Patrick Allington

Of the pile of lit mags I read this year, Griffith Review 44: Cultural Solutions stood out – especially Maria Tumarkin’s blunt, riveting, challenging essay on storytelling. With my parochial South Aussie hat on, I pored over Tracey Lock-Weir’s Dorrit Black: Unseen Forces (Art Gallery of South Australia), an accompaniment to a terrific recent exhibition of Black’s work. Two David Malouf collections of previously published work, A First Place (5/14) and The Writing Life (both Knopf), reinforce the gently rebellious and deeply intelligent qualities of Malouf’s non-fiction. A First Place is the pick of the two. I found historian and novelist Michael Ignatieff’s Fire and Ashes: Success and Failure in Politics (Harvard, 5/14) enthralling. While Ignatieff’s account of his failed attempt to become Canada’s prime minister deserves no less a sceptical read than any other politician’s attempt at self-examination, Ignatieff prods himself with an unusually sharp stick.

Dennis Altman

Two novels stand out: Francine Prose’s Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 (HarperCollins) and Damon Galgut’s Arctic Summer (Atlantic Books). The first is based on the extraordinary career of a Parisian lesbian in the 1930s who ends up a Nazi collaborator; the second on E.M. Forster’s voyage of self-discovery, which resulted in Passage to India. Both have taken historical moments and re-imagined them in ways that expand our understanding of what the novel can do. Of Australian authors, I was moved by Lynne Segal’s Out of Time: The Pleasures and Perils of Ageing (Verso) and excited by Eli Glasman’s The Boy’s Own Manual to Being a Proper Jew (Sleepers, 10/14), a coming-out story set in ultra-Orthodox Jewish Melbourne.

Cassandra Atherton

I counted the days until the English-language edition of Haruki Murakami’s Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage (Knopf, 10/14) was released. The Kafkaesque narrative culminating in Tsukuru’s pilgrimage to find a ‘colour symbol’, identity, and happiness is wonderfully oneiric. Similarly, Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book (Giramondo, 9/13) is a fabulist tale of exile and the search for belonging. Her brilliant use of language sharpens the political content, so that Wright’s discussion of indigenous affairs and climate change is devastating. By contrast, Paul Ewen’s How to Be a Public Author (Text), written by his alter ego, Francis Plug, is a deranged comedy targeting Booker Prize winners. Finally, I have devoured all of Lorrie Moore’s short stories since first reading ‘People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk’. Her recent collection, Bark (Knopf, 8/14), crackles with its characters’ brittle disconnectedness.

Judith Beveridge

I love the lyrical fecundity and consciousness in Libby Hart’s new book of poems, Wild (Pitt Street Poetry). The book is full of transformative, magical moments, the language subtle and highly suggestive, all poems written with a sure and convincing hand. Her work is not dissimilar to the master, John Burnside, whose book All One Breath (Jonathan Cape), is captivating for its elegance, his ability to write about the fleeting and the ghostly, and yet remain grounded. Anthony Lawrence’s Signal Flare (Puncher & Wattmann, 2/14), is riddled with wonder and amazement, and is underpinned by meticulous precision. Many of the poems are meditations on nature, metaphysics, love, loss, and mortality. Todd Turner’s first collection, Woodsmoke (Black Pepper, 9/14), is full of poems that have been hard won. They have a distinctive, beautifully hewn physicality to them, and they are loaded with sonic and imagistic ore.

Tony Birch

My book of the year was the short story collection Heat and Light (UQP, 9/14) by the young Queensland writer Ellen Van Neerven. The stories evoke mystery and sensuality in equal measure, while the vivid portrait of landscape leaves the taste of dust in your throat and fear in your heart. Omar Musa’s Here Come the Dogs (Hamish Hamilton) delivers menace, beauty, and true poetry. Musa’s Australia is one that many of us know but turn away from. His voice is one we need to hear, loud and clear. The master of music writing, Greil Marcus, continues to deliver in his The History of Rock ‘n’ Roll in Ten Songs (Yale). When I was eleven I gave my first girlfriend a 45 record – ‘To Know Him Is to Love Him’ – by the Teddy Bears. I now know why it was the perfect choice.

