The first Readings Monthly of 2025 is here! Here's our head book buyer Alison Huber's column, where she kicks off the year with a look at some of the most exciting Australian books coming this year.
You can read the March Readings Monthly online now, or pickup a copy in shops.
I can’t quite believe it but my calendar says it is 2025. It’s once again time to push through ‘blank page fever’ and write you my first missive for the year, but this time, I do feel differently inspired, and, just between you and me, the usual dread felt annually at the scale of the task ahead is thankfully evaporating as I recognise a renewed sense of purpose for the year.
The world of books and publishing has already been in the news media this year, with opinion pieces flying around regarding the fates and fortunes of Australian publishing following the acquisition of Melbourne’s own Text Publishing, one of the country’s key independents, by Penguin Random House. Text has been home to many writers synonymous with Australia’s literary field: Helen Garner, Garry Disher, and Kate Grenville among them, and has been the breeding ground for new generations of talent in recent years, writers such as Jennifer Down, Robbie Arnott, Tyson Yunkaporta, Melanie Cheng, and Nina Kenwood. They famously brought Elena Ferrante to our market and have also published international prize winners like Olga Tokarczuk and Ruth Ozeki here.
Text’s story follows a similar acquisition in 2024 of another Melbourne independent, Affirm Press, by another international big player, Simon & Schuster, and of Sydney-based Pantera Press by Melbourne’s large independent Hardie Grant. What, ask some commentators, will become of Australian writers and Australian stories if our independent sector shrinks, some publishers absorbed by entities reporting their profits offshore, where opportunities to publish become fewer and more concentrated within a global publishing ecosystem that is also consolidating? Will the local needs of the relatively small Australian market become collateral damage? These questions are not new, and are not specific to the news about Text, but have been reanimated by it in the public domain. They’re concerns that are live across all forms of Australian cultural production, and in the context of our industry, which often feeds content to local film and television, the effects of fewer cultural producers are potentially very significant. That said, the real-world changes in the opportunities for Australian writers to publish their writing are at this stage unknown: whether these recent changes actually do result in fewer Australian-authored books being published or not will unfold in the years to come. I wonder too about the impact of these changes on career pathways in publishing itself, and where students graduating from the popular publishing programs in the tertiary sector might spend their working lives in the future.
It’s very easy to write a doom and gloom narrative about this situation – indeed, it almost writes itself, or actually would write itself if you asked ChatGPT to provide you with an essay about the state of Australian publishing – but I’d like to think about it another way, to pose the question from the other direction. What is to become of Australian writers and their stories if there are no readers to read this work? If a writer writes a book and a publisher (independent or otherwise) publishes it and no one (or very few people) buys and reads it, does it (can it, should it, will it) really exist? And of course, that’s where you and I make our entrance into the story of a book’s life. Your choices for what and who you read really do make a difference. If you value Australian culture and its specificity, our vernacular, perspectives, voices, histories (and really, you must), it’s up to you, dear Reader, to make good on that commitment, and Read Local. Of course, this is not a plea to become parochial and eschew all that is not from where we are, and I’m certainly not suggesting that you stop reading international authors because we’ve got to do that too: we are and need to remain global reading citizens. It’s also not my intention to (heaven forbid!) overstate the power of consumption at this pointy late stage of capitalism. Instead, this is a very modest request to read mindfully and with purpose in 2025 and see how much local writing and publishing you can pack into your reading schedule. It’s what we all need to do to support an industry under pressure.
When you, the reader, find your way to buying an Australian-authored work, it does, at the end of it all, support the local publishing ecosystem. If we readers buy and read with this intent, it can be at a scale of support that secures local content in our market. Keep all that in mind as I tell you that in the face of the consolidation I’ve noted here, a new imprint called Pink Shorts Press with two experienced young publishing professionals at its helm is launching its first book during Adelaide Writers’ Week this month: Sea Green by Barbara Hanrahan, a rediscovered classic. I was pleased to read in the trade news as I began writing this column that they’ve acquired two new books that will come out later in the year. Go, Pink Shorts Press, go!
