Most Popular Books In 2023 According to Goodreads
Attention, book lovers! These popular fiction books belong on your must-read list for 2023.
Your TBR might not be empty, but let’s be honest, that doesn’t mean you’re going to stop looking for the next great read. And yes, it happens to me too! With so many books coming out every week, deciding which ones you’re going to pick up at your local bookstore can get super overwhelming.
Well, here are the most popular books published in 2023 according to Goodreads. The books listed here are ranked by how frequently they were added to Goodreads members’ shelves.
From chill-inducing thrillers to heated romances, there’s something here for everyone. Get cozy on your couch, because you’re about to be mesmerized by these books.
1. Happy Place by Emily Henry
A couple who broke up months ago pretend to still be together for their annual weeklong vacation with their best friends in this glittering and wise new novel from #1 New York Times bestselling author Emily Henry.
Harriet and Wyn have been the perfect couple since they met in college — they go together like salt and pepper, honey and tea, lobster and rolls. Except, now — for reasons they’re still not discussing — they don’t. They broke up five months ago. And still haven’t told their best friends.
Which is how they find themselves sharing a bedroom at the Maine cottage that has been their friend group’s yearly getaway for the last decade. Their annual respite from the world, where for one vibrant, blissful week they leave behind their daily lives; have copious amounts of cheese, wine, and seafood; and soak up the salty coastal air with the people who understand them most.
Only this year, Harriet and Wyn are lying through their teeth while trying not to notice how desperately they still want each other. Because the cottage is for sale and this is the last week they’ll all have together in this place. They can’t stand to break their friends’ hearts, and so they’ll play their parts. Harriet will be the driven surgical resident who never starts a fight, and Wyn will be the laid-back charmer who never lets the cracks show. It’s a flawless plan (if you look at it from a great distance and through a pair of sunscreen-smeared sunglasses). After years of being in love, how hard can it be to fake it for one week…in front of those who know you best?
2. Spare by Prince Harry
Prince Harry’s anticipated memoir is billed as being an “honest and captivated personal portrait” of a person the public has seen grow up, but is only recently getting to know on an intimate level. Poised to tell his story “at last,” the memoir is expected to cover the death of his mother, Diana, and why he left royal life behind with his wife Meghan Markle.
3. Things We Hide from the Light by Lucy Score
Nash Morgan was always known as the good Morgan brother, with a smile and a wink for everyone. But now, this chief of police is recovering from being shot and his Southern charm has been overshadowed by panic attacks and nightmares.
He feels like a brooding shell of the man he once was. Nash isn’t about to let anyone in his life know he’s struggling. But his new next-door neighbor, smart and sexy Lina, sees his shadows. As a rule, she’s not a fan of physical contact unless she initiates it, but for some reason Nash’s touch is different. He feels it too. The physical connection between them is incendiary, grounding him and making her wonder if exploring it is worth the risk.
4. Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros
Enter the brutal and elite world of a war college for dragon riders from New York Times bestselling author Rebecca Yarros
Twenty-year-old Violet Sorrengail was supposed to enter the Scribe Quadrant, living a quiet life among books and history. Now, the commanding general — also known as her tough-as-talons mother — has ordered Violet to join the hundreds of candidates striving to become the elite of Navarre: dragon riders.
But when you’re smaller than everyone else and your body is brittle, death is only a heartbeat away…because dragons don’t bond to “fragile” humans. They incinerate them.
With fewer dragons willing to bond than cadets, most would kill Violet to better their own chances of success. The rest would kill her just for being her mother’s daughter — like Xaden Riorson, the most powerful and ruthless wing leader in the Riders Quadrant.
She’ll need every edge her wits can give her just to see the next sunrise.
Yet, with every day that passes, the war outside grows more deadly, the kingdom’s protective wards are failing, and the death toll continues to rise. Even worse, Violet begins to suspect leadership is hiding a terrible secret.
Friends, enemies, lovers. Everyone at Basgiath War College has an agenda — because once you enter, there are only two ways out: graduate or die.
5. All the Dangerous Things by Stacy Willingham
Following up on her instant New York Times bestseller, A Flicker in the Dark, Stacy Willingham delivers a totally gripping thriller about a desperate mother with a troubled past in All the Dangerous Things.
One year ago, Isabelle Drake’s life changed forever: her toddler son, Mason, was taken out of his crib in the middle of the night while she and her husband were asleep in the next room. With little evidence and few leads for the police to chase, the case quickly went cold. However, Isabelle cannot rest until Mason is returned to her — literally.
Except for the occasional catnap or small blackout where she loses track of time, she hasn’t slept in a year.
Isabelle’s entire existence now revolves around finding him, but she knows she can’t go on this way forever. In hopes of jarring loose a new witness or buried clue, she agrees to be interviewed by a true-crime podcaster — but his interest in Isabelle’s past makes her nervous. His incessant questioning paired with her severe insomnia has brought up uncomfortable memories from her own childhood, making Isabelle start to doubt her recollection of the night of Mason’s disappearance, as well as second-guess who she can trust… including herself. But she is determined to figure out the truth no matter where it leads.
6. The Housemaid’s Secret by Freida McFadden
This absolutely explosive and shockingly twisty sequel to USA Today bestseller The Housemaid will keep you racing through the pages late into the night.
The book overview
It’s hard to find an employer who doesn’t ask too many questions about my past. So I thank my lucky stars that the Garricks miraculously give me a job cleaning their stunning penthouse with views across the city and preparing fancy meals in their shiny kitchen. I can work here for a while, stay quiet until I get what I want.
