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!
I think I say it every year, but the month of September always signals to me the start of the serious end of the retail year (Ian McEwan! R.F. Kuang! Toni Jordan! William Boyd! Olga Tokarczuk! Etcetera!), and in our shops you’ll likely see staff deep in conversation/exasperation wondering how to fit all the new books that arrive in such quantity (sorry about that everyone). If you also feel bamboozled by the scale of the choice, our Books of the Month are a great place to start.
Omar Musa’s first novel, Here Come the Dogs, was an acclaimed debut, resulting in longlistings for the Miles Franklin and the Dublin Literary Award, as well as Musa being named a Sydney Morning Herald Young Novelist of the Year in 2015 (an auspicious year with an impressive cohort). Musa’s second novel, Fierceland, arrives this month. Joe Rubbo gives it a wonderful appraisal and it’s our Fiction pick for September.
Our Nonfiction Book of the Month is Snake Talk, the third in a loose trilogy from Tyson Yunkaporta (author of bestselling books Sand Talk and Right Story, Wrong Story). This volume is co-authored with Yunkaporta’s wife, Megan Kelleher, and is a timely invitation to ways of thinking our reviewer says ‘we sorely need’.
Meanwhile in the Crime Fiction aisles, Sulari Gentill is back this month with her new whodunnit, Five Found Dead, set in the most crime-worthy location one could conjure up: aboard the Orient Express.
Our reviewers really have been reading their hearts out this month, and we have loads more great recommendations. There are books that have surprised and thrilled our staff, have led them to read outside their comfort zone, have challenged their thinking, or knocked them about emotionally: just another month in the new release stacks, then!
My colleague in the buying department Danielle Mirabella has written a smashing review of Arundhati Roy’s memoir, Mother Mary Comes To Me. It makes me want to read the book, even though The God of Small Things is still (shockingly) in my ‘have not read’ column, but one of Danielle’s sentences sent my thinking down a particular track: ‘[Roy’s] recollections are inspiring and reveal the making of an author before the digital age – what a gift’.
A number of us at Readings, admittedly a shrinking number, have been in the book trade long enough to remember this time. The analogue past is most definitely a foreign country, hard to conjure in this internet era, but it did exist. I’m going to start conversations about that time in the coming weeks. It’s not nostalgia, I’m genuinely interested in remembering how that old ecosystem worked. We may need to return to some of its practices one day.
And finally, dear Reader, I have a reading memory (this one unashamedly nostalgic) from my holiday in January: announcing to my family I would be out of action for a while, closing the door, and propping myself up on the bed to finish an advance copy of our colleague Fiona Hardy’s debut book for adults, Unbury the Dead. I spent a lot of my immersed time marvelling at the author’s control of her characters and the complicated plot while also managing to crack genuinely funny gags and paint a very vivid portrait of our city. I always knew Fiona would write a book as good as this, I remember thinking to myself. Fast forward to August and guess whose book has been shortlisted for a prestigious Ned Kelly Award (the awards of the Australian Crime Writers’ Association) for Best Crime Fiction, but our very own Fi! Truly, I feel like I had a premonition that I’d be writing something like this about you one day, Fiona.
And in further dispatches from the Department of Congratulations, our wonderful art and design specialist and acclaimed visual artist Zoë Croggon is a finalist in the 2025 William and Winifred Bowness Photography Prize, with a piece that has particular connection to work in the spaces of retail. We’re so thrilled for you, Zoë!
