Selecting Australia's Top 100 Books of the 21st Century

The Australian Broadcast Company (ABC) Radio National began soliciting votes on 1 September 2025 from listeners to nominate their favourite books of the 21st Century.  All books published between 1 January 2000 and 31 August 2025, are be eligible. You could select from a list of hundreds of books, or write-in your own title. Voting closes on 30 September and over two days, 18-19 October, Radio National conducted a countdown of the top 100. 

While we await the compilation of the Top 100 list, I thought I would share my votes and the ones I hope make the cut. 

My Top 10

I participated in the vote and found it devastatingly difficult to pick only ten titles. In fact, I had dozens on my shortlist and kept trading them off until I came up with a list of books I love. 

My list includes Australian authors Anna Funder (Stasiland), Charlotte Wood (The Natural Way of Things), Heather Rose (The Museum of Modern Love), Helen Garner (This House of Grief), Hannah Kent (Burial Rites), Sarah Krasnostein (The Trauma Cleaner) and Richard Flanagan (The Narrow Road to the Deep North). That didn't leave much room for others but I managed to squeeze in Barbara Kingsolver (Demon Copperhead), Elizabeth Strout (Olive Kitteridge) and Percival Everett (James). As soon as I voted, while satisfied with my list, I immediately felt the loss of the other titles that didn't make the cut. 

If I had the opportunity I would have added to this list:

• Margaret Atwood - The Testaments (2019)
• Graeme Macrae Burnet - His Bloody Project (2015)
• Eleanor Catton - Birman Wood (2023)
• Susanna Clarke - Piranesi (2021)
• Jennifer Down - Bodies of Light (2021)
• Jennifer Egan - A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010)
• Anne Enright - The Wren, The Wren (2023)
• Tayari Jones - An American Marriage (2018)
• Andrea Levy - Small Island (2004)
• Joan London - The Golden Age (2014)
• Emily Maguire - Rapture (2024)
• Cormac McCarthy - The Road (2006)
• Ian McEwan - Atonement (2001)
• Ian McGuire - The North Water (2016)
• Madeline Miller - Circe (2018)
• Emily St John Mandel - Sea of Tranquility (2022)
• Maggie O'Farrell - Hamnet (2020)
• Lionel Shriver - We Need to Talk About Kevin (2003)
• Douglas Stuart - Young Mungo (2020)
• Donna Tartt - The Goldfinch (2014)
• Colm Toibin - Brooklyn (2009)
• Sarah Winman - Still Life (2021)
• Alice Winn - In Memoriam (2023)
• Charlotte Wood - Stone Yard Devotional (2023)

I am hoping that all of these will land on the Top 100 list when it is revealed in a few weeks. Can't wait to find out. In the meantime, there is still time to vote!

Booker Prize Shortlist 2025

The Shortlist was announced last night for the 2025 Booker Prize. The thirteen titles on the Longlist have been whittled down to six:

• 
  Susan Choi - Flashlight (USA)
• Kiran Desai - The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny (India)
• Katie Kitamura - Audition (USA)
• Ben Markovits - The Rest of our Lives (USA)
• Andrew Miller - The Land in Winter (UK)
• David Szalay - Flesh (Hungarian-British)

This shortlisted authors are all veteran, critically acclaimed writers. Desai won the Booker in 2006 for The Inheritance of Loss and should she win this year she would join a small group of distinguished double winners - Margaret Atwood, Peter Carey, JM Coetzee and Hilary Mantel.

Chair of the judging panel, Roddy Doyle, said of the shortlist:

The six [shortlisted books] have two big things in common. Their authors are in total command of their own store of English, their own rhythm, their own expertise; they have each crafted a novel that no one else could have written. And all of the books, in six different and very fresh ways, find their stories in the examination of the individual trying to live with – to love, to seek attention from, to cope with, to understand, to keep at bay, to tolerate, to escape from – other people. In other words, they are all brilliantly written and they are all brilliantly human.’

I haven't read any of these novels yet. I have heard lots of great things about Flashlight, The Land in Winter and The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny so will likely start there, although Desai's book is not available in Australia until 30 September. 

The Winner of the Booker Prize, and recipient of £50,000, will be revealed on 10 November 2025. Happy reading!

National Book Award 2025 Longlist

The New Yorker has announced the longlist for the 2025 National Book Awards. These annual American literary awards have been presented since 1936. Each finalist received $1000, a medal and a citation, while the winners get $10,000 and a bronze sculpture. 

