About our past book boxes

Heady Mix was founded on the belief that everyone should be able to walk into a bookstore and find a story that represents some part of their experience – to read within the pages, a narrative that feels something like a reflection, to identify the familiar, recognise the reality. Sadly, in the West, the experiences of many underrepresented groups are missing from our bookshelves, leaving a sizeable chasm in the worldview we can glean from books. This is the imbalance our book boxes aim to put right: giving these voices a platform to tell their story, so that those who haven’t heard them yet can listen, so that they can become allies of support and change.

 The story behind our themes and collections

When the themes for each our collections are selected by the Heady Mix team, we take great care to ensure the people, places or perspectives being explored are narrow enough to truly spotlight the particular experience, and from there we work outwards, including as many different sides to the chosen focus as possible. This allows us to showcase real diversity, to explore how one episode, encounter or event can be lived out in countless different ways. We also make a point of reasserting assumptions, stereotypes that may be imposed by a Western-centric view of the world, and in reality, maybe nothing like the truth.

In our Lost and Found collection, the stories selected were ones that examined the complexity of the refugee experience – how despite the great euphoria of finding safety, so much is lost too; the senses of home, culture, the familiar. So often the narratives we read of refugees are those of unimaginable disaster, displacement, destruction – of course, these aspects happen, but what of before, the piece of a puzzle that makes up a person: home? And in our Earth collection, stories that looked to indigenous peoples and the disproportionate effect climate change is having on First Nations communities – we connected readers to more narratives being omitted. The historical, endemic suffering these groups have endured continuing today under a different guise.

So much of what we do with the subscription book boxes we select at Heady Mix is focused on telling the real story, to connect our readers with a reality, written by or about those who belong to the myriad of underrepresented groups we work to showcase. It’s our hope that by reading more diversely, the spectrum through which we see and understand the world will grow and diversify too.

Past book box spotlight

California Dreaming

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Two novels, a book of short stories and essays, and introduction letter delivered to your door once every three months.