2023 in review

I read a lot in 2023 and it got to the point where I just didn’t have the time to write full monthly reviews for every book I got through. There were some truly excellent reads in there though and I wanted to share them with you! I’ve picked my top three books from the year and also included my favourite films and my favourite album. I used to write about films regularly for my degree, so it’s been nice to stretch those muscles again.

Anyway, Happy New Year! Hopefully there will be some new favourites for you in here as well.

Strega by Johanne Lykke Holm

This is a strange and dreamlike small novel. Set in a rural Alpine town, it follows Rafaela, who, along with a group of other young women, has come to the fading Olympic Hotel to work as a maid for the season. The girls’ days are filled with the same, repetitive tasks: there are rooms to be dusted, dinner service to prepare. But the hotel remains empty - each morning the girls re-make fresh beds, the sheets unslept in, yet to see a guest. The girls wordlessly clump together, they spend their evenings and breaks curled around each other, passing cigarettes and sharing hairbrushes. At times they seem to speak as one. Occasionally, they get a glimpse of their only neighbours, a group of nuns that passes by silently, watching the hotel with disdain.

A party to celebrate a local holiday finally brings guests to the hotel and for the first time the grand rooms are filled with strangers. Amidst the dancing and celebrations, one of the maids, Cassie, disappears. The sense of threat that has been lurking in the hotel - moving beneath the wallpaper and creaking alongside the old building - finally comes to the surface. As the search for Cassie continues, Lykke Holm demonstrates how violence can be silent, how ‘a woman’s life could at any point be turned into a crime scene’.

Lykke Holm’s writing is rich and transportive - she weaves this sense of unease and grief into gorgeous imagery. Strega has hints of the gothic, it is strange and different and yet Lykke Holm is able to make you as a reader feel you too are one of these girls, stuck in the mountains, the inevitable waiting to happen.

Demon Copperhead - Barbara Kingsolver

You’ve probably already seen Demon Copperhead on every prize list and book round-up this year but it has definitely earned that position. This is a retelling of David Copperfield, but if you’re not a Dickens fan and/or have no prior knowledge of his original story, don’t let that put you off. Kingsolver has taken inspiration from the plot and its characters but re-worked them into a deeply relevant and contemporary portrayal of American life. This is an incredibly accomplished novel, rich with a sense of place and character.

Damon Fields is the central point of this story. Nicknamed Demon Copperhead, he is born in Lee County, Virginia, to a single mother. Kingsolver’s novel stretches across Demon’s life, following him through the difficulties of childhood and adolescence, first love, grief and loss. Demon’s story is one of institutional poverty and of the wide reaching and often inescapable effects of that. It is also a moving yet tragic portrait of the opioid epidemic in America, showing how the web of this problem extends far out beyond this one boy and his small town. I happened to read The Forgotten Girls and watch Painkiller at a similar time to reading this. They both speak to elements of Demon Copperhead so I would definitely recommend looking into those alongside this book.

Brutes - Dizz Tate

All three of the books I’ve included here are new favourites, but Brutes is hands down my book of the year. It’s a dark and accomplished exploration of girlhood that feels unlike anything else I’ve read recently.

The novel takes place in Falls Landing, a small town in Florida. Sandwiched between swamp land and theme parks, the town is made up of an immiscible combination of new builds with swimming pools and abandoned holiday homes, filled with broken glass and cigarette butts. And amongst this is a group of young teenage girls. They move in a pack, they know how to evade their mothers’ attention, they see everything and watch silently. These girls speak as a collective, the narrative voice of the novel is their joint ‘we’. And yet there are moments when you can feel the edges of this group, where a girl will momentarily flicker into her own singular person, before she is absorbed back into the safety of ‘us’.

As the book opens, Falls Landing is gearing itself up for the local talent show - it’s a chance at fame and the only route these girls know out of the town. But Sammy, an older girl who the group fanatically watch, has gone missing.

Brutes is about the horrors of girlhood, but it also expands to examine womanhood as well, turning the lens onto the mothers of these girls and to the women they will eventually become, if they manage to make it out. This is an outstanding debut - equal parts dark, clever and tragic - I can’t wait to see what Tate brings out next.