Past recipients include: William Faulkner (Collected Stories 1951; Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man 1953); Philip Roth (Goodbye Columbus, 1960); Joyce Carol Oates (them 1970); William Styron (Sophie's Choice 1980); John Irving (The World According to Garp 1980); John Updike (Rabbit is Rich 1982); Alice Walker (The Colour Purple 1983);  Don DeLillo (White Noise 1985); E Annie Proulx (The Shipping News 1993); Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections 2001); Jesmyn Ward (Salvage the Bones 2011); and Percival Everett (James, 2024)

The Longlists for 2025 are as follows:

Fiction

• Rabih Alameddine, The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother)
• Susan Choi, Flashlight
• Angela Flournoy, The Wilderness
• Jonas Hassen Khemiri, The Sisters
• Megha Majumdar, A Guardian and a Thief
• Kevin Moffett, Only Son
• Karen Russell, The Antidote
• Ethan Rutherford, North Sun: Or, the Voyage of the Whaleship Esther
• Bryan Washington, Palaver
• Joy Williams, The Pelican Child

Moffett and Rutherford are debut writers. Susan Choi is a past winner, having received this award in 2019 for Trust Exercise. She is also Longlisted for the Booker for Flashlight, so I reckon she has a good chance of taking the National Book Award.

Non-Fiction

• Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
• Caleb Gayle, Black Moses: A Saga of Ambition and the Fight for a Black State
• Julia Ioffe, Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy
• Fatemeh Jamalpour and Nilo Tabrizy, For the Sun After Long Nights: The Story of Iran's Women-Led Uprising
• Yiyun Li, Things in Nature Merely Grow 
• Lana Lin, The Autobiography of H Lan Thao Lam
• Ben Ratliff, Run the Song: Writing about Running about Listening
• Claudia Rowe, Wards of the State: The Long Shadow of American Foster Care
• Jordan Thomas, When It All Burns: Fighting Fire in a Transformed World
• Helen Whybrow, The Salt Stones: Seasons of a Shepherd's Life

Of all these titles, the one I have heard the most about is Li's Things in Nature Merely Grow about losing her two sons to suicide. She is an award winning writer and I imagine she will make the shortlist, if not win.

Poetry

• Gbenga Adesina, Death Does Not End at the Sea
• Gabrielle Calvocoressi, The New Economy
• Cathy Linh Che, Becoming Ghost
• Tiana Clark, Scorched Earth
• Rickey Laurentiis, Death of the First Idea
• Esther Lin, Cold Thief Place
• Natalie Shapero, Stay Dead
• Richard Siken, I Do Know Some Things
• Patricia Smith, The Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems
• Fargo Nissim Tbakhi, Terror Counter

Translated Literature 

• Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume (Book III) - Translated from Danish by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell
• Jazmina Barrera, The Queen of Swords - Translated from Spanish by Christina MacSweeney
• Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, We Are Green and Trembling -Translated from Spanish by Robin Myers
• Anjet Daanje, The Remembered Soldier - Translated from Dutch by David McKay
• Saou Ichikawa, Hunchback - Translated from Japanese by Polly Barton
• Hamid Ismailov, We Computers: A Ghazal Novel - Translated from Uzbek by Shelley Fairweather-Vega
• Han Kang, We Do Not Part - Translated from Korean by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris
• Mohamed Kheir, Sleep Phase - Translated from Arabic by Robin Moger
• Vincenzo Latronico, Perfection - Translated from Italian by Sophie Hughes
• Neige Sinno, Sad Tiger - Translated from French by Natasha Lehrer

Young People's Literature 

• María Dolores Águila, A Sea of Lemon Trees: The Corrido of Roberto Alvarez
• K Ancrum, The Corruption of Hollis Brown
• Derrick Barnes, The Incredibly Human Henson Blayze
• Mahogany L Browne, A Bird in the Air Means We Can Still Breathe
• Kyle Lukoff, A World Worth Saving
• Amber McBride, The Leaving Room
• Daniel Nayeri, The Teacher of Nomad Land: A World War II Story
• Hannah V Sawyerr, Truth Is
• Maria van Lieshout, Song of a Blackbird
• Ibi Zoboi, (S)Kin

Neapolitan Adventure

Last year I holidayed in Naples, inspired in part by the knowledge that Tara Moss' forthcoming book was set there. I had hoped to time my trip so that I could read the book and then walk in heroine Billie Walker's footsteps, but publication was delayed and my travels could not wait. This was perhaps fortuitous, as I was able to read the novel with a deep love of and familiarity with this beautiful city.

The Italian Secret (2025) follows private investigator Billie Walker's previous adventures in The War Widow (2019) and The Ghosts of Paris (2022). 

