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I can overstate how much reading means to me.
It makes commutes feel fleeting and full of characters and events and excitement it would otherwise meaningfully lack. It fills my stressy moments with such a profound sense of escapist release. And it dials down my anxiety and sense of over-bubbling disquiet about the world and makes it all feel calm and serene and comfortingly peaecful.
It fills my imagination with so much life and vivacity, sends my spirit soaring when it feels flat as a pancake, and it makes so many dull and awful moments feel full of possibility and life.
And I get to spend time with a bunch of people I’d never meet; doesn’t matter that they are technically fictional – they feel vibrantly, leap-off-the-page real to me and I feel better for knowing even if it’s just for a day or two.
Books make the world better, they make my life richer and they have made 2025, like all the years before it, better for their presence. Here are my 25 favourites among many …
Mrs Quinn’s Rise to Fame by Olivia Ford
This book was read at Kalimna, Yeranda cottages, near Dungog in early January 2025.
Mrs Quinn’s Rise to Fame is one of those novels that does feel like all the warmth and love of the world poured into a bountifully uplifting story, and it will do your heart a power of good, but it’s also emotionally honest and truthful too, and it’s this powerful combination of real, lived human experience and the joy that comes from connection and selfless love that makes it a novel you must not just read but take to your heart, not just while it’s being read but well beyond.
The Bogan Book Club by John Larkin
This book was read at Kalimna, Yeranda cottages, near Dungog in early January 2025.
The Bogan Book Club is a funny and ruminatively thoughtful delight that boldly goes to all kinds of interesting, life-changing places that will draw you in as you get to know a bunch of people who need each other as family more than they can possibly know at the start, and which will remind in the best possible way to avoid assumptions, to dump expectations and to embrace anything and everything that comes your way because who knows to what good and wonderful places they may lead?
A Short Walk Through a Wide World by Douglas Westerbeke
This book was read at Kalimna, Yeranda cottages, near Dungog in early January 2025.
Very much summoning the feel of books like The Thousand Doors of January by Alex E. Harrow and The Midnight Library by Matt Haig, A Short Walk Through a Wide World is a wholly rewarding read, one that offers up a truly original and imaginative story that for all its breathtaking magicality and rich variety is more than slightly tinged with a great deal of melancholy and loss in amongst treasured moments, for Aubry (and yes, for us as readers for you come to love this remarkable woman) as it takes around the world but also into the very heart of Aubry’s heart which appreciates her unusual life but which also wishes, more than once, that it had been a life a little more ordinary and more in step with those of the people around her.
Does it end happily? Of course, this reviewer can’t even begin to tell you that, but suffice to say, as it weaves its tale, A Short Walk Through a Wide World reminds you to treasure life and the world, to be glad of all the experiences you have, but to always, ALWAYS, treasure who experience life with and to remember that though the world js big and amazing and wonderful, that it is only, ultimately, as good as the people in it.
Emily Wilde’s Compendium of Lost Tales by Heather Fawcett
(courtesy Hachette Australia)
The creation and sustaining of these fantasy realms aside, what beats at the heart of Emily Wilde’s Compendium of Lost Tales, and indeed the whole wonderfully readable series, is the power that comes from the marriage of the mortal and the immortal, of the leavening that Wendell experiences as his worst faerie tendencies are ameliorated by Emily’s humanity, and how Emily, in turn, becomes something far more than she was as she encounters a world that tries to eat her alive, almost literally at times, and rises to the considerable challenges she faces.
Emily Wilde’s Compendium of Lost Tales is full of whimsy and humour, friendship and love, darkness and despair but most of all, a deliciously delightful sense of how much magic lies out there and that when its united with our humanity it becomes something no one and nothing can defeat, changes everyone and everything in ways that ensures nothing will be the same ever again.
Time Was by Ian McDonald
(courtesy Macmillan Publishers)
For a small book, Time Was packs a big punch.
It will leave you consumed happily by the beauty of love, beguiled by a mystery that does get solved and in incredibly compelling ways and saddened and comforted all at once by how love can bring us together, tear us apart and yet still feel like the greatest thing on earth even when it doesn’t play out as you expect.
Time Was is a joyously alive and clever book, full of emotion, humanity, hope and despair, all of it told with an elegance that will have you gasping at how clever one writer can be and how they can fit so much of what it means to be alive in such a small package, on which will have a large and everlasting impact on you if you let it.
Wild Massive by Scotto Moore
(courtesy Pan Macmillan Australia)
If you want your mind blown and your capacity for imagination set aflame in luminously acrobatic ways, then read Wild Massive; you may come for the dazzlingly out-there premise and the thrilling start but you will stay for the humanity, the magic, the groundedness and the all-embracing sense of gigantic fun, and you will finish the story knowing a whole lot more about what makes any being tick and why it is we will do anything to live the lives that matter to us and to be the people we were created to be.
