The Age's recommended books of 2020

The Living Sea of Waking Dreams
An ember storm of a novel, this is Booker Prize-winning novelist Richard Flanagan at his most moving - and astonishing - best.
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Real Life
Wallace is a biochemistry grad student at a lakeside Midwestern university used to keeping a wary distance even from those closest to him. But, over the course of one weekend, a series of confrontations with colleagues and an...
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The Trespassers
The Trespassers is a beguiling novel that explores the consequences of greed, the experience of exile, and the unlikely ways strangers can become the people we hold dear.
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Love
One summer's evening, two men meet up in a Dublin restaurant. Old friends, now married and with grown-up children, their lives have taken seemingly similar paths. But Joe has a secret he has to tell Davy, and Davy, a grief he...
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A Couple of Things Before the End: Stories
This brilliant collection mixes the storytelling originality of George Saunders and Lydia Davis with a sensibility all its own, taking the reader on an extraordinary tour of old and new Australia - and into a very frightening...
$27.99Buy now
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The Wild Laughter
An exhilarating, anarchic look at contemporary Ireland, from one of the country's most exciting new voices
$29.99Buy now
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Mammoth: The bestselling comic novel narrated by a prehistoric mammoth
The original, unforgettable and thought-provoking new novel by award-winning author Chris Flynn that will change how readers understand the world
$29.99Buy now
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Postcolonial Love Poem
Here, the bodies of indigenous, Latinx, black and brown women are simultaneously the body politic and the body ecstatic, and portrayed with a glowing intimacy: the alphabet of a hand in the dark, the hips' silvered percussion, a...
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Breasts and Eggs
A strange and beguiling novel about three women struggling to determine their own lives in contemporary Tokyo, from Japan's most exciting young writer, Mieko Kawakami
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The Death of Vivek Oji
They burned down the market on the day Vivek Oji died. One afternoon, a mother opens her front door to find the length of her son's body stretched out on the veranda, swaddled in akwete material, his head on her welcome mat.
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The Lying Life of Adults
A powerful new novel set in a divided Naples by Elena Ferrante, the beloved best-selling author of My Brilliant Friend.
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Infinite Splendours
Lawrence Loman is a bright, caring, curious boy with a gift for painting. He lives at home with his mother and younger brother, and the future is laid out before him, full of promise. But when he is ten, an experience of betrayal...
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Perfect Tunes
For readers of Stephanie Danler and Nora Ephron, a breakout novel from Emily Gould about music, ambition, sacrifice, and how compromises and rebellion shape women's destinies
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Writers & Lovers
Funny and heartbreaking, Writers & Lovers is the bitingly clever story of Casey, a young writer who has lost her direction in life, until two men step into her world and offer her two very different futures... ...
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More Than a Woman
Now with ageing parents, teenage daughters, a bigger bum and a To-Do list without end, Caitlin Moran is back with More Than A Woman: a guide to growing older, a manifesto for change, and a celebration of all those middle-aged...
$35.00Buy now
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One Day I’ll Remember This: Diaries 1987-1995
In this second volume of diaries from one of Australia's greatest writers, we see Garner in love; asking herself questions about relationships, individuality, morality and contentment.
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A Room Made of Leaves
A Room Made of Leaves is the internationally acclaimed author Kate Grenville's first novel in almost a decade. It is historical fiction turned inside out, a stunning sleight of hand that gives the past the piercing immediacy of...
$39.99Buy now
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Good Turn
$59.99Buy now
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The Mother Fault
Mim's husband is missing. No one knows where Ben is, but everyone wants to find him - especially The Department. And they should know, the all-seeing government body has fitted the entire population with a universal tracking chip...
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Change Machine
Tough and alert, Savige's shapeshifting poems reflect the world in violent transformation. Bodies scarred by history collide in the ruckus of generations, geopolitics and technology. Elegies appear alongside poems that set a pulse...
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Luster
Razor sharp. provocatively page-turning and surprisingly tender, Luster is a painfully funny coming-of-age story told by a fresh new voice.
$14.99Buy now
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How Much of These Hills is Gold
Set to be a major 2020 debut fiction launch from the American publishers of My Absolute Darling, this remarkable novel comes with praise from Sebastian Barry to Emma Donoghue. During the Gold Rush, two siblings carry the...
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Summerwater
From the acclaimed author of Ghost Wall, Summerwater is a devastating story told over twenty-four hours in the Scottish highlands, and a searing exploration of our capacity for both kinship and cruelty in these divided...
$19.99Buy now
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When We Say Black Lives Matter
A vital and timely picture book from the prize-winning and bestselling Australian author Maxine Beneba Clarke
$26.99Buy now
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Pew
A human-like creature emerges in a small town and sends the citizens into a frenzy.
$24.99Buy now
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Southern Cross Crime
Australian and New Zealand crime and thriller writing is booming globally, with antipodean authors regularly featuring on awards and bestseller lists across Europe and North America, and overseas readers and publishers looking...
$22.99Buy now
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Weather
From the author of Dept. of Speculation, a dazzling and deadpan new novel about hope and despair, fear and comfort as it plays out in these times of environmental and political turbulence.
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The Dictionary of Lost Words
In 1901, the word 'Bondmaid' was discovered missing from the Oxford English Dictionary. This is the story of the girl who stole it.
$19.99Buy now
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The Drop-off
At Baytree Primary, it's the adults who are behaving like children...
$29.99Buy now
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Animals Make Us Human
A response to the devastating 2019-20 bushfires, Animals Make Us Human both celebrates Australia's unique wildlife and highlights its vulnerability.
$29.99Buy now
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Sorry For Your Trouble
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sportswriter comes a profound, moving collection of stories about men, women, and the gulfs that lie between them
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Theft
Love, envy and revenge in divided Britain...
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Stone Sky Gold Mountain: The multi-award-winning Australian historical novel
Family circumstances force siblings Ying and Lai Yue to flee their home in China to seek their fortunes in Australia. Life on the gold fields is hard, and they soon abandon the diggings and head to nearby Maytown.
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The Animals in That Country
Out on the road, no one speaks, everything talks.
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Metal Fish, Falling Snow
A road trip with unlikely companions, a girl with a unique way of seeing the world, a great loss and a struggle of identity; Metal Fish, Falling Snow is an Own Voices YA debut that packs a punch.
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Turbulence
In this intensely personal collection, On explores loss, separation and renewal, online dating, sex, longing, rejection and desire. Though they are personal and confessional, taken from the authors own life, these poems speak to...
$22.99Buy now
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Throat
Throat is the explosive second poetry collection from award-winning Mununjali Yugambeh writer Ellen van Neerven.
$24.99Buy now
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