James Bradley

One of the highlights of my reading year was Joan London’s wonderful new novel of exile and illness, The Golden Age (Vintage, 9/14). London has always been an exceptional novelist, but The Golden Age transcends anything she has done before, demonstrating a command of language and structure and a psychological acuity that is so perfect it feels effortless. Chris Flynn’s second novel, The Glass Kingdom (Text, 6/14), feels similarly effortless, although in Flynn’s case it is an effortlessness of voice that lends his pitch-perfect examination of the different ways men perform masculinity a deliciously dangerous edge. Finally, I adored Ali Smith’s Booker-shortlisted How to Be Both (Hamish Hamilton), a book that manages to be funny, sexy, ferociously intelligent, and wonderfully moving all at once.

Bernadette Brennan

It was wonderful to finally be able to read Helen Garner’s This House of Grief (Text, 9/14), a forensic, compassionate tale from a writer at the top of her form. Fiona McFarlane’s lyrical, spare, and haunting début novel The Night Guest (Hamish Hamilton, 12/13) opens our eyes and hearts to the vulnerability and beauty of the aged. Elizabeth Harrower’s In Certain Circles (Text, 5/14) was arguably the most exciting publishing event for Australian literature this year, allowing us to return to familiar characters and settings but also extending our appreciation of Harrower’s oeuvre. The third in Elena Ferrante’s ‘Neapolitan’ novels, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (Text, translated by Ann Goldstein) augments our understanding of Italian class politics in the late 1960s, continues the exploration of Lila’s and Elena’s relationship, and has much to say about female creativity and desire.

Shannon Burns

Dubravka Ugrešić has always been a fine aphorist and essayist. Although this collection Europe in Sepia (Open Letter, translated by David Williams) starts slowly, it soon gathers momentum. A highlight is her blistering rejoinder to Paulo Coelho, for his cheap derision of James Joyce. I greatly admired A Million Windows (Giramondo, 8/14).While it is possible to trace connections between Murnane’s fiction and other local and international writing, his books are anything but imitative or predictable, especially on a formal level. Murnane’s distinctive narration, coupled with emotional depth, makes for resounding fiction.No one seems to know exactly who Elena Ferrante is, but her fiction is as piercing and energetic as anything published in recent years. Elena Ferrante’s Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay matches the earlier volumes for fury and mastery. For Tramp-tragics like me, news of a Peter Ackroyd biography of Chaplin is cause for anxiety and anticipation. Thankfully, Charlie Chaplin (Chatto & Windus) proves to be a nicely compressed portrait of an immense and complex cultural figure.

Matthew Condon

I have looked forward to new books by Peter Carey since The Fat Man in History in the late 1970s. His latest novel – Amnesia (Hamish Hamilton, 10/14) – carries the same peculiar electric current of his style and eye and ear for detail. This story of clapped-out left-wing journalist Felix Moore and a modern-day computer hacker is as wild, daring, and hilarious as anything he has written. Only Carey – with his pitch-perfect Aussie idioms – could successfully produce a narrative that combines the Battle of Brisbane in 1942, the sacking of Gough Whitlam, Australian international relations, and cyberspace. Another terrific read about truth and fakery is Adam Shand’s The Real Chopper (Penguin), about the life and times of criminal and clown Mark ‘Chopper’ Read. Shand expertly dismantles the myth of career gangster ‘Uncle Chop Chop’, exposing a common, albeit earless, spiv and bunk artist.

Miriam Cosic

The Quest for a Moral Compass: A Global History of Ethics by Kenan Malik (Atlantic Books) is an elegantly written moral history for our disoriented times: curious, open-minded, and not confined to the Western tradition. The Muslims are Coming!: Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror by Arun Kundnani (Verso) is carefully researched and impeccably argued. A rare cool voice in a usually heated discourse, it gives the Muslim view without special pleading. Terry Eagleton’s Culture and the Death of God (Yale) analyses with his usual lucidity and wit the concomitant rise of atheism and religious fundamentalism. And Christine Kenneally’s The Invisible History of the Human Race: How DNA and History Shape Our Identities and Our Futures (Black Inc., 12/14) is simply a fabulous read. An intriguing, thought-provoking update on the nurture–nature debate, it is dense with information and full of arcane ‘Hey, did you know this?’ moments.

