Our digital marketing manager Lian Hingee shares 12 sci-fi and fantasy books to get stuck into over the summer break. Plus, you find even more recommendations from this past year by browsing the collection below. Fire and Blood by George R. R. Martin

The final season of Game of Thrones hits our screens next year, so it’s the perfect time to reacquaint yourself with George R. R. Martin’s spr…

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Each week we bring you a sample of the books we’re reading, the films and TV shows we’re watching, and the music we’re listening to. Bronte Coates is reading Camille Perri & Katherine Heiny

It is that time of the year where everyone shares their end-of-year wrap-ups and the internet is flooded with recommendations for approximately one billion books that you missed out on reading this year.…

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Over the past few weeks, we’ve been compiling a host of gift guides to help you with your Christmas shopping. If you’re hoping to use this gift-giving opportunity as a way to persuade and inspire your friends and family to your own superior way of thinking, this is the guide for you. For the person who keeps killing houseplants…

Try… Handmade Houseplants by Corrie Beth Hogg & Christine Han

…

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Mike Shuttleworth has worked as a bookseller at our Hawthorn shop for close to four years but he’s been an advocate for youth literature for far longer – organising events and writing about youth literature since 2002! We chat with him about literary trends, weird bookshop queries, and which book he would choose to be trapped inside of. Why did you decide to work in books?

I went to universit…

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Our staff share the books that made their skin crawl this year.

‘Melissa Albert’s debut novel, The Hazel Wood, really got under my skin. It weaves together a contemporary set-up – two street-smart New York teens Alice and Ellery go on a road trip, searching for Alice’s missing mother Ella – with encroaching elements of dark fairytale. The fictional cult book written by Alice’s grandmother, Tal…

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The Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards shortlist for 2019 has now been announced.

The winners of the main suite of awards – fiction, non-fiction, drama, poetry, writing for young adults, and the biennial Prize for Indigenous Writing – each receive $25,000. The winner of the Prize for an Unpublished Manuscript receives $15,000.

PRIZE FOR FICTION Flames by Robbie Arnott Ironbark by Jay Carmi…

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Our staff share the books that kept them on the edge of their seat this year.

‘As a crime reader, it’s almost impossible to answer this question without missing 20 books that also kept me on the edge of my seat… Jane Harper’s The Lost Man, though, was suspenseful, mysterious and gripping, while Christian White’s The Nowhere Child kept my nails thoroughly chewed with its American snake cults an…

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Our staff share the books that made them cry this year.

‘Slam poet Elizabeth Acevedo is one of the most exciting young voices writing today. Her powerful verse novel The Poet X won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award for Best Fiction and was a stand-out favourite with our staff. The story about a young woman who uses poetry as a means to unde…

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Our staff share the books that made them laugh this year.

‘On the recommendation of several great colleagues, I read the graphic novel Fante Bukowski by Noah Van Sciver, which follows the adventures of a young delusional lit-bro as he tries to make it in the scene. Fante is a horrible person, which makes for delightful reading – his high opinion of himself, his work, and what it means to truly…

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All the Ways to be Smart by Allison Colpoys & Davina Bell The Ice Monster by David Walliams & Tony Ross Wundersmith: The Calling of Morrigan Crow (Nevermoor Book 2) by Jessica Townsend The Meltdown (Diary of a Wimpy Kid Book 13) by Jeff Kinney Lenny’s Book of Everything by Karen Foxlee Where’s Santa Claus? by Ingela Peterson Arrhenius Tricky’s Bad Day by Alison Lester 101 Weird Words (and Three …

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