These best-selling books are currently celebrating 10 years since their local publication!

A decade on, it’s incredible to see how these works have endured and heartening to know how many of these authors have continued to produce fantastic literature. How many of the below blockbuster books have you read?

Blood by Tony Birch

Jesse has sworn to protect his sister, Rachel, no matter what. It’s a promise that cannot be broken. A promise made in blood. But, when it comes down to life or death, how can he find the courage to keep it? Set on the back roads of Australia, Blood is Birch’s debut novel about a boy’s odyssey through a broken-down adult world.

Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel

Bring Up the Bodies unlocks the darkly glittering court of Henry VIII, where Thomas Cromwell is now chief minister. With Henry captivated by plain Jane Seymour and rumours of Anne Boleyn’s faithlessness whispered by all, Cromwell knows what he must do to secure his position. But the bloody theatre of the queen’s final days will leave no one unscathed. Bring Up the Bodies won the coveted Booker Prize for the year of its publication.

NW by Zadie Smith

Zadie Smith’s brilliant tragi-comic NW follows four Londoners - Leah, Natalie, Felix and Nathan - after they’ve left their childhood council estate, grown up and moved on to different lives. From private houses to public parks, at work and at play, their city is brutal, beautiful and complicated. Yet after a chance encounter they each find that the choices they’ve made, the people they once were and are now, can suddenly, rapidly unravel.

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson

In 1985 Jeanette Winterson’s first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, was published. It was Jeanette’s version of the story of a terraced house in Accrington, an adopted child, and the thwarted giantess Mrs Winterson. It was a cover story, a painful past written over and repainted. This memoir is that story’s silent twin. It is full of hurt and humour and a fierce love of life. It is about the pursuit of happiness, about lessons in love, the search for a mother and a journey into madness and out again. It is generous, honest and true.

Like a House on Fire by Cate Kennedy

In ‘Laminex and Mirrors’, a young woman working as a cleaner in a hospital helps an elderly patient defy doctor’s orders. In ‘Cross Country’, a jilted lover manages to misinterpret her ex’s new life. And in ‘Ashes’, a son accompanies his mother on a journey to scatter his father’s remains, while lifelong resentments simmer in the background. Cate Kennedy’s poignant short stories find the beauty and tragedy in illness and mortality, life and love. She takes ordinary lives and dissects their ironies and injustices and pleasures with her humane eye and wry sense of humour.

Am I Black Enough For You? by Anita Heiss

In this deeply personal memoir, told in her distinctive, wry style, Anita Heiss gives a first-hand account of her experiences as a woman with an Aboriginal mother and Austrian father, and explains the development of her activist consciousness. Read her story and ask: what does it take for someone to be black enough for you? Am I Black Enough For You? was the winner of the 2012 Vic Premier’s Award for Indigenous Writing.

Are You My Mother? by Alison Bechdel

Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home was a pop culture and literary phenomenon. This is her second tale of filial sleuthery, this time about her mother: voracious reader, music lover, passionate amateur actor. Also a woman, unhappily married to a closeted gay man, whose artistic aspirations simmered under the surface of Bechdel’s childhood … and who stopped touching or kissing her daughter good night, forever, when she was seven.

Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo

Katherine Boo is a prize-winning journalist who spent three years visiting Annawadi, a Mumbai slum, observing the lives of the people who lived there and interviewing them with the help of translators. The resulting book is remarkable for its depth and breadth; it succeeds not only in delving into the inner lives of her subjects in a meaningful and honest way, but also gives equal weight to the stories of each person she has chosen to write about. Behind the Beautiful Forevers won the Pulitzer Prize in the year of its publication.

Mateship With Birds by Carrie Tiffany

A novel about young lust and mature love. It is a hymn to the rhythm of country life - to vicious birds, virginal cows, adored dogs and ill-used sheep. On one small farm in a vast, ancient landscape, a collection of misfits question the nature of what a family can be. Mateship With Birds was the winner of the very first Stella Prize.

Questions of Travel by Michelle de Kretser

A mesmerising literary novel, Questions of Travel charts two very different lives. Laura travels the world before returning to Sydney, where she works for a publisher of travel guides. Ravi dreams of being a tourist guide until he is driven from Sri Lanka by devastating events. Around these two superbly drawn characters, a double narrative assembles an enthralling array of people, places and stories. Questions of Travel won the 2013 Miles Franklin Literary as well as the 2013 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction.

The Light Between Oceans by M.L. Steadman

It’s 1926. Tom Sherbourne is a young lighthouse keeper on a remote island off Western Australia. The only inhabitants of Janus Rock, he and his wife Isabel live a quiet life, cocooned from the rest of the world. Then one April morning a boat washes ashore carrying a dead man and a crying infant - and the path of the couple’s lives hits an unthinkable crossroads. Only years later do they discover the devastating consequences of the decision they made that day. The Light Between Oceans was the winner of the ABIA Book of the Year in the year of its publication.

Other notable (and best selling!) works from 2012 include Cheryl Strayed’s memoir Wild, Charlotte Wood’s Animal People, Anna Funder’s historical novel All That I Am.