Peter Craven

Helen Garner’s This House of Grief – full of vividly observed visual detail and brilliantly overheard snippets of dialogue – is a riveting account of the Farquharson trial. It is a representation of the most heartbreaking things in the world, but it is vibrant with life and drama. Anne Carson’s Red Doc> (Jonathan Cape) – a long poem, dramatic and powerfully sustained – is a monument to the ongoing genius of one of the greatest poets of the last half century, who happens to be at the height of her powers. It is fresh, unpredictable, and strange. Jean Findlay’s Chasing Lost Time: The Life of C.K. Scott Moncrieff: Soldier, Spy and Translator (Chatto & Windus) is a compelling account of the greatest translator of prose of the last century, the man who ensured that Proust would be an instant classic in English. Scott Moncrieff turns out to be all sorts of other things as well: soldier, spy, man searching for god and tumbling with boys, and who also seems to have had a blinding charm and a scathing capacity for self-mockery and wit, dead at forty.

Glyn Davis

 Amid so many politicians looking back, it is important someone is thinking ahead. Maxine McKew’s Class Act: Ending the Education Wars (MUP) surveys new research about schools. Her case studies suggest what is possible in the classroom with leadership and imagination. David Malouf’s Earth Hour offers a poet of apparent simplicity, looking at the world still with wonder. Out of such and such and bric-a-brac: brilliance. In Reading Dante: From Here to Eternity (Liveright), Prue Shaw draws together her lifetime of reflection on The Divine Comedy. She uses a handful of themes to link text, biography, and commentary. Julian Barnes is always intriguing. Levels of Life (Jonathan Cape) offers an unexpected metaphor to explore the death of a partner.

Geraldine Doogue

A Spy Among Friends, Kim Philby and The Great Betrayal, by Ben Macintyre (Bloomsbury 9/14). Do we really need yet another book on Philby? The answer is clearly yes. This brilliant work fleshes out the culture and family that produced Philby and his mates by portraying the perfect-storm territory of end of empire that produced a remarkable batch of high achievers, accustomed to power and protecting their class reflexively, even amid betrayal. Anthropological psychoanalysis without peer. I have never read an Australian story quite like Kerry Stokes: The Boy from Nowhere, by Andrew Rule (HarperCollins). The ‘giants’, Packer and Murdoch, seem reduced to orthodox achievers. This book could have been shorter with more editing, but Rule writes some bravura character-sketches using his marvellous material – the pitch for the film maybe? The Durack sisters have always fascinated me as a fellow Sandgroper. In True North, The Story of Mary and Elizabeth Durack (Text, 4/12), Brenda Niall has distilled their story with deftness and respect, both for the women and their ‘country’, the Kimberley. Last, I’d nominate The Stories, by Jane Gardam (Little, Brown). I’ll read anything she writes for her wit, compassion, and structure.

Morag Fraser

 John Wiltshire is a fine scholar and a model reader, so it is no surprise – although a considerable pleasure – that his latest book, The Hidden Jane Austen (CUP), takes us deep into the ‘hidden’ motives, impulses, and fallible memory of Austen’s characters. You think there is nothing more to learn about Austen’s world? Think again. This morally astute, effortlessly erudite study makes Austen exhilaratingly new. With the Republican surge, and Senator John McCain rattling sabres as head of the US Armed Services Committee, we should be keeping a very close eye on the implications of Australia’s strategic dependence on Washington. Dangerous Allies (MUP, 6/14), Malcolm Fraser’s historically dense, timely analysis of our ‘dangerous’ alliance, is the book to read. Controversial? Yes. Displacement, wars, and long-nurtured ethnic and nationalist rancour afflict every continent. British author Aminatta Forna’s heritage is Scottish and African, but The Hired Man (Grove Press), her third novel, set in a small Croatian village, is a profound and disturbing index of our times.

Jackie French

The job of a novel is to enchant. Tiger Stone by Deryn Mansell (Black Dog Books) is set in fourteenth-century Java, in the shadow of the rumbling volcano Mount Merapi. It is depicted by insight and authenticity. The Rat Catcher’s Daughter by Pamela Rushby (HarperCollins) evokes bubonic plague in 1900 Brisbane, superbly researched, a period forgotten by school history books, deeply relevant as we face the real and mythologised threats of Ebola. A good book transcends its genre, as does Rod Clement’s picture book Top Dog (HarperCollins). I bought three copies, one for a toddler, one for myself, one for my fifty-year-old brother. ‘Simple’ needs not be simplistic, and short can be (hilariously) profound.

