The Brilliant Ideas of Lily Green (Lisa Siberry, Hardie Grant Egmont)
Thursday, 6 June 2019
This debut middle-grade novel, which won Hardie Grant Egmont’s Ampersand Prize, ticks many familiar boxes. The main character: a 12-year-old on the cusp of maturity. The challenges: friendships, enemies, family,...
Australia’s Original Languages: An introduction (R M W Dixon, A&U)
Thursday, 30 May 2019
Bob Dixon has an impressive academic and publishing career, which includes 50 years of researching Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages. Dixon’s latest book combines linguistics, colonisation history, anthropology and...
Lapse (Sarah Thornton, Text)
Thursday, 30 May 2019
Former corporate lawyer Clementine Jones is holed up in a country town where no-one knows her past, and she’s hoping to keep it that way. During her self-imposed exile she...
Storytime: Growing up with books (Jane Sullivan, Ventura)
Thursday, 30 May 2019
Storytime is a delightful collection of essays by literary journalist Jane Sullivan on her favourite childhood books, revisited as an adult. Best known as the scribe behind the Saturday Age’s...
On Drugs (Chris Fleming, Giramondo)
Thursday, 30 May 2019
Philosopher Chris Fleming’s memoir is a searching, considered account of drug and alcohol use and the mechanisms of addiction. Fleming traces his history of marijuana, codeine-based painkillers and alcohol consumption,...
Taking Tom Murray Home (Tim Slee, HarperCollins)
Thursday, 30 May 2019
This debut novel and winner of HarperCollins’ Banjo Prize is based on the ingenious premise of a funeral-protest that raises awareness of the pressures facing dairy farmers from banks, supermarkets...
Love and Other Battles (Tess Woods, HarperCollins)
Thursday, 30 May 2019
Tess Woods’ latest novel follows the lives of three generations of women: Jess is a flower child who falls for a soldier under the shadow of the Vietnam war; Jamie...
Fortune (Lenny Bartulin, A&U)
Thursday, 30 May 2019
Lenny Bartulin—who cut his teeth with the Jack Susko crime series—made a dramatic shift with his rollicking 2013 historical novel Infamy. But the visceral energy and dirty, real descriptions that...
The Yield (Tara June Winch, Hamish Hamilton)
Thursday, 30 May 2019
The Yield unpicks intergenerational trauma and redacted histories in prose that glimmers. The word ‘yield’ has a dual meaning: in English it refers to the harvest reaped from the land...
A Constant Hum (Alice Bishop, Text)
Thursday, 30 May 2019
Alice Bishop’s debut is a collection of short stories linked by the central theme of bushfire, specifically Victoria’s 2009 Black Saturday fires, which killed and injured hundreds of people, decimating...
Something to Believe In (Andrew Stafford, UQP)
Thursday, 30 May 2019
This memoir is rock journalist Andrew Stafford’s first book since his 2004 milestone Pig City, which mapped Brisbane music ‘from the Saints to Savage Garden’. Named after a Ramones song,...
Fake: A startling true story of love in a world of liars, cheats, narcissists, fantasists and phonies (Stephanie Wood, Vintage)
Thursday, 30 May 2019
In 2017 journalist Stephanie Wood penned a piece for Good Weekend magazine in which she detailed a relationship she’d had with a man she met online. The relationship went awry,...
Kindred: 12 Queer #LoveOzYA Stories (ed by Michael Earp, Walker)
Thursday, 16 May 2019
Among the boon of recent #LoveOzYA anthologies (Begin, End, Begin; Meet Me at the Intersection; Underdog), Kindred takes the unique position of being entirely devoted to stories by and about...
Fox & Bird (Edwina Wyatt, illus by Alice Lindstrom, Little Hare)
Thursday, 2 May 2019
Edwina Wyatt’s picture book is about testing the bonds of new friendship. Fox’s loneliness lends him to do strange things. He tries to befriend a bird but she has a...
One Careless Night (Christina Booth, Black Dog)
Thursday, 2 May 2019
Christina Booth is an award-winning author and illustrator who has previously collaborated with well-known Australian authors such as Colin Thiele and Jackie French. In One Careless Night, Booth recreates the...
