The novel’s twin narratives unspool around a mysterious death; a stranger arrives in the small town of Cedar Valley, sits down outside the antique store on the main street, and dies. It is the first day of summer, but the man is ‘dressed for a wartime winter social’ in an elegant vintage suit, his shoes scrupulously polished. If his death is mystifying, his life seems even more so. He possesses no wallet and no scrap of identifying detail can be found; even the labels have been removed from his clothes. Rumour and conjecture abound as the townspeople attempt to solve the disconcerting predicament of this untimely death. The local police are flummoxed and there is talk of undetectable poisons, of spies and KGB connections.

The ongoing investigation, with its fascinating twists and turns, gives Cedar Valley the heady forward momentum of a detective novel, and on its own would been enough to sustain the narrative, but Throsby has more elaborate intentions. Another, quieter mystery slowly unravels alongside the central drama of the novel. Twenty-one-year-old Benny Miller arrives in Cedar Valley on the same day that the stranger dies and embarks upon a quest of her own. The mother who abandoned her as a small child has recently died, and the bewildered young woman has come to Cedar Valley seeking clues to the mystery of her enigmatic mother’s life. The grief-stricken Benny is enfolded by the community, given housing and a job at the local hotel, presented with homemade cakes, and drawn into the town’s intricate confluences of desire and betrayal, love and pain.

It was the compelling particularity of experience and the superbly imagined fictional world that so endeared readers to Throsby’s acclaimed first novel, Goodwood (2016), which was lauded by critics as possessing a touch of Tim Winton in its DNA. Cedar Valley digs similarly into the marrow of small-town Australia, taking a familiar world and delving into it to reveal a complex and sometimes startling place. Nuanced chroniclers of the intricacies of family life, such as Anne Tyler and Kate Atkinson, are perhaps this new novel’s more fitting literary progenitors, as it skilfully limns the closed worlds of individual lives, demonstrating a powerful attunement to the intersecting fates of people pressed up close together in small communities.

There are suffocating entanglements and humorous rivalries, abiding loyalties and old wounds. A confused policeman is unable to fathom why his wife turns away from him in bed at night. The town busybody is baffled by her sudden yearning to be alone, perplexed by her desire to ‘to just sit quietly and truly consider her life: the contents of it, the feeling of it, and which bits of it mattered’. Elsewhere in town, an old woman mourns the loss of her sight and the slow dimming of her memory, and an overweight detective feels a prick of shame as he catches sight of himself in a crime-scene photograph. Throsby focuses intensely on her characters and their lives, slipping seamlessly in and out of different consciousnesses in a kind of sophisticated interior eavesdropping, describing each character’s dilemmas in words that they might have chosen themselves. She treats all of her characters with a gentle brand of empathy that is blessedly devoid of sentimentality. The accretion of detail never feels onerous or unwieldy.

Duelling narrative strands are difficult to execute, but Throsby handles the challenging choreography with enormous skill and close attention to structure and pace. The novel’s two main storylines twine together in unexpected and illuminating ways, without ever succumbing to convenient conclusions or tying themselves up into tidy parcels. The two separate threads feel complementary and – more importantly – necessary.

Holly Throsby (photograph via Allen & Unwin)

Throsby wins the reader’s confidence partly because she is so adept at creating the persuasive illusion of real life, but also because while she is unravelling a mystery, she never makes the mistake of trying to solve the equally confounding enigmas of her characters’ existences. For a novel that can be read on one level as a conventional detective story, Cedar Valley is bracingly alive to the complexities and ellipses of existence and to the novelist’s task to seize and transcribe life rather than to explicate it neatly. The unexplained death of a stranger is the conundrum around which the narrative coalesces, but Throsby understands that the greater mysteries are those that unfold quietly behind the closed doors of every small town. Her exceptional openness to the inscrutable lives and sensitivities of other people is what makes Cedar Valley feel so large and luminous, and it is also what drives the narrative forward, chapter after compulsive chapter.