If you're buying books for Christmas this year, why not buy a new-release Australian book from an indie bookshop? It's been a crappy year for a lot of writers, launching their books into the pandemic. Here are some suggestions:

If you like books about young women figuring themselves out - books that are funny, warm, bleak, smart and completely absorbing - then take your pick of these three. (CB is the warmest, Kokomo the funniest, Inland Sea the bleakest if that helps).

If you haven't had enough pandemic talk this year then why not dive into The Animals in That Country? This utterly original book is the thing I've recommended the most this year - it's an astonishing feat of imagination and it left me flabbergasted.

If you want to put your finger on the pulse of Australian fiction, then grab one of these two brilliant anthologies, each packed with incredible talent and vivid, powerful stories.

If you'd rather sit with short stories from a single voice, try one of these. Smart Ovens is full of dreamy fairy tales of late capitalism, where technology bleeds into everything in sweet and horrifying ways. Ordinary Matter captures the depths of tiny moments. Both brilliant.

Historical fiction? Take a slightly surreal journey through colonial Tassie in A Treacherous Country - the most fun I had this year in book form, or have your heart pulled apart by Stone Sky Gold Mountain's moving exploration of the Chinese experience in goldrush era Queensland.

Australian nature writing often feels like a poor cousin to the UK and the US, but Fathoms was the latest local effort to really knock me out. Whales are brilliant and amazing, obviously, but Giggs works so much wonder into this that you'll be left gasping.

Song of the Crocodile is probably the book on this list that everyone should read - it's a beautiful and bleak examination of the poison of racism and colonisation. So much more than just something worthy, it's rich and alive and so, so sad.

For the essay-lover, try one of these two collections. Show Me Where it Hurts melds pop culture with riveting memoir about living with pain and disability. Blueberries is just bursting with Savage's incredible intelligence - questioning, thoughtful and original work.

I'm no poetry expert, but Ellen van Neerven's Throat still left me reeling - sexy, angry, beautiful, wise and vivid. Anyone with even a passing interest would love this.

Finally, this short book, ostensibly about the work of Beverley Farmer, is just essential. Rowe packs so much in here - on Farmer of course, but on nature and noticing, on writing and reading, on living, all in her crystalline prose. She's a wonder.

Buy these from your local bookshops! Mine are @NeighbourhoodBk, @BBoundbks, @paperback_books and @ReadingsBooks and I'm so lucky to have them.

I'm such a nong, I forgot to recommend the one book I contributed to this year!! Animals Make Us Human compiles glorious writing and thinking on Australian native animals plus stunning photographs (including mine!). All proceeds go towards conservation too.