November 2025, no. 481
In this special issue of Australian Book Review, we look at the future of the book in Australia. What do the rise in audiobooks, Silent Reading Clubs, and Gen Z’s preference for physical books tell us about where we are heading? To support the book industry now, Alice Grundy champions a new book bounty; and Julienne van Loon, Bronwyn Coate, and Millicent Weber argue that we must learn to quantify the cultural value of a locally produced book. We interview novelist and essayist Melissa Lucashenko, poet Eunice Andrada, and publisher Elizabeth Weiss. Cassandra Pybus explains why not all historic sources are equal in her review of a new history of Tasmania, and Bain Attwood considers the meaning of ‘truth’ in two ‘truth-telling’ Indigenous histories. Elsewhere, we review a new biography of Bob Hawke and a memoir by Bob Brown. Tony Hughes-d’Aeth, Mridula Nath Chakraborty, and Paul Giles review fiction by Tony Birch, Banu Mushtaq, and Ian McEwan, and Philip Morrissey reviews a new poetry collection from John Kinsella. In glancing to the future of the book, we celebrate the special value of human-produced creativity with an unpublished poem by Dorothy Porter.
November’s cover artwork is by Marc Martin.