Coincidentally (no, really it is a coincidence!), my colleagues have devised a 2025 Reading(s) challenge for those looking to broaden their reading in the new year, a form of bingo to help you to expand your literary horizons. You can pick up a card at any of our shops (and you’ll receive a journal to record your reading journey in at the same time), or you can download it here. If you’re inspired by what I’ve said here and are up for a ‘next level’ version of this bingo challenge, I put it to you that you can Read Local in almost every one of the categories, especially if you interpret your understanding of ‘Australian’ to include one of our independent publishers (for example, need to read a book in translation to check that box? Why not find something published by Scribe, another Melbourne independent publisher with an incredible list of translated fiction). Readings (and the Readings Monthly) is here, as always, to guide you through the monthly book avalanche.
And how about that, I’ve engineered a rather clunky and inevitable segue into my usual breakneck rundown/embellished list of books to look out for in 2025, with my focus, as it always is, on the publishing of Australian writers. Ready, set, here we go!
Back to me for a second though, because like many people I go on a beach holiday each year, and try to read as much as I can without the usual life distractions, just the sounds of surf and cicadas to bend my focus. This year I smashed through six great books in six glorious days, three local and three international writers. I read our brilliant colleague Fiona Hardy’s first book for adults and our March Crime Book of the Month, Unbury the Dead. This covers several tiles on my bingo card (An Australian author, Crime or mystery, Set near where you live) and I predict will be able to tick off a few more in the not-too-distant future (A bestseller, Adapted into a show or movie, First book in a series). I’m not an habitual crime reader, so this definitely broadened that horizon, and I found that I enjoyed this book so much I had to sit with it until I found out what the heck was going on! It’s funny, pacy, gripping, and surprising.
I won’t keep narrativising my bingo card, but the rest of my beach reading did span a few other criteria. I read and admired Luke Horton’s second book, Time Together, conveniently also set during a holiday at the beach but with a rather different dynamic to my break (see my review here), as well as the winner of last year’s prize for an unpublished manuscript at the VPLAs, The Sun Was Electric Light by Rachel Morton. This one is out in April from UQP, and my proof is covered with many breathless endorsements including from Helen Garner, who one does have to listen to for book advice. This is an original and unusual book with serious emotional reach.
The international books I read include two in translation. One was the new book from the author of A Whole Life (a beautiful short book I read a long time ago and still think about a lot), Robert Seethaler. It’s called The Café with No Name and explores similar themes to that debut, namely the experience of ordinary people living through change and within history. The other was the brilliantly titled (and covered) Eurotrash by an acclaimed Swiss author, Christian Kracht, which follows a wild road trip taken around Switzerland by the narrator and his ailing wealthy mother. The third international book I read was published by Scribe in February and I urge you to seek it out: it’s a debut called Fire Exit by Morgan Talty who is an author from the Penobscot Indian Nation in Maine, USA. I just adored this book, and it gives me chills to think about it again as I write now. It’s a book about longing and belonging, family histories and people living on the edge of things, and was such a special reading discovery, I can’t wait to read his acclaimed short story collection Night of the Living Rez (which Scribe will also publish in October).
As always, I like to have a little look at what the writers whose work we have showcased with the Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction have been up to. The Readings Prizes are now in their 11th year and are one of the many ways we support emerging Australian writers in their early careers. Just last year, Eleanor Elliott Thomas was shortlisted for her debut, The Opposite of Success (Text), and, impossibly, she has a second book due out in October this year intriguingly titled, Do We Deserve This? (Text). You might recall Moreno Giovannoni’s lovely novel of migrant experience shortlisted in 2018’s round, The Fireflies of Autumn (Black Inc.); he’s back in July with his second book, The Immigrants. I was a big fan of Rhett Davis’s Hovering (Hachette, 2022), and very much look forward to reading his second book (also Hachette, August) entitled Arborescence (this is a wonderful word that I like very much, which refers to something whose structure resembles a tree). In that same 2022 round, Robert Lukins was shortlisted for his book Loveland; his third novel is reviewed here and is called Somebody Down There Likes Me (Allen & Unwin).
