From the MWF Team: A Summer Reading List
To help narrow down your TBR list, the MWF team have compiled some of our favourite reads from 2025 - plus some books we've been waiting to dive into.
Whether you plan to spend your holiday lying on the beach, strolling in the city, or escaping to cooler climates, we hope you'll have a great stack of books to keep you company.
Happy summer reading, everyone! ☀️
Adrian Basso, General Manager
I’ve just finished The Hiding Place, by Kate Mildenhall, which follows a group of inner-city Melbourne friends who buy a rural property together and somehow manage to let the whole thing unravel in a few short days. The (sometimes frustrating) characters are exaggerated versions of the people you might bump into but pushed far enough to feel satirical rather than familiar. Boundaries, egos and old tensions flare quickly, and the whole 'let’s build a little utopia together' fantasy goes off the rails in a way that’s amusing, tense and messy.
Next on my summer reading list: Helen Garner’s The Season. I’m looking forward to something quieter, more reflective, and firmly grounded in the way only Garner can manage.
Georgia Booth, Marketing and Partnerships Manager
Skipshock by Caroline O'Donoghue was one of my most suprising and favourite reads of the year. The story follows Margot and Moon – one is an ordinary teen from Ireland, the other an intergalactic travelling salesman – as they slip through dimensions in a world where power is determined by time and travel is highly restricted (I promise it makes sense when you read it). O’Donoghue has built a truly unique world in New Davia – one that I personally cannot wait to revisit when the sequel is released later in 2026!
I've spent the last few years absorbing almost everything Elizabeth Strout has ever written. In her interconnecting novels, Strout beautifully captures the quiet tragedies, triumphs and tensions that make up a life. Bob Burgess is one of my favourite characters of hers (and maybe ever?). I’m looking forward to meeting him again in The Burgess Boys – a story that follows Bob and his brother, Jim as they are brought back to their hometown after escaping to New York. It'll be the perfect accompaniment to leftover turkey sandwiches in the blurry days between Christmas and the New Year.
Stephanie Corne, Head of Marketing and Partnerships
Poetry, short stories, and essay collections are my go-to for the holiday season – all works that can be consumed between meals, naps and family interactions. Moana: Voices of Our Ocean, brings together poems from twenty Indigenous storytellers and descendants of Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa. An ode to the ocean, collective memory and ancestral bonds, it’s a beautiful anthology and powerful meditation on kinship.
Tayi Tibble (Te Whanau a Apanui/Ngati Porou) writes poetry that feels like reading private correspondence from a friend. Start with her lush 2018 debut Poūkahangatus, an absolute must-read. Witty, provocative, and razor-edged, Tibble’s poems leap through time and space, exploring colonisation and beauty, teenage encounters, and growing up in the era of the Twilight phenomenon.
Jamila Djafar Khodja, Senior Development Manager
I’m currently working my way through Dead and Alive, the new Zadie Smith essay collection (I love her so much I made my sister name her daughter Zadie). Smith's incisive and utterly honest analysis of our society as it stands today is somehow confronting, comforting and educational all at once. She has a quiet optimism about the power of books and literature in the face of the all-consuming Algorithm, which I'm finding very heartening.
One of my best friends has the most unfailingly good taste in books, and she's told me to read Our Wives Under the Sea, by Julia Armfeild, many times over the years. I always love her slightly spooky, eerie recommendations, so I'm finally going to read this on the beach this summer.
My book club always offers up a surprising read for the summer, and this year it's Assassin's Apprentice. I've never read a Robin Hobb book in my life, but I'm ready to start – they're calling it a 'hot fantasy summer'!
Karys McEwen, Education Advisor
This Stays Between Us is a thrilling YA novel by Margot McGovern. Four girls head off on a school retreat to a remote town, only to discover that a ghost is rumored to haunt isolated campers. As tensions rise and secrets unravel, what begins as a fun adventure becomes a tense fight for survival. Dark, clever, and perfectly pitched, this is a love letter to 90s-style slasher horror that will have you turning pages long after your sunscreen’s worn off.
Music Camp is a heartwarming, hopeful middle-grade story by Penny Tangey. Two very different girls win spots at a five-day music camp. As they navigate social differences, music-camp rivalries and looming weather disasters, they form unlikely friendships and learn what it means to belong and to believe in yourself. Full of warmth, it's exactly the kind of tender, big-hearted story that feels right for long, lazy summer afternoons.
Maya Honey-Holmes, Program Producer
I read Hot Milk by Deborah Levy for the first time earlier in the year, back when it was grey and miserable outside. I wish I'd saved it for summer so I could fully immerse myself in the sweaty, heady vibes. The story is slow, feminine and hypnotic. My favourite Goodreads review declares it “a bosomy paradise”, as there are, yes, many references to breasts throughout. I plan to recall some of Levy's beautiful lines and pretend I am having some wild affair in a tiny coastal Spanish village, while I'm really just trying to avoid sun exposure at Cottesloe.
I'm taking advantage of the break to get to the older titles in my TBR pile. I've been meaning to read High Fidelity by Nick Hornby for many years, after watching and loving everything about the film as a teenager - particularly Jack Black's performance. I like consuming adaptations in a backwards order, the book following the film. Nothing lost, nothing spoiled. I am hoping this book will live up to the hype and soon join my carefully kept list of desert island, all-time, top five most memorable reads.
Veronica Sullivan, Festival Director
I’ve just read Omar Musa’s brilliant new novel Fierceland. It’s a blazing, poetic exploration of power, inheritance and the natural world, epic in scope but with deeply human characters at its core.
This summer I will be treating myself with several long-awaited reads I’ve been saving for long days in the sun. Top of my list is R.F. Kuang’s Katabasis, for dark academia realness. I loved Kuang’s previous novels and her immersive world-building, and am hankering for a chunky escapist read. Also on my pile are books 1, 2 and 3 in Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume series, and Philip Pullman’s The Rose Field, one of my most anticipated books of the decade.