Best books of 2023 | list the second

~ This Reading Life

2023 was a fabulous reading year.

When I started seeing all your posts about favourite books of the year, I knew I was going to be in trouble. How could I possible pick just one book? So I started making a list of the books that moved me in some way, opened my eyes in others or have stayed with me as treasured reading memories. The list ended up being an impressive 23 books long. The number was too serendiptious to ignore – I give you my 23 favourite and best books of 2023.

To make life easier for all of us, I will split the 23 titles into Australian fiction, international fiction with a third and final list of classics and non-fiction books.

Today we start with my SEVEN favourite Australian fiction titles for 2023.

Glass Houses | Anne Coombs

This is one of those books hard to categorise, difficult to describe and almost impossible to explain to others why I loved it so much. I read it back in March and still think about it.

Ostensibly it’s a gentle satire about renovating heritage houses in NSW in the 1980’s. But really it’s about how the “past matters because it never leaves us. The present disappears each and every instant but the past lingers on, growing in our imagination as it fades in our memory.“

Thirst For Salt | Madelaine Lucas

Written by a former colleague, Thirst For Salt is Madelaine’s debut novel set on the beautiful south coast of NSW.

Essential, it is a love story – a civilised love story between two decent people. It’s not toxic or violent, cruel or psychotic. It’s just two people who meet, find they are attracted to each other and give it a go.

We know from the start it doesn’t work. The story is about unpacking why not. Neither of them are terrible people, they simply aren’t that suited for anything long term together. Madelaine astutely, delicately explores the two of them loving and living together in all their glorious imperfections, as we slowly watch their relationship unravel.

Anam | André Dao

Not an obvious favourite; it wasn’t an easy read and it felt flawed. At least that;s how I felt at the time.

Now I think the fault may have been mine. I suspect Dao was playing around a lot more than I could readily comprehend with philosophy, memory and political theories. However the more personal sections about his family history, refugees and intergenerational trauma struck an immediate chord.

A book to revisit one day.

The Battlers | Kylie Tennant

I agonised over a number of my book responses this year. When a book has a big impact on me, I often struggle to unpack why. I just want to gush about it instead or I get tangled up in trying to do it justice.

This was one of those books.

Set during The Depression in Central West NSW, we follow a group of itinerant workers as they move from place to place looking for work. This is a story that reminds us how the women and children were impacted by this huge socio-political upheaval as well.

But the Girl | Jessica Zhan Mei Yu

Yu has lots of metafiction fun with But the Girl as she skewers the life of a young literary academic with gentle self-deprecation. Her protagonist is only ever named as Girl. She explores toxic friendships within the artistic world, but it is The Bell Jar and Sylvia Plath that the book continually circles around as Girl deals with a deep sense of homesickness away from her family for the first time.

I enjoyed some laugh out loud moments with this one and I now have Yu on my ‘I can’t wait to see what she does next’ list!

The Sitter | Angela O’Keeffe

There are only two characters in this magnificent story – the ghost presence of Hortense Cézanne and The Writer. It’s about art, lived experiences, beauty, time and silence.

With all of its secrets and hidden agendas, this slim novel got under my skin. O’Keeffe reminds us that we can never assume that we know another person’s story and that even our own story is a constantly revised construct.

Edenglassie | Melissa Lucashenko

However one book did stand out from the crowd of wonderful reads. And this is it.

I’m expecting Edenglassie to win a slew of awards next year. It has that sense of being an important story with so much to say about colonisation, our relationship with history and Country.

If you’re only going to read one Australian literary fiction title this year, make it this one!

This post was written on the traditional land of the Wangal clan, one of the 29 clans of the Eora Nation within the Sydney basin. This Reading Life recognises the continuous custodianship & connection to Country of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples for the lands, seas & skies on which we live. They are this nations first storytellers.

Published by This Reading Life

22 thoughts on “Best books of 2023 | list the second”

  1. Some wonderful choices here, Brona!
    I enjoyed Glass Houses too, and The Sitter, and The Battlers has been part of my understanding of Australian history for a long time. Tennant was such an amazing women, I am lost for words when it comes to describing my admiration for her.
    I have Anam on my TBR and will get to it sooner rather than later.

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    1. Sorry for the late reply – Christmas got in the way 🙂
      I certainly hope to read more Tennant in 2024 – I’d love to get my teeth into a really good bio too….I hope there is some PhD student researching her life as I type!!

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      1. I’ve read a bio by Jane Grant (2006) and I have her autobiography which has the intriguing title ‘The Missing Heir’, but I felt that the bio was treading carefully about her relationship with her husband Lewis Rodd because of his tragic history as a suicidal depressive. Perhaps with the passage of time there might be light shed on this aspect of her life…

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    1. I love how Sylvia Plath keeps turning up in my reading life atm. One of the things I love about my job is how it puts books under my nose that I might not necessarily consider otherwise. This was one such gem. As was Glass Houses.

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    1. I remember trying to read The Honey Flow in my late teens and not really getting on with it, so I was a little nervous. But The Battler’s was extraordinarily good, which has made me keen to read her other early books now, esp Tiburon & Foveaux.

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  7. I’m so enjoying your lists, both for the recommended reads and for the reminders of pleasures where our reading has overlapped. I’m ashamed to say I haven’t read any Kylie Tennant, though in my mid 20s I had the huge pleasure of being invited to afternooin tea with her and her husband, L C Rodd (I was buying his collection of Meanjins)

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    1. Ohh now that would have been a treat – was that when they were living in Hunter’s Hill? One of my regular customers at work also had many afternoons teas with Kylie as a child as her mother was a friend.

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  8. I am not familiar with the authors, but seem to be interesting books on interesting topics. I rarely read Australian fiction, so I will pick one here for sure.

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  9. I’ve added Edenglassie to my wish list although the pb is very expensive at the moment. We’ll see if it wins stuff and gets more available here. And your 23 makes me feel a bit better as I have 21 currently and was trying to winnow them down a bit!

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