Aftersun - dir. by Charlotte Wells

Aftersun is a brutally emotional film. Raw and real and touching. It takes place over a summer holiday, when young father Calum takes his 11-year-old daughter Sophie to Turkey for the week. Sophie’s childhood energy and curiosity is heightened in comparison to Calum’s struggling mental health and as the week progresses, we see the weight on his shoulders, his facade slipping in the moments he can’t pretend everything is ok.

There is a real sense of grief throughout Aftersun, and Charlotte Wells manages to embed this sense of an ending in everything - the knowledge that this can’t last forever. Whether that is the holiday, Sophie’s childhood or a shared laugh. But there are really touching moments to the film as well, the recognisable elements of a classic European resort, the thrill of the sun and the pool when you are a child. And the bond between Sophie and Calum is undeniable. Both Paul Mescal and Frankie Corio do an incredible job.

Sophie brings a video camcorder on holiday with them, and the film is interspersed with these clips she records, moments we see her also watch back as an adult, searching for the roots of the story that she now knows the end of. Charlotte Wells is great at leaving gaps for the viewer to fill themselves - this is such an accomplished and gut-wrenching debut, a real stand out of the year.

In the Mood for Love - dir. by Wong Kar-wei

I’ve been trying to see this film in the cinema for months - tickets seem to sell out almost immediately and I finally got to see why. This is one of the most gorgeous films. It opens in 1962 in Hong Kong. Chow Mo-wan and Su Li-zhen, both married (bot not to each other), move in to neighbouring apartments. We never see their spouses; they are simply a voice off camera, a shadow, an ankle or the back of a shoulder in the frame. When Chow and Su discover their spouses are having an affair with each other, they begin spending time together and we watch something bigger grow between them.

The power of In the Mood for Love lies in the ‘almost’; the slither of separation that always exists between the two main characters. They have this shared loneliness and mutual grief, a quiet but deep bond between them but yet a sense that they mustn’t come together. The lighting in this film is exquisite - they slide past each other in the shadows, the passageway lit only by a bare bulb, we watch smoke curling to the ceiling under the glare of a single desk lamp. And then there is the music -  a repeating theme that reverberates through their scenes together.

You should watch this film for the wardrobe of high-necked cheongsam dresses alone, and for two of the most beautiful lead characters ever on screen!

Bones and All - dir. by Luca Guadagnino

I love dark stories - plots and details that leave you feeling unsettled - and this film provides that in spades. I’m a huge Call Me By Your Name fan, so I already knew going into this that I could expect gorgeous cinematography from Luca Guadagnino, but that combination of horror and achingly beautiful shots, with golden landscapes and wide open road is just so good. Maren is a young woman existing on the edge of society and the film follows her journey across America as she searches for answers about herself. And at its core, Bones and All is a romance, that dangerous tumble of first love. I won’t say any more about the plot to avoid any spoilers but Taylor Russell is outstanding in this. She’s excellent at portraying the tiny details of Maren, the subtleties of that character.

I watched Past Lives on NYE so it only just scraped through into films of 2023 but this was an immediate favourite and I am adding it to this list - it is smart and powerful and moving, a really intricate and layered exploration of relationships and how we become the people we grow up to be.

Preachers Daughter by Ethel Cain

Favourite song: Sun Bleached Flies

I’m not confident about writing about music, so I’ll keep this brief, but this is a truly unique album in so many senses. A concept album, it tells the story of Ethel Cain, who runs away from home and her religious family, only to meet her end at the hands of a cannibalistic killer. I know that sounds incredibly dark, and it really is, but this is Southern Gothic at its best. It explores violence, religion, love, there’s even a road trip. There’s this whole story that exists outside the music itself; characters and histories that expand past the record. Sonically, it covers a diverse range of genres and the album steadily builds this sense of threat, culminating in a cacophony of noise and screams in Ptolemaea. Her lyrics are clever and tragic, her production next level. I was lucky enough to see her perform live this summer and her music is just as transformative in person.