The year’s top 20 reads as chosen by the newsroom team

Staff writers

The rom-com our political correspondent loved. The biography that captivated our Rear Window editor. The science-backed personal health manual our work and careers reporter couldn’t put down.⁠

This year, The Australian Financial Review Magazine’s list of must-reads has been compiled by the editors and reporters of our newsroom, drawing on experience, knowledge – and a rather charming affection for romantic comedies. ⁠

‍‌Political Lives

‍Chris Wallace | UNSW Press

John Curtin once lamented the fact that writers of erotic novels end up living in mansions, but “the author who writes history goes unrewarded”. Chris Wallace might not build a mansion from Political Lives – her richly researched study of Australian prime ministers and their biographers – but it stands as one of the must-read political books of the year. Spanning the “absent fathers” of Federation, through to the modern machine men of parliament, Wallace tells the stories behind the stories.

The book argues that rather than just documenting a politician’s rise and fall, a biography can become an intervention in the narrative itself, sometimes helping make or break the subjects. Wallace gives her first explanation of the controversial decision to pull a planned biography of Julia Gillard, the only woman to rise to the very top.

When, in 2011, it was clear publication risked aiding the blokes trying to push Gillard out of The Lodge, Wallace chose not to become a proxy fighter. She chases down mysteries, reveals interference by subjects, and celebrates genre-defining writers including Warren Denning, Blanche D’Alpuget and Edna Carew. Eminently readable and already pored over by politicians chasing the dream, Political Lives stylishly brings history to life.

Tom McIlroy, political correspondent