Bugger
Michael Mohammed Ahmad
Hamoodi may only be ten years old, but he already knows that to speak out is dangerous. Lessons from the mother-land have taught him that standing out can see you lose everything. Or disappear. In a new place, he has learned to be quiet, contained. He carries the wisdom and knowledge of his mother and father. They have told him to trust no one – except family.
Alooshi understands first-hand the hurt words can bring. As a teenager, he's learned that knowing how to wound someone gives him power. But words can only give him so much. And when his younger cousin Hamoodi is bullied at school, Alooshi sees a way to get something else he wants.
Over one day and one night, Hamoodi will come to understand how vulnerable he is. He will discover that family is complicated and trust is a cruel weapon. For him, there will always be a before and an after. He will forever struggle to un-know. But maybe, in the knowing, he will find a way to take back his power. Maybe.
Read our staff review here.
The Afterlife of Harry Playford
Steven Carroll
Queenscliff, Victoria, 1951: A man has disappeared, leaving only a pile of neatly folded clothes on a beach. Missing, presumed drowned. But for Detective Sergeant Stephen Minter, newly emigrated from England, it's far from an open-and-shut case. Because this is no ordinary man – Harry Playford is a successful politician, a charming man who is a rising ministerial star, a possible contender for the top job, who leaves behind a beautiful wife … and a mistress.
There could be a simple explanation. But, these murky days of the Cold War, in a time of rising mistrust and suspicion, spies and espionage, Stephen can't throw off his feeling that something's definitely not right. About the whole business …
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The Minstrels
Eva Hornung
Gem and Will grow up on a farm above the chasm and pool known as the Minstrels, a site where both are broken, each by the other. One will disappear. One will, eventually, be transformed.
Through her encounters with people and through art, land and language, Gem is remade while the world outside changes and time runs out.
This long-awaited new novel from one of our finest writers is a sweeping epic set in literal and figurative blight in a fictional Australian geography; a work of self, time and the very end of something. Wild, mythic and potent, The Minstrels is an apocalyptic redemption fable that weaves the history and probable fate of the world into the life of one woman.
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Soft Serve
George Kemp
Stuck in a regional McDonald's, as bushfires close in, three twenty-somethings and their dead friend's mum all face a reckoning. Fern longs for Ethan, Ethan longs for Jacob, and Jacob struggles to long for anything. Meanwhile, Pat just wants her grief to ease up.
Soft Serve proves that small-town lives are huge, and that anyone can get stuck in limbo between their past and their hoped-for future. From celebrated playwright and actor George Kemp comes this charming and poignant novel: it's drive-thru Chekhov ... and full of heart.
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Slip
Abbey Lay
Grace, a young linguist, plans a trip to Sicily to research Italian dialects. Travelling alone, she hopes for six weeks of total immersion in the language, food and social dynamics of Palermo. Then she’ll be joined by her long-term partner and barrister, Jack, for the holiday he needs after his first major trial.
But when Grace rents a room in writer Nico’s apartment, what was intended as a period of study and internal reflection takes a different turn. Moving gently at first, Nico and Grace talk and prepare meals together, and he opens the door to the local experience she craves. As they spend more and more time together, however, Grace and Nico’s conversations turn thrillingly intimate. And all the while, Jack’s arrival in Sicily draws nearer.
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Life Drawing
Emily Lighezzolo
Maisie and Charlie meet at a life drawing class as undergraduates: she's the model, he's an artist. Their immediate connection carries them across two decades as they navigate the slippery dynamics of friendship, estrangement and family.
Maisie's story is every woman's, and Emily Lighezzolo's bold debut interrogates the collision of art and gaze, desire and consent, muse and meaning. This is a love story. At its core: a woman's body – seen, touched, loved, hated, commodified and reclaimed. Life Drawing is an award-winning and unflinching novel for our times.
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Bird Deity
John Morrissey
David is a scout. For ten years he has plundered the ruins of an alien civilisation about which he knows nothing. Now his contract is ending, and he's ready to go home, a wealthy, successful man. Except that everything seems to be slipping out of his control. His mentor Tom vanished on a recent expedition. David doesn't know what has happened to him. And, as he waits for the ship that will take him away, he begins to question the choices he has made.
That's when he is visited by a researcher, a specialist in non-human societies. She has travelled far to learn about this strange world and wants to hire David as her guide. One more expedition, one more trip to the rainswept wasteland of the plateau – and he can go home at last, rich beyond his dreams. But he comes to realise that he may yet lose everything, as he is drawn inexorably towards an encounter with the terrifying soul of this world.
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A Far-Flung Life
M.L. Stedman
Western Australia, 1958: here, for generations, the MacBrides have lived on a remote sheep station, Meredith Downs. A million acres, it's an ocean of arid land. On an ordinary day, on a lonely road, under the unending blue sky, patriarch Phil MacBride swerves to avoid a kangaroo. In seconds, the lives of the entire MacBride family are shattered.
Then, instead of leaving them to heal, fate comes back for them in a twist of consequences that will cause one of them to lose their life, and another to sacrifice theirs for the sake of an innocent child. Matt, the youngest MacBride, is plunged into a moral and emotional journey for which there is no map, no guide, as he is forced to choose between love and duty, sacrifice and happiness.
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On Not Climbing Mountains
Claire Thomas
A woman arrives in Geneva, the first stop in a train journey through the country of her father's birth. She yearns to be outside time – untethered and alone – but she soon becomes immersed in the stories resonating all around her.
She visits a museum and stares into the oversized, disco-ball eyes of an insect, unsettled by the intimacy, 'like looking into the facial pores of a lover'. Later, she will tiptoe through the snow to find a portrait of James Baldwin on the window shutter of a chalet, his features rendered in rows of silver staples shot into timber.
She will find traces of Mary Shelley and Fleur Jaeggy; android pioneers in eighteenth-century Neuchatel; Charlie Chaplin, Patricia Highsmith, and striking workers drilling through the earth to create the vast Gotthard Tunnel; Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary as they summit Everest; Lenin and the Dada artists in early twentieth-century Zurich.
Read our staff review here.
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