Every now and again, we booksellers are invited to spend an evening with a publisher and their authors. You may have romantic visions of what this involves – a little schmoozing with a bubbly drink in hand and a touch of friendly industry gossip – and you’re not too far from the reality. Recently, a number of us attended Ultimo’s shindig, where the audience was treated to readings from and interviews with some of the publisher’s Melbourne- based writers. Arguably, the show-stealing presentation of the night belonged to Pip Finkemeyer, whose perfectly titled debut, Sad Girl Novel, is out in June, and is our Fiction Book of the Month. This novel is a right-on-time publishing moment, capturing the zeitgeist while also skewering it, by an author who is a step ahead of all of us at all times. It’s well written and entertaining, so I feel sure that it’s going to find a devoted audience. Our reviewers also recommend to you novels by fellow Australian writers Libby Angel, David Cohen, Nick Bhasin, and Jacqueline Ross, as well as new work from Emily O’Grady and Marija Peričić, both previous winners of The Australian/Vogel’s Award.

Readings is home to many fans of Jen Beagin (author of cult novels Pretend I’m Dead and Vacuum in the Dark), including yours truly, so there is a bit of a queue for reading copies of Big Swiss. The book is already being made into an HBO TV show, so this is Beagin’s breakthrough novel. Our reviewers also recommend the new books from several other staff favourite authors – Naoise Dolan, Kevin Powers, Rebecca F Kuang, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah – and rave about the debuts from Katie Bishop and K Patrick. Mat Osman, Ann Leckie, Brandon Taylor, Magda Szabó, Isabel Allende, and Daisy Buchanan also have new novels, as does Abraham Verghese (whose The Covenant of Water is notable for being named the 101st book picked for Oprah’s Book Club!). Our Crime Book of the Month is Margaret Hickey’s Broken Bay, in which more bad stuff happens in the beautiful regional locations of Australia, this time in the picturesque Limestone Coast area of South Australia.

Our Nonfiction Book of the Month is Jill Griffiths’ What’s for Dinner?, a book for, as our reviewer points out, ‘anyone who eats – which is all of us!’. Choices around which foods we choose to consume (or otherwise) can be a small daily act that can have a profound impact, and we recommend this book and its up-to-date research. Also in the same informative vein, check out The Great Greenwashing (by John Pabon) and Powering Up: Unleashing the Clean Energy Supply Chain (by Alan Finkel). This month’s Melbourne City Reads pick is Half Deaf, Completely Mad, the memoir of the late Tony Cohen (written with John Olson). This book is a must-read for anyone with even a passing interest in the Melbourne music scene: see the review on page 12 for a great introduction to an extraordinary life. Also out this month: Paul Dalgarno’s Prudish Nation which our reviewer calls an ‘enquiring work which combines cultural studies and personal experience’; Elliot Page’s highly anticipated memoir, Pageboy; local stock of Sara Ahmed’s The Feminist Killjoy Handbook arrives in store, as does Susan Sontag’s On Women; and a book of re-discovered photographs taken by Paul McCartney during the peak months of Beatlemania in 1964.

And finally, dear reader, this month marks the launch of a wonderful new series from UQP: First Nations Classics. Eight titles will be published to begin the series (ranging from fiction and short stories to poetry and memoir), with titles dating back to 1988. Some of the books might be familiar to you as classic works already, but others may not be so familiar, and some are being brought back into print via this initiative. Each book also includes a newly commissioned introduction by a contemporary author. The series has received funding from the Australia Council and the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund, and speaks to the commitment to publishing Indigenous stories embedded in the ethos of UQP, and is an invitation to explore more deeply the voices of First Nations writers. To celebrate the series, we’re offering 20% off each of the eight books, and we also thought it was a great chance to highlight the work of First Nations writers more broadly who are published by UQP (also offered at 20% off), so look out for the displays in our shops for the month of June, and see what you can discover.