This Irish novel might be my book of the year (in a crowded field). The Bee Sting by Paul Murray is about the cost of living crisis and the climate and it’s comic. But most of all, it’s a story about a family: their secrets, thwarted hopes and sense of doom. Funny and sad, this is a classic in the making.

Nobody writes about chaotic, passionate ratbags like Melissa Lucashenko. She won the Miles Franklin Award with her last book, Too Much Lip, and its follow-up, Edenglassie, finds her in fine form with big topics – as well as mischief – in mind. Her first historical novel, it shifts between the 1850s and the present day, with some unlikely love stories, the atrocities of colonial dispossession and the weight of history as we make our way through the world. And it has an enduring character of Australian literature in Granny Eddie.

David Marr is one of this country’s most respected writers and journalists, and his magisterial new book, Killing For Country, is a reminder of his skill and the depth of his moral authority. When an aged uncle asks him to do research into their ancestry, the discovery that his family tree includes members of the murderous Queensland Native Mounted Police leads Marr to an exercise in excavation and truth telling. A powerful and important work of Australian history.

Poet, historian and novelist Tony Birch writes beautiful books – on every page you can tell how much he cares about his characters. They’re lovingly depicted, with palpable fear for the challenges that life throws up at them. Joe Cluny and his mum, Marion, are no exception in Women & Children. This coming-of-age story set in the mid-1960s is both a tender account of the need to grow up fast and a celebration of extraordinary women.

A new Lauren Groff novel, The Vaster Wilds, is in bookshops and that’s an excellent reason to thrust her classic, Fates and Furies, into the hands of everyone you know. It’s the tale of a marriage in two parts. Both sides laid out. Grievances aired. Compromises forgiven (or not). Set across 25 years, this book will have you rethinking your sympathies as perspectives shift and the story becomes ever more complicated. Delicious.

Set across five claustrophobic days, Emma Cline’s propulsive new novel, The Guest, follows her heroine, Alex, through a series of increasingly bad decisions that you won’t be able to tear yourself away from. Cline’s debut novel, The Girls, was an international bestseller and this one is even better. Don’t read anything else about it. Just pick it up and clear your diary.

André Dao’s debut novel, Anam, is a beautiful story of family inheritance and the search for belonging; a tale of the ways we make sense of the displacements and losses of the past and how we understand the business of building a future for ourselves. Considered, lyrical and deeply human, this is literary fiction of profound and lasting depth.

Helen Elliott should already be a household name for Australian book-lovers after many years of her superior book reviews in different publications. Her own memoir of growing up in Melbourne in the 1950s and ’60s, Eleven Letters to You – in the form of 11 letters to family, friends, neighbours and teachers who have defined her life – is a wise, erudite and charming book, steeped in love.

If you haven’t discovered thriller writer B.M. Carroll yet, The Other Side of Her is a great place to start. Liane Moriarty is a fan, praising Carroll for the “addictive” nature of her stories, and her latest is a delicious slow-burning contemporary drama. When a million-dollar reward is offered for information about the disappearance of an Irish backpacker, two ordinary families with dark secrets find themselves pushed to breaking point.

Brigid Delaney’s most recent book on stoicism, Reasons Not To Worry: How To Be Stoic In Chaotic Times, proved to be the perfect prescription for how to make sense of the juggles and pressures of modern life. But her earlier book, Wellmania: Misadventures In The Search For Wellness, is in the news again because of the fabulous Netflix adaptation, Wellmania, starring Celeste Barber. You’ll never think about how to keep healthy, fit and well in the same way again.

Pip Williams’ debut novel, 2020’s The Dictionary of Lost Words, was an international bestseller and one of the fastestselling Australian novels of all time. Her beautiful follow-up, The Bookbinder of Jericho, once again dives into the world of books and knowledge against the backdrop of Oxford University Press in the war-ridden early 20th century. Lovers of her first book won’t be able to get enough of this (even better) iteration, with its rich cast of characters, luxurious storytelling and powerful sense of humanity. Irresistible.

