The New Wave of Australian Literature
Australia presents people with nothing short of a pristine environment for both creativity and discovery. So… the fact that the country keeps some of the most vibrant voices going transcends pure luck. The good news is, there’ll be plenty new Australian books to read in 2025.
Yep, we’ve been keeping those good juices flowing and Australian publishers have been busy pumping out one of our most impressive collections to date.
And it’s true, each year promises to display plenty of new works, from both the endearing and the emerging talents who are more than happy to bring their fresh voices to our bookshelves.
Now, with that said, I’ve selected 10 Australian books, from 2025 that merits your attention.
Each read arrives in the forms which range from sophisticated crime fiction, etc
So… without any further fluffing about, let’s hop straight to it, and… hopefully by the end you’ll consider adding some of titles to your reading list.
Unbury the Dead by Fiona Hardy
Fiona Hardy’s crime fiction debut introduces readers to two best friends Teddy and Alice.
They’re two fixers, of course, and they’ve appropriated themselves to navigating Melbourne’s criminal underworld. But, to get the job done, they’ll need to use their own internal intelligence, along with… nothing short of grit and determination.
To get the story rolling, Alice takes up a gig driving one of Australia’s wealthiest men to his final resting place—somewhere along the Victorian Coast— before news of his death hits the media.
Then, while all this is happening, Teddy goes digging through Melbourne’s suburbs, searching for a missing teenager.
But, just as all good writers do, Hardy ensures that their separate gigs cross paths.
And so… with all that in the meat works, and only after a startling revelation, they end up opposing their affluent employers.
Critics have described Unbury the Dead as a masterful blend of ever-changing crime and Australian noir, balancing grit and dry humour with effortless skill.
With that said, Hardy’s novel is no Pulp trash, and she employs the narrative—skilfully—to contrast the lives of the everyday battler against the well-to-do among Australia’s elite.
The story explores themes of friendship, morality, and justice via Teddy and Alice’s enduring relationship.
Readers who dig an unconventional protagonist will appreciate this fresh approach to crime fiction, but you will also find that there’s much to admire in this superbly fresh and pacey high-stakes drama.
Signs of Damage by Diana Reid
Diana Reid’s third novel—which bullocked its way onto bookstore shelves back in March 2025–promises to be a psychological thriller for the ages.
The narrative follows thirteen-year-old Cass.
Cass disappears during a family holiday in France, but then she’s discovered only a matter of hours later… in an old Icehouse no less without a mark or scratch on her body.
Now dig this… sixteen years later, Cass collapses in a seizure… at a family funeral of all the places.
This is a storyline which bounces between 2008 and 2024, and all the while it’s slowly and methodically uncovering all these hidden secrets which connect the Icehouse incident with the collapse, sixteen years after the fact.
Reid claims her latest drop is nothing more than a summer noir. However, readers will quickly notice how the narrative is all to do with the myriads of ways in which violence disrupts the status quo of life.
Elegy, Southwest by Madeleine Watts
Madeleine Watts’: Elegy, Southwest hits the shelves as nothing short of a poignant exploration of love, grief, and environmental decline.
Set against a devastating Camp Fire, the novel follows married couple Eloise and Lewis on a journey across America’s Southwest… all while wildfires are consuming the state of California.
Lewis is busy processing his mother’s recent death, and Eloise scratches her own itch by researching the diminishing Colorado River… for a dissertation she’s working on.
Now it’s no coincidence to Eloise, but she suspects there might be a bun in her oven. But while all this is going on, she also begins seeing her husband’s own mental health decline.
And what sets this narrative apart, I suppose is its perspective.
Told Eloise’s eyes, the reader sees firsthand how Eloise is addressing Lewis—which is quite directly, but it places an impetus upon a specific point in time, which in their case is after an unnamed catastrophe forcibly separates them.
Ultimately… what Watts has crafted here is a tragic love story—albeit one with an intelligent and profound spin of the way we’re currently living alongside our own environments’ breakdown.
The result is an authentic work of self exploration.
Always Home, Always Homesick by Hannah Kent
Hannah Kent is already a bestselling author… thanks to Burial Rites, so it should come as no surprise she’s hitting us with another banger’. However, in this climb up the literary mountain, she has ventured into the echelons of non-fiction.
And what readers will find, encapsulated within the book bindings is a captivating memoir about belonging… across multiple continents.
Always Home, Always Homesick finds its stride across three book sections.
The first is Kent’s own arrival… in Iceland as a seventeen-year-old exchange student, way back in 2003–when the planet was a little different.
The middle explores her return, some years later, to the very same country—albeit on a very planet now—and it’s here where she goes on a bit of a research journey to learn a little about Agnes Magnúsdóttir—the last woman executed in Iceland.
And consequently, or maybe not so consequentially, we all get to learn how Agnes became the foundation for Kent’s acclaimed novel.
The final part covers her most recent visit to Agnes’ execution site, where she now discovers a set of plaques that display lines from the aforementioned novel.
But what Kent’s achieved here is an elegantly crafted memoir that explores heimþrá (longing for home) and how one can belong simultaneously to two distinct places.
Kent also delves into Iceland’s literary culture and the longstanding traditions like Jólabókaflóð—the Christmas Eve book-giving custom that’s gained international recognition.
The Theory of Everything by Yumna Kassab
Yumna Kassab’s fifth book: The Theory of Everything promised to transcend literary conventions when it arrived back in March. And I reckon it well and truly hit this one out of the park.
