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 May Readings Monthly.
Mantle
Romy Ash
Ursula is a self-possessed geologist. In her life on the mainland, she’s a guardian of the timescale, dividing history into segments and reading the Earth’s depths. It sounds like science fiction, but it’s simply science. When her ailing mother is struck with a mystery illness she is called to the coastline of lutruwita/Tasmania. What begins as an incurable rash evolves into something more dangerous.
With the sickness spreading across the island, and beyond, Ursula finds herself stranded, stuck in her mother’s house and increasingly entangled with a younger man who she met at the pub. She is grieving, beginning to unhinge – and now she too has the rash.
The wild places of the island are solace, even as the world around her begins to shift. As she faces this eruption of new life, and grapples with death and decay, Ursula realises that this change may not signal an end, but a beginning.
Read our staff review here.
Cast Away: Or, the Surprising Adventures of Alexander Selkirk
Francesca de Tores
1704: Scottish sailor Alexander Selkirk has been abandoned by his own shipmates on a remote, uninhabited island. With little hope of rescue, and wild goats and cats as his only companions, he is forced to confront not only the urgent challenges of survival, but also the troubled, unsavoury past that has brought him here. What kind of man is deliberately stranded by his crew, to face near-certain death?
On the island, he must use his grit, tenacity and ingenuity to survive. As his isolation deepens, Selkirk's experience takes an extraordinary and often blackly comic turn, for the island's consolations prove as unexpected as its trials. The longer he is stranded, the more Selkirk wonders if he will ever escape the island, and in what ways he will be changed if he does.
Read our staff review here.
Songwriters on the Run
Robert Forster
It's 1991, and Australian singer-songwriters Mick Woods and Drew Lovelock – 'tall and skinny, rock-star-wrecked handsome' – haven't yet managed to crack the big-time. But that's soon to be the least of their problems.
On tour in Central Queensland, what seems like a minor marijuana bust turns ugly, and they're incarcerated in a low-security institution in the middle of nowhere. With help from a couple of prisoners, they escape – but now what? They're songwriters on the run, desperately evading the long arm of the law and trying to clear their names. On the upside, they might get a good song out of all the drama. Meanwhile, in Hollywood, a major film star takes a liking to their music...
Read our staff review here.
A Little Unwell
Kerry Jewell
For Amy, being a doctor was supposed to mean winning at life. Helping people. Saving lives. Having a secure job. Earning good money. Tick, tick, tick, tick.
But now, in her second year in a city hospital the reality is a world away from Amy's med school dreams. She is finding out that people don't always want to be 'helped', the pay barely covers rent, her hours are ridiculous, her favourite patients are getting sicker, and her surgical trainee boyfriend has recently gone shy on proposing.
What Amy does have are the friendships forged by dealing with recalcitrant patients, endless nightshifts, and crying in the emergency department bathrooms. And a belief that maybe, underneath it all, it's a job that's still worth doing. And when things begin to go wrong – horribly wrong – they're all that Amy has. Will it be enough?
Read our staff review here.
Capture
Amanda Lohrey
James Mather is a psychiatrist in his sixties. He is invited to take on a new group of patients. All he knows about them is that each one claims to have been abducted by aliens.
His wife, Deborah, is sceptical, but he gets going anyway. His patients tell mesmerising stories. There's Anthony, for instance, who was camping one night by the Aral Sea; or Mary, the owner of a beauty salon, confronted by a ball of light moving towards her in her bedroom.
James's research assistant Lucy Cheng sits in on each session. She's an attractive young divorcee, who has made a study of anxiety, and who takes notes about each conversation.
Read our staff review here.
Henry Goes Bush
Wayne Marshall
When Henry Lawson – New South Wales' most promising young writer and a budding alcoholic – is banished from Sydney to 'find the real bush', he hopes for fresh material and a new start. Instead, he stumbles into a mind-bending collision of myth, politics and madness on the edge of the Darling River.
Henry Goes Bush reimagines Lawson's fateful 1892 exile to Bourke as a surreal, action-packed journey through the birth of Australian identity. Blending fact with fiction, this novel plays with the very idea of history – exploring creativity, colonialism and masculinity through the eyes of a man haunted by his own legend, flailing for connection and on a quest to find a better version of himself while being pitted against a poet gunslinger who goes by the name of The Rider.
Read our staff review here.
Phantom Days
Angela O’Keeffe
Before Isabel has even cracked the spine of a novel she bought on a whim ahead of an overseas trip, she senses something beginning within her. From Sydney to London and back again, the book is a quiet observer. When it's left in an airport taxi and Isabel's boyfriend takes it home, the book begins to learn about him – about his family and his past. Soon, it begins to understand: Isabel is not safe.
Angela O'Keeffe is the master of voice, and Phantom Days is a marvel: eerie, elegant and unforgettable. With O'Keeffe's signature emotional depth and narrative quirkiness, this novel explores the unknowability of other people, the mysteries of the body and the strange ways stories shape, complicate and safeguard our lives.
Read our staff review here.
Yeah the Boys
Holden Sheppard
Seven years after escaping their rural hometown, the boys – Charlie, Zeke and Hammer – are back, though not as we left them.
Charlie's fighting spirit has faded as he's struggled to make it as a punk musician in Perth. The opening of a new gay bar by Curtis and Ahmed, an older gay couple who have become Charlie's mentors, offers him a different way to make his mark – but the bar's opponents have other ideas.
Zeke is lost. He knows what he stands against – the closeted life and conventional success his strict Italian parents demanded of him – but doesn't know what he stands for. He surprises himself by joining a gay footy team: is it the mistake his friends think it is, or will playing footy finally give him what he's always wanted?
Hammer has it all – fame and fortune as a star football player – or so he thinks. He's still closeted, and can't stand the AFL stuffing diversity initiatives like Pride Round down everyone's throats, especially his. But when he opens his mouth, he ignites a furore that throws all the boys' lives into chaos.
Read our staff review here.
The Thornbacks
Chloe Wilson
It's Friday night, date night, and two women are getting ready to head out. But it isn't them who Luka – lawyer, thirty-three – is coming to meet. It's Poppy, an angelic blonde who has been dead for more than a year.
Behind her profile are two morticians, Gertie and Tabitha. By day they pump the blood out of bodies, replacing it with formaldehyde, water, alcohol, and raspberry-coloured dye. They sculpt, sew, and paint on shades of Light Natural Tan and Warm Rose Bisque makeup until a face that is almost too perfect looks out of an open casket. They take their work very seriously, and treat their targets on the dating apps with the same scrupulous care.
But as they swipe their way through Luka, Zeke, Joshua and Angus, their carefully constructed routine begins to fray.
Read our staff review here.
