Chosen Family
Madeleine Gray
Nell Argall and Eve Bowman are both brilliant, odd and friendless. Traumatised in their first year of high school, their lives are changed forever when they meet.
Set in Sydney over eighteen years, Chosen Family follows Nell and Eve as they grow into themselves, as they both love and destroy each other. From school, to university, to careers, to motherhood, Nell’s and Eve’s is a relationship that is a life-raft, that is also a poison apple, that is also a Medusan stare, freezing them in time.
Together, Nell and Eve are a double helix. Love, guilt, shame, joy – these emotions twist and turn between them. Can the wounds of adolescent betrayal ever really heal? Can we ever really understand what is going on in someone else’s head?
And what’s love got to do, got to do with it?
Read our staff review here.
Else
Rose Michael
Leisl and her daughter Else have their own language, exchanging facts 'like a frontier trade'.
As the country is reclaimed by rains they escape the city, returning to their family home on a distant peninsula. Seasons become extreme. Else adapts, thriving in the wet and warming world.
In Else, Leisl sees herself, her father, his mother, as the past becomes present, and present: past. But flash floods are followed by more weather events, and the pair are forced further and further down the 'Ninch'.
Available from 1 December
The Hiding Place
Kate Mildenhall
When Lou sees an ad for a long-abandoned mining town up for sale, it doesn’t take her long to convince her sister and their oldest friends to go in on the idyllic property buried in the bush – a place where the four families can hide away on weekends, get back to nature and unstick the kids from their screens.
But things start to go wrong before they even arrive for their first camping trip – a rogue deer sends a trailer off the road, a neighbour complains about the fence line and squatters have set up camp down by the river. Soon none of that will matter, though, because by the end of the first night someone will be dead.
At first it seems that hiding a body is easier than keeping other sorts of secrets: a lost job, an illegal crop, an outrageous affair, a little embezzlement. But what’s buried has a way of coming to the surface, and even in the bush, it’s hard to remain unseen.
Read our staff review here.
The Transformations
Andrew Pippos
In the fading glow of Australia's print journalism era, The National is more than a newspaper: it's an institution, and the only place that George Desoulis has ever felt at home. A world-weary subeditor with a bookish sensibility and a painful past, George is one of nature's loners.
But a late-night encounter with an unorthodox and self-assured reporter, Cassandra Gwan, begins to unravel both of their carefully managed worlds. As the decline of the newspaper enters a desperate stage, George and Cassandra struggle to balance their turbulent relationship with their responsibilities to family, and the compromises each has built their life upon.
Read our staff review here.
Eros: Queer Myths for Lovers
Zoe Terakes
Eros is a stunning collection of short stories, grounded in truth and coloured with dazzling imagination and alluring, unpredictable mystery. Revealing how queerness, nature and myth have been intertwined for eternity, these are stories of gods and goddesses: of Zeus, of Aphrodite, of Hermaphroditus, of Icarus before he flew into the sun. Stories of queer life, lust, revenge, wrath, passion and sex. Of yearning, love, loss. Some stories span across a life, and others, an evening. Perspectives will shift. Houses will burn. Lovers will learn their fate.
Zoe Terakes has skilfully blended myth and modernity to illuminate the complex and enduring truth of trans lives, resisting a history of erasure and delivering a sexy, soul-touching book to read to your lover, or yourself.
Read our staff review here.
Anthologies
Where Light Falls: An Anthology
RMIT Professional Writing and Editing Students
Light reflects, absorbs and refracts. It casts shadows, shaping our social and emotional landscapes. It is tint, tone and shade, the difference between cerulean and indigo, the shift between a kind of blue and blue-sky thinking.
This vivid anthology, written and produced by final-year students of RMIT's Associate Degree in Professional Writing and Editing, brings together sixty-three diverse pieces of fiction, non-fiction and poetry. It explores light and dark – and a myriad nuances of blue.
Australian Poetry
Two Hundred Million Musketeers
Ender Başkan
Ender Başkan’s debut poetry collection depicts the intensity of life as a parent of young children. It maps the shifting trains of thought which go with the experience of being a new parent, when one’s attention is drawn in many different directions – between child-rearing and house-keeping, domestic crises, the need to earn a living, and the responsibilities you have to the past as well as to the future, to your own parents and grandparents, as well as to your children. Work, friendships, social life and creative practice are all altered.
The poet reflects on his own childhood, and his grandparents’ exile from their homeland in Turkey, to which he returns several times in the course of the book, with his own young family. But there is also an increased awareness of the future, not only to the world his children will grow up in, but to the kind of world that is being built right now, in homes, workplaces, and in social and political allegiances.
Read our staff review here.
beautiful changelings
Maxine Beneba Clarke
beautiful changelings is an incantation, a song, a war cry, a testimonial, a lament, a reckoning and a welcoming. Wrecking-ball revisitings of the myths, mantras and fairy tales fed to girls. Poignant, unashamed tributes to ageing, womanhood, motherhood, and reclaiming your dreams, your boundaries and your time.
This explosive new collection celebrates women and girls as the enigmatic wonders they are: beautiful changelings.
Read our staff review here.