Andrew Fuhrmann

We’re People Who Do Shows: Back to Back Theatre – Performance, Politics, Visibility (Performance Research Book) is a gift for anyone interested in Australian theatre: a unique perspective on one of the country’s great performing arts companies. The most engrossing new fiction I have read this last year is Nanni Balestrini’s Vogliamo Tutto: The Novel of Italy’s Hot Autumn (Telephone Publishing). It is a picaresque for 1969, as a rascally but charming young southern worker joins the struggle at a Fiat plant in Torino. The book is an Italian classic, but this is its first – long overdue – appearance in English, published by an enterprising new Melbourne firm. There seems always to be less time for poetry, but again and again I have come back to David Malouf’s Earth Hour, a collection of quiet insights and accumulating grace.

 Andrea Goldsmith

Damon Galgut is an astute and wise novelist, employing a prose style both elegant and punchy. In Arctic Summer, Galgut fictionalises E.M. Forster’s travels in India, exposing the agonies Morgan experiences as he tries to suppress and express his homosexual desires. Poor Morgan, how well we come to understand his yearnings. Judith Beveridge’s new book, Devadatta’s Poems (Giramondo, 8/14), is a first-person narrative in the voice of the Buddha’s cousin, told in lush, sensual poems. Devadatta is convincingly portrayed as envious, jealous, and vitriolic, as well as a man capable of great tenderness. Read it for the story, linger on the poetry. One can only be grateful that Elizabeth Harrower’s In Certain Circles has at last been published. This quiet story of two brothers and two sisters reveals profound insights about seemingly ordinary human relations. It is a great novel.

Kerryn Goldsworthy

Joan London’s The Golden Age uses the literary traditions of the ‘coming-of-age’ novel and the ‘portrait-of-the-artist’ novel in her recreation of a complex time in Australian social history, when the wave of postwar immigration coincided with the polio epidemic of the early 1950s. This novel is full of quiet power and feeling, its themes of illness and exile amplified through some superb characterisation and a steady calmness of style and vision. Helen Garner’s This House of Grief recounts the protracted trial and retrial of a Victorian man for the murder of his three children in 2005. This is difficult material, both shapeless and dismaying, but Garner finds a structure for it and tackles its implications, head-on, with intelligence and warmth. As much an illuminating exploration of the justice system as it is the story of a crime, this book combines precision of style, depth of feeling, and detailed observation of human behaviour.

Lisa Gorton

Tracy Ryan’s Unearthed (Fremantle Press) is a collection of elegies. Alongside a translation of Rilke, it includes a sequence in memory of her ex-husband. These are thoughtful poems with an unusual complexity of tone. Paul Magee’s Stone Postcard (John Leonard Press, 8/14) also includes translations, mostly from Virgil’s Georgics, and brings a classical, cool, satiric eye to family and work. Bonny Cassidy’s Final Theory (Giramondo) makes a love poem out of a fragmented epic set at the end of human time. It is striking both for its ambition and for its attempt to capture a geological sense of place. David Malouf’s Earth Hour, on the other hand, is memorable for an intimate sense of place and language, which gives it imaginative continuity with An Imaginary Life.

Tom Griffiths

Mike Smith’s The Archaeology of Australia’s Deserts (CUP) is a profound and scholarly book that changes the way we think about the history of Australia. A major scientific work that is also a contribution to desert literature, it sits beside Ernest Giles, Spencer and Gillen, T.G.H. Strehlow, and H.H. Finlayson. I relished the brilliant début by gonzo journalist Sam Vincent in his intelligent, witty, brave book, Blood and Guts: Dispatches from the Whale Wars (Black Inc.). Vincent sails with Sea Shepherd and tastes minke sashimi in Japan to challenge our thinking about what is going on in the Southern Ocean: ‘Because it sure as hell isn’t about whales.’ I welcomed Germaine Greer’s entry into the ranks of our nature writers in White Beech: The Rainforest Years (Bloomsbury, 2/14), and I found Biff Ward’s In My Mother’s Hands: A Disturbing Memoir of Family Life (Allen & Unwin, 8/14) compelling.

