Contest for the Indo-Pacific: Why China won’t map the future (Rory Medcalf, La Trobe University Press)
15 October 2019
How does the world balance China’s emergence as a global superpower? What are the risks ahead? How do nation states dilute China’s hegemony and avoid capitulation to its interests? These...
Shirl (Wayne Marshall, Affirm)
15 October 2019
Wayne Marshall’s Shirl is a collection of bizarre, consistently funny stories that delights in dismantling the tropes of Australiana. From the adventures of a bereaved yowie at a Desperate and...
Cherry Beach (Laura McPhee-Browne, Text)
15 October 2019
When best friends Ness and Hetty move to Canada together, it seems as though a new phase of their lives is beginning—but their shared past won’t relinquish its grip so...
Return Ticket (Jon Doust, Fremantle Press)
15 October 2019
Jon Doust has now devoted three books to wilful, semi-autobiographical protagonist Jack Muir. While 2009’s Boy on a Wire and 2012’s To the Highlands saw Jack fumbling towards manhood, Return...
Bird (Adam Morris, Puncher & Wattmann)
15 October 2019
A novel told from multiple viewpoints, Bird examines the Western Australian prison system via the cultural and social constructs that prop it up, while also exploring Indigenous and non-Indigenous identity....
In the Clearing (J P Pomare, Hachette)
15 October 2019
If J P Pomare’s Call Me Evie was a slow-burner of a psychological thriller, his follow-up, In the Clearing, is a pared-back firecracker where the danger is clear and present—even...
Fauna (Donna Mazza, A&U)
15 October 2019
Donna Mazza’s Fauna is set in a near-future Western Australia, recognisable but markedly bleaker. Stacey and her family have signed up to an experimental research procedure in which Stacey’s embryo’s...
Nothing New: A history of second-hand (Robyn Annear, Text)
26 September 2019
Opportunity shops—or op shops, as they’re lovingly referred to—are a well-established and much-loved feature of the Aussie retail landscape. In this entertaining and insightful history, Robyn Annear looks at where...
Peace (Garry Disher, Text)
26 September 2019
In Peace, Garry Disher returns to the rural South Australian town of Tiverton and to the hero of his 2013 novel Bitter Wash Road, Constable Paul ‘Hirsch’ Hirschhausen. Hirsch has...
Fascists Among Us: Online hate and the Christchurch massacre (Jeff Sparrow, Scribe)
26 September 2019
In the wake of the Christchurch massacre, Jeff Sparrow turns his eye to the recent rise of far-right violence. Fascists Among Us traces the history of fascism and seeks to...
The Great Divide (L J M Owen, Echo)
26 September 2019
In her fourth novel, L J M Owen, author of the ‘Dr Pimms, Intermillenial Sleuth’ series, gives us Australian rural crime at its most atmospheric: mist-shrouded streets, ruined vineyards, an...
Maurice Blackburn: Champion of the people (David Day, Scribe)
26 September 2019
Maurice Blackburn (1880–1944) was an influential member of the Australian Labor Party and a barrister, specialising in cases defending socialist causes. He held seats at both the state and federal...
The Bee and the Orange Tree (Melissa Ashley, Affirm)
26 September 2019
The Bee and the Orange Tree is Melissa Ashley's second historical novel. Set in the literary salons of 17th-century Paris, it follows the lives of three women: Marie Catherine d'Aulnoy, a...
Act of Grace (Anna Krien, Black Inc.)
29 August 2019
Anna Krien’s debut novel is an ambitious and compelling study of trauma and how it’s transferred and inherited, told through the points of view of four disparate but interconnected characters....
Paris Savages (Katherine Johnson, Ventura)
29 August 2019
Katherine Johnson’s fourth novel is a poignant imagining of the true story of three young Aboriginal people—Bonny, Dorondera and Jurano—who in 1882 agree to tour Europe with German engineer Hans...
