Goodwood is a quintessential NSW country town – sandwiched between a river and a mountain, known for its timber and its fishing – the sort of town where not much happens, everyone knows everyone else’s business, and nobody much bothers with locking their doors. That is until 18-year-old Rosie White disappears without a trace, followed a week later by Bart McDonald, the town’s beloved local butcher. The town is turned on its head – gossip and speculation turn into mistrust and suspicion as secrets are revealed, and the townspeople’s lives intersect in unforeseen and unforced ways. Against all this is the coming-of-age of narrator Jean Brown, whose interest in the case mirrors that of the whole town – it upends everything she thinks she knows about the world, and is all she can think about – except for an enigmatic new girl in town.

Best known and highly regarded as as a singer–songwriter, Holly Throsby’s debut novel is lyrical without being abstruse, colloquial without being contrived. Her characters, while familiar, are nuanced and authentic, and her depiction of small-town life is bang-on in both its endearing and suffocating ways.

At multiple points while reading Goodwood I was convinced that Holly Throsby had based the titular town on the one I grew up in, which has had its own share of tragedy in recent years – the close-knit cast of characters, the power of gossip as currency, even small details like the local-humour stubby coolers everyone seems to own, all ring remarkably true. Small towns react to tragedy differently from big cities – the landscape seems changed, the all-pervasive sense of ‘local mood’ shifts noticeably.

Reminiscent of Jasper Jones or Emily Maguire’s An Isolated Incident, Goodwood approaches small-town violence through a softer lens, but the undercurrents and ramifications are no less chilling. As in Maguire’s novel, there may be answers in the end, but answers are often not enough.

Alan Vaarwerk