The year's best stories

In 2023, Foreign Policy continued to expand the scope of our Books section. We published essays on a wide variety of new titles—novels, histories, and of course, classic foreign-policy releases—that combine criticism, reporting, and personal narrative.

In 2023, Foreign Policy continued to expand the scope of our Books section. We published essays on a wide variety of new titles—novels, histories, and of course, classic foreign-policy releases—that combine criticism, reporting, and personal narrative.

Read on for some of our favorite reviews of the year.

by V.V. Ganeshananthan, Jan. 7

The memory of the 1983-2009 civil war haunts present-day Sri Lanka—as Shehan Karunatilaka, the author of the Booker Prize-winning The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, knows well. In the novel, which takes place seven years into the war, the titular character is a dead photographer who has a week to navigate a bureaucratic In Between and reach something called The Light. But Maali’s interests lie elsewhere: He wants to ensure that a box of politically sensitive photographs that he took while he was alive end up in the right hands.

It’s a “merciless, madcap version of the afterlife,” V.V. Ganeshananthan writes—but also one that opens a window into a country racked, then and now, by historical and........

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