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, we'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.
You can also find recommendations for the 'One-word title' prompt on our blog here!
Prompt: An animal on the cover
The Burrow
Melanie Cheng
In her unforgettable new novel, Victorian Premier's Literary Award-winner Melanie Cheng has created this year's literary masterpiece.
Amy, Jin and Lucie are leading isolated lives in their partially renovated, inner city home. They are not happy, but they are also terrified of change. When they buy a pet rabbit for Lucie, and then Amy's mother, Pauline, comes to stay, the family is forced to confront long-buried secrets. Will opening their hearts to the rabbit help them to heal, or only invite further tragedy?
The Burrow tells an unforgettable story about grief and hope. With her characteristic compassion and eye for detail, Melanie Cheng reveals the lives of others – even of a small rabbit.
Horse
Geraldine Brooks
Kentucky, 1850. An enslaved groom named Jarret and a bay foal forge a bond of understanding that will carry the horse to record-setting victories across the South, even as the nation reels towards war. An itinerant young artist who makes his name from paintings of the horse takes up arms for the Union and reconnects with the stallion and his groom on a perilous night far from the glamour of any racetrack.
New York City, 1954. Martha Jackson, a gallery owner celebrated for taking risks on edgy contemporary painters, becomes obsessed with a nineteenth-century equestrian oil painting of mysterious provenance.
Washington, DC, 2019. Jess, a Smithsonian scientist from Australia, and Theo, a Nigerian-American art historian, find themselves unexpectedly connected through their shared interest in the horse – one studying the stallion's bones for clues to his power and endurance, the other uncovering the lost history of the unsung Black horsemen who were critical to his racing success.
The Sunbird
Sara Haddad
Nabila Yasmeen is in her eighties. She lives alone with over a hundred plants that she keeps in pots because she can’t bear to put them in the ground.
In June of 1948, as a six-year-old girl, she was expelled with her family from their village in Palestine. Now she carries the weight of that expulsion with her, and her past and present are one.
Told in two timeframes, The Sunbird is a modern parable that tells the story of millions who just want to go home.
The Blanket Cats
Kiyoshi Shigematsu, translated by Jesse Kirkwood
Is three days with a cat enough to change your life?
The troubled and anxious of Tokyo are desperate to find out. They all have their problems – and they all want to believe that a feline companion from a unique pet shop can help them find a solution. But there are rules: they must be returned after three days, and they must always sleep in their own familiar blankets.
In The Blanket Cats, we meet seven such customers, including a couple struggling with infertility, a middle-aged woman on the run from the police, and two families in very different circumstances simply seeking joy. But like all their kind, the blanket cats are mysterious creatures with their own unknowable agendas, who delight in confounding expectations. And perhaps what their hosts are looking for isn't what they really need.
Three days may not be enough to change your life. But it might be enough to change how you see it.
Love Unleashed
Melanie Saward
When Bigambul woman Brynn Wallace leaves her Brisbane home to pursue her big dreams in the Big Apple, she imagines herself landing a fabulous career at a New York City publishing house and acquiring a collection of Louboutin shoes, not working in a doggy daycare with a boss from hell and a wardrobe from her nightmares.
Yet good things are always possible in New York, especially when you believe in them hard enough. Bec soon finds herself making meaningful friendships, and engaging in some flirty flings, including with the gorgeous Sienna, also known as dancer Scarlett Belle. But when she stumbles on a handsome, single dog-dad and a commissioning editor for a big publisher, Brynn decides if she can convince him she's more than just a dog-sitter, all her NYC dreams will come true ...
The Jaguar
Sarah Holland-Batt
With electrifying boldness, Sarah Holland-Batt confronts what it means to be mortal in an astonishing and deeply humane portrait of a father’s Parkinson’s Disease, and a daughter forged by grief.
Opening and closing with startling elegies set in the charged moments before and after a death, and fearlessly probing the body’s animal endurance, appetites and metamorphoses, The Jaguar is marked by Holland-Batt’s lyric intensity and linguistic mastery, along with a stark new clarity of voice.
Here, Holland-Batt is at her most exacting and uncompromising: these ferociously intelligent, insistent poems refuse to look away, and challenge us to view ruthless witness as a form of love. The Jaguar is an indelible collection by a poet at the height of her powers.
The Death of Dora Black: A Petticoat Police Mystery
Lainie Anderson
Summer, Adelaide, 1917. The impeccably dressed Miss Kate Cocks might look more like a schoolmistress than a policewoman, but don't let that fool you. She's a household name, wrangling wayward husbands into repentance, seeing through deceptive clairvoyants, and rescuing young women (whether they like it or not) with the help of a five-foot cane and her sassy junior constable, Ethel Bromley.
When shop assistant Dora Black is found dead on a city beach, Miss Cocks and Ethel are ordered to stay out of the investigation and leave it to the men. But when Dora's workmate goes missing soon after, the women suspect something sinister, and determine to take matters into their own hands. After all, who knows Adelaide better than the indomitable Miss Cocks?
