AARP’s Best Books of 2023 (So Far)

A Pulitzer Prize winner for 2016’s Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, Matthew Desmond, 43, describes in Poverty, by America (March 2023) why the poor stay poor in this country, including almost 17 percent of U.S. children. It’s a weighty subject with a stern premise: Wealthy Americans — including some with progressive politics — are helping to perpetuate this sad reality. “Poverty persists because some wish and will it to,” he writes, pointing to factors like low wages, exploitative home rental rates, and a tax code that favors the rich. It’s not all bleak, though, as Desmond offers ways the better-off can help alleviate the problem.

My Father’s Brain: Life in the Shadow of Alzheimer’s by Sandeep Jauhar

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Photo Collage: MOA Staff; (Source: Book Photo: Sue Tallon)

Sandeep Jauhar, 55, — author of 2018’s Heart: A History — is a practicing physician, but that didn’t prepare him for the emotionally wrenching experience of watching his dad’s gradual cognitive and physical decline from Alzheimer’s, as he recounts in his moving memoir, My Father’s Brain (April 2023). Anyone who’s been a family caregiver, or has a loved one with the disease, will relate to the author, who describes his family’s long, difficult journey with compassion and candor (“I loved him, cared for him, and hated him, too,” he writes).

The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder by David Grann

Photo Collage: MOA Staff; (Source: Book Photo: Sue Tallon)

David Grann, 56, is the author of the gripping 2017 bestseller Killers of the Flower Moon (a film version of which is expected to hit theaters this fall), so you know the guy — a writer for The New Yorker — knows how to tell a story. And he tackles a doozy of a tale in his latest bestseller The Wager (April 2023), about the  18^th-century British warship that wrecked off the coast of Patagonia, leaving its men marooned on an island. Two separate groups of castaways managed to patch together boats and make it to safety — but each arrived with wildly conflicting tales, including accusations of murder and mutiny. The guilty party would be sentenced to death, Grann notes, yet “the only impartial witness was the sun.” He used the men’s own written descriptions, among other sources, to piece together this vivid account.

The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese

Photo Collage: MOA Staff; (Source: Book Photo: Sue Tallon)

Yes, The Covenant of Water (May 2023) is a door-stopper at more than 700 pages, but you won’t regret diving into this complex, beautifully written novel by 68-year-old Abraham Verghese, a professor at Stanford University School of Medicine who’s known for his 2009 bestseller Cutting for Stone. His new bestseller, an Oprah Book Club pick, takes us from 1900 to 1977, weaving multiple storylines throughout — including that of a family in Kerala, on south India’s Malabar Coast, with what appears to be a kind of curse: Someone from each generation dies by drowning. The audiobook version is narrated by the author, who has said the story was in part inspired by his own family’s history.  

King: A Life by Jonathan Eig

Jonathan Eig, 59, the author of 2017’s Ali: A Life, about Muhammad Ali, dives into the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s family history, childhood, accomplishments, private life and more — hoping to create “a more intimate kind of biography,” Eig told Library Journal. Obviously, King’s life has been plumbed by countless historians, but King: A Life (May 2023) may rise above those other bios. In The New York Times, Dwight Garner offers a glowing review, calling it “supple, penetrating, heartstring-pulling and compulsively readable.”

Lady Tan’s Circle of Women by Lisa See

Photo Collage: MOA Staff; (Source: Book Photo: Sue Tallon)

Lisa See, 68, the author of Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, among other novels, brings us an absorbing story set in 15th-century China in Lady Tan’s Circle of Women (June 2023). It follows a wealthy woman, Tan Yunxian, from childhood through the decades as she learns the basics of Chinese medicine from her grandmother, then goes on to practice it in an era when elite women — with their tiny, painfully bound feet (See’s descriptions of little girls’ experiencing the torturous tradition are enough to make you want to cry) and arranged marriages — had few freedoms. Her life is contrasted with that of her closest friend, Meiling, a midwife-in-training, who has more liberty as a lower-class woman, but her own set of challenges.

The Wind Knows My Name by Isabel Allende

Isabel Allende, 80, the esteemed Chilean American author of 1982’s The House of the Spirits, among so many other great works, centers her new novel The Wind Knows My Name (June 2023) on a little girl, Anita Díaz, whose mother disappears after they escape violence in El Salvador for the United States. A remarkable group of people — including an older man who fled Nazi Germany — step in to give her a home. It’s a heartfelt subject for Allende, who herself was an immigrant and refugee following Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 coup in Chile, as she discusses in our recent interview with the author.

Honorable mentions

The House Is on Fire by Rachel Beanland (April 2023). The historical novel by Beanland, 41, begins with the 1811 burning of a Richmond, Virginia, theater (which actually occurred), and tracks the drama that follows.

Chita: A Memoir by Chita Rivera, with Patrick Pacheco (April 2023). The Broadway legend, 90, recalls her famous role as Anita in the first production of West Side Story and more from her stellar career.

The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece by Tom Hanks (May 2023). The 68-year-old actor’s often humorous novel jumps from 1947 to 1970 and on to the present-day creation of a splashy superhero movie based on an old comic book.