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WBN advance reviews >

Night Swimming (Sharon Kernot, Text) 

Night Swimming book cover Tuesday, 21 April 2026
Sharon Kernot’s first foray into adult fiction, Night Swimming, is both a suspenseful verse novel and a ghost story in which the narrator of the book haunts herself. Night Swimming...

A Flash in the Dust (Meg Caddy, UQP) 

A Flash in the Dust cover Tuesday, 21 April 2026
Set in Western Australia in 1899, Meg Caddy’s queer YA historical novel A Flash in the Dust follows Gilberta and Norah, who are imprisoned in Fremantle Asylum and escape into...

I Remember Everything (Fiona Wilkes, Fremantle) 

The cover of "I Remember Everything" by Fiona Wilkes. Tuesday, 21 April 2026
Fiona Wilkes’s debut novel, I Remember Everything, memorialises the LGBTQIA+ communities lost to the AIDS crisis. In this fictionalised memoir, Billie recounts her formative years from 1979 to 1990, moving...

The Sisters of Serendib (Ayesha Inoon, HQ Fiction) 

Tuesday, 21 April 2026
The Sisters of Serendib, the sophomore novel from Ayesha Inoon (Untethered), opens in 1990 with a flurry of events as Tamil Muslims board boats to escape the escalating violence of...

Wormhole (Hannah McElhinney, Affirm) 

Tuesday, 21 April 2026
How far should you go in search of answers when mainstream medicine can’t help? Wormhole is author Hannah McElhinney’s attempt to answer that question through a blend of memoir, cultural...

Touch Grass (Mary Colussi, Penguin) 

Tuesday, 14 April 2026
Mary Colussi’s debut novel, Touch Grass, is the sharp and inventive winner of the 2025 Penguin Literary Prize. This work of speculative fiction takes readers into the not-too-distant future, where strawberries are...

Detention (Ralph Jackman, A&U) 

Tuesday, 14 April 2026
Detention is a powerful memoir about Australia’s youth detention system, told from the perspective of a rookie teacher and his fight for the rights of some of our country's most...

Over to You (Georgie Tunny, A&U) 

Tuesday, 7 April 2026
In her emotionally turbulent debut, Over to You, Georgie Tunny captures the highs and lows of working in television news. The novel follows 3 friends – Carter, Naya and Greta...

Deprivation (Roy V Marshan, New Dawn) 

Tuesday, 7 April 2026
In Deprivation, Roy V Marshan explores cannibalism as a feature of late-stage capitalism. In the 1973 film Soylent Green, cannibalism is presented as the solution to overpopulation, while in Agustina...

Kid (Peter Carnavas, UQP) 

Tuesday, 7 April 2026
Award-winning author Peter Carnavas is something of a master of timeless children’s novels full of heart and gentle lessons about life, family, grief and love. This most recent addition to...

Possible Springs (Samantha Ross, Penguin) 

Tuesday, 7 April 2026
In Possible Springs, Samantha Ross blends magical realism with rural noir in Australia across the late 1980s and 1990s. The novel follows Jimny Adams, who, after an accident at age...

The Wild Unknown (Emily Gale, Text) 

Tuesday, 31 March 2026
In The Wild Unknown by Emily Gale (Outlaw Girls), the year is 2045, and Eddie’s world is completely run by technology. From household devices to classroom support systems and the...

A Single Witness (Christine Balint, Spinifex) 

Tuesday, 31 March 2026
Christine Balint's gripping historical fiction, A Single Witness, is based on the true story of Anna Maria Bonon, a girl from a poor 1750s Italian rural village who works in a...

The Secrets of Strangers (Jess Kitching, S&S) 

Tuesday, 31 March 2026
Despite brimming with suspects, lies and a cast of clichéd small-town characters, The Secrets of Strangers by Jess Kitching (The Life Experiment) is anything but a stereotypical “cosy crime” novel....

Every Wild Soul (Katherine Johnson, HarperCollins) 

Tuesday, 31 March 2026
Eco-literature has been booming in recent years, thanks largely to writers including James Bradley, Richard Flanagan, Tim Winton, Charlotte Wood and Donna Cameron. Winner of the inaugural Australian Fiction Prize,...

Periodic Bitch (Emma Hardy, A&U) 

Tuesday, 24 March 2026
In Periodic Bitch, Emma Hardy delivers a memoir that is both intellectually rigorous and literary in style, interrogating the cultural construction of the “female monster” alongside her lived experience of premenstrual...