Hannah Kent was shortlisted in 2017 for her second novel, The Good People, and this year she has a memoir on the way called Always Home, Always Homesick (May, Picador). In that same round, Marija Peričić was shortlisted for The Lost Pages (which had won that year’s Vogel’s Award), and her new book is out in June (Foreign Country, Ultimo). Also in that same year, Jane Rawson was shortlisted for her novel, From the Wreck, and I was very pleased to see an advance copy of her new book come across my desk this week: a work of creative nonfiction entitled Human/Nature (NewSouth Publishing, April). Yumna Kassab’s The House of Youssef (Giramondo, 2019) made an impression on the 2020 round’s judges, and she has a book out this month called The Theory of Everything (Ultimo). And of course, Diana Reid was shortlisted in 2022 for the blockbuster breakthrough book for then-new publisher Ultimo, Love & Virtue, which went on to win many prizes including the ABIA Book of the Year. All eyes will be on Diana’s third work, Signs of Damage, out this month (see the review here).
Ultimo is no longer an emerging publisher, but has grown a strong and extensive list, year on year. Also out this year from them is a book I’ve reviewed this month, the impressive second novel by previous Miles Franklin shortlistee Madeleine Watts, Elegy, Southwest (also a road trip novel, and poses the question: should this category have been included on our bingo card?). As the year goes on, they’ll bring us the debut adult novel from Vijay Khurana, The Passenger Seat (April) which was shortlisted for the 2022 Novel Prize, plus new work from Melbourne authors Pip Finkemeyer (One Story, October), Anna Snoekstra (The Ones We Love, June) and Katherine Brabon (Cure, July), and in exciting news recently announced, they’ll publish Maxine Beneba Clarke’s poetry collection beautiful changeling in November. Speaking of poetry, which happily continues to find new audiences, Stella Prize-winning poet Evelyn Araluen’s new collection, The Rot (UQP) will be out in September, and promises to document, ‘… what happens when poetry swallows more rage than it can console’. This follow-up to Dropbear will definitely be a big deal.
You may not have heard of Summit Books; it’s a legacy imprint of Simon & Schuster which was relaunched internationally in 2024, and here as Summit Books Australia with the legendary Jane Palfreyman at the helm. The imprint published its first book last year, Gina Chick’s irresistible memoir, We Are the Stars, and its first work of fiction will arrive in May from a Melbourne-born writer living between here and Athens, Dominic Amerena. It’s called I Want Everything and is a twisty-turny story about authenticity and creativity set in the world of books and writing and sounds right up my street. Then along comes Pissants (I do really love that word, so evocative!) the debut novel by former AFL player Brandon Jack in July, which is described by the publisher as ‘Fight Club meets A Visit from the Goon Squad’: I am ready for this.
Tony Birch is a great friend of Readings, and I personally will never have enough of our shop floor catch ups exchanging tips on what we’ve recently read. UQP will be publishing a retrospective of Tony’s short stories in October, Pictures of You. Laura Elvery has written two acclaimed collections of short stories, and this year we’ll be able to read her first in the long form, a book inspired by the life of Florence Nightingale (also UQP, May). Samuel Wagan Watson is also published by UQP, known for his award-winning works of poetry. This July you can read his first collection of short stories, New + Used Ghosts. Josephine Rowe was named a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Novelist in 2017 and has a new work called Little World out in May via Black Inc. Anyone who read Miranda Darling’s Thunderhead last year (one of our staff faves for 2024) will be delighted to learn that a follow-up of sorts will be published in September called Fireweather (Scribe), picking up the story of Winona as her world turns on its head.
As my eyes continue down the extensive list of Australian novels on the way this year, it’s becoming evident that there’s just no way I can mention enough of them: a familiar feeling of failure I experience around about now in this column-writing process. Gail Jones, Toni Jordan, Sofie Laguna, Chris Flynn, Jennifer Mills, Kate Mildenhall, Mark Brandi, Dervla McTiernan, Jacqueline Maley, Hilde Hinton, Michelle Johnston, Benjamin Stevenson, Garry Disher … they all have new works of fiction in 2025, and there’ll be more announcements throughout the year, as ever. But maybe you’d like to start with our Fiction Book of the Month? It’s a debut by Brisbane-based Steve MinOn, First Name, Second Name, a highly original book about identity in this place we call Australia, and our reviewer said it knocked her socks off! See the full review here.