Fiona Gruber

First cab off the rank is a recommendation for Will Eaves’s slim volume The Absent Therapist (CB Editions), shortlisted for the 2014 Goldsmiths Prize. Eaves is an English poet and novelist currently living in Australia. This collection of jottings offers brilliantly sharp, witty, and sometimes devastating observations and overhearings culled from two decades’ worth of notebooks and woven into an experimental narrative. I was also captivated by the A-Z of Convicts in Van Diemen’s Land, written and illustrated by Simon Barnard (Text, 11/14). Meticulously researched, beautifully produced, this is a vivid evocation of a horrible, fascinating period of Australian history and as much a book for adults as for children. Thirdly, the reissue of a masterpiece of nature poetry: OUP’s neat hardback edition of The Shepherd’s Calendar by John Clare, on the 150th anniversary of his death. It is illustrated with wood engravings by David Gentleman.

Gideon Haigh

Nobody is publishing short fiction as inventive, unexpected, and satisfying as George Saunders, the stories in whose Tenth of December (Random House) have the scope of epic novels yet exhibit no sense of compression. Tony Birch’s The Promise (UQP, 5/14), meanwhile, stamped him as the outstanding Australian practitioner over shorter distances. There were too many damn Anzac books, though I suspect we haven’t seen anything yet. The most original was The Secrets of the Anzacs (Scribe) by Raden Dunbar, the story of the First AIF’s battle with venereal disease and its taint, meticulously researched and pleasingly written by a zealous independent scholar. Involved for much of the year in a foray into true crime, I spent a good deal of time schooling myself in the genre. The standard in Australia has been raised considerably by Julie Szego’s taut but sensitive anatomy of a miscarriage of justice, The Tainted Trial of Farah Jama (Wild Dingo Press, 6/14).

Sonya Hartnett

My choice is Hampton Sides’s In the Kingdom of Ice (Doubleday). In the closing years of the 1800s, the North Pole was one of the last largely unexplored parts of the planet; wealthy nations and brave men both competed and united in their efforts to conquer its mysteries. In 1879, Captain George DeLong set out on an Arctic expedition funded by a slightly mad newspaper publisher with a bloodlust for the next story, using maps provided by an even madder cartographer who hated to travel. The voyage would last three wretched years as disaster followed disaster, but the decency and stoicism and sheer steely courage of the USS Jeannette’s crew never falters; it is a humbling thing to read. Sides tells this epic story in clean, plain language. The explorers themselves never complain; it is only in the increasingly forlorn letters of DeLong’s lonely wife that we hear the sorrow that so often accompanies magnificent human endeavours.

Paul Hetherington

I would like to mention three Australian poetry books. Kevin Brophy has been writing poems for many decades and Walking: New and Selected Poems (John Leonard Press, 5/14) collects a good deal of that work. It is a captivating and essaying exploration of family and personal relationships, human quirkiness, and the extraordinariness of the mind and the imagination. Issues of personal identity are beautifully nuanced in a variety of poems. Lisa Jacobson’s South in the World (UWA Publishing, 11/14) is a gratifying new collection of lyrics from the author of the award-winning verse novel The Sunlit Zone. These are down-to-earth and sometimes disarmingly simple. They are also frequently poignant and inventive, all of them encouraging a pleasurable slow reading. Alex Skovron’s Towards the Equator (Puncher & Wattmann) gathers the best of his poetry published to date along with ruminative new works, taking the reader into a variety of reflections about language, culture, history, time, and autobiographical memory.

Kate Holden

Somehow I neglected new Australian fiction in favour of old works (finally I discovered Patrick White, adding The Tree of Man to my all-time top five), but two works of non-fiction added lustre to the year: Lee Kofman’s nerve-rackingly candid memoir of exploring non-monogamy, The Dangerous Bride: A Memoir of Love, Gods and Geography (MUP) and Helen Garner’s extraordinary This House of Grief. Too often I wonder if my life will be diminished if I don’t finish the book I’m reading and conclude that it won’t; these two works pass the test. Both of them are brave, elegant, intelligent, and say something important, something new to my experience. What more could you ask?

Sarah Holland-Batt

In poetry this year, an atypically expansive Louise Glück is at the height of her powers in Faithful and Virtuous Night (Carcanet), an unflinching meditation on mortality in the voice of a fictional male British painter. Claudia Rankine follows up her extraordinary Don’t Let Me Be Lonely with Citizen: An American Lyric (Graywolf Press), an inventive, unsettling interrogation of so-called ‘post-racial’ twenty-first-century America that, after Ferguson, feels more urgent than ever. Maria Takolander’s apocalyptic, menacing poems shine in The End of the World (Giramondo). Takolander dwells in viscera, madness, and the macabre. After the book’s close, as the poet says, ‘we are swallowed by silence as if by a tomb’. In fiction, Fiona McFarlane’s mesmeric début, The Night Guest, is both a taut psychological thriller and a moving study of dementia and ageing. McFarlane’s luminous prose haunts; The Night Guest places her in the first rank of her generation.

