Pam Macintyre

Scot Gardner’s The Dead I Know – about somnambulant Aaron, haunted by nightmares, Mam, losing her memory, the wonderful John Barton, funeral director and Aaron’s mentor – is full of compassion and kindness in a violent world. A gripping adventure that hauls you into its evocative world of seafaring, Andrew McGahan’s The Coming of the Whirlpool: Ship Kings Book One (Allen & Unwin, 12/11) is powerful storytelling at its lyrical best. Lili Wilkinson’s A Pocketful of Eyes (Allen & Unwin, 11/11), a witty detective story set in the Melbourne Natural History Museum, is loads of fun. One Small Island (Viking, 12/11), by Alison Lester and Coral Tulloch, combines beautiful images with environmental knowledge to potent effect.

Stephanie Owen Reeder

A Bus Called Heaven (Walker) is vintage Bob Graham: compassionate, humorous, entertaining. This heart-warming tale about tolerance and sharing emphasises the importance of family, friends, and an inclusive community in an often uncaring world. Margaret Wild and Ron Brooks’s The Dream of the Thylacine (Allen & Unwin, 6/11), an elegant and evocative lament for a lost species, uncompromisingly and dramatically charts the Tasmanian tiger’s demise. Libby Gleeson and Freya Blackwood also champion an ‘endangered species’ in the thought-provoking and charming Look, a Book!(Little Hare). When two small children find an abandoned book, they look after it and read it again and again, and thus discover the power of the imagination that is hidden within its covers.

Mike Shuttleworth

Ron Brooks’s Drawn from the Heart: A Memoir (Allen & Unwin) was released so late in 2010 that I am counting it in this year’s books. Brooks’s illustrated books – John Brown, Rose and the Midnight Cat, Fox, and Old Pig – areinternationally acclaimed. If you think picture books are easy, then read this candid, moving, and beautifully produced memoir. Ursula Dubosarsky shines in The Golden Day (Allen & Unwin, 5/11), about a group of schoolgirls in the late 1960s whose teacher disappears during a school outing. The novel sensitively depicts the children’s fear and doubt in the face of adult transgressions. Merging narrative non-fiction with elegant illustrations, Lauren Redniss’s Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie, A Tale of Love and Fallout (It Books) is an ambitious and seductive piece of work. In One Small Island, Alison Lester and Coral Tulloch elegantly communicate a two-century-old contest between natural habitat and human impact. Lester’s watercolour and pastel bring beauty and drama; Tulloch’s pen, pencil, and gouache provide nuance and rich detail. The result is seamless, beautiful, and necessary.

Ruth Starke

Revolution(Bloomsbury), by Jennifer Donnelly, is my international Wow pick: a big, gutsy emotional ride through revolutionary Paris. Locally, what a terrific début is Vikki Wakefield’s All I Ever Wanted(Text, 10/11), about a battler heroine who longs for Paris. Act of Faithby Kelly Gardiner (Angus & Robertson) is both dramatic and witty. Brave, clever Isabella fights for books and a free press in seventeenth-century Europe. For younger readers, Sally Rippin’s Angel Creek(Text) is an appealing mix of reality and magic, and Ursula Dubosarsky’s eerie mystery The Golden Dayis a small masterpiece.