For anyone who reads my Monday post, you’ll know I’ve imposed a book buying ban on myself. It’s day 5 and already hard. It’s definitely an addition.

I spent so much money this year on ebooks and audiobooks and then the 4 book events I attended, that something drastic needed to be done.

I don’t know how long it’ll last, but I’m aiming for the rest of the year, at least. It’s not like I’m going to run out of reading material, ever!

I did however order 4 books before my ban was even thought about and they all arrived last week. I thought I’d share my final (hopefully) purchases for the year.

Touched: A Small History of Feeling by Kim Kelly – Kim Kelly is my favourite author, I have always said I’d read anything she wrote, even a shopping list. Well, this is way better than a shopping list. Touched is the co-winner of the 2025 Finlay Lloyd 20/40 Prize. A nonfiction read I know is going to touch me deeply, because that’s what Kim does no matter what she writes.

About the book: Documenting the damaging role of anxiety in our lives is hardly new, but Touched takes us inside the destabilising riot of a three-day panic attack with such insight, honesty and humour that the perspective we gain is revelatory and overwhelmingly hopeful. This book has a wonderful breadth of understanding—of the author’s own crazily complex family, of the wider issue of anxiety across society, and of her own voyage as a highly competent yet vulnerable being in a worryingly unhinged world.

A Catalogue of Love by Erin Hortle I hadn’t even heard about this novel when I saw it in the shop, but I loved her previous novel The Octopus and I (my review)so it was an easy decision to buy this one.

About the book: A young woman surfer’s coming of age in Tasmania, where the natural world helps her find herself and navigate grief and trauma. Echoes of Love and Virtue, Breath and H is for Hawk.

‘Did I still love him? No, probably not. Just the memory of him. Except it wasn’t even that. It was probably that I was in love with the memory of the me who’d loved him before.’

Neika learned to surf in the sometimes crystal-clear, sometimes opaque green barrels of Cloudy Bay, under the guidance of her father and stepfather. Bruny Island, surfing and the natural world are as much a part of her as her blood and breath.

In her twenties now, she has made her way in the world without her mother, who died when Neika was only two. Her path to adulthood was shaped by the love of two adoring fathers, but sitting alongside their love was always a mother-shaped hole. How different would she be if she’d had her mother there to guide her? Would she have dodged the mistakes that seem to define her life?

Neika watches the world around her like the scientist she has become, seeking to understand what it means to be a woman in a culture that does not always treat women kindly. In navigating her catalogue of experiences – desire, loss, love and power – she comes to see how each has made her who she is.   

A moving and thrilling novel from the acclaimed author of The Octopus and I.

Pilbara by Judy Nunn despite having a whole shelf of Judy Nunn’s novels, many still unread, I had to buy her new one because I’m going to her author talk next month and it’s set in WA and I love books set in places I live and know.

About the book: A stunning tale of loyalty and survival from a master storyteller …

In this ancient, harsh place, faint hearts will not last.

The Pilbara, late 1800s: Frontier country, the wild west of Australia – a lawless, violent place where treachery is a way of life.

Widower Charles Burton arrives in this forbidding corner of the world with his three young children. They’ve travelled half the globe, from the lush, rolling hills and dales of Yorkshire, on a mission to save their family’s sheep and cattle property. Rebuilding the fortunes of Burton Station will ask everything of Charles and his children, particularly his daughter, Victoria, who will at times threaten to bring about their downfall.

Here in the oldest landscape on earth, survival has always proved a battle. And when greed takes over, the battle only intensifies. Aboriginal people are robbed of their lands and their very way of life as every new arrival fights for the riches on offer – the grazing territory, the pearls and the gold. Amid all this brutality, the Burtons and their allies must fight to conquer the savagery that surrounds them.

From Yorkshire to Cossack in Western Australia, and London to Tahiti in French Polynesia, Pilbara is the tale of a family on a mission to restore the honour of its name.

The Thirty Names of Night by Zeyn Joukhadar I’m not sure where I came across this book, I think on someone’s blog, but can’t remember whose, it interested me anyway and when it was on special the other day I decided it was a sign I had to have it 😁.

About the book: Five years after a suspicious fire killed his ornithologist mother, a closeted Syrian American trans boy sheds his birth name and searches for a new one. He has been unable to paint since his mother’s ghost has begun to visit him each evening. As his grandmother’s sole caretaker, he spends his days cooped up in their apartment, avoiding his neighborhood masjid, his estranged sister, and even his best friend (who also happens to be his longtime crush). The only time he feels truly free is when he slips out at night to paint murals on buildings in the once-thriving Manhattan neighborhood known as Little Syria.

One night, he enters the abandoned community house and finds the tattered journal of a Syrian American artist named Laila Z, who dedicated her career to painting the birds of North America. She famously and mysteriously disappeared more than sixty years before, but her journal contains proof that both his mother and Laila Z encountered the same rare bird before their deaths. In fact, Laila Z’s past is intimately tied to his mother’s—and his grandmother’s—in ways he never could have expected. Even more surprising, Laila Z’s story reveals the histories of queer and transgender people within his own community that he never knew. Realizing that he isn’t and has never been alone, he has the courage to officially claim a new name: Nadir, an Arabic name meaning rare.

As unprecedented numbers of birds are mysteriously drawn to the New York City skies, Nadir enlists the help of his family and friends to unravel what happened to Laila Z and the rare bird his mother died trying to save. Following his mother’s ghost, he uncovers the silences kept in the name of survival by his own community, his own family, and within himself, and discovers the family that was there all along.

Featuring Zeyn Joukhadar’s signature storytelling, The Thirty Names of Night is a timely exploration of how we all search for and ultimately embrace who we are.

So, wish me luck 🤞😄

Until next time, happy reading