Tom Pugh's 3 favorite reads in 2023

In Bliss and Blunder, King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table return to England as a group of entitled, insecure techbros.

It might sound unlikely, but there’s true, literary magic at work as Gosling weaves England’s best-loved legends into the fabric of our present moment. Strange, fearless, and utterly convincing, there’s fun to be had in imagining (Sir Ga)Wayne drinking in the Green Knight or rummaging through Guinevere's Instagram account – but there’s anger, too.

Beneath the mythmaking, the story of Arthur is a story of power – the way it oozes and where it pools, who it celebrates, and who it destroys. We’re still as bewitched by the myths as we ever were – and the story hasn’t changed at all. 

Andrew Miller doesn’t do conventional heroes. In his most recent novel, Now We Shall Be Entirely Free (set during the Napoleonic Wars), two soldiers are given the task of finding a suspected war criminal.

On the subsequent manhunt from Portsmouth to the west coast of Scotland, my expectations were repeatedly – and gloriously – upended. 

The pursued doesn’t know he’s being pursued. It isn’t even clear if he’s guilty. The question is both pressing and increasingly irrelevant, except as a matter for his conscience and as a matter of public relations for the British army.

More than anything, it’s this horror of objective truth, shared by nearly every character, which propels the book – by turns (and perfectly) a thriller, a romance, a comedy, and a novel of ideas.  

This is a recommendation for everyone who loves big nineteenth-century novels. The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni was new to me in 2023 – and just what I needed to get me through the long winter nights.

Written in the 1820s and 30s and set two hundred years earlier, the novel opens with an act of moral cowardice. An innocent couple is torn apart at the whim of a nobleman. In the way of all the best nineteenth-century novels, we only discover whether their love is strong enough to reunite them after numerous mishaps, adventures, and digressions.

Again and again, Manzoni shows how people can always be relied on to make a bad situation worse. At times, the book feels like it could have been written yesterday!