NEW BEFORE NOON BOOK CLUB & EXTRA SESSION FOR DAYLIGHT
BOOK CLUB IN 2026
BEFORE NOON BOOK CLUB
Due to the overwhelming demand for our High Noon Book Club, starting in February we have established a Before Noon Book Club. Before Noon will meet at 10.00am on the first Friday of the month and will discuss prize-winning and nominated fiction, and works by prize-winning authors, from Australia and around the world.
FIONA’S DAYLIGHT BOOK CLUB
We have added a second session to Fiona’s Daylight Book Club that will meet at 11.00am on the first Thursday of the month. The Daylight Book Club reads Fiona’s selection of contemporary fiction from Australia and around the world.
FOR MORE
DETAILS
Contact Jennifer at bookclubs@avidreader.com.au or call 3846 3422.
BOOK CLUBS BEST BOOKS 2025
Keep scrolling to see what our book clubs choose as their best books for 2025.
AUSTRALIAN BOOK CLUB
meets 6.00pm 1 st Tuesday of the month details here
Brisbane, 1975: Andie Tanner’s world is small but whole. Her mum is complicated, but she adores her dad and the kennel of racing greyhounds that live under their house. Andie is a serious girl with plans: finish school with her friends, then apprentice to her father until she can become a greyhound trainer, with dogs of her very own.
But real life rarely goes to plan, and the world is bigger and more complicated than Andie could imagine. When she loses everything she cares about - her family, her friends, the dogs - it’s up to Andie to reclaim her future. She will need all her wits to survive this new reality of secrets and half-truths, addictions and crime.
With luminous, aching prose, Tenderfoot will move you like no other story this year.
QUEER LITERATURE BOOK CLUB
meets 6.00pm 1 st Wednesday of the month details here
A sexy modern take on ancient Greek myths.
Eros is a stunning collection of short stories, grounded in truth and coloured with dazzling imagination and alluring, unpredictable mystery. Revealing how queerness, nature and myth have been intertwined for eternity, these are stories of gods and goddesses. Of Zeus, of Eurydice, of Hermaphroditus, of Icarus before he flew into the sun. Stories of queer life, lust, revenge, wrath, passion and sex. Of yearning, love, loss. Some transformations span across a life, and others, an evening. Perspectives will shift. Houses will burn. Lovers will learn their fate.
FIONA’S OPEN BOOK CLUB
meets 6.00pm & 7.00pm 1 st Wednesday of the month details here
WINNER OF THE WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR FICTION
A searing, gripping novel about a young Tamil woman living through the Sri Lankan civil war.
Sixteen-year-old Sashi wants to become a doctor. But over the next decade, as a vicious civil war subsumes Sri Lanka, her dream takes her on a different path as she watches those around her, including her four beloved brothers and their best friend, get swept up in violent political ideologies and their consequences. She must ask herself - is it possible for anyone to move through life without doing harm?
FIONA’S DAYLIGHT BOOK CLUB
meets 9.30am & 11.00am 1 st Thursday of the month details here
Tenderfoot is magnificent. Deeply moving. Beautiful. Powerful.
Trent Dalton
By the bestselling, award-winning author of Addition, an exhilarating novel about coming of age in 1970s Brisbane.
The Emperor of Gladness shows the profound ways in which our lives are changed by the most unexpected of people. When Hai takes a job at a diner to support himself and Grazina, his fellow workers become the family he didn’t expect to find. United by desperation and circumstance, and existing on the fringes of society, together they bear witness to each other’s survival.
YOUNG & RESTLESS BOOK CLUB
meets 6.00pm & 7.00pm 1 st Thursday of the month details here
Atmosphere is Taylor Jenkins Reid at her best - transporting readers to iconic times and places, creating complex protagonists, and telling a passionate and soaring story about the transformative power of love - this time among the stars.
Written with the precision of poetry and the emotional tide of an epic, Heart the Lover is a celebration of literature and the life-long echoes of young love. This is King at her very best, affirming her as a masterful chronicler of the human experience and one of the finest novelists at work today.
HER VOICE BOOK CLUB
meets 7.00pm 1 st Thursday of the month details here
A civil servant is offered a lucrative job in a mysterious new government ministry gathering ‘expats’ from across history to test whether timetravel is feasible.
Her role is to work as a ‘bridge’: living with, supporting and monitoring expat ‘1847’ - Commander Graham Gore, a former Victorian polar explorer. Gore, an adventurer by trade, soon adjusts to this bizarre new world of washing machines, feminism and Spotify; and during a long, sultry summer the pair move from awkwardness to friendship to something more.
But as the true shape of the project that brought them together begins to emerge, Gore and the bridge are forced to confront their past choices and imagined futures.
