Swampshire, her small English township--she is terrible at needlework, has no musical ability, and her artwork is so bad it frightens people....

"Evie Shockley's new poems invite us to dream-and work-toward a more capacious 'we'. In her new poetry collection, Evie Shockley mobilizes visual art, sound, and multilayered language to chart routes towards openings for the collective dreaming of a more capacious 'we.' How do we navigate between the urgency of our own becoming and the imperative insight that whoever we are, we are in relation to each other? Beginning with the visionary art of Black...