By Her Hand by Marion Taffe
(courtesy Harper Collins Publishers Australia)
It’s this fight for agency at a time when that is not an option open to many, let alone many women, that powers By Her Hand, a remarkable book which is historically accurate to an impressive degree but which also wonders to compelling effect what might happen when someone defied the edicts of the day amd fought for their agency?
It’s a masterful and highly affecting work with a wholly rich and fully-rounded protagonist at its richly beating heart that is able to go epically big and emotionally intimate all at once, imbuing By Her Hand with a an expansive tableau that is also charmingly small, intensely meaningful and so involving that you will find it hard to pull away from the story and be wholly sad when it comes to a profoundly satisfying end.
Friends of Dorothy by Sandi Toksvig
(courtesy Hachette Australia)
Friends of Dorothy is all the joys and happiness and warm hugs in the world, and even though it acknowledges how cold the winds may blow and how dark things may get at times, it never once loses its faith in the power of found, or as Toksvig rather winningly puts it, “logical” family, and how the connectedness it brings can change things powerfully, truly and in ways that makes everything good in ways we never could have imagined.
Great Big Beautiful Life by Emily Henry
(courtesy Penguin Books Australia)
Great Big Beautiful Life is a turning of the page, author-wise, for Henry who steps it up and then some, and while the romcom aspect for which she has become known and loved is still very much in evidence, it almost plays second fiddle, in the best possible way, to a story which is mesmerisingly intriguing and which seizes the heart in some pretty powerful ways, making the novel likely the best of Henry’s already impressive career.
The Stardust Grail by Yume Kitasei
(courtesy Harper Collins Publishers Australia)
You finish this all-too-short but brilliantly expressed novel with a giddy rush of adventures lived and escapist imaginative storytelling given all the zest and vibrant buoyancy in the world, but also all too aware that perspectives matter, and that, while it’s all too easy to retreat into echo chambers of your own dogmatically orthodox choosing and act accordingly, as we’re alarmingly seeing in the world today, that we need look and feel wider if we are to land where The Stardust Grail does, not necessarily delivering what every character wants but what the galaxy as a complex whole needs and leaving everyone better off even if they don’t quite see it that way.
The Phoenix Ballroom by Ruth Hogan
(courtesy Allen & Unwin Book Publishers)
It is a great big hug for the soul, no doubt, but The Phoenix Ballroom is far from just being a warm and fluffy moments that passes before you know it.
Yes, you get a much-need shot of enthusiastic adrenaline, an emboldening to seize the day and make the most of every newly-realised moment, and it’s a gloriously enlivening and soul warming as you’d hope it might be, but The Phoenix Ballroom is far more than that, wonderful though that is; it is also a reminder that past mistakes and profound regrets don’t have to be the end of your story, and that second chances, real, muscular actual second chances are not only possible but necessary and that when we get them, like Venetia does, we must do the most we can with them and see where life, in its all wondrous possibilities, takes us.
The Lost Story by Meg Shaffer
(courtesy Hachette Australia)
Fantastically, wondrously, excitingly and movingly alive and bursting with so much vibrant imaginative heartfelt truth, The Lost Story is a truly special book that, while it acknowledges the horrific darknesses of life and the way in which it can twist itself and us into some truly damaged shapes, also offers the chance not simply of escape but of healing and of restoration and the possibility that what has been imagined and take magical form might also have a power in the real world, the one that has always mistreated but might be able to be changer for the better, too.
The Show Woman by Emma Cowing
(courtesy Hachette Australia)
Charming and wondrous, dark and emotionally intense, The Show Woman is that rare debut that comes out into the world and into the hands of lucky readers fully and flawlessly formed, a joyful paean to found family and the rich and enlivening possibility of hopes and dreams that, while they might cost you damn near everything and suck so much from your beleaguered hearts and souls, provide the rocket fuel for rich and rewarding lives that can happen even in the face of a host of enemies, within and without, arrayed against them.
Salvage by Jennifer Mills
(courtesy Pan Macmillan Australia)
Full of loss and heartbreak and a sense that the world is slipping through the plucky fingers of those hanging onto a planet actively trying to get rid of them, Salvage is a rare and precious gem of a novel that ask hard questions and reveals dark and troubling things while never once taking its eyes on how beautiful connection and found family can be, even in the worst of circumstances, and that anonymity, while perhaps necessary in some ways for survival, does not serve anyone well, least of all Jude, if we want to truly live, thrive and be known.
Rise and Shine by Kimberley Allsopp
(courtesy Harper Collins Publishers Australia)
For a novel that embraces the death of love as much how alive and buoyantly good it can be, Rise and Shine is full of real hope and optimism.
