2025 WRAP UP EDITION

In this edition

+ From the desk

+ Holiday season hours

+ Staff faves of 2025

+ The Top 10 books of 2025

+ Events wrap up

+ Book Clubs wrap up

+ Deep Creek Residency Fellowship

From the Desk—2025 in Review

Dear Reader,

Welcome to this special bumper edition of the Matilda Bookshop Review, where we reflect on the momentous year that was in our little patch of books and reading.

It is our pleasure to provide some respite from the December whirlwind, by looking back over a year of fabulous Meet the Author Events, our book club sessions (of which there were seventy-four!), our very favourite reads and bestsellers of the year, the Deep Creek Residency, as well as letting you know about our holiday trading hours, and the new Ask Our Booksellers recommendation station.

For Christmas Shopping Night (Thursday December 18), we'll be supporting Foodbank SA for our Monthly Charity with 15% of all book sales going to their Christmas appeal. As the largest food relief organisation in Australia, Foodbank restores hope to people who are struggling by rescuing and sourcing food and distributing it to front line charities. With your help, we have supported 12 stellar charities this year, including The Indigenous Literacy Foundation, UNICEF's Gaza Emergency, Save The Children - Gaza appeal, The Hutt St Centre, and more.

Christmas is ever-closer, but don't worry, we have all your bookish needs covered, as well as stationery, beautiful cards, gift-wrapping, gift-vouchers, and subscription services. We are delighted to have our superb Summer Reading Guides for adults and kids in store. Peruse these carefully curated guides on our website here and here. If you've missed the Matilda Bookshop gift guides, you can find them again here: Children's Gift Guide; Fiction Gift Guide; NonFiction Gift Guide; Art/Food/Gardening Gift Guide.

A very big thank you to all of you for your support and love of our bookshop in 2025. We hope you have an incredible summer of reading.

Jo, Gavin, Molly, Kasey, Rose, Heather, Nadia & Emilie

Festive Season Trading Hours

Christmas Shopping Night

Join us after hours on Thursday December 18th ( open until 8pm) for peaceful browsing, awesome recommendations, bubbles, nibbles, free gift-wrapping all the while supporting Foodbank SA with 15% of book sales between 4 and 8pm donated to this worthy organisation.

Our Favourite Books of 2025

Top Ten Bestselling Books of 2025

Matilda Bookshop's Book of The Year

We have been devotees since January of David Szalay's Flesh, this year's Booker Prize winner. It's also our most favourite book and #1 bestseller of 2025.

To read our fascinating Q&A with Szalay, please click HERE.

"Writing, in a way, is a form of thinking. By that I don’t necessarily mean that it directly expresses concrete abstract thoughts."

"I wanted to use a language that was mostly concrete and precise. That mostly dealt with physical experience. That dealt with emotional experience mostly obliquely."

Meet The Author Events Wrap Up 2025

Our Meet the Author programme for 2025 has been simply stunning, and we've loved being able to bring some of our very favourite authors to you in person, across a stunning year of writing, publishing, reading, and chatting.

Highlights have included an exquisitely deep and radiant chat between Hannah Kent and Molly Murn, about the lure of Iceland, ghosts, storytelling, the creative life, and the Rotary exchange to Iceland that shaped a teenage Ms Kent into the electrifying writer she is today. To see the delight of so many young and passionate readers fill the gorgeous Regal Theatre to the brim to see their literary heroes Jessica Townsend and Craig Silvey (interviewed by the sublime Margot McGovern and Kasey Chambers, respectively) talk about Silverborn and Runt #2, is a Matilda Bookshop memory that we will treasure forever. Children are reading, and literature is powerful.

We'd also like to remember our beautiful evenings with Lainie Anderson, Heather Rose, Sofie Laguna, and Trent Dalton, as well as the chat between elder statesman Bob Brown and Senator Hanson-Young, which was both sobering and enlightening. Love Your Bookshop Day is always a reminder of just how important our beautiful community is to us, and we want to take this moment to thank you all again. Bookshops cannot flourish without readers.

We also thank all the authors, publishers, hosts, our event partners, and audience members, who contribute to an intellectually enlivening, and richly artistic events programme. More again next year.

In case you missed it: if you didn't get to read the absolutely incredible Author Q&As with some of our favourite voices, such as David Szalay, Catherine Lacey, Hannah Kent, Jane Rawson, Madeleine Watts, Zoe Dubno, Siang Liu and more, please click HERE.

