Beetle and Boo (Caitlin Murray, Puffin)
8 November 2019
Beetle is not scared of anything. Monsters? Ghosts? Bad dreams? Wild storms and cracking thunder and lightning? Nope. Uh-uh. Not ever. Caitlin Murray’s Beetle and Boo is a story of...
The Girl with the Gold Bikini (Lisa Walker, Wakefield)
8 November 2019
Lisa Walker’s second YA novel gives us a fun new spin on Nancy Drew and ‘girl detectives’. It will absolutely appeal to readers who love the mystery genre, with a...
A New Kind of Everything (Richard Yaxley, Scholastic)
8 November 2019
A New Kind of Everything picks up the story of the Gallagher family after the loss of patriarch Barney, his spectre still looming large over his wife Allison and their...
Euphoria Kids (Alison Evans, Echo)
8 November 2019
Euphoria Kids is a tender, contemporary fairytale about magic, friendship and gender identity. A departure from the horror elements of Alison Evans’ previous novels, this book focuses on the wonder...
Coming Home to Country (Bronwyn Bancroft, Little Hare)
8 November 2019
This picture book is bathed in a ‘palette of leaf green, red rust, yellow ochre, deep blue and crimson’ as the unnamed narrator returns home, back to Country. Bronwyn Bancroft’s...
Morphing Murphy (Robert Favretto, illus by Tull Suwannakit, Ford Street)
8 November 2019
Murphy is a happy tadpole, quite content with his life eating algae and rotting water plants all day. So happy that he wouldn’t change a thing … until he slowly...
Jelly-Boy (Nicole Godwin, illus by Christopher Nielsen, Walker Books)
8 November 2019
In this deceptively simple story, a jellyfish falls in love with a plastic bag, having assumed that it’s a fellow jellyfish. The book’s aim is to teach children about the...
Evie and Pog: Take Off! (Tania McCartney, HarperCollins)
8 November 2019
Six-year-old Evie and her best friend Pog the pug live in a treehouse next to obsessively tidy Granny Gladys’ house. Evie is accident-prone, wildly enthusiastic about the world, and enjoys...
Emergency Rescue Angel (Cate Whittle, Scholastic)
8 November 2019
Mitch is rudderless and lonely after the death of his dad and the upheaval of his best mate across the country. Max is a goth angel—an Emergency Rescue Angel, to...
Me and My Boots (Penny Harrison, illus by Evie Barrow, Little Hare)
8 November 2019
Author Penny Harrison exemplifies the beauty in nature and the power of self-expression through her books, which include The Art Garden, Dance with Me and Emily Green’s Garden. Her latest...
A Year in the Mud and the Toast and the Tears: My (semi) rural kind of life (Georgie Brooks, Bad Apple Press)
31 October 2019
In the middle of another stifling summer in suburbia and in desperate need of a ‘tree change’ Georgie Brooks and her young family decide to make the bold move to...
No Neat Endings: Stories (Dominic Carew, MidnightSun)
31 October 2019
Dominic Carew sketches masculinity faltering or in crisis in his short story collection No Neat Endings. In these snapshots of manhood, Carew depicts male kinship and identity fraught with the...
Shark Arm: A shark, a tattooed arm and two unsolved murders (Phillip Roope & Kevin Meagher, A&U)
31 October 2019
Shark Arm is an offbeat true crime book that begins with a shark throwing up a man’s tattooed arm in front of onlookers at a Coogee aquarium in 1935. The...
A Couple of Things Before the End: Stories (Sean O’Beirne, Black Inc.)
31 October 2019
The stories in this debut collection from Melbourne writer Sean O’Beirne are written as fictional, often funny monologues, letters, speeches, interviews, texts and emails, diary entries, official reports and online...
Jane in Love (Rachel Givney, Michael Joseph)
31 October 2019
It is a truth universally acknowledged that Jane Austen re-imaginings are an uneven offering. Some are brilliant; some less so. The fundamental challenges of this niche, however, remain constant: that...
Maggie’s Going Nowhere (Rose Hartley, Michael Joseph)
31 October 2019
The eponymous character in Rose Hartley’s debut is introduced in the blurb as thoroughly relatable and a counterpart to Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag. While the comparison feels true on the surface—both...
Blueberries (Ellena Savage, Text)
15 October 2019
Ellena Savage’s debut collection of essays, Blueberries, is a breathtaking interrogation of the self in the world; the self within structures of power and oppression. Each essay examines a memory,...
The Medicine: A doctor’s notes (Karen Hitchcock, Black Inc.)
15 October 2019
When discussing modern medicine there is a lot to consider. There are the complexities of the doctor/patient relationship. The wellbeing of doctors. How responsible treatment and the law sometimes intersect...
Ten Doors Down: The story of an extraordinary adoption reunion (Robert Tickner, Scribe)
15 October 2019
As the rolling apologies for forced adoptions swept Australia in 2012 and 2013, it was too late for Robert Tickner’s mother—she had died, taking her secrets to the grave. But...
Contest for the Indo-Pacific: Why China won’t map the future (La Trobe University Publishing, Chris Saliba)
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...
The Wonderful Wisdom of Ants (Philip Bunting, Scholastic)
15 October 2019
Ants. What exactly do these tiny, easily overlooked creatures have to teach us? Quite a bit, according to Philip Bunting, whose picture book is funny and informative as he goes...
Extraordinary! (Penny Harrison, illus by Katie Wilson, New Frontier)
15 October 2019
What a magical book this is! In Extraordinary! Penny Harrison, author of Emily Green’s Garden and Dance With Me, and New Zealand-based illustrator Katie Wilson take the reader on a...
The Threads of Magic (Alison Croggon, Walker)
15 October 2019
This first foray by Alison Croggon—best known for her ‘Pellinor’ fantasy series—into middle-grade is a sophisticated story of power, friendship and magic. The city of Clavel is in a medieval-style...
Ready, Set, Code! (Heather Catchpole & Nicola O’Brien, CSIRO Publishing)
15 October 2019
Ready, Set, Code! teaches computer programming skills to kids aged 8–12 using the open source Scratch language created by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This book presents introductory programming concepts...
