The start of a new month means that there's a new issue of Readings Monthly available online and in our shops. Below you can read Alison Huber's column from the latest issue – and keep an eye on the blog for more updates and recommended new releases throughout the month!
We’re now well into the second half of the 2025 literary year, and it’s in some ways a moment of calm before the publishing storm that happens from around mid-September onwards as we enter the summer gifting season. That’s not to say that there are not many new books to look out for this month in our shops (in fact, there are as many as ever!) but it’s a time when publishers, particularly those with a local Australian list, give the work of emerging authors time to breathe outside the competitive commercial space of the year’s end.
Rhett Davis wrote the wonderful debut Hovering which was shortlisted for The Readings Prize in 2022 and one of my personal favourite books of that year, and we at Readings have been eagerly awaiting his follow up: it’s Arborescence, a beautiful and unusual book, just as we hoped it would be, so it’s our Fiction Book of the Month.
Another alumnus of The Readings Prize, Murray Middleton (shortlisted last year for No Church in the Wild), publishes U Want It Darker, a short-story collection, and we’ll also see the work of more emerging Australian writers, including Patrick Lenton, Alli Parker, Natalia Figueroa Barroso, Monica Raszewski, and Zeynab Gamieldien, while Rebecca Starford (probably best known for her memoir Bad Behaviour and as co-founder of Kill Your Darlings) publishes her second novel, The Visitor.
This month we’ll also have the first novels commissioned by new Australian independent publisher, Pink Shorts Press, in our shops: a debut novel by Olivia De Zilva called (brilliantly) Plastic Budgie, and a debut collection of short stories by Alex Cothren called (equally brilliantly) Playing Nice Was Getting Me Nowhere. Our staff reviewers recommend both of these books to you, so now is the time to support a local independent publisher in its first year and two emerging authors at the same time: this is all kinds of new! Pink Shorts also dives deeper into Barbara Hanrahan’s backlist, republishing her 1985 novel Annie Magdalene.
There’s a beautifully written review of Luke Patterson’s poetry collection, A Savage Turn, published by Magabala, and our Crime Book of the Month is Don’t Say His Name by writer and filmmaker Rachel Givney, which had our reviewer on the edge of the proverbial seat, ‘compelled and too chilled to the bone to look away’. And then of course there’s a huge batch of international fiction coming our way too, much of it in translation, including the first novel that was written by Jente Posthuma (translated from the original Dutch by Sarah Timmer Harvey), whose second novel (but first to be translated) What I’d Rather Not Think About, was shortlisted for last year’s International Booker Prize. I loved reading People With No Charisma just as much.
Our Nonfiction Book of the Month is a compelling exploration by two Australian journalists, Ariel Bogle and Cam Wilson, Conspiracy Nation. The time for this book is right now, and as our reviewer succinctly puts it, ‘conspiracy theories aren’t just a fringe concern, they’re having real-world ramifications in local and global politics, education, health and communities’, and the authors have written, ‘a compassionate call to action’ in trying to understand the contexts for and attractions of conspiracy thinking that takes popular hold. Another strong piece of local nonfiction publishing appears in the form of Human Nature by Kate Marvel, a book that goes some way into navigating the emotional impact of the climate emergency.
The next book in the Thames & Hudson First Knowledges series is Ceremony, by Wesley Enoch and Georgia Curran; Tim Ross, comedian and enthusiast of architectural modernism and classic design, will delight all who pick up What a Ripper! with his curation of Australia’s design history (it had me wondering on the whereabouts of our family Frij bag, long forgotten in a shed somewhere!). August is not traditionally the cookbook category’s prime time, but I will point out the new book from Jess Elliott Dennison, called Weekend Recipes. Jess is a Scotland-based food writer and stylist who independently published the lovely Midweek Recipes last year, a book that has become a sleeper hit here at Readings. We’re importing the new book directly from the author, and we will have it in August.
And finally, dear Reader, I went on a very brief holiday recently and while I was away off-grid, two very important things happened: the first was the delivery of the guilty verdict on Erin Patterson’s very public murder trial which has transfixed people around the world; the second was the announcement of what will surely become the definitive book on the trial and its status as a cultural phenomenon, The Mushroom Tapes: Conversations about a Triple Murder Trial, co-authored by what can only be described as the authors our collective dreams would have assembled to write such a book: Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper, and Sarah Krasnostein. Between the three of these fine authors is unparalleled experience in researching and writing literary nonfiction about crime; in this book, as the blurb has it, ‘the lone wolves became a team’, and the result will be one of the publishing sensations of the year. It’s very exciting! Available from the 4th November, you can preorder your copy at any of our shops or on our website at the special price of $29.99 (was $36.99).