There’s something seductive about the true-crime genre, however problematic it may be. In Rebecca Makkai’s thrilling new novel, I Have Some Questions For You, the entertainment that transpires from reckoning with another’s trauma and unearthing their secrets comes under scrutiny. Page-turning, frightening and addictive, this is a fabulous read about ethical grey areas and the battle between the debt to a story and the debt to the truth.

Poetry is not for everyone but Australian poet Omar Sakr – who won the 2020 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry with The Lost Arabs – is a powerful writer with an expansive voice. His latest collection, Non-Essential Work, will lure you in and leave a mark.

Elliot Perlman’s modern Australian classic, Three Dollars, turns 25 this year and as good as it would be to say that its story about financial insecurity and the precarity of modern life in the face of economic rationalism is a snapshot of a forgotten era, it feels as relevant today as it did when it first came out.

Colson Whitehead is the only writer to win two Pulitzers for consecutive books (The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys). He’s written about elevator operators and zombie apocalypses, poker games and coming of age. Now, for the first time, he’s tackling a trilogy. Fans of his 2021 heist novel, Harlem Shuffle, will be thrilled to return to Ray Carney’s world in Crook Manifesto. It’s 1971 and what better motivation for some light criminality than Jackson 5 tickets? Delicious fun.

Nobody writes historical fiction like Kate Grenville. Again and again she has brought history —both the official records and the messy tensions in the margins — indelibly to life. And her new novel, Restless Dolly Maunder, brings her immense talents to bear, once again, on her own family. This time it’s her grandmother Dolly, a working woman at the end of the 19th century, struggling to build a life and survive. Women like Dolly Maunder rarely make it into the history books. Here, she’s honoured by one of our best.

It’s hard to think of many authors who have been more significant in their writings on tyranny and structural power than George Orwell. But across six biographies and decades of scholarship about him, the contribution of his wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy, has been all but erased. Lifelong Orwell fan and acclaimed author Anna Funder corrects the record in her revelatory masterpiece, Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life.

Mem Fox’s children’s classics, Guess What?, was banned in Florida in a ludicrous move. She’s been a national treasure in Australia for generations of kids, from her bestseller Possum Magic to Where is the Green Sheep? The rhyming delight of Good Night, Sleep Tight (reuniting her with Green Sheep illustrator Judy Horacek) will get stuck in your head and those of the children in your life. Bonnie, Ben and Skinny Doug will become an essential part of bedtime.

One of the books I’ve bought again and again as a gift is Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto, a romantic, suspenseful and tender wonder. So a new Ann Patchett novel has me rushing to the bookshop. And Tom Lake doesn’t disappoint. Three adult daughters facing various challenges and fears in their own lives return home. They hear their mother’s stories about a time before they were born, a romance with a man and with the world of theatre. Stunning.

Remember the name Peter Polites and his new book, God Forgets About the Poor. It’s his third novel and he deserves to be recognised as one of Australia’s most exciting writers. The satire and sharpness of his earlier books is on ample display here but they’re leavened by deep love as he turns his considerable skills to sharing his mother’s story. “A son can never see his mother as a woman,” he writes. This novel contradicts that claim powerfully.

Before he became a leading advocate of climate action, Tim Flannery was a respected palaeontologist. Long before that, he was a boy on a beach, uncovering the fossilised tooth of a giant shark at Port Phillip Bay. The shark was a megalodon – Big Meg – a 15-millionyear- old super-predator. Now he and his daughter, scientist Emma Flannery, tell the extraordinary story of a fascinating piece of natural history in Big Meg: The Story of the Largest and Most Mysterious Predator That Ever Lived.

Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray (River Dreams) by author and academic Anita Heiss is only a couple of years old but she is a wonderful writer with many books to her name (including some outrageously fun romantic comedies). This novel, set on Heiss’s Country on the banks of the Murrumbidgee River, is devastating and a complete triumph. An antidote to the lies of national mythology and an essential read for all of us.

