Misfit: The Unravelling of Samantha X (Amanda Goff, Echo)
Tuesday, 28 January 2025
Amanda Goff was a successful journalist in London and Sydney before leaving her corporate career at 38 to become Samantha X, an escort. She later founded her own escort agency...
Melanesia: Travels in Black Oceania (Hamish McDonald, Black Inc)
Tuesday, 28 January 2025
As a foreign correspondent, Australian journalist Hamish McDonald (Demokrasi) frequently flew in and out of Melanesian hotspots during his career. Fascinated by the region’s complexity, he traversed it slowly by...
The Thrill of It (Mandy Beaumont, Hachette)
Tuesday, 28 January 2025
The Thrill of It is the latest crime novel by Mandy Beaumont, author of the Stella Prize–longlisted The Furies. The story follows Emmerson Kerr, whose grandmother was brutally murdered in...
SoXiety (Tamlyn Teow, Riveted Press)
Tuesday, 28 January 2025
Tamlyn Teow’s SoXiety offers a thought-provoking, immersive experience that mirrors the anxiety of today’s world. Teow’s graphic novel, the first in a new collection called The Book of Kin, is...
Love Unedited (Caro Llewellyn, Picador)
Tuesday, 28 January 2025
Reading Caro Llewellyn’s debut novel, Love Unedited, is like reading someone’s diary entries on life and love, which is fitting for this story within a story. Set predominantly in New York...
Soaring with the Sugarbird Lady (Dianne Wolfer, Fremantle)
Tuesday, 28 January 2025
Soaring with the Sugarbird Lady is based on the true story of Robin Miller, who single-handedly flew life-saving vaccines to remote Western Australia in the late 1960s. This new middle-grade novel...
Ariana Treasure: The Missing Book (Jacqueline de Rose-Ahern, illus Karen Erasmus, Wombat)
Tuesday, 21 January 2025
Ariana Treasure: The Missing Book is the first in a new series for beginner readers by Jacqueline de Rose-Ahern. Ariana’s family own the Treasure Chest, a local thrift shop filled...
How Australian Democracy Works: And Why We Need It More Than Ever (ed by Amanda Dunn, T&H)
Tuesday, 21 January 2025
At a time when democracy seems under threat globally, Australia’s democratic system is often seen as one of the best. Compulsory voting, democracy sausages and electoral boundaries set by a...
Sunny at the End of the World (Steph Bowe, Text)
Tuesday, 21 January 2025
Steph Bowe’s Sunny at the End of the World, published posthumously, provides clear evidence of Bowe’s creative skills levelling up. The book is set across dual timelines in 2018 and...
The First Sunrise (Vanessa Stevens, illus Paul Seden, Magabala)
Tuesday, 21 January 2025
The First Sunrise is the first Mbabaram creation story to be published and was passed down to Mbabaram, Yidinji, Kaanju and Taribelang Bunda woman Vanessa Stevens from her father, Colin...
Geraldine (Andrea Thompson, Fremantle)
Tuesday, 21 January 2025
In this heartwarming debut novel, spanning the 1960s to the early 2000s, music journalist and artist manager Andrea Thompson tells the story of Geraldine, a fierce protagonist who remains true...
The Last Seed Keeper (Paul Russell, EK Books)
Tuesday, 21 January 2025
In The Last Seed Keeper, the first in Paul Russell’s cli-fi (climate fiction) trilogy of the same name, not a narrative minute is wasted. Tense action, complex speculative cautionary concepts,...
Best, First and Last (Amy Matthews, S&S)
Tuesday, 21 January 2025
Best, First and Last is a fun romance novel that has everything you could ask for: an unexpected, all-expenses-paid holiday, a charming stranger, a nosy family with no concept of...
Signs of Damage (Diana Reid, Ultimo)
Tuesday, 21 January 2025
Diana Reid’s third book is an engrossing, meticulously crafted drama that explores memory, trauma, repression and self-preservation, examining how these themes intersect, overlap, are misinterpreted or deliberately distorted to devastating...
Wild Dark Shore (Charlotte McConaghy, Penguin)
Tuesday, 21 January 2025
In Charlotte McConaghy’s latest novel, the aptly named Salt family are the last caretakers of a seed vault on an ocean-battered subantarctic island. In the final weeks before the base...
