The Invention of Nature by Andrea Wulf

$22.99

Alexander von Humboldt is the great lost scientist. Napoleon was jealous of him, Simon Bolivar’s revolution was fuelled by his ideas, Darwin set sail on the Beagle because of Humboldt, and Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo owned all his many books. He simply was, as one contemporary put it, ‘the greatest man since the Deluge’. Taking us on a fantastic voyage in his footsteps – racing across anthrax-infected Russia or mapping tropical rivers alive with crocodiles – Andrea Wulf shows why his life and ideas remain so important today.

Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff

$22.99

At age twenty-two, Lotto and Mathilde are tall, glamorous, madly in love, and destined for greatness. A decade later, their marriage is still the envy of their friends, but with an electric thrill we understand that things are even more complicated and remarkable than they have seemed. With stunning revelations and multiple threads, and in prose that is vibrantly alive and original, Groff delivers a deeply satisfying novel about love, art, creativity, and power that is unlike anything that has come before it.

The Other Side of the World by Stephanie Bishop

$19.99

Cambridge, 1963: Charlotte is struggling. With motherhood, with the changes marriage and parenthood bring, with losing the time and the energy to paint. Her husband, Henry, wants things to be as they were and can’t face the thought of another English winter. Then, a brochure slipped through the letterbox gives him the answer…

(This novel was last year’s winner of the Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction – read more here.)

Barracuda by Christos Tsiolkas

$22.99

His whole life, Danny Kelly’s only wanted one thing: to win Olympic gold. When his parents manage to send him to the most prestigious private school with the finest swimming program, Danny finds himself bullied and shunned as an outsider. But his coach is the best and knows Danny is, too, better than all those rich boys, those pretenders. Danny’s win-at-all-cost ferocity gradually wins favour with the coolest boys – he’s Barracuda, he’s the psycho, he’s everything they want to be but don’t have the guts to get there. He’s going to show them all.

In the Quiet by Eliza Henry-Jones

$19.99

Cate Carlton has recently died, yet she is able to linger on, watching her three young children and her husband as they come to terms with their life without her on their rural horse property. As the months pass and her children grow, they cope in different ways, drawn closer and pulled apart by their shared loss. And all Cate can do is watch on helplessly, seeing their grief, how much they miss her and how – heartbreakingly – they begin to heal.

The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty by Vendela Vida

$19.99

A woman travels to Casablanca, Morocco, on mysterious business, and while checking into her hotel, she is robbed of her wallet and passport. Though the police investigate, the woman is certain she’ll never recover her possessions and feels strangely strangely liberated by her sudden freedom to be anyone she chooses. Part literary mystery, part psychological thriller, The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty is Vendela Vida’s most assured and ambitious novel yet.

The Gap of Time: The Winter’s Tale Retold by Jeanette Winterson

$22.99

The Gap of Time is part of the Hogarth Shakespeare project which sees Shakespeare’s works retold by acclaimed and bestselling novelists of today. A baby girl is abandoned, banished from London to the storm-ravaged American city of New Bohemia. Her father has been driven mad by jealousy, her mother to exile by grief. Seventeen years later, Perdita doesn’t know a lot about who she is or where she’s come from – but she’s about to find out.

Napoleon’s Island by Tom Keneally

$22.99

When Tom Keneally discovered by chance at the National Gallery of Victoria that Betsy Balcombe, a young girl living on St Helena while the Emperor Napoleon was exiled there, had become the Emperor’s intimate friend and annoyer, and had then emigrated with her family to Australia, he was impelled to begin another extraordinary novel, exploring the intersection between the ordinary people of the world and those we deem exceptional.