In what was a strong year for literature in Australia and worldwide, it was hard to choose this year’s reading highlights. Read this list in conjunction with my ‘Bring on the elves’ blog post for an even more comprehensive list of great books I discovered in 2015.

The Golden Age by Joan London

Set in a polio convalescent home for children, this elegant novel provides a distinctive picture of Australian family life and society in the 1950s and the influence immigrants from Europe were having on Australian culture.

A Man Made Entirely of Bats by Patrick Lenton

This short-short story collection is a leap into the surreal, comedic, satirical, punchy and resonant. It’s the rarest of birds: smart literature that makes you laugh.

Panthers and the Museum of Fire by Jen Craig

This novella’s intriguing narrator ponders the close rhythms of writing and walking; anorexia; religion; how we get saddled with living other people’s unfulfilled dreams; and more. A clever and complex fictionalised memoir.

The Simple Act of Reading by Debra Adelaide

A delectable anthology with many gems, including Luke Davies’ essay ‘Hergé and Me’. He writes, ‘It is as if at that moment my old life—that innocent boy—was being given back to me, in the form of a new life; and everything in-between was wiped clean-slate.’

Waiting for the Past by Les Murray

With few exceptions, the compressed and succulent language of these poems eases our access to meaning rather than inhibiting it. I wish I’d invented the phrase  ‘slop biltong’ to describe a dead octopus (and its past dexterity).

The Green Road by Anne Enright

The part where Rosaleen is ‘out on the dark road under a deep sky’ (in the uplands of Ireland’s Burren) and her children are beginning to search for her, is further evidence that Enright is one of the finest writers alive today.

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Canadian survivors of a global flu pandemic are connected with an actor who died on stage just two weeks before the flu hit. As their paths intersected and glanced away again, I really wanted to know where the survivors would end up.

Being There by David Malouf

Malouf’s incisive mind ranges across subjects as disparate as Hollywood stardom, Glenn Murcutt’s architecture, Verdi’s operas, Jim Henson’s photographs and more. Read Malouf and be inspired to lose yourself in otherness; to engage deeply with artistic endeavour as maker or audience. Know being there is (partly) what it takes.

The All Saints’ Day Lovers by Juan Gabriel Vásquez

Set in the Belgian Ardennes and shot through with hunting and adultery, these seven stories are mesmerising and insightful explorations of the dimensions of loss and love.

Small Acts of Disappearance by Fiona Wright

These ten essays form a moving memoir of award-winning Australian poet Fiona Wright’s years battling anorexia nervosa. They span her years at university, as a young journalist in Sri Lanka, on a writing fellowship in Berlin, and in Sydney, where she seeks treatment.

Goodbye Sweetheart by Marion Halligan

The death of William Cecil allows Halligan to rove through the minds of those who loved him and to see how they deal with the loss. We also learn about who he was as a lover, parent, husband and brother, and of grief’s shadows.

Black Rock White City by A.S. Patrić

Some predict this compelling novel will become an Australian classic. Jovan and Suzana are casualties of a brutal war and an alienating adoptive country. Their haunted lives and hobbled attempts to assuage their suffering will feel disturbingly real to you.

The Iceberg by Marion Coutts

This is a sonorous and unflinching account of the two-and-a-half years it took Coutts’ husband Tom Lubbock to go from his diagnosis with glioblastoma multiforme to death. So don’t be surprised if Coutts’ honesty slices into your deepest fears and puts a specimen or two under the microscope.

brush by joanne burns

I love how Australian poet joanne burns seems so open to collisions — her telekinesis crashing out the freshest meanings. These thought/word mash-ups get readers’ minds to move, too, taking us to places we haven’t been to before and helping our synapses to shift and sizzle.

The Getaway Car by Ann Patchett

‘I could see the genius in not having given 100 per cent of myself over to my writing before. It had kept me from ever having to come to terms with how good I was — or wasn’t. As long as something got in the way of writing, I could always look at a finished story and think it could have been a little better if only I hadn’t spent so much time on XYZ.’ … ‘Do you want to do this thing? Sit down and do it. Are you not writing? Keep sitting there.’ See why this is such an indispensable writing guide?

Happy reading!