One Hundred Years of Dirt, by Rick Morton

Picked by: Brigid Delaney, staff writer

My initial thoughts of this book – why is a journalist in his early 30s already penning a memoir? – were quickly dispelled. Rick Morton has written the most compelling memoir of the year.

Morton’s story starts with the break-up of his family’s massive cattle station, Pandie Pandie, then moves on to tragedy in his own early years. His brother is almost burned to death, his father leaves the family and doesn’t pay child support, his mother – now in poverty – must move away and raise her sons.

This is a love letter of sorts to his single mother, but it also looks at the effect of poverty on Australians, in everything from the food they eat to their capacity to dig themselves out of the problems that disproportionately affect them, such as drug addiction.

Morton survives and thrives, almost despite the hand he’s dealt. He’s candid with the problems that come later in adulthood: issues with intimacy, a brother that uses ice and trouble managing money. And he’s eloquent and clear-eyed about how socially stratified Australia is. When he reports on poverty or schemes such as the NDIS for the Australian, he is right to wonder how many other people in the newsroom have experienced poverty, deprivation and hunger first hand.

Also he can write. This is no bloated, indulgent memoir. There’s not a word wasted in One Hundred Years of Dirt. I read it in one go, and had to remember to breathe.

Rusted Off, by Gabrielle Chan

Picked by: Katharine Murphy, political editor

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Before I crown Gabrielle Chan’s Rusted Off my political book of 2018, I need to declare the obvious. Chan is my colleague and friend. But my relationship with the author doesn’t influence my judgment. It’s the Australian political book of the year because it sets about reporting the remarkable political times we live in in the way the story needs to be reported: from the ground up, with empathy and intellect.

Rusted Off charts the growing gap between the circus in Canberra and the lived experience of regional Australians by telling the story of a town, the town in which the author has built a life. Wisely, Chan understands that contemporary political reporting spends too much time fixated with palace intrigues, and not enough time interrogating the on-ground impacts of policies, or the lack of them, and how the latter creates a gap in representation that is leading people to vote in increasing numbers for candidates from outside the major parties. It’s the story of the moment, and Chan tells it with great clarity.

Rusted Off is a must-read over the summer for any political tragic to help limber up for the coming federal election.

Waiting for Elijah, by Kate Wild

Picked by: Stephanie Convery, deputy culture editor

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Every journalist has a bag of unexamined insecurities about their own work, but every now and then you come across a fellow writer whose wholehearted embrace of the ups and downs of the gig is so heartening, and their work so tenacious and compassionate in the process, that you feel simultaneously in awe of their achievements and relieved that you’re not alone in your stumbling.

It’s a rare feat, but Kate Wild’s Waiting for Elijah is both an excellent work of investigative journalism – digging deep into the effects and implications of the fatal police shooting of 24-year-old Elijah Holcombe in 2009 – and a compelling narrative about the personal hurdles that come along with trying to tell such a story.

Wild spent over six years trying to answer fundamental questions about the shooting. Why weren’t the pleas of Elijah’s family heard when they tried to appeal to the police for help after he went missing? Why did the police feel they had no choice but to shoot a mentally ill young man? Why did accounts of the incident vary so wildly? What did the incident expose about the way law enforcement demonises the mentally ill?

In the process, she also confronted her own demons, made mistakes in the process, but struggled on nonetheless, with refreshing honesty and compassion.

River Dreams: the people and landscape of the Cooks River, by Ian Tyrrell

Picked by: Mike Ticher, news editor

Like all the best local history, Ian Tyrrell’s wonderful book on Sydney’s Cooks river appeals to an audience far beyond those who are locals. The river, which meanders through the inner west suburbs of Sydney before emptying into Botany Bay, is of no obvious significance other than in its symbolic reminder of Cook’s visit – in fact, you can’t get too far towards its source before it turns into a concrete stormwater drain.

But Tyrrell skilfully uses its history to weave a much bigger story about the changing demands of white settlement on the landscape – “a place in which a series of unrealistic Euro-Australian dreams were invested”. Those dreams included pastoral retreats for the gentry, dams to supply Sydney with water, working-class recreation, industrial development that left the river atrociously polluted and, more recently, environmental activism. The most brutal wrenching of the river’s pre-European course – the expansion of Sydney airport – entirely buried its former mouth beneath concrete.

For those who regularly walk the river, it still offers a kind of beauty (from a certain angle, if you half-close your eyes). But Tyrrell’s book, full of fascinating detail, provokes troubling thoughts about our interactions with nature, even those that have the best of intentions. After reading what we have done to this “river of perpetual disappointment”, the wonder is that it has survived at all.

Eggshell Skull, by Bri Lee

Picked by: Steph Harmon, culture editor

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For the past year it seemed I couldn’t open my eyes without being confronted by gendered injustice. Every book I read, show I watched and play I sat in seemed, somehow, to be about #MeToo. Eventually I gave up trying to avoid it, and started seeking it out.

