2023 has been an astonishingly good year for Aotearoa fiction. Books like Pet Catherine Chidgey’s taut atmospheric thriller, Lioness Emily Perkins’s beguiling tale of women unravelling and Everything is Beautiful and Everything Hurts Josie Shapiro’s triumphant debut have made every local best books of 2023 list from The Listener to The Spinoff. The phenomenon that is Birnam Wood has made all the international ones too (New Yorker, check, The Guardian, check, Time, check). Kete reviewers covered 32 long fiction works this year (short stories and poetry will be covered in separate best of the year recaps). Here are those that made the biggest impression.

Bestsellers … constants on the Aotearoa Bestsellers List

Birnam Wood (of course) the ‘wrenchingly effective, darkly funny and flawlessly crafted single-sitting thriller.’ By 2013 Booker Prize winner Eleanor Catton.

The Bone Tree, Airana Ngarewa’s coming of age novel – the ‘exquisitely written’ story of brothers Kauri and Black as they navigate the world and whanau in the wake of their parents’ deaths.

Everything is Beautiful and Everything Hurts, Josie Shapiro’s moving, insightful ‘triumph’ of a debut – a novel about long distance running and the treatment of women in sport.

Pet by Catherine Chidgey. As Dionne Christian writes, ‘Catherine Chidgey has been causing confusion’. The Catholic School set thriller was released hot on the heels of Chidgey’s win for her 2022 novel The Axeman’s Carnival at the Ockhams this year – both books have been Aotearoa Bestsellers without reprieve ever since.

Best for suspense, mystery and plot twists

Dice by Claire Bayliss. A multiple perspective courtroom drama that takes readers into the jury room for deliberations in a teenage sex offence trial. Fiction that may bring to mind the Roast Busters case. It’s a book, writes Grey Fleming, with an ‘icy power.’

Emergency Weather by Tim Jones is a Wellington-based cli-fi thriller. Reviewer Greg Fleming contrasts it with Kirsten McDougall’s 2021 success She’s a Killer noting that Jones presents ‘a much more traditional character-driven novel that takes place in near-future Wellington with the Beehive playing a vital part in the exciting final chapters.’

His Favourite Graves by Paul Cleave, according to Greg Fleming, deserves to win Cleave many more fans. ‘It’s another twisty, gory and disturbing outing … compelling to the end.’

Shadow Over Edmund Street by Suzanne Frankham is a ‘crisply written’ crime novel set in Ponsonby. The deceased has one foot in the present day fashionable suburb and another in its earlier, poorer, incarnation. Unexpected twists in the back story of the detective on the case ‘play out expertly’ writes David Gadd.

Best for a great holiday read

Backwaters by Emma Ling Sidnam. Laura, a 4th generation Chinese New Zealander, navigates the tides of trying to find herself in her twenties and begins to uncover the life stories of her parents, grandparents and great great grandfather who emigrated from China as a market gardener. ‘Warm and satisfying … a book you can safely take on holiday with you writes Renee Liang.

Last Days of Joy by Anne Tiernan. Joy’s adult children gather at her hospital bedside in the wake of her attempted suicide. Lifted by dark humour the book digs ‘into the weight of trauma and how it echoes down generations, with a pacey unravelling plot that carries the story along and lets us feel Joy’s children’s grief and eventual understanding,’ writes Erica Stretton.

One of Those Mothers. Megan Nicol Reed wrings the absurdity out of modern parental concerns. Caroline Barron writes ‘by the way, Aotearoa, it’s official: we have a new Queen of the Twist. If you enjoyed Liane Moriarty’s Big Little Lies or Christos Tsiolkas’s The Slap, this one’s for you.

Best for bending reality

Audition by Pip Adam. Part sci-fi, part social realism. Three giants are contained in the spaceship Audition, hurtling towards the event horizon. A book that explores incarceration and oppression but also, writes Ruth Spencer, ‘offers a glimpse of redemption, singing a different, beautiful alternative to that inhumanity.’

