One of my favorite Read Harder Challenge tasks this year is #21: Read a book that went under the radar in 2023. Between the access I now have to early review copies of books and co-hosting the All the Books podcast, it’s easy for me to become fixated on new releases. The truth is, there are hundreds of thousands of books published every year, and most of them go under the radar. It’s worth taking the time to turn away from the buzzy books of the moment and pick up a recent release that didn’t get the marketing budget to break out.
Of course, “under the radar” is a nebulous term. It can be hard to gauge the popularity of a title, especially in an era of social media bubbles. The book all your friends are talking about might only be popular in your echo chamber, and the biggest bestselling books are often titles getting very little attention from bookish social media. (Think: business books and the latest John Grisham mystery.)
That’s why I use the inexact but useful tool of total Goodreads ratings. The books I’m recommending here are all 2023 releases that currently have under 5,000 ratings. For comparison, Happy Place by Emily Henry has over a million ratings, and The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese has 200,000 ratings. Feel free to use your own standard for an under-the-radar 2023 release, but make sure you’re not accidentally selecting a big bestseller.
Now, here are my recommendations for task #21! Six are my favourite under the radar 2023 releases, and the last two are ones that are on my TBR.
Tauhou by Kōtuku Titihuia Nuttall
I love this novel that makes literal the author’s experience of being of Māori and W̱SÁNEĆ descent: it imagines Vancouver Island and Aotearoa, New Zealand, as side-by-side islands, with the kind of cultural exchange you’d expect from that proximity. It’s told in a series of vignettes with repeating characters. It also has several queer characters. My favourite vignette was of an Indigenous woman trying to introduce her white girlfriend to her aunty in the graveyard. This is a beautifully written book published in 2023 that deserves far more attention.
What Stalks Among Us by Sarah Hollowell
As I put together my October TBR, I started reminiscing about this book and how much I enjoyed reading it last October. It’s about two queer teens who get lost in a corn maze and then stumble on their own bodies and have to figure out what’s happening. This delivers exactly on that premise: they’re in the maze within the first few pages, and they find their bodies in the first chapter. I especially loved Sadie as a narrator: her anxious, ADHD mind was extremely relatable. Pick up this 2023 release for your 2024 Halloween TBR!
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