Bri Lee’s Eggshell Skull is one of the most important books of this moment in Australia. In it, she relates her traumatic journey as a victim of sexual violence, navigating Australia’s deeply faulted justice system while also being employed by it. From 9-5 she works as a judge’s associate, witnessing trial after trial on a circuit dominated by sex crimes that rarely end well for the victims – particularly if the victims are women, and particularly if those women aren’t white. And after the day is done she spends her downtime deeply triggered, jumping over hurdle after horrifying hurdle in an attempt to find justice for herself.

I can’t imagine how it would feel to be confronted by others’ trauma and injustice each day, and then carry your own home each night. “I couldn’t walk around Brisbane without seeing places where crimes had been committed,” she writes. When she went to watch the turtles hatch at Mon Repos, it was the same: “I was witnessing a miracle of new life, and all I could think about was how many children were being brutalised at that very moment.”

For a lot of women I know dealing with trauma, that’s how this year has felt like: the reckoning is of course long overdue but being confronted by it over and over has come at a cost too.

The Shepherd’s Hut, by Tim Winton

Picked by: Alexandra Spring, editorial partnerships editor

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Tim Winton’s The Shepherd’s Hut was one of this year’s most memorable books – although not just for literary reasons. Winton’s story of the teenage Jaxie Clackton fleeing the horrors of his past in a stolen car, running towards what he believes is his only shot at love, is as powerful, raw and visceral as we’ve come to expect from one of Australia’s favourite authors. Along the way Winton’s antihero meets a defrocked Irish priest and the pair form an awkward blokey bond, offering both a tantalising but ill-fated glimpse of peace and redemption.

Yet what set it apart for me was the way Winton took the opportunity to jumpstart a discussion about toxic masculinity in Australia. His author appearances became a speaking tour where Winton railed against the deep-seated misogyny in our culture and the damage it causes to everyone, not least to boys like Jaxie Clackton. I went along to his Sydney event and it was stirring stuff. There was this boofy Australian surfer bloke demanding that boys be weaned off machismo and misogyny. Sure, he was selling books in the foyer afterwards but he used his platform to say uncomfortable things that need to be said.

Winton is known for his activism – he regularly supports environmental issues with words, actions and cold hard cash – but this isn’t an easy fit for him. He’s been accused of sexism in his books, of reducing women to stereotypes or “literary devices enabling the stories of his slightly bewildered, emotionally repressed Aussie blokes to unfold”. Winton rejects the criticisms. Still it was a powerful move from someone who reaches more than the obvious audiences. And, in a year filled with a parade of appalling male behaviour, Winton’s stance gave me hope that maybe one day things might change.

Boy Swallows Universe, by Trent Dalton

Picked by: Helen Davidson, reporter

Photograph: Harper Collins

Boy Swallows Universe launched with an extraordinary amount of hype, and I approached it with scepticism. I was wrong – this is one of the best Australian novels I’ve ever read.

It is extraordinary and beautiful storytelling by journalist Trent Dalton, about the unusually intense childhood of a young boy in a dodgy bit of Brisbane, with a fair bit of magic and adventure thrown in for good measure. Drug dealers, addicts, crooks and crims, reporters, bikies and young gangsters in the making – the characters in Dalton’s book are human and complex and clearly loved deeply by the author. The writing is fast-paced and heartfelt, and every sentence is surprising.

Through the eyes of 13-year-old Eli, the reader sees how full of love he and his family are for each other, driven to protect at all costs while often not being kind to themselves. It’s a mix of suburban nightmare, magical realism, film noir and coming of age. It’s a love letter to Dalton’s mum and a treatise on the importance of family and truth and holding your own in a world that doesn’t think much of you or your mates.

This book will stay with me for a long time.

The Arsonist by Chloe Hooper

Picked by: Brigid Delaney, staff writer

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Photograph: Hamish Hamilton

'Who would become an arsonist?': Chloe Hooper on Black Saturday and the nuances of blame Read more

Why would someone become an arsonist? This is the question that sticks under Chloe Hooper’s skin as she forensically tells the story of Brendan Sokaluk: a CFA volunteer accused of starting one of Black Saturday’s most deadly fires.

The fire, in Victoria’s Latrobe Valley, devastated a community that was in decline. The rates of crime were the highest in the state, and increasingly unemployment and poverty were on the horizon, as Victoria moved away from coal as an energy source.

Just like with her previous virtuoso work of nonfiction, The Tall Man, Hooper comes to a story once it has been seemingly exhausted and forgotten by the mainstream media. The skill and urgency of her writing make the terrible day come alive again while, using transcripts, Hooper is able to recreate the complexities of the trial.

Is Sokaluk, who has an intellectual disability, being demonised by the devastated community wanting a scapegoat? Or is he a lot shrewder than he is making out to be? Hooper’s account is even handed – we have compassion for Sokaluk’s long suffering family, and see up close the grief of those whose lives have been destroyed by the fires.