Dear Reader,

As the February Readings Monthly went to print, I was en route to Denver, Colorado, USA, the beautiful mile-high city that played host to this year’s American Booksellers Association Winter Institute. The WI is an annual gathering of independent booksellers from around the US, and each year it welcomes a number of international guests into the fold. It was a packed schedule over four days, including a bus tour to book stores in the greater Denver area, breakfast keynote speakers (front and centre at 7.30am folks!), and three days of parallel sessions covering a vast array of topics pertinent to the mechanics (and pleasures) of bookselling.

Among the many memorable presentations that have given me lots to think about, I saw a session reporting on research detailing the devastating scale of Amazon’s cultural and economic impact and (more hopefully) another on the activism that aims to draw the attention of the US Department of Justice to this escalating situation. I heard a fascinating explanation of how to read a publisher’s profit and loss statement in a session on the ‘economics of publishing’, saw a panel predicting upcoming trends in the book industry, and attended a tutorial on how to deal with ‘Free Speech emergencies’ in retail. There were also book launches, a sort of speed dating set up with publishers’ reps over lunch (reps, you have five minutes to pitch – go!), author talks, book signings, and FOUR WHOLE ROOMS of advance book proofs (I am still waiting patiently for that box I sent back to arrive…). It was pretty much a bibliophile’s happy place.

If you ever find yourself in Denver (and it is a great city in stunning surrounds) you simply must visit the Tattered Cover, the Denver institution that hosted the WI opening reception. There are several outlets but the stores I visited on Colfax and Downtown are proper ‘wow’ shops where you could get lost browsing for hours. Incidentally, next door to the Colfax branch is a totally fabulous and gigantic record shop, Twist and Shout, and it is definitely in my top ten record shops of all time: what a shopping precinct!

But back to the task at hand – and that’s my monthly new release run-down…

You may have heard about The Midnight Watch already, an impressive Australian debut novel by David Dyer set around the sinking of the Titanic. We know the gist of this story so well by now, embedded as it is in western mythology, so there must be something pretty special going on with the writing of this book when you are reading it thinking, ‘Maybe the boat won’t sink! Maybe a rescue party will get there in time!’. Prepare to become a Titanorak (that is a thing: look it up…!). It shares the spotlight with Jennifer Down’s Our Magic Hour, a book that has staff who have been lucky enough to snaffle an advance copy singing its praises (NB: I’m next for the reading copy, dear colleagues). But the list of Australian talent doesn’t stop there: Robyn Mundy’s Wildlight, Olga Lorenzo’s The Light on the Water, Kristen Tranter’s Hold, Sarah Kanke’s Sing Fox to Me, and Jennifer Rowe’s A loving, faithful animal are all out this month.

There are some great international releases too: I am keen to read Stork Mountain by Bulgarian writer Miroslav Penkov, and am hearing excellent things about My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Olive Kitteridge. I know quite a lot of people who are well and truly ready for the next installment of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s ‘My Struggle’ cycle (Some Rain Must Fall). If that’s not enough for you, there are also books from Graham Swift, Muriel Barbery, Jesse Ball and Tracy Chevalier. And you’ll see from my review that I loved Work Like Any Other: debut author Virginia Reeves is the real deal, and I won’t forget this book any time soon.

I hope a lot of people read our Book of the Month: Stan Grant’s exploration of race, identity and the nation, Talking to My Country. This work expands on his powerful writing for the Guardian newspaper last year following the booing directed at Adam Goodes at an AFL match; our reviewer calls it ‘one of those rare books that has the potential to change the way people think’. You can’t ask more of a book than that.

In other non-fiction releases this month, journalist Niki Savva offers her analysis of the Abbott/Credlin situation in Road to Ruin, and George Megalogenis writes the next Quarterly Essay, Balancing Act: Australia Between Recession and Renewal. Meanwhile, David Kilcullen revisits and expands his QE of last year in Blood Year: Islamic State and the Unravelling of the War on Terror. Jhumpa Lahiri gives us a beautiful account of living in/with language and in/with translation, In Other Words. When Breath Becomes Air is the posthumously published moving memoir of life and death by neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi. A new edition of Anne Summers’s essential feminist classic, Damned Whores and Gods Police, is published in time for its fortieth anniversary. Melbourne muso Hugo Race writes a travel-music-memoir, Road Series, for Transit Lounge, another of our local independent companies with a really interesting publishing program. I’m also a big fan of UK publisher Verso’s work: this month they bring us a reissue of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s earlier biographical work, Beautiful Struggle: A Memoir, and the writings of the late computer genius, Aaron Swartz, The Boy Who Could Change the World.

And finally, dear reader, one of the big announcements of the last few weeks has been the revelation of an imminent new chapter in the Harry Potter saga, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, due to be published on 31 July (that’s Harry Potter’s birthday, for all you Muggles out there). The book is in script form, published to coincide with a play being staged in London’s West End. I must confess that yours truly has remained relatively untouched by Harry Potter mania over the years, but I have taken great delight over the last few weeks in witnessing the sheer excitement of my colleagues who just cannot wait to read this instalment of the story, set nineteen years after Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. All this enthusiasm is proof again that when you love a book and its characters, that love never ends, and thank goodness for that. Plans are afoot for celebrating its release in store, and our staff is abuzz with predictions for what the story might hold. We are taking pre-orders now, both in stores and online, so be sure to secure your copy. See you in April!

Alison Huber