Even in its darkest places, it stays warmly and refreshingly honest at all times, acknowledging all the assumption we make and the expectations we can carry, and how we use them to shape our way of looking at the world, especially our personal slice of it, but also asking whether what we assume follows the death of love is all there is and that maybe, jusy maybe, there is another way where a love story night be able to begin all over again …
Snowed in for Christmas by Claire Sandy
(courtesy Pan Macmillan)
Snowed in for Christmas may sit firmly in the festive rom-com camp, and it may offer falling snow and garrulously festive meals and Midnight Mass awash in carols and happiness, but it also feel emotionally substantial and authentically heartfelt, full of characters who matter, a story that rarely, if ever, misses a beat and an ending that feels hopeful and magical without feeling like it’s traded away its truth for a happy ending.
Clarke by Holly Throsby
(courtesy Allen & Unwin Book Publishers)
Picking up Clarke after its spent three years on a massively impenetrable TBR (to be read) pile is one of the best things this reviewer has ever done as he came to appreciate how devastatingly sad and endlessly unknowable life can be but also how rich and nourishing it can be if we let ourselves be known and know right back, all through one brave grieving woman, a young boy who wants to be loved after all kinds of pain and a man trying to figure where next in a world where the answer lies with those you know and the ways they point you forward to healing and new life if you let them.
June in the Garden by Eleanor Wilde
(courtesy Text Publishing)
Learning to appreciate those differences is perhaps one of the greatest gifts of June in the Garden which celebrates a young woman of passion, deep gardening knowledge and bravery who takes a chance on finding her tribe and who is embraced, after a long and winding journey, by the people she set out to find but in a way that defies both their expectations in the very best and most mutually rewarding of ways.
The Wolf Who Cried Boy by Mark Mupotsa-Russell
(courtesy Affirm Press)
Reading this singularly brilliant, and wondrously moving book which takes a dark subject and sheds some thoughtful light on it, is a brilliant experience – yes, it shakes you to the core, as it does Henry, but it also helps you to understand the power of love (not the greeting card frippery but the the real muscular stuff that stares down hellish terror without flinching) and how powerful family and connection can be, especially when it is harnessed to take down, or attempts to take down, an evil which must be confronted if anyone is ever going to be truly free again.
The Shattering Peace by John Scalzi
(courtesy Pan Macmillan Australia)
Thankfully Scalzi does the sensible thing and ends the novel exactly where he must, leaving The Shattering Peace a brilliant return to a much-loved universe, proof that you can take people, or at least someone like this reviewer, and not simply get them up to speed in elegantly record time with the setting but tell a story that has heart, heart, big ideas and a sense that, with the right person calling the shots, the very worst of possibilities can become the very best of outcomes and maybe everyone will live sort of happily ever after, after all.
The Maskeys by Stuart Everly-Wilson
(courtesy Transit Lounge Publishing)
Written with a penetrating gaze and a sharp gift for observation coupled with a rich understanding of what it means to be human, The Maskeys is deeply compassionate, not condoning the actions of many its characters but understanding why they do what they do, and in so doing telling a story that resonates with a palpable sense of humanity while communicating how easy it is to lose your way in the mud even if you are trying to navigate by and aim for the stars.
Spiderlight by Adrian Tchaikovsky
(courtesy Pan Macmillan Australia)
Spiderlight is an absolute delight – full of heartfelt humanity, lots of hilarity, serious questing and a general sense that while you might you know how the world operates and thus how certain things might play out, that you know nothing and while confronting at first, that might be not such a bad thing after all, once the narrative dust settles, of course.
Tiny Uncertain Miracles by Michelle Johnston
(courtesy Harper Collins Publishers Australia)
Life is really big, flashy or showy and it can be hard and cruel and sad, but as Johnston’s sublimely wonderful novel, Tiny Uncertain Miracles, shows, it can be wholly wonderful and restorative too, and while it may or may not be miraculous, it is always filled with possibility, hope and love and all it takes is being the time and space to see that once again if you have lost all sight of what’s next.
Frankie by J. M. Gutsch and Maxim Leo
(courtesy Penguin Books Australia)
Frankie however is no easy tale of grief excised by an unconventional approach and while the book ends with progress towards healing and a new life genuinely being made, the story isn’t over by that point although it is heading in the right direction and while we are left with hope but not absolute certainty, we are assured that there is a way out of grief, even if it isn’t easy, and it may, to everyone’s surprise, involve a cat who asks the questions that need to be asked and who is there for someone, as much as they are there for him, when it matters the most.
Grace & Henry’s Holiday Movie Marathon by Matthew Norman
(courtesy Amazon)
Grace & Henry’s Holiday Movie Marathon, which is a funny, heartwarming, sweet and raw gem of a novel that will move your heart and make you smile even as tears sometimes roll down your cheek, argues Christmas can do all that more in ways that will surprise, delight and remake a broken world into something worth living in again.
BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE …
It’s fun to pick my top 25 but I am but one man so here’s someone else’s perspective.