BEFORE NOON BOOK CLUB
meets 10.00am 1 st Friday of the month details here
Due to the overwhelming demand for our High Noon Book Club, starting in February we have established a Before Noon Book Club for 2026.
Like High Noon, this book club will discuss prize-winning and nominated fiction, and works by prize-winning authors, from Australia and around the world. Before Noon is facilitated by Avid’s Book Clubs Manager, Jennifer Stephens.
HIGH NOON BOOK CLUB
meets midday 1 st Friday of the month details here
LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2025
SHORTLISTED FOR THE NERO BOOK AWARDS 2025
Seascraper is a mesmerising portrait of a young man confined by his class and the ghosts of his family’s past, dreaming of a bigger life.
Benjamin Wood is a magnificent writer and I intend to read everything he has written. Douglas Stuart
BLOODY CRIME BOOK CLUB
meets 2.00pm 1 st Saturday of the month details here
A gripping Australian outback crime thriller where a murder in the present leads to a long-buried injustice.
A country town, a brutal murder, a shameful past, a reckoning to come... The injustices of the past and dangers of the present envelop Aboriginal policewoman Renee Taylor, when her unwilling return to the small outback town of her childhood plunges her into the investigation of a brutal murder.
LOVE ROMANCE BOOK CLUB
meets 4.00pm 1 st Saturday of the month details here
The Love Hypothesis meets The Hating Game in a new standalone romcom from acclaimed author and romance academic Jodi McAlister.
Sadie Shaw and Jonah Fisher have known each other for fifteen years –and they’ve disliked each other for every one of them. It started with a minor altercation in an undergrad literature class, but as their academic careers developed, so did the intensity of their arguments. By the time they graduate with their doctorates, they’re embroiled in a full-on rivalry.
So when a position comes up that Sadie and Jonah are both perfect for, their ongoing enmity explodes into a red-hot competition. But as Sadie fights to secure her future, she realises there might be a way for both of them to get their dream job. There’s just one catch – they’ll have to get married first.
AVID AT HOME BOOK CLUB
meets online 6.00pm 2 nd Thursday of the month details here
There Are Rivers in the Sky is a rich, sweeping novel set between the 19 th Century and modern times, about love and loss, memory and erasure, hurt and healing, centred around three enchanting characters living on the banks of the River Thames and the River Tigris - their lives all curiously touched by the epic of Gilgamesh.
YOUNG & CLASSIC BOOK CLUB
meets 6.30pm 2 nd Thursday of the month
details here
New York City, 1940s. In a crumbling tenement in Harlem, Lutie Johnson is determined to build a new life for herself and her eight-year-old boy, Bub. Having left her unreliable husband, Lutie believes that with hard work and resolve, she can begin again. But in her struggle to earn a respectable living amid the violence, poverty and racial dissonance of her surroundings, Lutie is soon trapped: she is a woman alone, ‘too goodlooking to be decent’, with predators at every turn.
The first book by a Black woman to sell more than a million copies, The Street combines the pace of a thriller with an unflinching portrait of injustice and hope.
ROMANTASY BOOK CLUB
seasonal meetings 3.00pm, Saturday every 2 nd month
details here
Romantasy is a new seasonal book club to our stable in 2025 and only met on two occassions so did not choose a best book.
Romantasy Book Club features books celebrating the latest and greatest romance fantasy. For fans of Rebecca Yarros, Sarah J. Maas, and Sarah A. Parker, we will be celebrating magic systems, world-building and spicy love stories!
2026 Subscriptions are open now and will be meeting Dates in 2026:
Saturday 14 February at 3pm
Saturday 11 April at 3pm (2nd Saturday of the month to avoid the Easter long weekend)
Saturday 6 June at 3pm
Saturday 1 August at 3pm
Saturday 3 October at 3pm
SHORT ON CLASSICS BOOK CLUB
seasonal meetings 11.00am, 1st Saturday every 2nd month details here
When May’s mother dies suddenly, she and her brother Billy are taken in by Aunty. However, their loss leaves them both searching for their place in a world that doesn’t seem to want them. While Billy takes his own destructive path, May sets out to find her father and her Aboriginal identity. Her journey leads her from the Australian east coast to the far north, but it is the people she meets, not the destinations, that teach her what it is to belong.
Swallow the Air is an unforgettable story of living in a torn world and finding the thread to help sew it back together.
LOST IN TRANSLATION BOOK CLUB
seasonal meetings 3.00pm, 1st Saturday every 2nd month details here
A virtuosic group portrait, There’s No Turning Back broke radical new ground in representing modern women’s lives when it first appeared in 1938, facing immediate censorship by the Fascist authorities. Published in a new translation by the acclaimed Ann Goldstein, it is a powerfully moving story of women coming of age in a turbulent world.
