With the new year barely begun, take a look back at our top ten reviews of 2025. Is your favourite among them?

This latest offering of Australian rural noir contrasts urban and small-town sensibilities from the perspective of a child protection officer. Readers of Crows Nest will not be surprised to learn that ...

Actor and Australian icon Bryan Brown brings his laconic style to his first full-length crime novel. The Drowning is set on the northern beaches of New South Wales in a small town that is mostly ...

Tara June Winch’s multi-award-winning novel is told in three voices, one of which takes the form of a dictionary. Yield, bend the feet, tread, as in walking, also long, tall – baayanha. Yield itself ...

In BM Carroll’s latest crime novel, one family’s celebration turns to disaster as a teenager disappears amid a crowd of concert-goers. The Sullivan family feels like a loving unit, perhaps because ...

The lyrical second novel from the author of The Burial criss-crosses through time following one girl’s parallel lives. Bird is the pensive, defiant 14-year-old protagonist of Courtney Collins’ new ...

Ghost Species, James Bradley’s terrifyingly relevant seventh novel, is On the Beach for a globally warmed generation. Its proposed roadmap of where humankind’s false belief we’re in control will lead ...

A finalist in the Ngaio Awards for Best First Crime Novel, Paper Cage is the story of a divided community and a string of missing children. There’s not much that happens in Masterton that Lo Henry ...

Michael Warner doesn’t hold back in this examination of the scandals that have beset the AFL over the past two decades. In professional sport teams compete not only with each other on the field, but ...

British historian Anne Sebba’s account of the Nazi death camp describes the dissonance of beautiful music in a place of suffering and death. A monstrous, life-and-death version of sing for your supper ...

Diana Reid’s debut novel poses some philosophical dilemmas. University campus culture was fresh for Diana Reid when she began writing Love & Virtue. She had recently graduated from The University of ...

The new novel from the author of Dyschronia and The Airways is climate fiction focussed on human adaptability. There is plenty going on in Australia at the moment that reflects the impacts of climate ...