Every year, some books seem to take the world by storm—splashed all over social media feeds, piled high on the front tables of bookstores, and spotted routinely in the wild. While I would never begrudge a book its popularity—yes, Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake deserves every effusive TikTok video that it inspired—I do sometimes wish other great reads could elbow their way into the spotlight. As we close out 2023, I’m singling out five of the year’s releases, all well reviewed, that nevertheless deserved more fuss:

The New Life by Tom Crewe (Scribner, Jan. 3): This debut novel by an editor at the London Review of Books explores the relationship between two late-19th-century English activists, one gay and one straight, who collaborate on a manifesto in defense of homosexuality—only to find public opinion turned against them by the Oscar Wilde scandal. It’s a deft melding of the personal and the political, written in prose that shines.

Don’t Call Me Home by Alexandra Auder (Viking, May 2): The daughter of Warhol superstar Viva (and older sister of actor Gaby Hoffmann) recounts a chaotic and colorful childhood at the Chelsea Hotel, home to New York’s artistic demimonde in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s. Auder writes with total honesty and humor about her mother’s antics—and her own. Neither an accusation nor an absolution, Don’t Call Me Home is a stunner.

The Man in the McIntosh Suit by Rina Ayuyang (Drawn + Quarterly, May 2): In a year of exemplary graphic novels such as Daniel Clowes’ Monica, this brilliantly executed comic more than held its own. Set in Depression-era California, it follows a Filipino farmworker who journeys to San Francisco in search of the wife who hasn’t answered his letters in months. Drawn in vibrant hues, the book brims with period details and film noir sensibility while addressing the anti-immigrant prejudice too often left out of such tales.

North Woods by Daniel Mason (Random House, Sept. 12): Mason has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, but he isn’t the household name he should be. His latest novel continues an excellent run of fiction (The Winter Soldier, A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth) with the chronicle of a house in rural Massachusetts across the centuries. Mason adopts wildly varied styles and voices to depict the house’s many residents: an idealistic apple orchardist, his rivalrous spinster daughters, a lovesick oil painter, and a schizophrenic person who seems to channel them all. (Since I first wrote this, North Woods was named one of the 10 Best Books of 2024 by the New York Times, but I intend to keep shouting about Mason until everyone everywhere is reading him.)

The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year by Margaret Renkl (Spiegel & Grau, Oct. 24): I’m not a regular reader of nature writing, but the books that seduce me into sticking with them—Helen Macdonald’s Vesper Flightsand Ellyn Gaydos’ Pig Years are two recent ones—become all-time favorites. I’m adding to the list the latest book by the New York Times columnist and author of Late Migrations. It’s structed as a kind of breviary, with short, beautifully observed reflections on the natural world—featuring illustrations by the author’s brother, Billy Renkl—for each of the 52 weeks of the year, as experienced in the backyard of a Nashville suburb. It’s a book to be savored.

Tom Beer is the editor-in-chief.