1 Flesh by David Szalay (Jonathan Cape, $38)

Some are saying the greatest honour this book has received all year is inclusion in The Spinoff’s best books of 2025.

2 Mana by Tāme Iti (Allen & Unwin, $50)

“I never saw or experienced that kind of racism in my life, where people make judgements about the colour of your skin, or there’s always some kind of excuse about why you’re not allowed to enter into their space,” Iti says. “The biggest challenge [in writing this book] was how we maintain our mana in our space, in our creativity, so we’re not being construed to be locked into being a slave to someone else’s ideology.” Read more, right here on The Spinoff.

3 What We Can Know by Ian McEwan (Jonathan Cape, $38)

Provocative, moving, timely cli-fi.

4 The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai (Hamish Hamilton, $38)

“Critically, it is a novel about work as much as it is about the relationship between Sunny and Sonia Shah, whose families are neighbours and whose attempts to make a match begin their on-off liaison. Where Sunny dreams of journalistic success, albeit heavily inflected by the work of JD Salinger and Kurt Vonnegut, Sonia’s heart and mind lie in writing fiction. Alienated and alone at college in rural Vermont, she finds solace in Tolstoy, but is perplexed and provoked by the idea of magic realism and ‘the enticement of white people by route of peacocks, monsoons, exotic-spice bazaars’. The dilemma facing an Indian writer, she ponders, is one of obeisance to the west’s appetites and projections, and the lure of producing ‘stories cheapened by proliferation, decorative outside and hollow inside’.” Read the rest of Alex Clark’s review in The Guardian.

5 Names by Florence Knapp (Phoenix (Orion) $38) 

“It is October 1987 and Cora, trapped in a wretched and abusive marriage, has just had a second baby, a son,” writes Clare Clark in The Guardian. “As she and her nine-year-old daughter Maia push the pram together through the debris of the Great Storm to register the birth, they talk about names. Cora’s husband Gordon has always insisted that the baby will take his name, a tradition passed down through his family, but Cora shrinks from the prospect. It is not just that she dislikes the name Gordon, ‘the way it starts with a splintering wound that makes her think of cracked boiled sweets, and then ends with a downward thud like someone slamming down a sports bag’. She fears that the name will force an unwelcome shape on her baby son, corrupting his innocence, locking him into a chain of violent, domineering men. Cora prefers Julian which, in her book of baby names, means sky father; she nurses the naive hope that, since the name honours Gordon’s paternity, he will find it an acceptable compromise. Meanwhile, Maia suggests Bear because it sounds ‘all soft and cuddly and kind … but also, brave and strong’. At the registrar’s desk Cora must pick one – and with that the narrative neatly divides into three.”

6 Bread of Angels by Patti Smith (Bloomsbury, $39) 

Patti Smith on Patti Smith’s childhood.

7 Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy (Penguin, $38)

A book club hit for 2025.

8 Lessons on Living: Finding Your Way Through Life’s Ups and Downs by Nigel Latta (Harper Collins, $40) 

One for the family library.

9 Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy (Hamish Hamilton, $40)

Mother memoir.

10 The Mushroom Tapes by Chloe Hooper, Helen Garner and Sarah Krasnostein (Text Publishing, $40)

The trial of the year as told by three of Australia’s greatest writers.

WELLINGTON

1 Mr Ward’s Map: Victorian Wellington Street by Street by Elizabeth Cox (Massey University Press, $90)

Third week in a row! Snatch a peek inside this marvellous book right here on The Spinoff.

2 The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai (Hamish Hamilton, $38)

3 Flesh by David Szalay (Jonathan Cape, $38)

4 Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy (Hamish Hamilton, $40)

5 Bread of Angels by Patti Smith (Bloomsbury, $39) 

6 What We Can Know by Ian McEwan (Jonathan Cape, $38)

7 The Book of Guilt by Catherine Chidgey (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $38) 

Another fantastic novel that made it onto The Spinoff’s best books of 2025.

8 Raising Hare by Claire Dalton (Canongate Books, $28)

Will make you want to live with a hare.

9 1929: The Inside Story of the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History by Andrew Ross Sorkin (Allen Lane, $45)

The chaos of market freefall!

10 Mana by Tāme Iti (Allen & Unwin, $50)