And then of course there’s nonfiction, a whole other aspect of my suggested Read Local pledge. Any book from Kate Grenville is a highlight of the literary calendar and this year she publishes a nonfiction work, Unsettled: A Journey Through Time and Place (April). Kate takes a kind of road trip (see, that category really needed to be there!) as she returns to the places where her family lived on the Hawkesbury River and which formed the context for The Secret River. Her publisher for this book is Black Inc., another of our local independents, which turns 25 this year and holds a crucial role publishing works of Australian nonfiction. The Quarterly Essays alone are so important in capturing the nation’s contemporary debates, and this year we’ll have ones from Jess Hill, Hugh White, Marian Wilkinson and an as-yet-unnamed author of the 100th QE in November. They’ll also publish several additions to the ‘shortest history’ series including from Larissa Behrendt, Mark McKenna, and Don Watson, and works of history from Sheila Fitzpatrick and Linda Jaivin.
Jack Latimore, former Indigenous Affairs reporter for The Age, has written an important book which is due out this year, Kumanjayi: Death and Indifference (S&S), a work of investigative reporting that takes readers behind the story of the death of Kumanjayi Walker and the trial of police officer Zachary Rolfe, and deeper into the brutal practices of policing in remote Indigenous communities. When this book was announced, Latimore said, ‘In matters of Aboriginal justice, it’s essential to foreground Aboriginal voices and to bring the perspectives of our communities to broader audiences and general readers across the country’, and it could not be more important to have this book for the nation to read.
Jamila Rizvi and Rosie Waterland have written a very personal collective work on the brain called Broken Brains (May, Penguin). Jenny Macklin’s Making Progress (MUP, April) outlines many of the ALP’s big thinking policy changes that happened on her watch, and argues for the necessity of more reform. Virginia Haussegger will publish an account of the various waves of feminism from 1975 onwards called Genderquake (NewSouth, September). Jacinta Parsons collects the words of older women in her ongoing project to reframe our discussions around aging in A Wisdom of Age (HarperCollins, May). Tyson Yunkaporta will release the third in his trilogy of books on Indigenous thinking (following Readings’ bestsellers Sand Talk and Right Story, Wrong Story) in September with Snake Talk (written with Megan Kelleher, Text). Steve Vizard (yes, that Steve Vizard!) holds research positions at Monash University and the University of Adelaide, and he’s publishing a book on the Gallipoli myth, Nation, Memory, Myth (MUP, April). A new addition to the First Knowledges series will be out in July (T&H), this time on Ceremony, co-authored by Georgia Curran and Wesley Enoch.
At the risk of reminding people of that time when we knew the names of every single one of the nation’s senior epidemiologists, you’ll surely recall Professor Raina MacIntyre’s expertise delivered so eloquently through many television interviews. She has a new book out in May called Vaccine Nation: Science, Reason and the Threat to 200 Years of Progress (NewSouth). Historian Henry Reynolds sets his sights on Queensland with Looking from the North, a work that covers the Frontier Wars, land rights, and the important legal cases of Mabo and Wik. And for those keeping track, it’s 50 years since The Dismissal (yes, it’s 50 years since 1975). If you’re reading that sentence wondering WTF does ‘The Dismissal’ mean, you should definitely check out some of the publishing that will commemorate the event, including The Dismissal: The Untold Story by Peter Edward (November, NewSouth), or the new edition of Gough Whitlam’s own words about the whole affair, The Truth of the Matter, with a new introduction by the current PM (out this month!). Speaking of Gough, he’s also a key figure in our Nonfiction Book of the Month, in which Tom McIlroy tells of the history and cultural impact of the nation’s acquisition of Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles, which our reviewer calls ‘a terrific book’ and ‘a must-read for the year’.
And this, dear Reader, is where I run out of puff (and space, and issue my annual apology and gratitude to my dear Ed.) and also realise with horror that I have told you NOTHING about cookbooks, or ANY big international writers with books on the way, and have COMPLETELY MISSED entire genres and categories, but my faith in our ability to discuss these releases throughout the year endures, and means I am quite happy to remind you to grab your bingo card and leave you right here.
