10 booksellers share their personal favourite reads of 2023
Below 10 booksellers share which books stand out as exceptional amongst everything they’ve read this year.
Art Monsters by Lauren Elkin
Art Monsters is the highlight book for me this year – energising, fresh, and entirely well researched this book combines visual and performance art with a series of powerful essays on the body in feminist art and practice by Laura Elkin. For art lovers, feminists and anyone grappling with where and how their body fits.
– Bec Kavanagh
Yellowface by Rebecca F. Kaung, Search History by Amy Taylor, and If You Could See the Sun by Ann Liang
I absolutely loved Yellowface by Rebecca F. Kuang, it was such a thrilling, hilarious, and insanely shocking novel that made my jaw ache from dropping so much. I also immensely enjoyed Search History by Amy Taylor, which was more embarrassingly relatable than I was expecting it to be but in the best way possible. And lastly, I have to mention this year's winner of the Readings Young Adult Prize If You Could See the Sun by Ann Liang, which was a highly compelling and original novel suitable for readers of all genres.
– Aurelia Orr
The Skull by Jon Klassen
One of my favourite books this year has been Jon Klassen's The Skull. I've always loved his work, and this takes Klassen's darker side right to the edge. It's a fable-adjacent story – one Klassen misremembered after reading a folk story in a regional library one day and forgetting the ending – about a young girl running through the woods who encounters a strange old house. Living there alone is a skull, and the girl and the skull forge a friendship over the day (the two of them wearing masks that the skull had explained the page before were for decoration only is one of my favourite moments in picture books). Then, at nighttime, it turns out there are secret horrors within the house walls... It's a genuinely spooky book, involving chasing skeletons and grinding bones and bottomless pits. It's sparse on words, so older readers might feel too smart for it; yet, it's too dark for younger readers. I would suggest it for a scare-loving 8+ year old.
– Fiona Hardy
Check Points by Michael Fikaris
Michael Fikaris' comic book/graphic novel Check Points, published by the Brunswick Glom Press on their riso machine, is a beautiful meditation about art-making, musing on/reflecting on Fikaris' 3 x studios in Melbourne over the past 20 years. Visually and verbally poetic, the book captures the density and freedom, the memory and dreaming, of time at the drawing board.
– Bernard Caleo
Lola in the Mirror by Trent Dalton, and many other coming-of-age novels
This year I’ve read some previously published Australian coming of age books. These included Jasper Jones, Honeybee and Boy Swallows Universe. I thought Lola in the Mirror couldn’t possibly be as good as Boy Swallows Universe, but it is. Dalton has amazing empathy for his characters, and the level of observation of each character really conveys their ‘place in the world’. I really enjoy the Australian landscape as a backdrop, so my next authors to read include Mark Brandi and Jane Harper.
– Hannah Cunnington
I Went to See My Father by Kyung-Sook Shin (trans. Anton Hur)
I Went to See My Father by Kyung-Sook Shin (translated from Korean by Anton Hur) is by far my favourite read of the year. A stunningly well-researched depiction of familial love and familial guilt, this story felt so incredibly real and the father-daughter relationship in it brought me to tears. If you loved Pachinko you will love this.
– Tracy Hwang
Western Lane by Chetna Maroo
The Booker Prize shortlist is just brilliant this year, but my favourite is Western Lane by Chetna Maroo. It’s a short novel about an eleven year old Indian girl whose mother has just died. Gopi isn’t sure how to grieve, and at her aunt’s suggestion that the sisters will ‘run wild’ without a mother, Gopi’s father takes all three sisters to ‘Western Lane’, a sports centre just outside London to train long hours on the squash courts. Gopi is the stand out player, and the sport becomes the stand in for many things including the sisters’ grief. It’s a divine coming of age novel, and a testament to sisterhood.
– Annie Condon
The Vitals by Tracy Sorensen
The Vitals by Tracy Sorensen surprised and moved me like no other this year – a truly unique, funny and deeply personal way of sharing her cancer journey – the relationship with my own body has changed because of this work; her organs were the ensemble of characters and just as she named them all, I feel like naming mine!! Whilst I recognise this may not be for everyone; I also have to say this is why I read, why I love holding a book in my hands, until the wee late hours, and cannot put it down... for the gem that you will remember forever.
– Carolyn Watson
Chrysalis by Anna Metcalfe
I reckon Chrysalis by Anna Metcalfe has been really underrated! I generally trust Granta and they did not disappoint with this debut! Perfect for anyone who is lamenting on the rampant narcissism of our influencer-age as well as those who are feeling distant from the people around them.
– Melanie Basta
Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck
I made an early declaration this year that Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos would be the best novel I’d read in 2023, and as the year now comes to a close, that declaration still stands. For me, no other book has touched it – I love its emotional and psychological complexity, and the way it recreates the last days of life in a divided Germany so vividly and sensually. I think about it all the time.
– Joanna Di Mattia