Nicholas Jose

Two novels surprised me this year. One is The Night Guest by Fiona McFarlane, who handles an unusual, pertinent subject so inventively, creating comedy, suspense, and uplift with great writerly flourish. I liked the odd Fiji past that haunts her old widow on the South Coast, vulnerable to what she hasn’t done in life as well as what she might still do. The other novel is Carrie Tiffany’s Mateship with Birds (Picador, 2/12), which I prize for its tender, precise language, its attentiveness to physical life, and its slow burn. Mating takes on so many meanings in this assemblage of characters and creatures, including kookaburras that I look at afresh. Also, as we mourn his loss, let me commend Simon Leys’s The Hall of Uselessness (Black Inc., 2/12), which contains one of the most resonant essays ever written about China: ‘The Chinese Attitude Towards the Past’.

Paul Kane

Mark Strand’s Collected Poems (Knopf) is an essential book, with the whole exceptional career laid out before us from beginning to end (since Strand has retired from poetry). No one writes like Strand, though many of us wish we could. Barry Hill’s long-awaited Peacemongers (UQP) was worth the wait and is worth its weight in platinum. As with Broken Song, Hill writes with reckless disregard for generic distinctions: deeply learned, deeply poetic, his non-fiction is provocative and profoundly meditated. Jeffrey Harrison is a poet to relish. Engaging and affecting, in a voice and style unmistakably American, the poems in his latest collection, Into Daylight (Tupelo Press), give pleasure – as Wallace Stevens says they must. Marilynne Robinson’s new novel, Lila (Hachette, 12/14), completes her trilogy set in fictional Gilead, Iowa, which now takes its place with Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County. She is a powerful and incisively intelligent writer.

Joy Lawn

Alice Pung’s first Young Adult novel, Laurinda (Black Inc.), is a biting yet compassionate exposé of scholarship girl Lucy Lam’s experience at a prestigious private school with a culture of bullying. Best novel for younger readers is Rosanne Hawke’s Kelsey and the Quest of the Porcelain Doll (UQP). Hawke masterfully illuminates the culture of Pakistan in her perfectly structured tale. Elise Hurst reaches new heights in her exquisite picture book Imagine a City (Omnibus, 8/14). Fantastical drawings in black pen and ink enhance a minimal text to unleash children’s imaginations. In The Hole by Øyvind Torseter (Wilkins Farago), recently translated from Norwegian into English, a man moves into an apartment and finds a hole. There is a literal hole on every page of this sophisticated picture book. The precise line drawings tell the fascinating story.

Mark McKenna

Iain McCalman’s The Reef: A Passionate History (Viking, 3/14) is one of Australia’s finest histories of place. Through a succession of memorable biographical portraits, McCalman gives us a human history of the Great Barrier Reef, one that embroiders science, history, and deep environmental knowledge. No other historian writes with McCalman’s lightness of touch. Don Watson’s The Bush: Travels in the Heart of Australia (Hamish Hamilton, 10/14) will endure as one of a handful of books that reveal both the magic of the Australian bush and the sorry history of our attempts to tame and conquer it. The final volume of Alan Atkinson’s The Europeans in Australia (NewSouth, 11/14) brings to an end one of the most imaginative and sustained efforts to understand Australia up to the end of World War I. Atkinson sees and hears the past (and country) like no one else. Rereading Alex Miller’s Journey to the Stone Country (Allen & Unwin, 10/02) has taught me much about what it means to live in the bush, while Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways: a Journey on Foot and W. G. Sebald’s A Place in the Country, have remained constant sources of inspiration.

Brian Matthews

Janette Turner Hospital’s The Claimant (Fourth Estate, 6/14) is a vast, dense, utterly absorbing story which Turner Hospital manages with beguiling and attractive ease. She is a splendid prose stylist, unselfconsciously in command of her art and confident in exploring its intricate possibilities. The Critic in the Modern World: Public Criticism from Samuel Johnson to James Wood (Bloomsbury, 10/14), by James Ley, is an elegant, witty reminder that intelligent, illuminating literary criticism is still possible and can be generally accessible and page-turningly interesting. In his latest volume of poems, Us, Then (Victoria University Press), Vincent O’Sullivan, arguably New Zealand’s greatest living writer, casts a quizzically compassionate eye on life, on death, with his customary mordant wit and haunting plangency. Javier Marías’s The Infatuations (Knopf) is an extraordinary, lushly written novel of love, violence, and the inscrutability of human motivation in which the action unfolds with glacial yet irresistible deliberation.