But critics are already doing what critics love to do, and that’s assign some labels. And in this case, they’re describing The Theory of Everything as a fictional theory (for whatever that’s intended to mean), and as a rant or… a manifesto that defies conventional.
The book is effectively an anthology of five mini-novels or post-novels, all with their own unique titles: Game, Gender, Modern, Silver, and Absurd.
It opens with a powerfully violent allegory as it follows Ibrahim (an elite footballer), Lucille/Nour (a film star), and Jamal as they navigate questions surrounding and abounding in identity and belonging.
This work will appeal to readers who appreciate the intellectual challenge of literary innovation.
The Immigrants by Moreno Giovannoni
Moreno Giovannoni’s: The Immigrants: Fabula Mirabilis combines both fiction and memoir to bring home an authentic story of Italian migration… in post-WWII Australia, and the narrative begins with a young Italian migrant’s death in a petrol drum explosion… on a tobacco farm no less.
The focus then shifts to Ugo and Morena Giovannoni who are each working in tobacco fields north of Melbourne but end insight into their childhood via transcribed interviews where we learn about, courtship in Italy, and the challenges of immigrant life in Australian.
Giovannoni began writing in his sixties after a distinguished career as a translator and this work digs in deep to examine the overlooked costs of migration. The difficult agricultural conditions. Cultural discrimination, and the profound homesickness that goes along with it… if only to display his character’s resilience throughout a sense of displacement.
Do We Deserve This? by Eleanor Elliott Thomas
Do we deserve this… well bloody oath we do, and in Eleanor Elliott Thomas’s nuanced family drama we get a deep dive into questions of fortune, privilege, and dessert when a multimillion-dollar lottery ticket gets dropped into the melting pot.
Bean Halloway describes herself as the lone nobody in a family of ambitious somebodies, but she goes off and buys this lottery ticket, which was… intended to be for her glamorous mother Nina.
But an accident leaves Nina in a coma, and she never ends up receiving said ticket.
So, Bean and her siblings—which includes a dramatic pop star and a meticulous lawyer—decide to keep the ticket until their mother regains consciousness.
The situation gets a little tricky when an old romantic interest enters the frame.
Enter the gambling debt.
A vindictive former partner.
And the family secrets which are always waiting to appear.
Time Together by Luke Horton
Luke Horton’s: Time Together is nothing short of a refined examination into the long-term friendship. But in between the covers, there’s so much more… such as midlife reflections…all brought to the reader through the lens of a beach holiday reunion.
Sound familiar? Well, it isn’t
And picture this if you will: a group of friends… all in their forties… meeting at Phil’s parents’ beach house—after his mother’s passing.
The gathering includes pragmatic Jo and her younger, and undeniably politically minded husband.
There’s high-strung Bella, who is joined by her partner Tim.
And then there’s the recently single Annie.
All have their children in-tow… including a pre-adolescent girl who mirrors most aspects of her mother’s temperament.
What Horton creates here is relatable, but will a restorative retreat… which gradually descends into a revelation of longstanding tensions challenge everyone’s long-held beliefs?
One can only imagine what happens next—
Cure by Katherine Brabon
Katherine Brabon’s fourth novel hit the shelves via an insightful, if not exploratory perspective on chronic illness.
And when we peek deep inside of what that could mean, we soon find Vera and her teenage daughter Thea—who both share the same medical condition.
Each resolve to seek therapeutic intervention—in Italy.
But it’s here where the narrative veers off the predicted path and we begin to re-witness Vera’s past adolescent journey to Italy… all neatly juxtaposed against her daughter’s parallel experiences—all these years later.
But while Thea records her observations in a journal, Vera finds her own community in online forums where she can anonymously share her experiences.
Cure deeply complements Brabon’s earlier novel: Body Friend.
And while each novel examines women’s experiences with autoimmune conditions (circumstances Brabon understands personally) the atmospheric prose and shifting narrative in Cure moves to investigate the stories we construct about our own, individual wellness, healing, and memory—
The ultimatum lands in questioning whether narratives require factual accuracy to merit belief… or so the story goes!
Pictures of You by Tony Birch
Our final choice showcases Pictures of You: Collected Stories by Tony Birch
This is, without any doubt the most comprehensive anthology which represents Birch’s twenty-year career.
Each narrative, and the overarching narratives capture extraordinary moments within ordinary lives… all to create an unexpected connection between strangers.
But it’s Birch’s commitment to marginalised communities which will captivate readers the most—a fact that will become clear throughout this collection. Yet… all in the same breath, the said commitment is equally complemented by his advocacy for environmental justices.
Pictures of You won’t last long on your TBR list, and because Birch’s writing moves seamlessly between poignant, melancholic, and the humorously profound moments, it demands to be read.
As a respected Aboriginal Australian author, academic, and activist, Birch made history as the first Indigenous recipient of the prestigious Patrick White Award in 2017. His stories continue his significant examination of colonial oppression and intergenerational trauma while illuminating humanity within overlooked lives.
The Evolution of Australian Literature
Australian literature continues its impressive run in 2025, and what this selection illustrates is our remarkable range of narrative approaches from a variety Australian writers.
It contains stories of sophisticated crime fiction to experimental literary forms and even the deeply psychological.
But what all ten titles represent most is a carefully curated sample of Australia’s vibrant literary output.
And, whether you’re into psychological suspense, climate fiction, or just a good old family narrative—with some emotional depth—then this collection aims to offer a little bit of something for everyone.
[if you’re interested in reading some of my work, then please check out AFGHANI. It’s available at all major online retailers]