Adult Book Clubs 2025

Wow! And yay! In 2025, we've hosted 48 sessions of adult book clubs, across three groups, once a month, in back-to-back meetings. With Matilda, Translated launching only in August 2025, next year will see us expanding to 60 meetings annually. Thank you to longtermers and newcomers who all contribute in making the shared passion of reading so pleasurable.

For further information about all of our fabulously dynamic book clubs, or to sign up in 2026, please click here.

MATILDA BOOKSHOP BOOK CLUB (TUESDAYS, MONTHLY)

Our book club has read some blazing books this year. From desert roadtrips and artmaking, to life on the margins of mighty rivers, to ghostly forests of snow and dreams, to spongediving and rock-ledge trysts, as well as odysseys in search of faith healers, and transformation while enduring the minutiae of traditional shrimp-fishing, we've enjoyed the deep engagement with humanity that reading diversely with peers, provides.

#1 Book Club Read: Seascraper by Benjamin Wood

RED DOOR BOOK CLUB (WEDNESDAYS, MONTHLY)

The 2025 Red Door Book Club experience started in the afterlife and then led us to Italy, dust bowl USA, New York, ancient Mexico, ancient China, and back to New York a couple more times. Over 10 wonderful chats we expanded our reading repertoire and finally voted on our favourite book of the year, with Ghost Cities by Siang Lu just squeaking into first place.

#1 Book Club Read: Ghost Cities by Siang Liu

MATILDA, TRANSLATED BOOK CLUB (THURSDAYS, MONTHLY)

For our first year of Matilda, Translated, we began traversing the wide world of literature, reading the translated words of Denmark, Germany, South Korea, and Chile. Through these, we experienced one woman's groundhog day, what it would be like to direct films under the Nazi regime, elevated campfire stories set at a haunted institution, and finished with a dichotomous class system that makes everyone a victim. The resounding favourite was On the Calculation of Volume I, which now has a cult of followers prepared to ride at dawn for each release of this septology.

#1 Book Club Read: On the Calculation of Volume I by Solvej Balle

Kids Book Clubs 2025

We run three book clubs for kids, Magical Minds, The Matilda Society, and Chapter & Ink book clubs. That's 26 sessions in 2025!

To find out more, or to sign up for any of our kids' book clubs in 2026, click HERE.

With the blink of an eye we have found ourselves at the end of another year of our kid's book club program . It has been a truly marvelous year of reading, and I have greatly enjoyed seeing our participants tackle the challenge of new books, sharing their thoughts and opinions and working with their peers to make our book clubs a haven for readers. This year has been particularly exciting to have so many boys join us, particularly when all the data available about children's reading indicates boys are significantly more disengaged from reading and reading for pleasure. We're already excitedly planning for Term 1 2026, and can't wait to see where the books take us! Kasey

Deep Creek Residency Fellowship 2025

We are thrilled to have sent another exceptional South Australian writer to Grass Tree Gully in Deep Creek for this year’s Residency Fellowship. Last month, Tom Gurn spent a week in magical surroundings with time to think, dream, walk, restore, and write, underpinned by a mentoring session with award-winning author, Favel Parrett. We cannot wait to see the ways this holistic support deepens the manuscript and future pathways as a writer.

“It was an utter gift and joy to be in such gentle and quiet nature for an entire week. I reached a deep state of joyous relaxation and focus, it was so lovely.” Tom Gurn, DCRF winner 2024.

We once again thank our partners Writers SA and Ultimo Press for this significant collaboration and we generously thank Favel Parrett and Grass Tree Gully for their support in mentoring and hosting. This is our fourth writer to be supported by the residency with previous mentors and winners, including Hannah Kent and Corrie Hosking; Pip Williams and Alison K Richards; Rachael Mead and Rebecca Burton.

Ask Our Booksellers for a Recommendation

Do you need a hand choosing something for yourself or a loved one for Christmas, or otherwise?

Our Matilda booksellers are now offering a curated recommendation service by book-loving humans. If you’d like to fill out the form HERE, our widely-read staff will be in touch soon with their personal selections.

Matilda Bookshop
8 Mt Barker Road, Stirling SA 5152
Ph 08 8339 3931
books@matildabookshop.com.au
matildabookshop.com.au
OPEN 7 DAYS

2023 ABIA Australian Bookshop of the Year