Australia is mired in grief, anger and division over the horrific act of antisemitic terrorism in Sydney. The attack in Bondi has reverberated internationally, tragically bookending a year that already challenged humanity, hope and the future of the planet.

Indeed as 2025 ends it is defined by yet more abject and ignoble political, economic, technological and environmental derelictions of dire proportions.

Acts of war have bombarded our screens in real time, the Earth reached its first “catastrophic” climate tipping point, and the US has perniciously slid towards autocracy under Donald Trump. Meanwhile the tech billionaires who have aided this decline grow ever richer and more powerful on the theft of our intellectual capital.

Under the weight of such bleak realities, feelings of hopelessness and helplessness can arise. Faith in mankind – in goodness and kindness – is threatened.

In such times it can be tempting to look away and seek escape. Alternatively, we can face our fears and threats, stoke resistance and nourish understanding through the knowledge that reading can foster. Through books, people can seek both escape and wisdom.

Guardian Australia asked some prominent activists, writers and thought leaders what writing they turn to for hope, understanding, comfort, emotional and intellectual strength, and to restore their faith in human nature.

Bob Brown: ‘I frequently give this book to friends’

The environmental activist and writer Bob Brown says: “Worst-case scenario is that if we keep knocking down [environmental] tipping points like we did this year then by 2050 there’ll be a 25% collapse in the economy and 2 billion people dead.”

That is why his first recommendation is The Lorax, a picture book by the children’s author Dr Seuss, whose central character declares: “I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees.”

“It ends with the word ‘unless’. Unless we do something we’re leaving our kids a very troublesome mess. I frequently give this book to friends,” the former Greens leader says.

“It’s a surface look at the situation the world thinks it’s in where everyone says it’s about the economy. But it’s not. It’s about the environment with the economy subservient to that.”

Brown also offers 12 Rules for Strife, a comic book call to action and social unity by Jeff Sparrow and Sam Wallman, as well as historian Mark McKenna’s recently released The Shortest History of Australia.

“That way Mark McKenna has of standing back and looking at 65,000 years of human history on this continent rather than looking at just 200 years [of European habitation] is actually very uplifting.”

Brown, whose latest book Defiance aims to inspire environmental activism, also finds consolation in the memoir A Feeling For Nature by the nonagenarian natural history documentary maker and photographer Stanley Breeden.

“It’s a beautiful book about his interactions with nature and the destruction of nature over the last century.”

Brown also suggests reading A Memory of Solferino by Henry Dunant, who co-established the Red Cross after seeing the aftermath of an epic battle in Italy. “It’s a great story about looking at the outcome of the worst of human nature and employing the best of human nature to do something about it.”

Anna Funder: ‘See these things fully, from all sides’

The celebrated Australian author Anna Funder says she does not read much escapist material, “because it doesn’t engage with the real”.

“Then there are works that, in looking at the dark, hard stuff about humans, the societies we make, the structures of fairness we develop in politics and law to rein in brutal impulses, are much more interesting. Because they are dealing with what it is to be human and not a fantasy version of that, there is relief in it, even if there is also horror.

“And there is hope, because the first step to countering the problems we face – in misogynist authoritarian regimes, techno-broligarchical surveillance and theft of our work, and the climate catastrophe – is to see these things fully, from all sides.”

That’s why it’s important, she says, to read Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale for all it conveys about “the primal power move in all societies, which is that of male power over women”.

“We are living in an age in which the authoritarianism, totalitarianism, untrammelled techno-surveillance is very gendered. It is gendered male, and it comes as a backlash to 100 years of feminism, and 50 years of gains by women in western cultures in achieving legal and economic rights.”

Funder, who is writing from Europe as Germany and France reintroduce “voluntary, for the moment” national service, recommends “as an anti-war read” All Quiet on the Western Front, the 1929 novel by German writer Erich Maria Remarque.

“The idea of sending young people to their deaths because politicians didn’t use their words horrifies me.”

Jason Stanley’s How Fascism Works is another thematically consistent recommendation from Funder.

“[It] shows how fascism is an extreme form of patriarchy (first move: control women to make men central and powerful, exclude them from the public sphere, confine to reproductive uses, then find internal enemy – immigrant or Jew – to scapegoat etc). So, to my mind, we are going to need to look at these authoritarian and totalitarian regimes in a gendered way, in order to bring other values which are more humane, and often gendered ‘feminine’, to confront them.”