Despatches horror maestro Lee Murray’s latest offering is a World War I novella. Angelique Kasmara writes, ‘in less capable hands, adding Lovecraftian-type monsters to the grim horror of war might have turned the story into an unpalatable mess but Murray plays these disparate elements beautifully against each other.’

The Words for Her by Thomasin Sleigh is ‘one of the most inventive, provocative and layered novels released this year’ says Dionne Christian. The book questions our devotion to the selfie, asking how it might affect memory and the way we communicate and relate to each other, and what could happen in a world where a sickness means some people are disappearing from images altogether.

Best at exploring mental health and different ways of being in the world

Hannah & Huia by Charlotte Lobes. Rendered speechless and institutionalised in the aftermath of the sudden death of her baby and husband Hannah finds herself drawn to long-term resident Huia’s mysterious circumstances. Hannah & Huia ‘highlights one of the more shameful aspects of Aotearoa New Zealand’s past when young, unmarried girls and women were forced to give up babies for adoption,’ says Dionne Christian. ‘A strong story that resonates.’

Bird Life, The Chimes author Anna Smaill’s immersive third book is set in Tokyo and follows New Zealander Dinah as she grieves her dead twin and Yasuko a solo mother with powers and the ability to talk to animals. ‘In the end,’ writes Ruth Spencer, readers are ‘destabilised … unable to be sure what is delusion and what is magic.’ ‘A kind of aria on the slippery madness of grief.’

Best for shining a light on family secrets, family dynamics or dysfunction

Checkerboard Hill by Jade Kake. A death in the whānau propels Ria back to Australia for a tangi and to unravel the past. Vaughan Rapatahana writes that Ria ‘is often on the edges of the action, an outsider amongst a cultural rōpū that is itself not mainstream Australian – namely expatriate Māori and Aboriginal Australian.’ The book is, he notes is ‘an impressive debut.’

Landed by Sue McCauley. Briar’s comfortable, ordinary life is turned upside down by the unexpected death of her husband. ‘Landed explores the concerns of a mature woman who has become, to a large extent, superfluous,’ writes Jenny Purchase.

Light Keeping by Adrienne Jansen. When a terrible accident makes orphans of Robert and Jess they go to live with their grandparents in the lighthouse. But their grandparents’ way of life and home is at risk – automation and government cost-cutting mean light keeping is set to become a thing of the past. Jessie Neilson says Light Keeping is ‘extensive and detailed’ and will draw readers in.

Lioness, there’s a ‘Succession-like sensibility’ about author Emily Perkins’ Thorne family writes Josie Shapiro. ‘An ominous novel, about femininity, wealth, inequality, duplicity, pretence, seduction and family.’

The Waters by Carl Nixon. A novel in 21 stories, following the Waters family through 40 years. ‘Immersive, incisive and beautiful … a gradually unfolding tale of shifting sympathies and nuance, involving you intimately in the family’s fate,’ writes Ruth Spencer.

Best for a history hit

The Spanish Garden. Cliff Taylor’s story spans a lifetime, framed within the dawn and dusk of a single day. ‘Focusing on the Spanish Civil War, rather than WWII, and New Zealand’s part in it provides a refreshing change as well as a soul-searching counterpoint for the reader,’ writes Dan Rabarts.

The Witching Tide by Margaret Meyer. Set against the 1640 East-Anglian witch hunt The Witching Tide reveals the full horror of the time. ‘A deeply feminist novel,’ its focus is ‘steely on the women at the centre of the conflict,’ writes Erica Stretton.

Best pandemic novels

The Deck by Fiona Farrell, is a ‘resonant, multitextured story about a group of friends locked down during a pandemic who keep one another entertained by telling tales,’ writes Siobhan Harvey. ‘On one level, this is an eminently relatable read,’ on another is a ‘richly layered subtext,’ with ‘motifs from Giovanni Boccaccio’s 14th Century epic, The Decameron … a relevant, expansive read’.

Kind by Stephanie Johnson. ‘A cross between a satire and a thriller that pivots around – before, during and after – that strange silent period of the first lockdown in March 2020,’ writes Linda Herrick. ‘After a startling twist, it turns out that Johnson’s book is deeper … something much more tender – and reflective about what we have lost.’