11 Timeless Tales From The Top 100 2025

Each year, Better Reading invites Australian readers to vote for the books they love most, and the results are always a celebration of great storytelling. This list brings together 11 standout titles from the 2025 Top 100, blending beloved classics with modern favourites that have captured readers’ hearts. Whether you’re revisiting an old friend or meeting a new one for the first time, these stories are sure to stay with you long after the final page.

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Generations of readers have fallen in love with Jane Austen’s beloved classic Pride and Prejudice. The sparkling Elizabeth Bennet, the taciturn Fitzwilliam Darcy, and an array of characters that range from irrepressible to almost irredeemable, move through this comedy of manners about the danger of first impressions. Set in a provincial world away from London, Austen’s novel pokes fun at the machinations of courtship rituals while celebrating the importance of friendship and sisterhood.

#2 on Better Reading ‘s Top 100 2025

Buy a copy of Pride and Prejudice here.

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

A lawyer’s advice to his children as he defends the real mockingbird of Harper Lee’s classic novel – a black man charged with a serious crime. Through the young yes of Scout and Jem Finch, Harper Lee explores the irrationality of adult attitudes to race and class in the Deep South of the 1930s. The conscience of a town steeped in prejudice, violence and hypocrisy is pricked by the stamina of one man’s struggle for justice. But the weight of history will only tolerate so much.

#5 on Better Reading ‘s Top 100 2025

Buy a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird here.

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

It is 1939. Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier, and will become busier still. By her brother’s graveside, Liesel’s life is changed when she picks up a single object, partially hidden in the snow. It is The Gravedigger’s Handbook, left there by accident, and it is her first act of book thievery. So begins a love affair with books and words, as Liesel, with the help of her accordion-playing foster father, learns to read. Soon she is stealing books from Nazi book-burnings, the mayor’s wife’s library, wherever there are books to be found. But these are dangerous times. When Liesel’s foster family hides a Jewish fist-fighter in their basement, Liesel’s world is both opened up, and closed down.

#6 on Better Reading ‘s Top 100 2025

Buy a copy of The Book Thief here.

The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien

Bilbo Baggins enjoys a quiet and contented life, with no desire to travel far from the comforts of home; then one day the wizard Gandalf and a band of dwarves arrive unexpectedly and enlist his services – as a burglar – on a dangerous expedition to raid the treasure-hoard of Smaug the dragon. Bilbo’s life is never to be the same again.

#17 on Better Reading ‘s Top 100 2025

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Cloudstreet by Tim Winton

After two separate catastrophes, two very different families leave the country for the bright lights of Perth. The Lambs are industrious, united and – until God seems to turn his back on their boy Fish – religious. The Pickleses are gamblers, boozers, fractious, and unlikely landlords. Chance, hardship and the war force them to swallow their dignity and share a great, breathing, shuddering joint called Cloudstreet. Over the next twenty years they struggle and strive, laugh and curse, come apart and pull together under the same roof, and try as they can to make their lives.

#25 on Better Reading ‘s Top 100 2025

Buy a copy of Cloudstreet here.

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

Marie-Laure has been blind since the age of six. Her father builds a perfect miniature of their Paris neighbourhood so she can memorize it by touch and navigate her way home. But when the Nazis invade, father and daughter flee with a dangerous secret. Werner is a German orphan, destined to labour in the same mine that claimed his father’s life, until he discovers a knack for engineering. His talent wins him a place at a brutal military academy, but his way out of obscurity is built on suffering. At the same time, far away in a walled city by the sea, an old man discovers new worlds without ever setting foot outside his home. But all around him, impending danger closes in.

#42 on Better Reading ‘s Top 100 2025

Buy a copy of All the Light We Cannot See here.

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

A tale of gods, kings, immortal fame, and the human heart, The Song of Achilles is a dazzling literary feat that brilliantly reimagines Homer’s enduring masterwork, The Iliad. An action-packed adventure, an epic love story, a marvelously conceived and executed page-turner, Miller’s monumental debut novel has already earned resounding acclaim from some of contemporary fiction’s brightest lights–and fans of Mary Renault, Bernard Cornwell, Steven Pressfield, and Colleen McCullough’s Masters of Rome series will delight in this unforgettable journey back to ancient Greece in the Age of Heroes.

#55 on Better Reading ‘s Top 100 2025

Buy a copy of The Song of Achilles here.

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

Offred is a Handmaid in The Republic of Gilead, a religious totalitarian state in what was formerly known as the United States. She is placed in the household of The Commander, Fred Waterford – her assigned name, Offred, means ‘of Fred’. She has only one function: to breed. If Offred refuses to enter into sexual servitude to repopulate a devastated world, she will be hanged. Yet even a repressive state cannot eradicate hope and desire. As she recalls her pre-revolution life in flashbacks, Offred must navigate through the terrifying landscape of torture and persecution in the present day, and between two men upon which her future hangs.

#59 on Better Reading ‘s Top 100 2025

Buy a copy of The Handmaid’s Tale here.

1984 by George Orwell

The year is 1984. War and revolution have created an unrecognisable world. Great Britain, now known as Airstrip One, is ruled by the Party, led by Big Brother. Mass surveillance is total and The Thought Police ensure no individual thinking is allowed. Winston Smith works at The Ministry of Truth, carefully rewriting history. But Winston dreams of freedom, and of rebellion. It is here that he falls in love with Julia, and starts a secret, forbidden affair with her – but in this world nothing can be kept secret, and they are forced to face consequences more terrifying than either of them could have ever imagined.

#62 on Better Reading ‘s Top 100 2025

Buy a copy of 1984 here.

The Secret History by Donna Tartt

Under the influence of their charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at an elite New England college discover a way of thinking and living that is a world away from the humdrum existence of their contemporaries. But when they go beyond the boundaries of normal morality their lives are changed profoundly and for ever, and they discover how hard it can be to truly live and how easy it is to kill.

#84 on Better Reading ‘s Top 100 2025

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Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell

On a summer’s day in 1596, a young girl in Stratford-upon-Avon takes to her bed with a sudden fever. Her twin brother, Hamnet, searches everywhere for help. Why is nobody at home? Their mother, Agnes, is over a mile away, in the garden where she grows medicinal herbs. Their father is working in London. Neither parent knows that Hamnet will not survive the week.