It's 1948 and Billie's business is booming. In addition to her trusty assistant Sam, Billy has now employed Shyla. Much of their casework still consists of female clients seeking evidence of infidelity to enable their divorce. For the most part, the agency procures what is needed to the client's satisfaction, but every so often things go awry. When one case ends in tragedy, Billie needs a break.

Billie organises a holiday to Naples, taking Ella, her mother, and Alma, her mother's companion, with her. The three women board the Luxor, a luxury cruise ship and set sail for Europe. Billie has another reason for wanting to get to Naples. She has found a stack of letters to her father from an Italian woman and she wants to understand who this woman was to her beloved dad. But before she can resolve that mystery, she has to deal with her nemesis Vincenzo Moretti. 

The Italian Secret is a gripping page-turner. Moss has found the perfect blend of adventure, historical fiction and mystery. She blends multiple storylines and vividly portrays the post-war period. Billie Walker is a fabulous heroine - smart, stylish and self-aware - who holds her own in a world which has different views about the role of women.

I love this series. While The Italian Secret can be read as a standalone novel, I strongly suggest reading these novels in order as there are story threads here which stem from the previous books. My reviews of other books in the Billie Walker series are available on this blog:

•  The War Widow (2019)
•  The Ghosts of Paris (2022)

The Hand of the King

Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall (2009), is the first book in a trilogy about Thomas Cromwell. Critically acclaimed, this historical novel won the Booker Prize (2009), the National Book Critics Circle Award (2009), and the Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction (2010). It was in the top ten of the New York Times Books of the Century and adapted into a BBC series. With this much hype, perhaps I was a bit nervous to read Wolf Hall in case I did not like it. Having just finished two long novels, I figured I had the stamina to get stuck into another big read and finally embark on this series.

Thomas Cromwell was born around 1485 in Putney. He fled a violent home as a young teen and took off to Europe, working his way across the continent, picking up language skills in French, Italian, Latin and Greek. He married Elizabeth Wyckes and had three children. By the 1520s Cromwell had established himself in legal circles as a brilliant mind and cunning advisor. In 1524 he became a trusted confidante of Lord Chancellor Cardinal Thomas Wolsey and soon found himself in the court of Henry VIII where he rose through the ranks to Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lord Privy Seal and Lord Great Chamberlain. 

After a brief look at Cromwell's life in Putney, Mantel takes readers to where the action begins, in 1529. King Henry VIII, desperate for a son and heir, seeks to rid himself of his wife of twenty-four years, Catherine of Aragon. He has his eye on Anne Boleyn, sister of his mistress Mary. In order to pursue Anne, Henry sought papal permission to annul his marriage and needs Cromwell's help to make Anne Queen. 

So who is Cromwell? In Mantel's telling, the Duke of Norfolk calls Cromwell 'you nobody from Hell, you whore-spawn, you cluster of evil, you lawyer' (p158). Cromwell is depicted as a street-smart schemer, a man who uses his intellect and wit to learn about everyone around him and influence the King. As Cromwell rises, he senses 'a great net spreading about him, a web of favours done and favours received' (p463). The King says 'I keep you, Master Cromwell, because you are as cunning as a bag of serpents' (p 501). Despite his characterisation as a man not to be crossed, he is also a family man and benefactor, supporting his expansive household of extended family and friends.

Mantel has clearly done her research and subtly adds historical references to give the story authenticity. She does not shy away from the brutality of life in the 1500s, the illness, executions and filth. I particularly enjoyed the description of Hans Holbein's efforts to paint Cromwell's portrait and his family's reaction to the completed work.

As someone already familiar with the events covered in the book, I was surprised that there were times that I was confused about what was happening. Perhaps it was because there were so many Thomases,  Henrys and Marys, that it was hard to keep track. This distracted me from enjoying the first half of the novel, as did Mantel's writing style and her frequent use of the phrase 'He, Cromwell, ...'. The chapter lengths did not help as some would go on for over fifty pages. Shorter chapters, with headings, would have assisted my reading.

Once the story reached 1529, the pace quickened and it was easy to become absorbed. The backgrounding, the efforts to get Thomas More to swear an oath about the line of succession, Anne Boleyn's scheming, and the discarded Catherine's resilience. By the time the novel reached its conclusion, I did not want it to end.

My reading was enhanced by listening to the audiobook narrated by Ben Miles. As much of the story relies on sharp dialogue, Miles infuses the characters with verve and energy, bringing the tale to life.

I have downloaded the audiobooks of the next two books in the series for when I continue my Wolf Hall adventures. Despite my misgivings about the first half of this book, I finished eager to journey with Cromwell to Wolf Hall. Plus, I want to read the next book Bring Up the Bodies (2012) so I can watch the first season of the BBC series. Stay tuned!