Discipline
Randa Abdel-Fattah
Sydney, May 2021. Ashraf is an academic whose career and personal life are in freefall. Hannah is a young journalist struggling to honour the voices of her community.
When a Year 12 student from a local Islamic college is arrested for protesting a university's ties to an Israeli weapons manufacturer, Ashraf sees an opportunity to exploit his personal connection to the situation for professional redemption. Meanwhile Hannah, who is juggling the demands of new motherhood and family trauma, fights racism in the newsroom. As Israel's bombardment of Gaza intensifies into the final weeks of Ramadan, Ashraf and Hannah must reckon with their choices, values and places in their communities. Will they be prepared to make sacrifices in the pursuit of what is right?
Read our staff review here.
Desolation
Hossein Asgari
This is the story of Amin as he falls in and out of love and the choices he makes in the shadow of his brother’s death, lost in the tragic downing of Flight 655.
Amid the chaos of 1980s Iran, he witnesses the senselessness of violence and the enduring power of sorrow. As he grapples with the trauma, Amin discovers a profound truth: stories can both heal and deceive. Through the lens of literature and the harsh realities of politics, he questions the blurred lines between truth and lies.
A tale of disillusionment and the human spirit, Desolation explores the enduring power of storytelling in the face of tragedy.
Read our staff review here.
Hollow Air
Verity Borthwick
Isolation can be hard on a person. It can be hard on the mind, especially when the bush closes in on you in the darkness of night.
In the tin fields of Far North Queensland, Sarah, a fly-in-fly-out geologist, is working alone at a remote mine site. She spends her time in a sort of limbo, never quite fitting into her life at site or back home in Sydney with her fiancé.
Strange things keep happening at the mine site, and Sarah can try to explain them away as the ramblings of a lonely mind, but there are dead bodies from a mining accident a century ago at the old Dulcie Ada mine, still buried beneath more than a hundred metres of rock.
A deeply moving novel that explores the friction that comes with the desire to understand the secrets of the Earth coupled with the knowledge that this can exact a toll.
Read our staff review here.
Fireweather
Miranda Darling
It all began when they started running away …
Life for Winona Dalloway is not as it should be. Her husband is no longer her husband, her children are not at home with her, and the city in which she lives is besieged by fires. Black ash falls like snow, songbirds screech like dinosaurs, and the doctors are calling her mad …
In this looking-glass world, Winona is forced to prove she is a sane, rational human being. As the pronouncements of the professionals grow more insistent, so too do the voices crowding inside Winona's head. She seeks solace in the company of plants and animals, and begins to imagine an entirely other way of being – one that might make whole her broken heart.
Read our staff review here.
A Catalogue of Love
Erin Hortle
Neika learned to surf in the sometimes crystal-clear, sometimes opaque green barrels of Cloudy Bay, under the guidance of her father and stepfather. Bruny Island, surfing and the natural world are as much a part of her as her blood and breath.
In her twenties now, she has made her way in the world without her mother, who died when Neika was only two. Her path to adulthood was shaped by the love of two adoring fathers, but sitting alongside their love was always a mother-shaped hole. How different would she be if she’d had her mother there to guide her? Would she have dodged the mistakes that seem to define her life?
Neika watches the world around her like the scientist she has become, seeking to understand what it means to be a woman in a culture that does not always treat women kindly. In navigating her catalogue of experiences – desire, loss, love and power – she comes to see how each has made her who she is.
Read our staff review here.
Honeyeater
Kathleen Jennings
A richly imagined dark fantasy that pulses with the beautiful destruction of a town reclaimed by the natural world.
Subtropical Bellworth is founded on floodplains and root-bound secrets. And Charlie, remarkable only for vanished friends and a successful sister, plans to leave for good, as soon as he deals with his dead aunt's house. Then Grace arrives, with roses pressing up through her skin, and drags Charlie into the ghost-choked mysteries of Bellworth, uncovering the impossible consequences of loss and desire – and a choice Charlie made when he was a boy. But peeling back the rumours and lies that cocoon the suburb disturbs more than complacent neighbours and lost souls. And Charlie and Grace are forced to a decision that threatens not only their lives, but all they believed those lives could be.
Read our staff review here.
Tenderfoot
Toni Jordan
Brisbane, 1975: Andie Tanner's world is small but whole. Her mum is complicated, but she adores her dad and the kennel of racing greyhounds that live under their house. Andie is a serious girl with plans: finish school with her friends, then apprentice to her father until she can become a greyhound trainer, with dogs of her very own.
