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WBN advance reviews >

Translations (Jumaana Abdu, Vintage) 

Cover of Translations Tuesday, 25 June 2024
Translations is a powerful, character-driven debut novel by Jumaana Abdu. It follows young mother Aliyah and her daughter, Sakina, who leave Sydney for a property in the Northern Rivers region...

Girl Falling (Hayley Scrivenor, Macmillan) 

Tuesday, 25 June 2024
Girl Falling is the second novel by award-winning crime writer Hayley Scrivenor. Three women—Daphne, Magdu and Finn—head out for a day of rock climbing in the Blue Mountains, but only...

Bird (Courtney Collins, Hachette) 

Cover of Bird Tuesday, 25 June 2024
Following the success of her first novel, The Burial, Courtney Collins’s new dual-narrative novel, Bird, centres on the titular 14-year-old girl. The story is told in alternating chapters differentiated by...

Dirrayawadha (Anita Heiss, S&S) 

Tuesday, 18 June 2024
Dirrayawadha is a work of searing historical fiction set during the Wiradyuri wars in 1820s Bathurst and centring on a love story between a young Wiradyuri woman and an Irish...

Liars (James O’Loghlin, Echo) 

Tuesday, 18 June 2024
In James O’Loghlin’s murder mystery Liars, every character has secrets to hide. The novel is set in the fictitious Bullford Point, a coastal town on NSW’s Northern Beaches, untouched by...

Voyagers: Our journey into the Anthropocene (Lauren Fuge, Text) 

Tuesday, 18 June 2024
The Anthropocene—the geological period dominated by humanity’s activity on the planet—is increasingly seen by scientists and academics as an era of devastation wrought by overconsumption and insatiable industrialisation. In Voyagers,...

Love Unleashed (Melanie Saward, Michael Joseph) 

Cover of Love Unleashed Tuesday, 11 June 2024
Melanie Saward’s Love Unleashed is a bingeable, warm and soulful romantic comedy. Saward (whose debut novel, Burn, was released in 2023) draws on her own experience in New York to...

Winter of the Wolf (Amanda Willimott, Viking) 

Tuesday, 11 June 2024
Winter of the Wolf is Amanda Willimott’s debut novel, inspired by the real-life trial of Gilles Garnier, who was convicted of being a werewolf in 1573. When Sidonie Montot travels...

The Youngest Son (John Byrnes, Macmillan) 

Tuesday, 11 June 2024
John Byrnes’s The Youngest Son follows the fortunes of three siblings from a working-class Sydney family in the 1930s and 40s. Bob, the titular youngest, naturally gets the largest share...

Hi from Outer Space (Fiona Katauskas, A&U Children’s) 

Tuesday, 11 June 2024
Cartoonist and illustrator Fiona Katauskas’s debut middle-grade novel, Hi from Outer Space, is a wonderfully wacky sci-fi/comedy that will appeal to readers of Nat Amoore, Morris Gleitzman and Eve L...

Woo Woo (Ella Baxter, A&U) 

Tuesday, 4 June 2024
In Woo Woo, Ella Baxter’s raucous second novel after New Animal, art is terrible, a living spell, a parasite, a trick, and all there is. ‘Art is life,’ writes protagonist...

Six Figures While You Sleep (Kate Toon, Major Street) 

Tuesday, 4 June 2024
Following the success of her first book, Six Figures in School Hours, copywriter, podcaster and self-made millionaire Kate Toon returns with Six Figures While You Sleep, a practical, no-nonsense guide to creating...

Shades of Me (Mel Brown, Rockpool) 

Tuesday, 4 June 2024
Melinda Brown’s Shades of Me challenges the saying ‘jack of all trades, master of none’ by taking us through Brown’s ‘many lives through many Dreamings’, including her careers as a...

Catherine Wheel (Liz Evans, Ultimo) 

Tuesday, 4 June 2024
Kate is starting over in the small town of Bridgewell after a bad break-up with Max. She works as a yoga instructor and volunteers at the local library, living in...