Suddenly, it’s the end of the year and time for lots of bookish gift-giving! To help you in that regard, we’ve created a number of top ten lists in various categories from a rather wonderful year of new releases. (Find these lists here.)

Of course, these lists are intended just as much to help you with gifts to yourself, as the prospect of summer is, for many of us, a chance to tackle those books we didn’t quite get around to reading during the year.

With that in mind, we’ve also chosen several literary series that might just be your fix for the holiday season: namely, those by Elena Ferrante, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Jeff van der Meer, and Marilynne Robinson. The first customer to tell us they’ve read ALL of these volumes will win a special mention in our first newsletter of 2015!

For my part, I of course spent a lot of this year in the company of the books nominated for our inaugural New Australian Writing Award. We haven’t included any of them in our top ten list for fiction simply to prevent overlap – but that we salute them as well is a given. It’s certainly been gratifying to see the huge response we’ve had to the award, and – as this is what it’s all about – for lots of people to seek out and discover these fine writers for themselves. I’m hearing whispers of new books in the works from at least a couple of our shortlistees too, so we’re all looking forward to those immensely in 2015.

I recently had cause to recall a conversation I had with an author at about the time that we first announced the New Australian Writing Award. She had (graciously) lamented the fact that her book was published a couple of months before the opening timeframe for submissions, and thus her book was ineligible for consideration. I was able to console her by telling her that this had happened to several other very worthy authors as well – it was indeed all rather sad! But it’s a reminder just what a lottery all things of a prize nature can be.

Needless to say then I was overjoyed to see the name of said author crop up recently on the shortlist for the ‘Most Underrated Book Award’, administered by the Small Press Network, for a book published in 2013 that might not have received its fair due since then. That she went on to win the award is just like a fairytale, so I’m ever so pleased for Jane Rawson and her debut work of fiction, A Wrong Turn at the Office of Unmade Lists. Rawson has another book due next year, this time a non-fiction title. It sounds fascinating, if not somewhat ominous: a survival guide for living in times of – let’s face it, even if Mr Abbott can’t or won’t – undeniable climate change. It’s another one to add to the list of books we’re looking forward to in 2015.

In the meantime, wishing you all the best of summer reading ahead!

Martin Shaw