Emily Maguire

Every woman needs a bit more Edna St Vincent Millay in her life. I recommend the Selected Poems for a generous dose of Millay’s tough-minded, delicately phrased poems of lust, longing and grief. I'd also give a copy of Nancy Milford’s biography of Millay, Savage Beauty, which is worth reading just for the relationship between the brilliant, charismatic poet and her equally fabulous mother and sisters.

Emily Maguire’s latest book is Princesses and Pornstars.

Joan London

I love The View From Castle Rock this latest, possibly last book from the great Canadian short story writer, Alice Munro. It’s a new, inspiring form of autobiography in which she looks at her own family history and turns it into a collection of powerful, often uncanny stories.

Ex-Australian photographer Megan Lewis spent five years’ living with the Martu people in the Great Sandy Desert. The result is Conversations With The Mob, a series of photographs which stunned me with their beauty, insight and affection. By the end, without any sense of intrusion or exploitation, you are brought right close-up to a people and a landscape.

Joan London’s latest book is The Good Parents.

Cate Kennedy

I want to receive Tim Winton's new novel Breath. I wonder if he's called his book this because he knows his prose has the power to take a reader's breath away? I'm sure I'll devour this one with my usual mix of envy and wonder.

Cate Kennedy’s latest book is Dark Roots

Anne Manne

There are three books I would recommend as reading for Mother’s Day. What Mothers Do: Especially When It Looks Like Nothing is a great book for early motherhood because unlike all the Sleep Gurus and Feeding Nazis, it offers absolutely no advice! Instead the gentle and perceptive Naomi Stadlen, a psychotherapist who runs ‘Mother’s Talking’ groups in Britain, just asks; ‘What works?’ By listening to what mothers actually do, and how they discover what works, Stadlen winds up with a profoundly encouraging book.

The second is Maternal Desire: On Children, Love, and the Inner Life by Daphne De Marneffe about feminism, mothering, and the pleasure that caring for children can bring, from a very contemporary voice.

The third is Ann Crittenden’s The Price of Motherhood; why the most important job in the world is still the least valued. This accessible account shows both the important contribution mothers (in or out of the workforce) make to the shadow care economy, but also the economic disadvantages they so often suffer, and what we should do about it.

Anne Manne’s latest book is Quarterly Essay 29: Love and Money.

Toni Jordan

Mum loves Australian history, biographies and women with chutzpah—so I Am Melba by Ann Blainey is the perfect choice. She’ll love this story of the driven girl who becomes the most famous singer of her time. Mum’s also a insanely proud Queenslander, and she’ll soon be convinced that the time Melba spent in the cane-fields near Mackay were the secret to her success.

Toni Jordan is the author of Addition.

Virginia Duigan

Like me, I think my mother would have rushed out already to buy the irresistible new books by Geraldine Brooks, Helen Garner, Chris Koch and David Malouf. So rather than double up, I would give her Janet Frame’s posthumously published early novella, Towards Another Summer, written 45 years ago and, like so many first novels, rewardingly and revealingly autobiographical.

And being a long time admirer of Richard Ford I’d add The Lay of the Land, third in his Frank Bascombe trilogy – compare his take on America with that of his much younger contemporary, Jonathan Franzen.

And I just know how my mother would have loved observing Alan Bennett steer the Queen (the Her Majesty version) around the chessboard as she discovers literature in The Uncommon Reader. Her eye-popping learning curve embraces such disparate writers as Nancy Mitford and Jean Genet, and the joys of reading were never suggested with such sly and stylish humour or such inimitably subversive wisdom.

After writing a novel in which art is a central component, I would be delighted if I found in my own Mother’s Day parcel two very different books about art and artists. One is a novel: Pat Barker’s Life Class, about students at the Slade in WW1, the other a biography, Arthur Boyd: A Life, by Darleen Bungey. And to be extra greedy, I’d choose Janet Malcolm’s Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice, for the sheer fun of watching a biographer-detective in full forensic flight.

Virginia Duigan’s latest book is The Biographer.

Fiona Capp

A novel I would like (and haven't yet read) for a Mothers' Day present is Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972. It is, I believe, about a woman artist struggling to cope with the demands of frontier life in America. Having just written a novel about a woman artist living in the Victorian goldfields, I'm keen to find out how Stegner approaches and explores a similar theme.

Fiona Capp’s latest book, Musk and Byrne.

Geraldine Brooks

‘Do you have a mother?’ For a year, this was the question that Melissa Fay Greene's adopted daughter asked every new child she met. In Addis Ababa, where she had come from, such a birthright couldn't be taken for granted. Greene's book, There Is No Me Without You: One Woman's Odyssey to Rescue her Country's Children is about what it means to be a mother in the most profound sense. Greene writes about Haregewoin, a middle class Ethiopian woman who loses her daughter to AIDs and is plunged into despair until she reluctantly agrees to shelter two of her city's thousands of AIDs orphans. Soon, infants and children of all ages began to appear on her doorstep, and an ordinary woman becomes an extraordinary champion, sheltering dozens of kids and finding adoptive families for them. Greene herself has adopted four Ethiopian children and she has much to say in this book about mothers and children and the different ways they find each other. It is by no means a sentimental book: Haregewoin is no saint, and Greene's anger at the multinational drug companies and politicians (including Al Gore) who turned their backs on the AIDs crisis gives the prose a white heat of urgency and rage.

Geraldine Brooks’s latest book is People of the Book.