Playing Nice Was Getting Me Nowhere: Satires
Alex Cothren
A conspiracy theory about bees divides a nation. A haunted pokie machine seeks revenge. A ‘smart’ home becomes a little too clever.
Alex Cothren’s riotous collection of ethical fever dreams explores the ethos of the end times, testing the limits of technology, humanity and modern media. His predictions are incisive, hilarious and terribly plausible, tracing our contemporary obsessions to their logical – and often dire – conclusions. Yet amid the horror are moments of hope and resistance, and possibly even a path to redemption – or at least instructions on finding a good place to hide when it all comes crashing down.
From an internationally recognised master of the short form, this is a book for anyone struggling to tell the difference between the news and satire. It will stop you doomscrolling and keep you guessing.
Read our staff review here.
The Leap
Paul Daley
'Think three-fifths of the way to fuck-all-nowhere-ville. Pioneering grazing family. Once hallowed farming country gone to shit. Rabbit plagues and feral pigs. Never-ending drought. Full of Flat Earth Party-voting, climate-change-denying, God-bothering, gun-nut, ground-zero, wife-beating, racist, fundamentalist f*ckers. Pardon my French. Apart from that it's just a great place.'
Welcome to The Leap, an outback town fuelled by fear, churning with corruption, prejudice and misogyny – and blighted by its inescapable history of frontier violence. Into this nightmarish morass falters traumatised British diplomat, Benedict Fotheringham-Gaskill. He's on his first Australian mission, one seemingly straightforward enough – until he arrives in The Leap to battle a town conspiring against him.
The Leap is baying for vengeance over the alleged murder of the celebrated daughter of a powerful local grazier. But Benedict is on an impossible quest for the opposite: mercy for the young woman's two accused female killers. The townspeople will challenge and threaten him at every turn as he fights for justice, his future, his sanity – and ultimately his life.
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Arborescence
Rhett Davis
Bren works for an obscure company with colleagues he's never met, and who might not be real. His partner, Caelyn, is looking for something more but isn't sure what. The only thing she knows for certain is that humans are breaking the world and she's powerless to do anything about it.
One day Caelyn finds a group in a forest who believe that if they stand still for long enough they will become trees. And then she discovers another … The idea is spreading. Soon, people go missing and trees appear in unlikely places. Is it really possible?
As cities decay and the world becomes greener, Caelyn sees nothing to fear. Bren is not so sure. Finally, they must ask themselves what they're prepared to give up – and if they are ready to stand still.
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Plastic Budgie
Olivia De Zilva
‘There was no use googling "am I cursed" because the search engine algorithm would always say yes.’
Olivia was named after a lycra-clad singer her parents saw on Rage. As a child, she lost the ability to speak and spent a year barking like a dog. Her Gong Gong bought her a yellow bird in a shoebox from the Adelaide Central Markets. Her heart was broken by a guitar teacher after a school disco. She started university and learnt to run and travelled to Guangzhou for her cousin’s wedding.
In her brutally funny, genre-defying debut, Olivia De Zilva collects stories on shelves: neat coming-of-age anecdotes and sitcom characters trapped behind glass. Then she breaks it all apart.
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Learned Behaviours
Zeynab Gamieldien
The past is calling him home ...
As a prospective barrister, Zaid Saban is on the cusp of achieving everything he has dreamed of. His social and professional world is far removed from his schoolyard days in the suburbs of western Sydney, even more far removed from the traumatic events of his final year of school in which best friend, Hass, was arrested for murder.
Zaid thinks he has put all this behind him. But when Hass’s sister, Amira, finds him and asks him to read her brother’s diary, Zaid is pulled back to the very world he had left behind. Is it possible that Hass was innocent? As Amira and Zaid seek to solve the mystery of what happened all those years ago, Zaid is forced to confront the ugliness of the past and what it means for who he is today.
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In Spite of You
Patrick Lenton
When Jeremy is invited to the 10-year reunion of his prestigious writing program, his life is a horrible mess. He's a pop-culture journalist with no money, he's permanently single and he now has to face his cheating ex-boyfriend – the reunion's guest of honour.