Australian Football’s 100 Year Club: Celebrating Three Great Teams (Andrew Clarke, Gelding Street Press)
Tuesday, 21 January 2025
Hawthorn’s Hawks. Footscray’s Bulldogs. North Melbourne’s Kangaroos. Australian Football’s 100 Year Club: Celebrating Three Great Teams celebrates the centenary of these three iconic Aussie Rules clubs in 2025. From the...
Half Truth (Nadia Mahjouri, Penguin)
Tuesday, 14 January 2025
Half Truth follows Zahra, a young Moroccan Australian woman, and her grandmother, Khadija. In alternating narratives, the novel follows the pair as they come of age in their respective timelines. The...
A Good Kind of Trouble (Brooke Blurton & Melanie Saward, HarperCollins)
Tuesday, 14 January 2025
Noongar-Yamatji youth advocate Brooke Blurton has teamed up with Bigambul and Wakka Wakka author and academic Melanie Saward (Love Unleashed) for a new YA series, beginning with A Good Kind of...
The Knowing (Madeleine Ryan, Scribe)
Tuesday, 14 January 2025
Camille works for a semi-famous florist in Armadale, where she commutes daily from her home in the country. She yearns for a life full of beauty and meaning and can’t...
Outrageous Fortunes (Megan Brown & Lucy Sussex, La Trobe)
Tuesday, 14 January 2025
‘Mary Fortune’ might sound like a pseudonym but it’s the name of one of Australia’s most prolific—if often overlooked—woman crime writers. Outrageous Fortunes is a dual biography of Fortune and...
Joan Lindsay: The Hidden Life of the Woman Who Wrote ‘Picnic at Hanging Rock’ (Brenda Niall, Text)
Tuesday, 14 January 2025
Brenda Niall’s portrait of author Joan Lindsay is bookended by her charming recollections of meeting Lindsay in 1984, just months before her death. In the intervening chapters of this concise...
Creature Corridors (Billie Rooney, illus Anke Noack, CSIRO Publishing)
Tuesday, 14 January 2025
Billie Rooney’s educational picture book, Creature Corridors, explores how human infrastructure impacts animal habitats and highlights the role of wildlife corridors in helping animals travel and live safely. The book...
Harry and Gran Bake a Cake (Fiona McIntosh, illus Sara Acton, Puffin)
Tuesday, 14 January 2025
Fiona McIntosh (The Sugar Palace), the much-celebrated author for grown-ups, makes her debut in picture books with the simply delicious Harry and Gran Bake a Cake. A day in the...
Sunny and Shadow (Helen Milroy, Fremantle)
Tuesday, 14 January 2025
Sunny and Shadow is a heartfelt junior fiction novel and intergenerational tale that follows Calla and her descendants, who all have the precious gift of talking with and caring for...
Past & Parallel Lives (Kaya Ortiz, UWA Publishing)
Tuesday, 14 January 2025
In their debut poetry collection, Past & Parallel Lives, Kaya Ortiz explores what it means to wrestle with your identity and find belonging. Their poetry strikes a balance between grounded...
Monty and Mandy Take On Camp Spaloonka (Adam Wallace, illus Dave Atze, Larrikin)
Tuesday, 14 January 2025
Monty and Mandy Take on Camp Spaloonka is a junior graphic novel that follows the hilarious adventures of Monty and Mandy, two best friends who get very excited about everything...
Creating Schools: Where Students and Teachers Want to Be (Michael Lawrence & Fabio D’Agostin, Melbourne Books)
Tuesday, 14 January 2025
Teachers Michael Lawrence (Testing 3, 2, 1) and Fabio D’Agostin (whose PhD was called ‘Task-Related Emotions in Mathematics Education’) have written an informed and considered exploration of the growing crises...
Grave Empire: Book One of The Great Silence (Richard Swan, Orbit)
Tuesday, 10 December 2024
In Grave Empire, Richard Swan returns to the world of his Empire of the Wolf fantasy trilogy in a way that’s thrilling and wholly unexpected. Set two hundred years after...
The Body Next Door (Zane Lovitt, Text)
Tuesday, 10 December 2024
Nestled in Melbourne’s western suburbs, Carnation Way is a quiet street of identical-looking houses with one distinction: number 37 was the scene of a murder 13 years ago. In the...
Unhallowed Halls (Lili Wilkinson, A&U)
Tuesday, 10 December 2024
Lili Wilkinson’s latest young adult novel, Unhallowed Halls, is a dark academia fantasy about finding your inner strength and accepting who you are. After a tragic incident that ended her...
