Christina's top reads of 2023

Explore the team’s favourite books of 2023! Choosing three from an entire year is a challenge and more recent reads tend to obscure what you read in February. Still, there are those that stay with you through the months. Why three? Because it's more than one but less than a list.

These are Christina's choices!

How Kyoto Breaks Your Heart by Florentyna Leow: I only just started this book but I already know that it’s going to stay with me for a long time. I am completely enchanted by its precise and lush descriptions of natural and built environment, its wise reflections on figuring out how to live, and by the central theme of a friendship that breaks apart.

Sisters in Arms by Shida Bazyar: I am thrilled this book was finally translated from German so I can recommend it to everybody. It’s a meditation on friendship, the ties that bind us, and belonging, exposing in vivid detail racism and sexism in contemporary Germany. Its structure and language are immediate and propulsive - I couldn’t stop reading it. I immediately read another of Bazyar’s books which I hope will also be translated soon.

Soundings by Doreen Cunningham: I just loved this book about whales and the climate emergency and parenting and pain and falling in love and making mistakes. It follows the author as she travels with her two-year-old son tracking the migration of whales from Mexico to Alaska, intercut with flashbacks showing the author’s time living with an Iñupiat family six years prior. It is vivid and contemplative, angry and tender, full of scientific, historical, and political details.

Watch out for the rest of the team favourites, coming in the next few days on the website!