Is your new year's resolution to read more? Or do you want to push yourself to broaden your reading and try some new genres and authors? Take on the challenge and read 25 books in 2025!
Our Reading(s) challenge bingo card has 25 different prompts to inspire your reading this year. And to help you further, I'll be posting blogs full of books relating to some of the prompts! Download the bingo card here or pick up a printed copy in our shops.
Prompt: One Word Title
My recommendation:
Scythe
Neal Shusterman
A dark, gripping and witty thriller in which the only thing humanity has control over is death.
In a world where disease, war and crime have been eliminated, the only way to die is to be randomly killed – or 'gleaned' – by professional scythes. Citra and Rowan are teenagers who have been selected to be scythes’ apprentices, and despite wanting nothing to do with the vocation, they must learn the art of killing and understand the necessity of what they do.
Only one of them will be chosen as a scythe’s apprentice and as Citra and Rowan come up against a terrifyingly corrupt Scythedom, it becomes clear that the winning apprentice’s first task will be to glean the loser.
Fiction:
Rapture
Emily Maguire
The motherless child of an English priest living in ninth-century Mainz, Agnes is a wild and brilliant girl with a deep, visceral love of God. At eighteen, to avoid a future as a wife or nun, Agnes enlists the help of a lovesick Benedictine monk to disguise herself as a man and devote her life to the study she is denied as a woman.
So begins the life of John the Englishman: a matchless scholar and scribe of the revered Fulda monastery, then a charismatic heretic in an Athens commune and, by her middle years, a celebrated teacher in Rome. There, Agnes (as John) dazzles the Church hierarchy with her knowledge and wisdom and finds herself at the heart of political intrigue in a city where gossip is a powerful – and deadly – currency.
And when the only person who knows her identity arrives in Rome, she will risk everything to once again feel what it is to be known – and loved.
Bestseller:
Intermezzo
Sally Rooney
Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common.
Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties – successful, competent and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father's death, he's medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women – his enduring first love Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke.
Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined.
For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude – a period of desire, despair and possibility – a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.
Crime:
Gunnawah
Ronni Salt
It's 1974 in the Riverina. The weather is hot. But the body in the Murray River is stone cold ...
When nineteen-year-old farmgirl Adelaide Hoffman applies for a cadetship at the Gunnawah Gazette, she sees it as her ticket out of a life too small for her. The paper's owner, Valdene Bullark, seeing something of the girl she once was in young Adelaide, puts her straight to work.
What starts as a routine assignment covering an irrigation project soon puts Adelaide on the trail of a much bigger story. Water is money in farming communities, and when Adelaide starts asking questions, it's like she's poked a bull ant's nest. Someone will do whatever it takes to stop Adelaide and Val finding out how far the river of corruption and crime runs.
Shady deals. Vested interests. A labyrinth of lies. It seems everyone in Gunnawah has a secret to keep. And too many are already dead quiet.
Set deep in the heart of rural Australia during the era of Gough Whitlam, pub brawls and flared jeans, Gunnawah is a compulsive crime thriller of corruption, guns and drugs from one of Australian Noir's most arresting new voices.
Nonfiction:
Taboo
Hannah Ferguson
This part memoir, part feminist manifesto meets women where they are and as they are.
A vulnerable exploration of modern womanhood that weaves deeply personal stories with opinions and advice on sex, friendship, family, career and beyond.
Hannah exposes and celebrates the messy, honest and insular parts of ourselves in a book designed to feel like a late-night conversation with your best friend – one that will make you laugh, cry and that you'll never want to end.
Prize winner:
Praiseworthy
Alexis Wright
Praiseworthy is an epic set in the north of Australia, told with the richness of language and scale of imagery for which Alexis Wright has become renowned.
In a small town dominated by a haze cloud, which heralds both an ecological catastrophe and a gathering of the ancestors, a crazed visionary seeks out donkeys as the solution to the global climate crisis and the economic dependency of the Aboriginal people. His wife seeks solace from his madness in following the dance of butterflies and scouring the internet to find out how she can seek repatriation for her Aboriginal/Chinese family to China. One of their sons, called Aboriginal Sovereignty, is determined to commit suicide. The other, Tommyhawk, wishes his brother dead so that he can pursue his dream of becoming white and powerful. This is a novel which pushes allegory and language to its limits, a cry of outrage against oppression and disadvantage, and a fable for the end of days.
A stunning cover:
Darkly
Marisha Pessl
A seemingly ordinary high school student. A mysterious summer internship. And a legendary games designer, now dead.
When an ad for an internship with the Louisiana Veda Foundation appears, Arcadia 'Dia' Gannon rushes to apply. Veda's game-making empire, Darkly, was renowned for its ingenious and terrifying games back in the day and Dia is as obsessed with them as anyone.
The remaining games are priced like highly sought-after works of art, with the rarest and most notorious commanding tens of millions of dollars at auction. Now, Dia is thrust into the enigmatic heart of the operation. But who are these other interns? Why do they all seem to have something to hide? And why was she really chosen? It soon becomes clear that this summer will be the most twisted Darkly game of all.
Poetry:
Dropbear
Evelyn Araluen
I told you this was a thirst so great it could carve rivers.
This fierce debut from award-winning writer Evelyn Araluen confronts the tropes and iconography of an unreconciled nation with biting satire and lyrical fury.
Dropbear interrogates the complexities of colonial and personal history with an alternately playful, tender and mournful intertextual voice, deftly navigating the responsibilities that gather from sovereign country, the spectres of memory and the debris of settler-coloniality. This innovative mix of poetry and essay offers an eloquent witness to the entangled present, an uncompromising provocation of history, and an embattled but redemptive hope for a decolonial future.
