Book reviewer COLIN STEELE reflects on his top five books for 2025.

Geraldine Brooks’ Memorial Days (Hachette, $32.99) is a profoundly moving memoir of what followed for her after her journalist husband, Tony Horwitz, died of a heart attack on a Washington DC street on Memorial Day in 2019.

Brooks takes the reader through her and her family’s grief, issues in reclaiming Tony’s body and dealing with myriad bureaucracies over health cover, banks and credit cards. And then trying to complete the manuscript of what would become her award-winning book, Horse.

In 2022 with Horse out of the way, Brooks allows herself to grieve alone, living in a shack on Flinders Island off the coast of Tasmania. Memorial Days is a moving and ultimately uplifting account of one individual’s attempt to cope with a death and the attempt to transition to a new reality.

THE Welsh border town of Hay-on-Wye is the world’s leading book town. James Hanning in The Bookseller of Hay: The Life and Times of Richard Booth (Corsair, $55) documents how this was created by the remarkable Richard Booth (1938-2019), who appointed himself Hay’s King Richard Coeur de Livre (Bookheart) in 1977.

In 1962, Booth established, aged 23, a bookshop in Hay. By the early 1970s, Booth was selling around 2000 books a week and by the end of the decade selling 10 times that number. By 1986 there were 40 bookshops in Hay, although not all of them were owned by Booth, who once said he had inherited one fortune, made two, and lost four.

Hanning covers, in fascinating detail, Booth’s epic bookselling career, which combined brilliance and dubious business practices, including illegal library book purchases through mob connections.

Booth’s personal demeanour was often shambolic and appearance unkempt but this did not prevent indulging an hedonistic lifestyle, that  included three wives, within the vibrant Bohemian scene around Hay in the 1970s.

Booth claimed to have had an affair with Marianne Faithfull, who famously said that Booth was “completely mad”.

By the late 1990s, Booth saw his book empire beginning to implode but his legacy lives on. Hanning concludes that Booth’s greatest achievement was “to change a small market town into a global brand”.

PHILIP Pullman’s The Rose Field: The Book of Dust, Volume Three (David Fickling Books, $34.95) is the final part of his Book of Dust trilogy, which continues Pullman’s acclaimed previous trilogy, His Dark Materials.

The second trilogy began in 2017 with La Belle Sauvage and continued with The Secret Commonwealth in 2019. The five books to date have sold more than 50 million copies.

The Rose Field is included in my top five in the context of marking the completion of Pullman’s epic six-volume work, a remarkable achievement, which confirms Pullman’s place alongside JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis in creating an original imaginative fantasy world, which also reflects issues in the contemporary world.

It will, however, definitely help new readers to have read the preceding volumes to fully appreciate Pullman’s complex and always inventive  back story, the links to his main character, Lyra Belacqua, the huge cast of characters, and the nature of the mysterious Dust, “an analogy of consciousness, and consciousness is this extraordinary property we have as human beings” .

JUNO Gemes has spent more than 40 years documenting the changing social landscape of Australia and, in particular, the lives of indigenous Australians.

In a beautifully illustrated book, Until Justice Comes (Upswell, $65), Gemes has assembled a powerful collection of more than 220 photographs, accompanied by new writings and poems by a wide range of contributors.

Gemes photographs brilliantly document crucial landmark indigenous moments, such as the Redfern Revolution, the land rights campaigns, the National Apology to the Stolen Generations and the election of 11 indigenous members to the 47th federal parliament, as well as activism played out on the streets.

DONALD Trump has been a daily and, for many, a depressing news item this year.

Trump’s golden ambitions are covered in the chapter “Tanned by the Sun King” in Robert Wellington’s Versailles Mirrored – The Power of Luxury, Louis XIV to Donald Trump (Bloomsbury Academic, $49.99).

Wellington, an ANU associate professor of art history, superbly blends artistic and historical expertise into a very readable narrative.

He reveals, through eight case studies, including Ludwig II of Bavaria, Alva Vanderbilt and two Dukes of Marlborough, how the Palace of Versailles, the defining symbol of opulence in 17th-century France, was subsequently adopted by the nouveau riche to show off their wealth and thus their alleged social and political capital.