It’s almost perfect. But I haven’t seen the inside of the guest bedroom, which I’m forbidden to enter. And I still haven’t met Mrs Garrick. I’m sure I hear her crying. I notice spots of blood around the neck of her white nightgowns when I’m doing laundry. One day I can’t help but knock on the door. When it gently swings open, what I see inside changes everything…
That’s when I make a promise. After all, I’ve done this before. I can protect Mrs. Garrick while keeping my own secrets locked up safe. Douglas Garrick has done wrong. He is going to pay. It’s simply a question of how far I’m willing to go...
7. Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld
With her keen observations and trademark ability to bring complex women to life on the page, Curtis Sittenfeld explores the neurosis-inducing and heart-fluttering wonder of love, while slyly dissecting the social rituals of romance and gender relations in the modern age.
8. Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano
An exquisite homage to Louisa May Alcott’s timeless classic, Little Women, Hello Beautiful is a profoundly moving portrait of what is possible when we choose to love someone not in spite of who they are, but because of it.
9. What Lies in the Woods by Kate Alice Marshall
Kate Alice Marshall’s What Lies in the Woods is a thrilling novel about friendship, secrets, betrayal, and lies — and having the courage to face the past.
Naomi Shaw used to believe in magic. Twenty-two years ago, she and her two best friends, Cassidy and Olivia, spent the summer roaming the woods, imagining a world of ceremony and wonder. They called it the Goddess Game. The summer ended suddenly when Naomi was attacked. Miraculously, she survived her seventeen stab wounds and lived to identify the man who had hurt her. The girls’ testimony put away a serial killer, wanted for murdering six women. They were heroes.
And they were liars. For decades, the friends have kept a secret worth killing for. But now Olivia wants to tell, and Naomi sets out to find out what really happened in the woods — no matter how dangerous the truth turns out to be.
10. Yours Truly by Abby Jimenez
Dr. Briana Ortiz’s life is seriously flatlining. Her divorce is just about finalized, her brother’s running out of time to find a kidney donor, and that promotion she wants? Oh, that’s probably going to the new man-doctor who’s already registering eighty-friggin’-seven on Briana’s “pain in my ass” scale. But just when all systems are set to hate, Dr. Jacob Maddox completely flips the game… by sending Briana a letter.
And it’s a really good letter. Like the kind that proves that Jacob isn’t actually Satan. Worse, he might be this fantastically funny and subversively likable guy who’s terrible at first impressions. Because suddenly he and Bri are exchanging letters, sharing lunch dates in her “sob closet,” and discussing the merits of freakishly tiny horses. But when Jacob decides to give Briana the best gift imaginable — a kidney for her brother — she wonders just how she can resist this quietly sexy new doctor... especially when he calls in a favor she can’t refuse.
11. Someone Else’s Shoes by Jojo Moyes
A story of mix-ups, mess-ups, and making the most of second chances, this is the new novel from #1 New York Times bestselling author Jojo Moyes, author of Me Before You and The Giver of Stars
Who are you when you are forced to walk in someone else’s shoes?
Someone Else’s Shoes is a funny, moving, and heartfelt story about how, for any of us just one little thing can suddenly change everything.
12. I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai
In I Have Some Questions for You, award-winning author Rebecca Makkai has crafted her most irresistible novel yet: a stirring investigation into a collective memory and a deeply felt examination of one woman’s reckoning with her past, with a transfixing mystery at its heart. Timely, hypnotic, and populated with a cast of unforgettable characters, I Have Some Questions for You is at once a compulsive page-turner and a literary triumph.
Actually, I included this book in the best books to read this year if you want to check out the full list it's embedded below.
13. Hell Bent by Leigh Bardugo
From the author of Shadow and Bone, now a hit NETFLIX series. This book was listed as the most anticipated book of 2023 by The New York Times, The Week, Kirkus Reviews, PopSugar, Distractify, Booklist Queen, The Nerd Daily, and more!
Thick with history and packed with Bardugo’s signature twists, Hell Bent brings to life an intricate world full of magic, violence, and all-too-real monsters.
14. Maame by Jessica George
Maddie wants to be someone new. She’s spent much of her early adulthood caring for her father, who has Parkinson’s, forced to grow up fast and live up to her nickname, Maame, which means “woman” in Twi, while her brother chases his dreams and her mother is mostly in Ghana.
When her mother returns from her latest stint overseas and urges Maddie to move out, she’s determined to make the most of it and be the kind of person she’s always hoped to be. She wants to go out more and date and let loose, but tragedy strikes while she’s on this quest of self-discovery, and she’s forced to navigate a world that’s totally unlike the one she imagined.
Maame is a quick, satisfying read with characters you’ll want to spend a few hundred pages with and a page-turning plot that leaves you rooting for Maddie.
15. Still Pictures: On Photography and Memory by Janet Malcolm
When the journalist and critic Janet Malcolm died in 2021, she had published about a dozen books of nonfiction, none of them autobiographical. In fact, she was opposed to the idea of “life writing,” which she thought of as hopelessly self-forgiving and, presumably, unsuited to the clear-eyed approach she took toward her subjects.
So it’s not surprising that Still Pictures: On Photography and Memory, structured around snapshots of Malcolm, her family, and other figures in her life, builds that hesitation in. “I would rather flunk a writing test than expose the pathetic secrets of my heart,” she says at the end of a chapter about an affair she had with a married man who would become her husband.
In writing about her childhood and her Czech émigré family, too, she admits every lapse of memory — though she remembers a lot, about her “grotesque” after-school teacher and her faux-suave high-school boyfriend and her touchingly middle-brow parents, who had narrowly escaped the Holocaust. The result is something lucid and honest, as much about the nature of memory as her own life. “The past is a country that issues no visas,” she writes. “We can only enter it illegally.”
