Dear Reader, June 2018

I can’t remember a month with so many strong Australian nonfiction releases. Our Book of the Month, Kate Wild’s Waiting for Elijah, is a superb piece of investigative journalism that explores the fatal shooting of a mentally ill young man by police in 2009. Wild’s account is classic detective work, but also a strong critique of the legal system and the ongoing social taboos that surround mental health.

Two other books also engage with the Australian legal system: Eggshell Skull by Bri Lee agitates for reform with her account of bringing a sexual assault matter to court; Kate Rossmanith’s Small Wrongs meditates on the legal notion of remorse. Meanwhile, Phillipa McGuinness masterfully brings together the personal and the global in The Year Everything Changed: 2001; Out of the Forest is Gregory P. Smith’s account of his incredible life journey from society drop-out to PhD; and Justin Heazlewood shares his experience growing up with a mentally ill mother in Get Up Mum.

To balance these heavy themes, we also have the latest from humourist David Sedaris: Calypso’s cover alone guarantees you’ll be LOLing as much as our reviewer. Plus there’s a collection of prose from the peerless Lorrie Moore; Leslie Jamison’s exploration of addiction, The Recovering; David Christian’s Big History blockbuster, Origin Story; previous Pulitzer Prize winner Margo Jefferson’s On Michael Jackson; Michael Pollan journeys into psychedelics in How to Change Your Mind; psychologist Frank Tallis’s stories of lovesickness, The Incurable Romantic; and Pops, Michael Chabon’s pieces on fatherhood.

Congratulations to all at UQP on the occasion of their seventieth year of publishing. Our second Book of the Month, Reading the Landscape, is a wonderful collection of specially commissioned pieces published to mark this milestone. In fiction this month: Jay Carmichael’s Ironbark; Kudos completes Rachel Cusk’s acclaimed Faye trilogy; Florida, stories by Lauren Groff of Fates and Furies fame; Sheila Heti’s groundbreaking Motherhood; the final of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s seasonal quartet, Summer; Raymond A. Villareal’s touted A People’s History of the Vampire Uprising; and 84K by Claire North, which our reviewer calls, ‘an original dystopian nightmare fit for the twenty-first century’.

And finally, dear reader, by the time you read this, we will have completed the monumental task of relocating our Carlton shop to the temporary pop-up space in Lygon Court, making way for the renovation of our store at 309 Lygon Street. It has felt very much like moving house: we’ve been rationalising our belongings for months; we’ve packed boxes, moved them, unpacked them; we’ve found weird things down the back of shelves, things we thought we’d lost, things we didn’t know we had; everyone got overtired and cried (okay, that was just me). The analogy of moving house is particularly apt because the store has felt like a second home to so many of us, staff and customers alike. I have so much affection for the rambling space that we’ve lived in, but I can’t wait to see the new shop. Once we fill it back up with books, it will feel like home again in no time at all.


Alison Huber is the head book buyer at Readings.

You can pick up a free copy of the June edition of the Readings Monthly from any of our shops, or download a PDF here.

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Cover image for Waiting for Elijah

Waiting for Elijah

Kate Wild

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