Every year our staff vote for their favourite books of the year and then from their votes, we build a list of 2025's Best Books across six categories, encompassing fiction and nofiction for all ages.
But that's not all – we wanted to know your opinon too! So we've tallied up the votes of our community to create this list of the Best of the Best of 2025.
Australian fiction
The Readings community's favourite Australian fiction read was:
Tenderfoot
Toni Jordan
Brisbane, 1975: Andie Tanner's world is small but whole. Her mum is complicated, but she adores her dad and the kennel of racing greyhounds that live under their house. Andie is a serious girl with plans: finish school with her friends, then apprentice to her father until she can become a greyhound trainer, with dogs of her very own.
But real life rarely goes to plan, and the world is bigger and more complicated than Andie could imagine. When she loses everything she cares about – her family, her friends, the dogs – it's up to Andie to reclaim her future. She will need all her wits to survive this new reality of secrets and half-truths, addictions and crime.
📖 Also hugely popular last year were The Transformations by Andrew Pippos and Pictures of You: Collected Stories by Tony Birch.
International fiction
The Readings community's favourite international fiction read was:
Heart the Lover
Lily King
Our narrator understands good love stories – their secrets, their highs and free falls. But her greatest love story, the one she lived, never followed the rules.
She was in her senior year of college when star students Sam and Yash swept her into an intoxicating world of academic fervour, rapid-fire banter and raucous card games. Their lives became quickly intertwined – with friendship but also with unpredictable passions and the intimations of first love.
Decades later, she is a successful writer, living a comfortable life with her husband and children, when a surprise visit brings the past crashing into the present, forcing her to confront the decisions and deceptions of her youth.
📖 Following close behind were Flesh by David Szalay and What We Can Know by Ian McEwan.
Nonfiction
The Readings community's favourite nonfiction read was:
The Mushroom Tapes: Conversations on a Triple Murder Trial
Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper & Sarah Krasnostein
For this extraordinary book, the lone wolves became a team. Garner, Hooper and Krasnostein tracked Erin Patterson’s preliminary hearings and trial, joined the media scrum at the Latrobe Valley Law Courts, slept over in Morwell and spent countless hours in fervent discussion of the case and the themes it raises: love, hate, jealousy, revenge, marriage, money, mycology and murder.
The Mushroom Tapes is a true crime book like no other, an unputdownable record of the writers’ private conversations about their impressions from inside the courtroom. They explore the gap between the certainties of the law and the messiness of reality, their own ambivalence about the true crime genre, and all that remains unknowable about Erin Patterson.
📖 Helen Garner topped the list for the second year in a row, with honourable mentions going to Memorial Days by Geraldine Brooks and Mother Mary Comes To Me by Arundhati Roy.
Picture books
The Readings community's favourite picture book was:
The Bookshop on Lemon Tree Lane
Mike Lucas, illustrated by Sofya Karmazina
This endearing picture book in rhyme is a love letter to bookshops and the space they provide for discovery and delight.
A little boy adores visiting the old bookshop down Lemon Tree Lane with his grandpa – its nooks and crannies, its endless stories, and even the bookshop dog at the back. That is, until the day the owners box up the books, take down the shelves and lock the doors, and the bookshop is no more. But then something wonderful happens …
📖 Two other uniquely Australian picture books also got lots of love: Dropbear by Philip Bunting and Weaving Country by Aunty Kim Wandin & Chris Joy, illustrated by Ashleigh Pugh.
Junior & middle grade
The Readings community's favourite junior or middle grade book was:
Caring for Country: First Knowledges for Younger Readers
Bruce Pascoe, Bill Gammage & Jasmin McGaughey, illustrated by Savi Ross
What do you need to know to prosper as a people for 65,000 years or more?
Join writer and farmer Bruce Pascoe and historian Bill Gammage as they generously share their knowledge about the amazing way that First Nations people cared for Australia and how closely humans have been connected with nature for tens of thousands of years.
From the careful use of fire to sustainable hunting and farming, there is so much we can learn to make sure we have a beautiful country today and for the future.
📖 Second and third place for the year went to Silverborn: The Mystery of Morrigan Crow by Jessica Townsend and Inked by Karen Wasson, illustrated by Jake A. Minton
Young adult fiction
The Readings community's favourite young adult book was:
Lady's Knight (Lady's Knight, Book 1)
Amie Kaufman & Meagan Spooner
Gwen has spent the past several years manning the blacksmith's in place of her father, an open secret in the village in which she lives. A much more covert secret, however, is that she knows not only how to craft but also how to wield a sword, and an incognito stunt at the local jousting tournament manages to catch the eye of the wily Lady Isobelle.
Isobelle has secret dreams too, but she's been promised in marriage to the winner of the whole stupid tournament, which means an end to any freedom or choices for her. Desperate to avoid this fate, when she connects the newcomer knight to the female smithy she saw earlier that day, she begins to hatch a scheme …
Petty knights. Backstabbing noblemen. A prison breakout. Cheesecake-on-a-stick. One particularly large and angry dragon. Will our ladies survive the night? And can our knight save the day?
📖 Following close behind were more great Australian books – This Stays Between Us by Margot McGovern and Black River by Ruby Jean Cottle.