Paddy O’Reilly

 It has been a plentiful and vintage year for short story collections. I found The Secret Maker of the World by Abbas El-Zein (UQP, 4/14) elegant, meditative, and compelling, with stories spanning centuries and the globe. Ceridwen Dovey’s collection Only the Animals (Hamish Hamilton, 5/14) has already received much praise for its playful, erudite channelling of human tragedy through animal speakers. As for novels: a quiet and evocative début novel on grief and the work of love has stayed with me: Letters to the End of Love by Yvette Walker (UQP, 6/13). From overseas, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler (Serpent’s Tail) is a gripping story that asks important questions about our humanity in a voice simultaneously funny, biting, and furious.

Felicity Plunkett

Each of these works explores, in its way, resilience, creativity, and the possibilities of renewal after grief. Blazing and tender, David Grossman’s Falling out of Time (Jonathan Cape) has its origins in the death of Grossman’s son. Part-play, part-score, part-poetry, its slivers of exquisite lyricism express the quietude and cacophony of mourning. Helen Garner’s empathic and intelligent work of jurisprudential exploration This House of Grief has a similarly unflinching focus on the aftermath of grief and the idea of love’s ambivalence. Ali Smith’s How to Be Both traces loss and gain in a brilliant palimpsest, striking for its melding of bravura with emotional delicacy, and for the glorious young protagonist at its centre. Lila, the third of Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead novels, builds its quiet power from the angular beauty of its imagery and its insistence on the wild, unruly energies of grace.

Nicolas Rothwell

Few books published in our day enjoy much of an afterlife: very few grow or take on fresh resonances with passing time. One that has lingered in my thoughts is Mark McKenna’s majestic history of the southern Monaro, Looking for Blackfellas’ Point: An Australian History of Place (UNSW Press, 2/03). It is a reconciliation history, and the book’s first appearance in 2002 did much to reshape regional understanding of the past and its dispossessions. It was released in an updated edition this year, with a poignant afterword, describing the author’s sense of connection to the place where he composed his book, and where he lives to this day, ‘the one patch of land to which I most instinctively belong’. What did McKenna find there? ‘Solitude. Nature. Distance. Space. Independence. My voice is tied inextricably to the aesthetics of this one place.’ It is a book full of insight: it has a distinctive charm. In it the local takes on universal import. It stands as a model of its genre.

Susan Sheridan

The most extraordinary novel I read this year was the Miles Franklin Literary Award winner, All the Birds, Singing, by Evie Wyld (Vintage, 7/13). As the mystery of the protagonist’s past is gradually revealed, a story of violence and cruelty surfaces. Wyld’s style is visceral and elliptical: it creates an atmosphere of haunting guilt where an island prison, and a person with a scarred back, can suggest Australia’s convict past. Among the many war stories that appeared, two stand out: A God in Every Stone by Kamila Shamsie (Bloomsbury, 12/14), which offers a brilliantly different take on World War I. Ashley Hay’s second novel, The Railwayman’s Wife (Allen & Unwin, 5/13), deals beautifully with loss, mourning, and consolation, on the part of two men returned from war service, and of a woman suddenly widowed.

Ruth Starke

I cannot remember when the demise of a goat has ever affected me much, but I felt more than a pang when Kwame exited the pages of Figgy in the World (Omnibus, 9/14), Tamsin Janu’s début novel of an endearing young heroine and her pet who set off from her home in Ghana to walk to America to get medicine for her sick grandmother. I was delighted that Catherine Jinks’s City of Orphans: A Very Singular Guild (Allen & Unwin) provided such an exciting, satisfying, and Dickensian end to a wonderful and highly original series; I will miss Birdie and the bogling! For older teenagers, Rose Under Fire (Hardie Grant Egmont) by Elizabeth Wein is a brilliant but harrowing read about a young pilot with the Air Transport Auxiliary in World War II who is captured by the Germans and sent to Ravensbrück where her survival is dependent on a remarkable group of women.

