Take the Reading(s) challenge!
Ten books. Ten months. Ten prompts to challenge your reading in 2026. Pick up a free challenge card at your local Readings or see all ten prompts and download a printable version here.
Melbourne Writers Festival (MWF) is this week! And this year, they are celebrating their 40th anniversary! Running from 7 to 10 May, MWF's special 40th anniversary program is inspired by the theme Visions & Revisions.
The lineup for the festival is pretty incredible, so of course we had to make 'an author appearing at MWF' as our May prompt! While some sessions have sold out, you can still read the wonderful books by the authors visiting our wonderful city – and remember, there are still plenty of great events to see. Grab your tickets here.
A cosy read
Songwriters on the Run
Robert Forster
Songwriters on the Run by Robert Forster, singer-songwriter and co-founder of the iconic indie band the Go-Betweens, is our May book of the month! Daniel, our reviewer said 'It’s a wonderful ride, filled with names and stories, real and imagined – guessing games galore! Forster writes well, with warmth, humour and insight into the process of writing. He has the knowledge that it takes time to create a song – and this most charming and unexpected delight of a novel!' Read the full review here.
It's 1991, and Australian singer-songwriters Mick Woods and Drew Lovelock – 'tall and skinny, rock-star-wrecked handsome' – haven't yet managed to crack the big-time. But that's soon to be the least of their problems.
On tour in Central Queensland, what seems like a minor marijuana bust turns ugly, and they're incarcerated in a low-security institution in the middle of nowhere. With help from a couple of prisoners, they escape – but now what? They're songwriters on the run, desperately evading the long arm of the law and trying to clear their names. On the upside, they might get a good song out of all the drama. Meanwhile, in Hollywood, a major film star takes a liking to their music …
A touch of romance
The Ruiners
Ellena Savage
Ellena Savage, the aclaimed author of the memoir Blueberries, is back with her debut novel! This is a witty, yet unsettling literary eco-thriller about love and lust, ambition and legacy, and the last days of civilisation as we know it.
What do we inherit from the world and the people in it? And what do we do with that inheritance?
Pip’s life is going nowhere. She’s a university drop-out stuck in a dead-end job at a Melbourne lobster shack. But when her long-absent father dies, she’s left an orphan and fifty-thousand dollars richer. She doesn’t know what to do with her windfall until she meets Sasha, a dashing young scholar of Balkan literature.
Together, they hatch a mad plan: buy a decrepit house on a distressed Greek island where Sasha will write and Pip will sort out what to do with her life. However, instead of bohemian idyll, the couple find themselves ensnared in an environmental struggle that brings the mistakes of the past into sharp relief.
A poetry collection
The Rot
Evelyn Araluen
You may recognise Evelyn Araluen as the winner of the 2022 Stella Prize for her debut poetry, Dropbear. Now she's back with a new poetry collection. The Rot, only 6 months old, has already won the 2026 Victorian Prize for Literature and the 2026 VPLA Prize for Indigenous Writing and has been shortlisted for the 2026 Stella Prize! Surely I don't need to convince you that this is a worthy read.
The Rot is a recalcitrant study of the decaying romances, expired hopes and abject injustices of the world. A liturgy for girlhood in the dying days of late-stage capitalism, these poems expose fraying nerves and tendons of a speaker refusing to avert their gaze from the death of Country, death on Country, and the bloody violence of settler colonies here and afar.
Across sleepless nights, fractured alliances and self-destructive coping strategies, The Rot is what happens when poetry swallows more rage than it can console, quiet or ironise – this book demands you ready yourself for a better world.
A green cover
Fire in Every Direction
Tareq Baconi
This deeply personal memoir is a portrait of how a political consciousness – desire and resistance – is passed down through generations. it's about loss, nostalgia and hope. And it will leave you speechless.
In 1948, Tareq's grandmother would flee Haifa as Zionist militias seized the city. In the late 1970s, she would flee Beirut with her daughter, as the country was in the throes of a civil war. In Amman, the family would eventually obtain the comfort of middle-class life – still, a young Tareq would feel trapped: by cultures of silence, by a sense of not belonging, by his own growing awareness that he is in love with his childhood best friend, Ramzi.
After relocating to London, Tareq hopes to put aside his past. Yet as the Iraq War radicalizes young people around the world towards anti-war protest, history comes back to him.
Living between the region and London, Tareq fits in neither and feels alienated from both. Queerness is policed back in Amman, just as his Palestinian-ness is abroad. These gradual estrangements escalate, forcing him to grapple with what it means to live in liminal spaces, and rethink the meaning of home.
