I often read like I’m prospecting for an essential fact or figure. Novels resist this approach in a way that non-fiction doesn’t. As such, my three best Australian novels of 2023 are grounded in place and relationships. In Paradise Estate by Max Easton, Helen, in her late thirties, returns to sharehousing in Sydney after a breakup and the death of her brother. The house is a dilapidated ruin. One housemate, Sunny, is feverishly reproducing music scene marginalia to preserve what they know will otherwise be lost. For Helen, ‘all she wanted from 2023 was to go to bed each night with a life worth waking up to’. Paradise Estate is an exception to the aesthetic rule that one must never write about sharehouses or a sub-historicised music scene. It’s grief, loud noises and mould.

Ronnie Scott’s Shirley is another novel made by its time and place, set in a distinctly pre-lockdown, bushfire era Naarm/Melbourne when people were seeking particulate filter masks for poor air quality. The unnamed emails-job-having protagonist is making a quiet and comfortable life for herself alone in her inner-city flat, yet this is complicated by the proximity of her defenceless ex-boyfriend and celebrity chef downstairs neighbour. Scott does a thrilling job depicting power dynamics amid mid-conversation changes, particularly between the protagonist and her imperious neighbour, in tiny instances like getting one’s mac and cheese clocked as vegan, because the chef knows all the new vegan products, naturally. There is something cool and coiled about the book because of this.