We've got your next read covered with these new Australian books, recommended by our booksellers! And you can find even more new books in the April Readings Monthly.
The Endling
Keely Jobe
On an isolated mountaintop, a small feminist community is fracturing under the weight of ideological divides and dwindling numbers. Mila struggles to hold the women together, while deeper in the bush her aunt Frank – an ailing recluse – lives with only her dog, Chicken Midnight, for company. Nearby, an orchid endling approaches its own death, and the extinction of its entire species.
As Frank grows increasingly unwell and secretive about her condition, the community women begin mysteriously falling pregnant. When Mila gives birth to the only boy, their hardline separatist ideals face an impossible test.
Vividly expressed, wildly funny, and wholly original, The Endling examines the volatile intersection of community and politics, exploring what happens when the borders we construct between species, between sexes, between self and world prove more porous than we imagine.
Read our staff review here.
Frogsong
Melissa Manning
Caro and Danny grew up side by side at the waterhole. Bound by love, loss and a promise Caro made to Danny's mother, their lives are entwined. But as Danny spirals into addiction and self-destruction, Caro is caught between loyalty and the need to save herself.
She becomes haunted by memories, by the stories she told herself of the life they'd have, and by the waterhole that shaped them both. From southern Tasmania to Lisbon's winding streets, she searches for escape from lost dreams, until a return home forces her to confront what it means to let go.
Read our staff review here.
The Trap
Fiona Kelly McGregor
Sydney, October 1942. A wartime city dimmed by brownouts, flush with American cash, rotten with corruption. For nightclub manager Ray Sayles, a fateful encounter in the Domain turns him into a police target. He's plunged into a system where the rich are untouchable but the marginalised – like notorious queer sly-grogger Iris Webber – are relentlessly targeted, and bent coppers hunt ordinary men whose only crime is desire.
Based on a shocking real-life scandal, The Trap is a blistering, standalone companion to the best-selling Iris. By turns tender and excoriating, it exhumes the hidden history of a city in which the law is a weapon wielded against those deemed deviant – and the most unforgivable vice is the truth.
Read our staff review here.
De’Ath Takes a Holiday
Shaun Micallef
This is the origin story of the first real vampyre (not Dracula).
The trouble with immortality is that eventually you get sick to death of it, and so to soothe his sickened soul, the Comte De'Ath decides to take a trip. From psychoanalysis in Vienna to blood transfusions in London, the Comte learns that a holiday is as good as a change. On the way, he meets the Queen, brings her husband back to life, helps win the Second Matabele War, matches wits with the Elephant Man, inspires Henry Ford to pursue the American Dream, almost solves the crisis in the Middle East and even falls in love. Will he become mortal again in time for his funeral in Carfax Abbey? Ah – but what a fine book this would be if we gave away the end of the story in the blurb.
Read our staff review here.
Sororicidal
Edwina Preston
Well-born Mary and Margot are raised on a vineyard estate above Adelaide in the early years of the last century. Mary, brilliant and beautiful, dazzles all as her quiet, serious sister trails in her shadow. But Mary's high-handed malice finds a match in Margot's growing resentment at mistreatment; her revenge will be served at absolute zero. Set against a backdrop of privilege and propriety – and unfolding in an era of global conflict and radical new ideas about art and female agency – Sororicidal is an account of Edwardian-era sisterly love that mutates into a very modern tale of rivalry and betrayal. The polite cruelty of their childhood games becomes adult battles where the endgame is to split the nuclear family, releasing utter devastation.
At once intimate and expansive, locally grounded and global in reach, Sororicidal is the story of womanhood across a convulsive century – and the ordinary lives of two sisters who remain inextricably linked across a lifetime: as mirrors, rivals, and executioners of one another's dreams. It is a novel about the necessary and unendurable entanglements of family; the thin, volatile line between care and spite; and how love is a flame that both feeds and consumes.
Read our staff review here.
Once We Were Wildlife: Stories
Inga Simpson
In this compulsive compilation of eleven stories and one poem – set against scorched landscapes, wild oceans, and rocky terrain – Simpson follows people on the edge of desire, heartbreak and change.
In 'Poached', an ex-soldier finds himself between a poacher and a Bengal tiger. In 'The Wash', a woman's reckless ocean swim reveals the instinct to survive and the end of a passionate love.
From the aching intensity of romantic love to the quiet devastations of motherhood and ageing, Simpson's literary prowess keeps us riveted by the power of nature to shape human relationships and worlds. Melancholic and joyful, masterful and inspiring, this is contemporary fiction at its finest by Australia's foremost writer of the natural world, Inga Simpson.
Read our staff review here.
A Rising of the Lights
Steve Toltz
In a reeling world of fraudsters and hypnotists, sleep talkers and estranged twins, false alibis and second chances, Rusty Wilson is beset on all sides by mysteries. Why was his childhood decided by a throw of dice, why has his wife confessed to a lover, and why do his parents no longer wish to see him?
When Rusty loses his job to an AI system, Edwina, the mercurial friend of his youth, finds him a new role as an oracle to the young. But how can he advise anyone on what it means to be human when artificial consciousness appears within reach? If it's all just one more con, it's not clear who's scamming who. Besides, should any of it matter to Rusty, when all he wants is for those he loves to love him back? What holds a life together when everything is coming apart?
Read our staff review here.
The Water Takes
Sarah Walker
Pam is in her mid-seventies, widowed and hiding from the world behind a caustic sense of humour. Her health is declining, and she’s afraid of dying alone, but her most pressing concern is complaining to the council about her waterlogged garden.
When Pam’s ten-year-old neighbour, Charlotte, is foisted upon her, a tentative friendship begins to unfurl, cracking open Pam’s hard exterior. But the puddles in the garden become pools, and then sinkholes. Nowhere seems safe. With no help coming, Pam and Charlotte can only shelter in place for so long – eventually, they know they must attempt to navigate a catastrophically altered world.
Read our staff review here.
Griefdogg
Michael Winkler
Meet Jeffrey Watson-Johnson: hydrologist, husband of Martine, father of Bern, model citizen of Mildura. But after he inherits a small fortune from an obscure aunt and has a disconcerting encounter with his cousin Pam, Jeffrey decides it's time to change everything.
He tells Martine he wants to live as if he were the family pet. Sleeping through the day or wandering beside the river, he discovers a new power: he can sense secret grief in others. What to do with this gift? Or with his awareness of the endless streams of water flowing unseen beneath the earth?
Read our staff review here.
Kill Your Boomers
Fiona Wright
The great Australian dream is slipping out of reach for Keira and her friends. No partner, no house, no kids. At 30-ahem, she is still languishing in a mould-filled share house, with an unexplained and ever-growing hole in the floorboards that threatens to consume her and her housemates.
Her part-time job as a nanny to a pair of atrocious twins – and her role as emotional support servant at the beck and call of their mother, Johanna – provides barely enough money for the G&Ts she finds necessary to get through her other job as a freelance copywriter – though it does allow her to steal a fancy avocado every now and then. Each day she can feel herself falling further and further behind.
When her best friend Dylan is able to buy an apartment with the help of his partner’s inheritance, Keira sees a way out. The bank of Mum and Dad. But what to do with parents who are in the rudest of health, and whose plans threaten to spend the only lifeline she has? From the lounge room of her rotting share house she hatches a deadly plan to speed up the process of wealth transfer.
Read our staff review here.
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