Don Winslow has been delivering propulsive crime novels and thrillers for years but the buzz around City of Dreams is stratospheric. Following on from City on Fire, it’s the second book in a trilogy, a multi-generational American crime epic that’s drawing comparisons to The Godfather. In the latest book, young Mob boss Danny Ryan is trying to rein in the excesses of his crew and protect his family, all against the backdrop of a gangland war threatening to tear New England apart. A big, fat airport novel full of thrills and delights.

In Kylie Needham’s stunning debut, Girl in a Pink Dress, Frances is an artist struggling to find the balance between her art and her carefully guarded solitude. But the glamour of old associates and all the pressures and rewards of the world of high arts is hard to escape – and the past has a way of reasserting itself. Needham’s experience as an awardwinning screenwriter is obvious as she expertly guides this story through two different timelines.

Melbourne-born Peter Singer is one of the world’s most influential philosophers: at times, he’s controversial, at others, divisive, but he’s always thoughtful and deeply humane. His classic title Ethics in the Real World has been fully updated and expanded for the unethical world we find ourselves in now. Clear and incisive on everything from assisted dying to the poverty gap, the climate crisis to fake news, this is nothing short of an essential primer on how we could be living.

It was published in 2022 so The Jaguar, a book of poetry by Sarah Holland Batt, may not feel timely. But this year she won the prestigious Stella Prize for this volume written before and after the death of her father. It’s a beautiful, powerful collection and Holland Batt should be a household name.

There’s a reason Cloudstreet by Tim Winton is often cited as a modern Australian classic. There’s no writer quite like Winton. The story of the Lamb and the Pickle families in the warmth of the West Australian sun remains a singular pleasure to read. Last year marked 40 years of Winton as a published writer and it’s always the perfect time to read his books.

If you’re already hooked on The Thursday Murder Club books by English comedian and TV star Richard Osman, you don’t need me to tell you the fourth in the series, The Last Devil to Die, is out this month. And if you’re not, then you have a real treat ahead of you. This series, which follows a bunch of senior citizen amateur sleuths as they investigate murder and mayhem, is far funnier and more heartwarming than it has any business being – and with cracking crime plots as well.

The short stories in Laura Jean McKay’s Gunflower are weird and wonderful, just as you’d expect from the author of The Animals in That Country. Some of the concerns of the earlier book are in its follow-up, with a similar dreamlike, even fabulist take on a world that’s familiar but with improbable and fantastical twists. Funny, creepy and addictive.

The tagline for Robyn Davidson’s new memoir, Unfinished Woman, is “Writer. Explorer. Filmmaker. Legend.” Taking in the scope of her travels and extraordinary career suggests that this might be an understatement. Ever since her bestseller, Tracks, she has been one of our most beloved writers and the joy from her adventurous life makes this book wonderful.

Madeleine Gray’s debut novel, Green Dot, follows a 24-year-old comment moderator at a news website as she begins an affair that is doomed from the start. This book is funny, charming, deeply relatable and just so good.

Next year, when literary awards season rolls around, expect to see the name Sara M Saleh on all the shortlists. Her remarkable debut novel, Songs for the Dead and the Living, follows a Palestinian family’s journey from the outskirts of Beirut to Australia. It captures powerfully the stories of refugees but with a specificity and grace that comes from a singular, very personal set of experiences. Saleh’s background as an award-winning poet is apparent in each beautiful sentence and the story of Jamilah and her family will have you buying this release for all the booklovers in your life.

Sarah Firth is a seriously talented comic artist. Her drawings burst off the page and the energy and fun in her storytelling is always a treat. Eventually Everything Connects, her first graphic novel, is a collection of illustrated essays – memoir, philosophy, comedy, critical thinking – all in beautiful and explosive colour. Even if you typically don’t read graphic novels, make an exception for this exceptional book.

I’ ll Let Myself In by Hannah Diviney is a collection of autobiographical essays about growing up disabled in Australia. Writer, advocate, editor – even actor, in the terrific SBS series Latecomers – Diviney presents a challenge to conventional narratives about disability. Her stories on how to navigate a world that excludes or limits people with disability will move, challenge and even delight you.