Funder’s own major works – the nonfiction Stasiland, her novel All That I Am and her most recent book Wifedom all, in her words, “examine tyranny from below, from the point of view of characters who see and feel how unjustly it works, and who find in themselves the courage and conscience to resist”.

Behrouz Boochani: ‘It takes us into the depth of an authoritarian regime’

The award-winning Kurdish author and journalist Behrouz Boochani – incarcerated under Australia’s immigration detention system for seven years on Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island – chose three books and a documentary film, all about personal and collective resistance.

Then The Fish Swallowed Him, a novel by Amir Ahmadi Arian, chronicles a political prisoner’s torture and survival in Tehran’s Evin prison.

“I think this book is important because it takes us into the depth of [an] authoritarian regime and how this kind of system works. Also it creates an image of how citizens feel under watch by the system and how anyone is potentially targeted.”

Boochani, who now lives in New Zealand, recommends Te Waka Hourua’s Whītiki, Mātike, Whakatika, a book that follows a group of Māori activists in New Zealand who carried out a “treaty redaction” in the national museum in Wellington to achieve self-determination of their people.

He suggests reading his own second book Freedom Only Freedom – a collection of essays about resistance and resilience by Boochani and other contributors – and watching the feature-length documentary Gulîstan, Land of Roses about female Kurdish fighters opposing the Islamic State.

Kate Fullagar: ‘This novel brought me hope’

The nonfiction writer and historian Kate Fullagar says What We Can Know by Ian McEwan ponders many big questions of our epoch. The novel is set in the 2120s in a Britain reduced to small islands after “the inundation” caused by climate change and wars.

In the novel, Fullagar says, “people can sustain themselves (though chocolate is supremely rare), and they even go to university. McEwan makes the extraordinary point that other than the Catholic church, universities are one of the few institutions to have survived so many world-historical transformations. Why not this transformation? This novel brought me hope about two of the things that most panic me – climate change and the fate of universities.”

She also suggests a 2019 essay by Liane Carlson, What is Called Thinking in the Anthropocene? She re-reads it often.

“It’s really beautiful, and sad, but somehow uplifting … Carlson makes such a great case for why studying thought matters at all – it’s never really to find solutions, as university defenders feel compelled to say now, but instead to realise our fellowship with all other humans – past and present – in our inevitable failures among the successes.”

Fullagar’s most recent book is Bennelong and Phillip, the joint biography of Wangal man Bennelong and colonial governor Arthur Phillip. The award-winning author says she reads anything written by Australian constitutional law academic Megan Davis because she finds “her graciousness towards Australia, her love of it in fact, even while allowing for anger and frustration, something close to superhuman”.

“Whenever I read her being positive or reflective or encouraging about Indigenous issues to the Australian people, I am too ashamed to be furious about our systematic denial of Indigenous sovereignty.”

Finally she suggests Anna Funder’s All That I Am.

“What remains in my mind is the vision of the modern Australia that the older Ruth character lives in, and her summary of why Australia could be a viable place for refugees. ‘After the war I came to this sunstruck place. It is a glorious country, which aspires to no kind of glory. Its people aim for something both more basic and more difficult: decency.’ This was the nicest thing I think I’ve ever read about any country. I remember it made me sign up the next day to help volunteer at Villawood [immigration detention centre]. That is galvanisation by a work of literature!”

Thomas Mayo: ‘Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon’

Union leader, justice advocate and author Thomas Mayo says that Kevin Gilbert’s 1973 book Because A White Man’ll Never Do It – an expose of Australian race relations – has profoundly influenced his own public activism.

“He was Australia’s Mandela in some ways. He wrote this book in prison I think, most of it. It is about [political, social and racial] resistance really. For Blackfellas finding their way in activism I think it is a really important book to read.”

He recommends Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals by Saul Alinsky (with its wisdom that “ridicule is man’s most potent weapon”) and Hegemony How-To: A Roadmap For Radicals by Jonathan Smucker.

He says of Alinsky’s book, “This was an important book for me. I read it around 2011 as part of my union training. It taught me a lot about organising – strategies and principles.”

He also lists Nelson Mandela’s autobiography Long Walk to Freedom and Martin Luther King Jr’s exposition on the American civil rights movement, Why We Can’t Wait. Mayo says both have served as “inspirational figures” in his own public life.

“Most of the books I read are historical because I think history does repeat itself. It’s important to understand the struggles that have preceded us as we try to create a better world and to fight against the darkness that is creeping in these days,” he says.

“I’d describe the world as being on the brink right now … there’s never been a more critical time.”