Like any well-adjusted individual, Jeremy develops a revenge plan: fix his life by becoming super hot and successful and, most importantly, find a handsome and successful boyfriend to bring to the reunion.
Enter Sam – irritatingly perfect, disgustingly hot and generous to a fault – who agrees to help with Jeremy's scheme. When Sam suggests they start fake-dating each other, the simmering tension between them threatens to boil over. Now Jeremy must choose between nursing his grudges and giving himself another chance at love.
Read our staff review here.
U Want It Darker: Tales of Artists in Despair
Murray Middleton
A true artist transforms suffering into beauty. But sometimes, all you've got is the suffering …
U Want It Darker is a bold and darkly humorous short story collection about artists struggling with their egos, facing their failures and redeeming their bad behaviour. With each exhilarating tale, Murray Middleton draws us deeper into the absurdities of creative life, inhabiting dingy painters' studios, anarchic movie sets, depraved pizza restaurants and grimy comedy clubs, as he tries not to plunge into the abyss himself.
Daring, original and shot through with pathos, these stories are a gulp of fresh air from a Vogel Award-winning literary talent.
Read our staff review here.
Until the Red Leaves Fall
Alli Parker
Emmy Darling has a secret. She has a few. Her lemon meringue pie is a recipe from a women's magazine, she's always wanted to be a playwright, and the best parts of her husband Sebastian's plays are the scenes she's written during edits. But when charismatic theatre impresario and leading lady, Virginia van Belle, insists Emmy write about her wartime experiences as the lead play in her 1957 season, Emmy is faced with every writer's dilemma.
Because Emmy's biggest secret is that her name is actually Emiko Tanaka. She and her Japanese-Australian family were arrested, brutally split up and held in internment camps by the Australian government after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. And it's this secret that Virginia wants to bring to the masses. As Emmy struggles to determine where the edges of truth and fiction blur, Virginia's vision of the story morphs into something more sensationalised. Emmy can't ask for Sebastian's help but she confides in Isadora Westlake, a dancer at a nearby coffee lounge, who knows a thing or two about keeping secrets.
As opening night looms and rewrites threaten to transform Emmy's personal history into something unrecognisable, wounds of the past are torn open, jeopardising everything Emmy holds dear. As the cast take their places and the curtain goes up, Emmy must decide which is right: tell the story or tell the truth.
Read our staff review here.
Crimson Light Polished Wood
Monica Raszewski
Leonora, a British teacher, has relocated to Melbourne and falls in love with Margaret, a fellow female teacher who three years later dies of cancer. While still grieving for Margaret, Leonora meets and befriends Anna, the Polish woman who lives next door.
As Leonora becomes increasingly involved with Anna and her family, the novel illuminates with subtle ease the influence Leonora has on Anna's daughter, Lydia, introducing her to the wonderful world of literature and art.
This is a novel about the ways we all long for acceptance and the ways in which those we might feel most in touch with including parents, siblings and mentors can often have different values and views about us. As such it is a beautiful work about art, gender, disappointment, understanding and celebration.
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The Visitor
Rebecca Starford
For most of her adult life, Laura has lived in the UK, her ties to her Brisbane upbringing all but severed. When her parents, Bruce and Eliza, perish in mysterious circumstances in the Queensland outback, she and her family must return to settle their affairs and sell the now-dilapidated house of her childhood.
But as the renovations progress, Laura starts to experience strange happenings in the house that cannot be explained away. Is it haunted? Or is the woman next door, who had inveigled her way into Bruce and Eliza's lives, testing her as she copes with the grief and trauma of their deaths?
Fourteen-year-old Tilly, alarmed by her mother's increasingly erratic behaviour, is drawn into the disturbing atmosphere of the house as the distance between them grows. And with both of them seeing things, Laura realises that unless she unearths what drove her parents to flee the house, they will never be free of the past.
Read our staff review here.