Tony Birch’s 2019 novel, The White Girl, was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award and has won countless other prizes. The story of Odette Brown and her granddaughter, Sissy, who are fighting to avoid the attention of welfare authorities removing Aboriginal children from their communities, is everything that makes Birch – who also writes short stories and poetry – a beloved author. It’s a beautifully written page-turner full of characters who will live on in the Australian literary memory for generations to come.

Celebrity memoirs are a tricky thing: just because we like someone on the screen or love their music, it doesn’t mean they have anything to say. But Sam Neill is a natural storyteller and this beautiful, funny book is a page-turner as well as a  revelation. Capturing a life and a career – from The Piano to Peaky Blinders, Death in Brunswick to Jurassic Park – Did I Ever Tell You This? feels like a seat at the table of the finest dinner party conversation you could hope for, cementing Neill’s place as a living treasure.

A Western Sydney comingof- age story that you won’t forget, Funny Ethnics, the debut novel by Shirley Le, is a portrait of the daughter of two Vietnamese refugees: an “unexceptional student, exceptional self-doubter”. The writing is crisp and clear, the voice utterly charming and the Nguyen family join the ranks of the great Australian suburban families of literature.

Nobody’s writing long-form non-fiction at the moment at the level of Patrick Radden Keefe. Say Nothing, his book on Northern Ireland, was a definitive account of The Troubles, while Empire of Pain detailed an American pharmaceutical dynasty and its influence. This latest work, The Snake Head: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream – a romp through organised crime – is an unstoppable and thrilling ride.

Tanya Plibersek, the federal minister for the environment and water, is the longest-serving woman in the House of Representatives. In this wide-reaching biography, Tanya Plibersek: On Her Own Terms, award-winning journalist Margaret Simons considers the politician and the woman, exploring Plibersek’s philosophy and influences and examining what makes her tick.

In April, Praiseworthy, a new novel by Alexis Wright (her first in a decade) will be released so now is the perfect time to revisit Carpentaria, her Miles Franklin Award winner from 2006. Set in North West Queensland, it’s a modern epic and an Australian masterpiece. After reading it, your understanding of our literature, history and country will never be the same.

Don Watson is well-known for his biography of Paul Keating (Recollections of a Bleeding Heart) and his countless other books on subjects as diverse as modern language and the bush. The new major work from one of our finest thinkers, The Passion of Private White explores the collision between biologist and anthropologist Neville White and the Yolngu clans of Donydji in north-east Arnhem Land. A story of the colonised and the colonisers, trauma and dispossession, adaptation and country, this is a work of Australian history that is intimate in focus and epic in ambition.

This one is for reading at the tail end of January, when summer relaxation starts to fade and the battle with motivation for the year ahead takes hold. Ellie Hopley is a Gold Coast-based artist better known on Instagram as @Shuturp. Hey You! Keep Going is a playful and spiky set of illustrations that might not meet the conventional thresholds for self-help but is guaranteed to inspire and energise you into tackling 2023 with gusto. Give it to someone whose spirits are a little low and Hopley will be a delightful salve. Your career, socialising, relationships, just being in the world – this book is sure to keep you going.

Janet Malcolm, who died in 2021, was a giant of American journalism and letters. From reportage and biography to personal reflections and criticism, she was peerless in the power of her observations and the precision of her pen. Still Pictures: On Photography and Memory is her memoir – spanning Europe to New York, across decades and achievements – and it’s as witty, compelling and honest as Malcolm herself was.

Warm and celebratory, with indelible characters, Happy Hour, Jacquie Byron’s debut novel, is the ultimate holiday read. Franny Calderwood has lost her husband and decides to focus on her two dogs (Whisky and Soda) and deliberate solitude. But, of course, the new neighbours are set to challenge that. Not so much a feel-good read as a feel-glorious one.

Find a copy of Hating Alison Ashley by Robin Klein and read it to your kids. Or to yourself. It’s an Australian classic for young adults, hilarously funny and enduringly enjoyable. You’ll meet teenagers Erica Yurken, Alison Ashley, Barry Hollis and the other kids of Barringa East. If you have memories of this 1984 book, it stands the test of time and will delight new generations.