A memoir
Periodic Bitch
Emma Hardy
I hand over to our reviewer, Aurelia and her succinct description of this incredible memoir – 'Periodic Bitch is uncompromising in its honesty about the author’s personal yet universal experience of life in a hormonal body. The book is necessarily challenging in its candour, and the author must be commended for shining a light on this often-misunderstood aspect of women’s lives with such grace, insight, and erudition.'
Every twenty-nine days, Emma Hardy becomes angry, monstrous and out of control. Then it passes, and she forgets about it. Until it cycles around again, of course. When a doctor diagnoses her with PMDD, premenstrual dysphoric disorder, she begins to question when a mood is just a mood, and when a mood becomes an illness.
Searching for truth between the myths and taboos that surround menstruation, Hardy stumbles across crime scenes, feminist horrors and the history of hysterical illnesses. With unwavering honesty, Periodic Bitch offers a new understanding of our beliefs about female illnesses and the stories we tell.
A debut author
Eros
Zoe Terakes
This collection of stories retells classic Greek myths through a queer lense. Our reviewer, Tamuz called Eros 'A vivid, confident and mesmerising debut from rising star actor, activist and now author Zoe Terakes …'
Eros is a stunning collection of short stories, grounded in truth and coloured with dazzling imagination and alluring unpredictable mystery. Revealing how queerness, nature and myth have been intertwined for eternity, these are stories of gods and goddesses: of Zeus, of Aphrodite, of Hermaphroditus, of Icarus before he flew into the sun. Stories of queer life, lust, revenge, wrath, passion and sex. Of yearning, love, loss. Some stories span across a life, and others, an evening. Perspectives will shift. Houses will burn. Lovers will learn their fate.
Zoe Terakes has skilfully blended myth and modernity to illuminate the complex and enduring truth of trans lives, resisting a history of erasure and delivering a sexy, soul-touching book to read to your lover … or yourself.
A First Nations author
I am Nannertgarrook
Tasma Walton
This powerful, heart-wrenching novel was joint winner of the 2025 ARA Historical Novel Prize: Adult category and is shortlisted for the 2026 Stella Prize! But if you need more convincing that this book is worth your time, our reviewer said 'This novel memorialises not only the stories of Walton’s ancestors but also immerses us in continuing Boonwurrung language and culture.'
From her idyllic life in sea country in Nerrm (Port Phillip Bay, Victoria), Nannertgarrook is abducted and taken to a slave market, separating her from a husband, daughter and son. Pregnant when seized, she soon gives birth to another son, whom she raises with the children of her fellow captives.
Nannertgarrook is separated not only from her Boonwurrung family, but from her birthright, but she must keep her old life alive in her mind for her and her new son. The rich, pulsating elements of their culture sing to us through her beautiful voice, even while Nannertgarrook herself is subjected to the worst of humanity.
A funny book
Good Citizens Need Not Fear
Maria Reva
Set immediately before, and after the fall of the Soviet Union, this brilliant and darkly funny novel-in-stories is inspired by Maria Reva's own family history. It's facinating, tragic and heartwarming.
A cast of unforgettable characters – citizens of the small industrial town of Kirovka – populate Maria Reva’s ingeniously entwined tales that span the chaotic years leading up to and immediately following the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989. Weaving the strands of the narrative together is an unforgettable, chameleon-like young woman named Zaya: an orphan turned beauty-pageant crasher who survives the extraordinary circumstances of her childhood through a compelling combination of ferocity, intelligence, stubbornness and wit.
Recommended by a Readings bookseller
Griefdogg
Michael Winkler
Michael Winkler, the author behind the cult hit Grimmish, is back with another triumph! And many of our booksellers are recommending this to everyone who walks into a Readings shop! Our reviewer, Clem Larkins said 'Griefdogg is a mediation on grief, universal and immediate, but also attachment and detachment.'
Meet Jeffrey Watson-Johnson- hydrologist, husband of Martine, father of Bern, model citizen of Mildura. But after he inherits a small fortune from an obscure aunt and has a disconcerting encounter with his cousin Pam, Jeffrey decides it's time to change everything. He tells Martine he wants to live as if he were the family pet.
Sleeping through the day or wandering beside the river, he discovers a new power – he can sense secret grief in others. What to do with this gift? Or with his awareness of the endless streams of water flowing unseen beneath the earth?
Looking for more recommendations? Check out the collection of books from the star-studded line-up of local and international writers appearing at MWF here.
And don't forget you can share and win! Show us how our prompts inspire your reading and you'll go in the draw to win a monthly prize! Find out more here.
