Big World, Tiny World: Forest (Jess Racklyeft, Affirm)
Children’s picture book
Released February 2022, reviewed by Ellen Cregan.
Jess Racklyeft will already be a familiar name to readers of picture books, and Big World, Tiny World: Forest is just as...
The Grass Hotel (Craig Sherborne, Text)
Fiction
Released February 2022, reviewed by Chris Saliba.
A woman suffering from dementia speaks to her son in her own idiosyncratic, damaged voice—her ‘wiring’ is gone. The mother-narrator's...
The Furies (Mandy Beaumont, Hachette)
Fiction
Released February 2022, reviewed by Cher Tan.
A woman in a small Australian town is haunted. Death is all around her: she is still grieving her murdered...
South Flows the Pearl (Mavis Gock Yen, ed by Siaoman Yen & Richard Horsburgh, SUP)
Nonfiction
Released February 2022, reviewed by Elizabeth Flux.
Over the 80s and 90s, Mavis Gock Yen (1916–2008) collected the stories of her contemporaries—Australian Chinese people whose memories and...
The Cane (Maryrose Cuskelly, A&U)
Fiction
Released February 2022, reviewed by Scott Whitmont.
Award-winning nonfiction writer Maryrose Cuskelly’s first leap into fiction is set in a small Australian town where an unsolved crime...
Xavier in the Meantime (Kate Gordon, Riveted Press)
Younger readers
Released February 2022, reviewed by Karys McEwen.
Xavier in the Meantime is the new companion novel to Kate Gordon’s CBCA award-winning Aster’s Good, Right Things. Focusing this time on...
The Very Last List of Vivian Walker (Megan Albany, Hachette)
Fiction
Released February 2022, reviewed by Kate Cuthbert.
This quiet but compelling novel follows the very ordinary path of an ordinary woman completing the ordinary business of dying....
A Witness of Fact (Drew Rooke, Scribe)
Nonfiction
Released February 2022, reviewed by Nathan Smith.
A Witness of Fact examines the controversial public life of South Australia's former chief forensic pathologist Dr Colin Manock, and his...
Leo and Mina Fink: For the greater good (Margaret Taft, Monash Publishing)
Nonfiction
Released February 2022, reviewed by Julia Taylor.
In this biography of the working lives of an impressive 20th-century power couple, the competing forces of hope and catastrophe...
In an Artist’s Garden (Claire Orrell, Thames & Hudson)
Younger readers
Released February 2022, reviewed by Anica Boulanger-Mashberg.
Like all good seek-and-find books, In an Artist’s Garden is a bit addictive regardless of the reader’s age, though is perhaps best...
Ouch! Tales of Gravity (Kate Simpson, illus by Andy Hardiman, A&U)
Children’s picture book
Released February 2022, reviewed by Anica Boulanger-Mashberg.
How do you explain something as complicated as gravity to a young audience (five-year-olds and above)? Well, humour certainly helps....
Cold Enough for Snow (Jessica Au, Giramondo)
Fiction
Released February 2022, reviewed by Jacqui Davies.
Cold Enough for Snow is Jessica Au’s second novel and the winner of Giramondo Publishing, Fitzcarraldo Editions and New Directions’...
This is Me! (Sally Morgan, Magabala)
Children’s picture book
Released February 2022, reviewed by Ellen Cregan.
Written and illustrated by well-loved author Sally Morgan, This is Me is a simple and colourful board book for very...
Found, Wanting (Natasha Sholl, Ultimo Press)
Nonfiction
Released February 2022, reviewed by Ash Davida Jane.
Beginning with a sudden death, Natasha Sholl’s memoir sets us up to expect a traditional grief narrative, ending with the...
Tiny Wonders (Sally Soweol Han, UQP)
Children’s picture book
Released February 2022, reviewed by Anica Boulanger-Mashberg.
This story has been told plenty of times but it’s one that is always worth listening to: the idea that...
The Competition (Katherine Collette, Text)
Fiction
Released February 2022, reviewed by Chloë Cooper.
When 21-year-old Frances’s parents give her the ultimatum to find some direction in her life or find herself a new...
Delia Akeley and the Monkey (Iain McCalman, Upswell)
Nonfiction
Released February 2022, reviewed by Carody Culver.
On an African hunting expedition in 1909, an American woman named Delia Akeley captured a baby vervet monkey to settle...
The Riddle of Tanglewood Manor (Tracey Hawkins, Storytorch)
Younger readers
Released February 2022, reviewed by Karys McEwen.
The Riddle of Tanglewood Manor is a new younger readers novel from real-life detective-turned-children’s author Tracey Hawkins. When Sam and...
Twelve Summers (Adam Zwar, Hachette)
Nonfiction
Released December 2021, reviewed by Brad Jefferies.
Twelve Summers is a memoir by actor and writer Adam Zwar, structured around the retelling of several memorable performances by...
The Beautiful Words (Vanessa McCausland, HarperCollins)
Fiction
Released December 2021, reviewed by Fay Helfenbaum .
Sylvie is a lover of words who lives a quiet and solitary life after an accident as a teenager robbed...