So She Did: The Story of May Wirth (Simi Genziuk, illus by Renée Treml, Affirm)
Thursday, 2 May 2019
Born in Bundaberg in 1984, May Wirth showed an unusual knack for acrobatics at an early age. So much so that she was adopted by an equestrienne from the famous...
Cheeky Dogs: To Lake Nash and Back (Dion Beasley & Johanna Bell, A&U)
Thursday, 2 May 2019
Dion Beasley’s illustrated memoir details his early life moving between a couple of remote communities in the Northern Territory before settling at Tennant Creek. Both profoundly deaf and suffering muscular...
My Book (Not Yours) (Ben Sanders, Lothian)
Thursday, 2 May 2019
This is the first in what is slated to be a series of picture books featuring Lento (a sloth) and Fox (a fox). It joins the growing trend of books...
Secrets of a Schoolyard Millionaire (Nat Amoore, Puffin)
Thursday, 2 May 2019
In her first children’s book, Nat Amoore has created such a likeable heroine in Tess Heckleton, entrepreneur and life advice-giver, that her unlikely adventures and somewhat unlikely personality are entirely...
Mindcull (K H Canobi, Ford Street)
Thursday, 2 May 2019
Eila, a rising social media star, is shortlisted to become the new face of Pearl, a virtual reality tech company. She is invited to spend three days in England trying...
Split: True Stories of Leaving, Loss, and New Beginnings (ed by Lee Kofman, Ventura)
Friday, 26 April 2019
Author and editor Lee Kofman sent a callout for personal essays about breaking up. The essays could be about any kind of separation: with people, objects, whatever. Split: True Stories...
The White Girl (Tony Birch, UQP)
Friday, 26 April 2019
Tony Birch’s latest novel tells the story of Odette Brown and her granddaughter Sissy, who live on the fringe of Deane, a fictional town situated between the mountains and the...
The Nancys (R W R McDonald, A&U)
Friday, 26 April 2019
In the poky New Zealand town of Riverstone—home of bad interior design, dull news cycles and not much else—11-year-old Tippy Chan’s mother is about to go on holiday. Tippy’s flamboyant...
The Electric Hotel (Dominic Smith, A&U)
Friday, 26 April 2019
Dominic Smith’s The Electric Hotel is a sensory delight, retelling the life story of a former film director—known as ‘the Frenchman behind the viewfinder’—with the rich vocabulary of cinema. Claude...
Allegra in Three Parts (Suzanne Daniel, Macmillan)
Friday, 26 April 2019
In this impressive debut novel, 11-year-old Allegra finds herself torn between the three adults in her life: her two grandmothers and her father. They live on adjoining blocks and adore...
My Culture and Me (Gregg Dreise, Puffin)
Thursday, 4 April 2019
This beautiful picture book presents the voice of an Indigenous child relating the importance of knowing and living your culture. Beginning with an expression of love for Country and family,...
Arthur and the Tiger (Sophie Beer, Puffin)
Thursday, 4 April 2019
Sophie Beer has a knack for creating books that simultaneously feel contemporary and vintage, which is sure to make them modern classics. In Arthur and the Tiger, Arthur is the son of...
Sophia and the Corner Park Clubhouse (Davina Bell, Hardie Grant Egmont)
Thursday, 4 April 2019
Davina Bell is one of Australia’s most highly regarded authors for young people, and the first book in her new series for middle-grade readers cements her reputation as one of...
Devil’s Ballast (Meg Caddy, Text)
Thursday, 4 April 2019
After escaping her violently abusive husband, Anne Bonny disguises herself as a boy and joins her lover, pirate captain Calico Jack Rackham, on his ship the Ranger. Anne fits in...
How it Feels to Float (Helena Fox, Pan)
Thursday, 4 April 2019
How do you find the will to live when you can’t even feel the ground anymore? Elizabeth Martin Grey—Biz—doesn’t know. All she knows is that she’s got one foot in...