Jane Sullivan

This was the year I discovered the Norwegian confessor, Karl Ove Knausgaard. I read Boyhood Island (Vintage, 10/14), the third in his My Struggle cycle of six novels cum memoirs, immediately went back to read the first, A Death in the Family (Vintage), and cannot wait to read the rest. How does he do it? How can he write page after page about making coffee, cleaning up a messy house, walking to the refuse tip, and yet make it so mesmerising? All I know is he alternates philosophical distance with close-up emotion, and the space between vibrates with tension. That weaving of distance and emotion is strong too in Helen Garner’s This House of Grief. Always subjective, never purporting to fathom what is essentially unfathomable, it is a brilliant piece of storytelling that never relaxes its grip. And I loved the jolts Maxine Beneba Clarke delivered in her fierce short stories in Foreign Soil (Hachette, 6/14).

Martin Thomas

As Tom Lehrer said when the Great War celebrated its fiftieth, ‘It’s been a good year for the war buffs.’ While I have avoided the orgy of 1914 commemoration, Photography and the American Civil War (Metropolitan Museum of Art) transported me to an earlier warzone. Jeff L. Rosenheim’s scholarship is as magnificent as the reproductions, and there is no whiff of nostalgia. On the personal impact of war, one Great War veteran’s story moved and enthralled me. Victorian farmer Rex Battarbee was peppered with bullets in France. Permanently disabled, he took up painting, went on bush trips to the Centre, and met Albert Namatjira, whom he tutored as a water-colourist. Martin Edmond’s Battarbee and Namatjira (Giramondo) is a dual biography of the artists and a finely calibrated meditation on the larger process of engagement between cultures. Finally, I was absorbed by Gardens of Fire: An Investigative Memoir (UWA Publishing, 12/13). Robert Kenny’s memoir about loss and retrieval in the wake of bushfire is an enduring testimony to Black Saturday as the sixth anniversary approaches.

Kim Williams

Three books stood out for me this year: Inside the Hawke and Keating Government: A Cabinet Diary by Gareth Evans (MUP, 12/14); and two Penguin Press titles The Most Dangerous Book: the Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses by Kevin Birmingham and The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State, by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge. Each of these books deals with exceptionally different aspects of politics, society, and the law. Evans gives a gripping blow-by-blow account of policy and law-making inside the Cabinet room. Birmingham traces the genesis, creation, banning, and arduous passage to eventual legal publication and release of the twentieth century’s masterpiece, Ulysses. It provides fascinating, accessible scholarship. Mickelthwait and Wooldridge, applying their forensic Economist skills (editor-in-chief and Schumpeter columnist respectively), cast an erudite net over the evolutionary phases of democratic government, current Western paralysis, vast regional power shifts, and the unprecedented challenge for continued effective reform.

Robyn Williams

I steeled myself this year for two rugged reads about Japanese atrocity: Richard Flanagan’s magnificent The Narrow Road to the Deep North (Vintage, 10/13) and Vogel winner Christine Piper’s After Darkness (Allen & Unwin, 9/14). Both, in different ways, were so well written that the pain did not cloud my immense enjoyment. Eleanor Catton’s Luminaries (Granta) seemed to be a challenge of sheer size but her control of this Dickensian saga made me relish every Booker-winning page. Stephen Hawking’s My Brief History (Bantam Press, 12/13) was direct and charming; above all, it answered that supreme question: how can he endure being locked up in that broken body?’ His answer: you concentrate on what you can do, not what you can’t. Finally, a mystery book: Critical Mass by Duronimus Karlof (Ivory League). It is a wonderfully capricious satire and lampoons establishment science like no other. Who on earth (or beyond) could this Karlof be? And how could he be so terribly rude about Harvard?

Geordie Williamson

The praise lavished by myself and others on Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North is wholly deserved, but in a strong year for Australian fiction it is worth drawing attention to two books published in its shadow. Two thousand and fourteen saw the appearance of Elizabeth Harrower’s long-awaited final novel In Certain Circles – forty-odd years late and worth every second of the delay. Joan London is another who takes her time. The Golden Age is only her third novel in a writing career that spans almost three decades, yet it is the work of an author in total command of her material. Finally, Michel Faber’s new novel, The Book of Strange New Things (Canongate), is also apparently his last. There is a quiet and terrible certainty about its unfolding – a dreamlike lucidity in its descriptions. It is also one of the saddest stories I have read.