But real life rarely goes to plan, and the world is bigger and more complicated than Andie could imagine. When she loses everything she cares about – her family, her friends, the dogs – it's up to Andie to reclaim her future. She will need all her wits to survive this new reality of secrets and half-truths, addictions and crime.
With luminous, aching prose, Tenderfoot will move you like no other story this year.
Read our staff review here.
Very Impressive for Your Age
Eleanor Kirk
Twenty-six-year-old Evelyn is well on her way to becoming an international opera star until one night, mid-performance, when she inexplicably loses her voice. With no cure in sight, she's forced to put her dreams on pause, flying back to her hometown to wait out her recovery.
Stuck in limbo, Evelyn balances her time attending overpriced doctors' appointments and accidentally-on-purpose running into her ex on the street outside his apartment. Then she discovers that her old high school is hiring a debating coach (no experience needed!) and realises this might just be her ticket back to relevance.
While re-entering the gates of her alma mater is a welcome reminder of the glory days, being faced with a bunch of starry-eyed teenagers, who haven't had their dreams blown to pieces yet,makes clear just how thin the line can be between drive and delusion – forcing Evelyn to consider whether she could ever be truly satisfied living a life away from the spotlight.
Read our staff review here.
The Farm
Jessica Mansour-Nahra
When 37-year-old Leila suffers a health tragedy, she doesn't recover as quickly as she expected. Her partner, James, suggests a year away from the city – they'll stay on his family farm, where the wide, open spaces and clean country air will help her come to terms with her grief.
But the property is remote and the house oppressive. Leila is disturbed by strange noises, fleeting visions and intrusive dreams. James worries that her medication is causing hallucinations.
As Leila's isolation grows amid the haunted landscape, so does her suspicion that she isn't the first woman James has relocated to the farm. Is what she's experiencing real? Or is it all in her head?
Read our staff review here.
The Wolf Who Cried Boy
Mark Mupotsa-Russell
Six-year-old Henry believes his life is a fairytale. He’s a Star Prince, his mum is a Star Queen and they’re hiding from Henry’s father, the mysterious ‘Wolf King’.
When news arrives that his Grandma is gravely ill, Henry and his mum must take a road trip across the country and back into the Wolf King’s orbit. Henry isn’t afraid: he knows his magic powers will save them. But as the King draws ever closer, Henry’s world starts to fall apart. Who is the real baddie in his life? Who can he trust? And why don’t his powers seem to work?
In this astoundingly original story of heroes, villains and the messy reality between them, a world of violence and fear can be wildly funny and streaked with magic. Through its unforgettable narrator, The Wolf Who Cried Boy explores how cycles of violence, misogyny and corruption must be broken if we ever want our children to grow up free.
Read our staff review here.
Here are My Demands
Andrew Roff
In a near-future Australia, Maggie Garewal knows that her moment has arrived. Working on policy with a newly installed government, she is desperate to use what leverage she has to secure real change: a redistributive program to help millions, stricken jobless by automation, into a purposeful life.
But progress never comes easily, especially in an augmented reality that blends truth, illusion and misdirection. Navigating manipulative politicians, public shaming, religious fundamentalists and foreign powers, Maggie is confronted with impossible decisions about the kind of future she wants for herself and her society.
Daringly speculative and yet all too recognisable, Here are My Demands is a story about fighting on in the face of resistance, and the unprecedented hazards of a world our children have already started to inhabit.
Read our staff review here.
Australian Graphic Narrative
Cannon
Lee Lai
We arrive to a wreckage – a restaurant smashed to rubble, with tables and chairs upended riotously. Under the swampy nighttime cover of a Montreal heatwave, we meet our protagonist, Cannon, dripping in beads of regret sweat. She was supposed to be closing the restaurant for the night, but instead, she destroyed it. The horror-scape left in her wake is not unlike the films Cannon and her best friend, Trish, watch together.
Cooking dinner and digging into deep cuts of Australian horror movies on their scheduled weekly hangs has become the glue in their relationship. In high school, they were each other's lifeline – two queer second-generation Chinese nerds trapped in the suburbs. Now, on the uncool side of their twenties, the essentialness of one another feels harder to pin down. Yet when our stoic and unbendingly well-behaved Cannon finds herself very uncharacteristically surrounded by smashed plates, it is Trish who shows up to pull her out
In Cannon, Lee Lai's follow-up to the critically acclaimed and award-winning Stone Fruit, the full palette of a nervous breakdown is just a part of what is on offer. Lai's sharp sense of humour and sensitive eye produce a story that explores the intimacy of queer friendship and weight of family responsibility, and breaks open the question of what we owe both to each other and to ourselves.
Read our staff review here.
