How might we measure the value of a locally produced book? Or, in a more collective sense, how might we put a value on a local books and literary sector, one that is distinct from the larger English-language markets of the Northern Hemisphere and attentive to our own regional and cultural ways of being, doing, and belonging? What does value mean in the context of the local book? And on whose terms might it be expressed?

In a recent university seminar, I wanted to give my students a sense of how capitalism is a way of being, rather than being the way of being. Hoping to paint an affective picture, I turned to personal anecdote.

Australian author Sofie Laguna has a gift for capturing the unique voices of the children and adolescents who inhabit her novels. It is a gift she attributes to her early career as an actor, when she enjoyed portraying children as much as she enjoys writing about them now. The common thread through each of her five adult novels, which have won and been shortlisted for multiple awards, is that they feature unusual, often troubled children or young adults whose lives are difficult because they have been let down or abused by the adults who care for them.

After Prime Minister Albanese called an unscheduled media conference at Parliament House on 26 August 2025, assembled journalists were surprised to see him accompanied by ASIO Director-General Mike Burgess. The reason quickly became apparent. The government was expelling the Iranian ambassador because of an ASIO assessment that Iran’s security services were behind two attacks on Australian Jewish premises in the second half of 2024.

Speaking in Tongues is a conversation between author J. M. Coetzee and translator Mariana Dimópulos. Structured in four themed chapters, the book is a digestible initiation into a philosophy of literary translation that doesn’t answer questions as much as asks them. Coetzee and Dimópulos note that the book ‘aspires to some general statements’, is ‘not a work written by or for specialists’, and has ‘no scientific aspirations’. This is a fair description. Speaking in Tongues only gently brushes against the big topics within its pages.

There is a fine tradition in Australia of two-volume prime ministerial biographies. John La Nauze on Alfred Deakin (1965), Laurie Fitzhardinge on Billy Hughes (1964, 1979), John Edwards on John Curtin (2017, 2018), Allan Martin on Robert Menzies (1993, 1999), Jenny Hocking on Gough Whitlam (2009, 2012): all are insightful and enduring accounts of significant figures who exerted deep influence on the country.

Welcome to a special issue of ABR, put together with the help of Melinda Harvey at Monash University. This issue focuses on the future of the book in Australia. The book, like other key nouns in that sentence – Australia, future – might now signify radically different things to each of us. This should not stop us thinking about how we can foster the acts of reading, listening, focusing, evaluating, and imagining – and how we might do it best in Australia – for our pleasure and elevation, for our cultural richness, for our democracy.

A university librarian mentioned in a recent conversation how a famous writer had sold his computer hard drive to an American archive without realising this could give future researchers a record of not only his emails but all the internet sites he had ever visited. Ian McEwan was not the author in question, but it is precisely such issues that frame the narrative of his latest novel: the first part is set a hundred years from now, while the second section consists of a fictional journal set in our own recent past. As the novel’s title suggests, a key concern here is epistemology – how lived human experience differs from knowledge in forms of representation and rationalisation.

As someone whose primary literary interest is Aboriginal writing, reviewing John Kinsella’s aptly titled Ghost of Myself means approaching his poetry with a different perspective from many of his readers. The coolness of the writing, combined with the sombreness of much of his observation of the world around him, gives an end-of-days tenor to the four sections that comprise Ghost of Myself.

Mark McKenna’s The Shortest History of Australia is the latest offering in Black Inc.’s Shortest History series (now nearing twenty titles). Combining erudition and expertise with good writing and respect for readers, the books aim to be more than a primer or a simple precis of common knowledge. Rather, the challenge of length imposed by the publisher and heralded in the title is generative for the history told. In both the text and in ensuing publicity, authors explain and justify how they tackled the task.