Bruny (Heather Rose, A&U)
29 August 2019
Set in a near future, Heather Rose’s latest book is a work of political intrigue that samples current events and headlines. A diplomat returns to her Tasmanian hometown, charged with...
Womerah Lane: Lives and landscapes (Tom Carment, Giramondo)
29 August 2019
Tom Carment’s Womerah Lane is a lively and pensive personal history, chronicling 30 years of life and art from one of Australia’s most well-known landscape artists. Taking an episodic, essayistic...
Her Kind of Luck (Michelle Balogh, Brio)
29 August 2019
When Michelle Balogh’s great-grandmother Shan-Yi dies, Balogh moves into her apartment temporarily. Struggling with depression, the opportunity to live in the luxurious Sydney home provides a welcome change, but it...
Wearing Paper Dresses (Anne Brinsden, Macmillan)
29 August 2019
Life is tough in the Mallee in the 1950s, and when city sophisticate Elise, brimming with artistic and musical talent, is uprooted with her young children to her father-in-law’s wheat...
The Woman Who Cracked the Anxiety Code: The extraordinary life of Dr Claire Weekes (Judith Hoare, Scribe)
25 July 2019
Australian doctor Claire Weekes found worldwide fame with her bestselling books on ‘nervous illness’ in the 1960s and 1970s—but despite gratitude from thousands of sufferers, she is almost forgotten today....
The Innocent Reader: Reflections on reading and writing (Debra Adelaide, Picador)
25 July 2019
Debra Adelaide’s biblio-memoir is more of a collection of essays than a cohesive story of a literary life, and reading it as such can help mitigate some of the internal...
Being Black ’N Chicken, & Chips (Matt Okine, Hachette)
25 July 2019
It’s 1998. Mike Amon is almost 13 and about to start high school. All he wants is to be good enough at athletics to be chosen for the Dobson Dash,...
Hide (S J Morgan, MidnightSun)
25 July 2019
Hide opens in the Australian outback in the 1980s. A hitchhiker, Alec, is picked up by a man who has his own intentions for the passenger. When the driver reveals...
The Tiniest House of Time (Sreedhevi Iyer, Wild Dingo)
25 July 2019
The Tiniest House of Time is the well-researched debut novel by Sreedhevi Iyer, an Indian-Malaysian-Australian author. Matriarch Susheela Sastri is dying. Her granddaughter, Sandhya, born on the same date as...
Silver (Chris Hammer, A&U)
25 July 2019
Silver is Chris Hammer’s follow-up to his bestselling debut Scrublands. In Hammer’s second novel, journalist Martin Scarsden, fresh from turning the events of Scrublands into a book, follows his new...
Growing Up Queer in Australia (ed by Benjamin Law, Black Inc.)
27 June 2019
Mapped across a spectrum of ages and eras, sexualities and ethnicities, Growing Up Queer in Australia captures the resilience and strength of queer people coming of age in Australia. Edited...
A River with a City Problem: A history of Brisbane floods (Margaret Cook, UQP)
27 June 2019
Who can forget the image of a disheveled Premier Anna Bligh, in the midst of the devastating 2011 Brisbane floods, making her ‘We are Queenslanders’ speech? In the aptly titled...
The Trespassers (Meg Mundell, UQP)
27 June 2019
Meg Mundell’s second novel has been hotly anticipated since her debut, Black Glass, showed her to be a writer of extraordinary imaginative prowess, with a commitment to exploring themes of...
The Wooleen Way: Renewing an Australian resource (David Pollock, Scribe)
27 June 2019
David Pollock, a second-generation pastoralist from Western Australia, describes a wicked environmental problem in his memoir The Wooleen Way. Animals produced for food—beef in particular—eat native grasses and plants, degrading...
Going Under (Sonia Henry, A&U)
27 June 2019
Dr Kitty Holliday has just started her internship at a Sydney hospital and is struggling to stay afloat. The problem isn’t just the long hours or the emotional drain of...
