Our booksellers have been loving these new books from emerging authors! Read them now to discover what has us excited.
Playing Nice Was Getting Me Nowhere
Alexander Cothren
A conspiracy theory about bees divides a nation. A haunted pokie machine seeks revenge. A ‘smart’ home becomes a little too clever.
Alex Cothren’s riotous collection of ethical fever dreams explores the ethos of the end times, testing the limits of technology, humanity and modern media. His predictions are incisive, hilarious and terribly plausible, tracing our contemporary obsessions to their logical – and often dire – conclusions. Yet amid the horror are moments of hope and resistance, and possibly even a path to redemption – or at least instructions on finding a good place to hide when it all comes crashing down.
From an internationally recognised master of the short form, this debut collection is for anyone struggling to tell the difference between the news and satire. It will stop you doomscrolling and keep you guessing.
Read our staff review here.
Plastic Budgie
Olivia De Zilva
‘There was no use googling "am I cursed" because the search engine algorithm would always say yes.’
Olivia was named after a lycra-clad singer her parents saw on Rage. As a child, she lost the ability to speak and spent a year barking like a dog. Her Gong Gong bought her a yellow bird in a shoebox from the Adelaide Central Markets. Her heart was broken by a guitar teacher after a school disco. She started university and learnt to run and travelled to Guangzhou for her cousin’s wedding.
In her brutally funny, genre-defying debut, Olivia De Zilva collects stories on shelves: neat coming-of-age anecdotes and sitcom characters trapped behind glass. Then she breaks it all apart.
Read our staff review here.
The Golden Sister
Suzanne Do
Lili Berry is busy curating a tidy life for herself in the charming coastal village of Swanning, before the death of her beautiful sister, Honey, upends everything.
A shocked Lili sets out to discover the cause of Honey's death, finding relief from her raw grief amid a flurry of investigative activity.
Pete, a cultivated man who seems to live on the streets, has his own tragedy to deny: the disappearance of his little boy fifteen years ago.
When Lili learns Pete was the one who found her sister's body, she trades beer for swimming lessons and plunges head-first into a web of secrets and lies, before emerging to confront the truth.
Hailstones Fell Without Rain
Natalia Figueroa Barroso
Graciela is a Uruguayan migrant struggling to raise her three daughters in Western Sydney – her life feels like just one bill after another, and she's reaching breaking point. Chula, her elderly aunt, is still waiting for justice after living through the civic-military coup of 1973 in Uruguay. And Rita, Graciela's eldest daughter, wants to escape the constraints of her family but finds herself indelibly tied to the ghosts of her mother's past.
Dazzling, multilayered and often laugh-out-loud funny, Hailstones Fell Without Rain tells the story of these three indomitable women from one working-class family. As the novel moves across time and place, from Western Sydney to Uruguay and back again, we realise that buried secrets and family trauma always, ultimately, resurface – but also that it's possible for broken connections to mend.
In Spite of You
Patrick Lenton
When Jeremy is invited to the 10-year reunion of his prestigious writing program, his life is a horrible mess. He's a pop-culture journalist with no money, he's permanently single and he now has to face his cheating ex-boyfriend – the reunion's guest of honour.
Like any well-adjusted individual, Jeremy develops a revenge plan: fix his life by becoming super hot and successful and, most importantly, find a handsome and successful boyfriend to bring to the reunion.
Enter Sam – irritatingly perfect, disgustingly hot and generous to a fault – who agrees to help with Jeremy's scheme. When Sam suggests they start fake-dating each other, the simmering tension between them threatens to boil over. Now Jeremy must choose between nursing his grudges and giving himself another chance at love.
Read our staff review here.
Mayra
Nicky Gonzalez
It's been years since Ingrid has heard from her childhood best friend, Mayra, a fearless rebel who fled their hometown for college in the Northeast. But when Mayra calls out of the blue to invite Ingrid to a weekend getaway at a house in the Everglades, she impulsively accepts. From the moment Ingrid sets out for the house, danger looms: the directions are difficult, she's out of reach of cell service, and as she drives deeper into the Everglades, the wet maw of the swamp threatens to swallow her whole. But once Ingrid arrives, Mayra is, in many ways, just as she remembers – with her sharp tongue and effortless, seductive beauty, still thumbing her nose at the world.
Before they can fully settle into the familiar intimacy of each other's company, their reunion is spoiled by the reemergence of past disagreements and the unexpected presence of Mayra's new boyfriend, Benji. The trio spend their hours eating lavish meals and exploring the labyrinthine house, which holds as much mystery and danger as the swamp itself. Indoors and on the grounds, time itself seems to expand, and Ingrid begins to lose a sense of the outside world, and herself.
Read our staff review here.
People with No Charisma
Jente Posthuma, translated by Sarah Timmer Harvey
An unnamed narrator grows up overshadowed by her unconventional mother, an ex-Jehovah's witness and former television star with an inferiority complex. Her father is the head of a psychiatric institution, whose only form of parenting is to offer his daughter the same life advice he dispenses to his patients. Reserved and somewhat aloof, he chooses not to intervene when his wife obsesses about charisma, calorie counting, and turning their daughter into a child prodigy.
Their daughter strives to meet her mother's expectations and bond with her father while secretly worrying she lacks the drive or charisma to do anything significant with her life. When her mother is diagnosed with terminal cancer, she begins to address their generational trauma, forge a new relationship with her father, and discover life on her terms. In twelve chapters – each reflecting a different phase of life – Posthuma expertly dissects a fraught family history, exposing the absurdity that often lies at the heart of life's most poignant and challenging moments.
Read our staff review here.
Maggie
Katie Yee
A man and a woman walk into a restaurant. The woman expects a lovely night filled with endless plates of samosas. Instead, she finds out her husband is having an affair with a woman named Maggie. A short while after, her chest starts to ache. She walks into an examination room, where she finds out the pain in her breast isn't just heartbreak – it's cancer. She decides to call the tumor Maggie.
Unfolding in fragments over the course of the ensuing months, Maggie; Or, a Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar follows the narrator as she embarks on a journey of grief, healing, and reclamation. She starts talking to Maggie (the tumor), getting acquainted with her body's new inhabitant. She overgenerously creates a 'Guide to My Husband: A User's Manual' for Maggie (the other woman), hoping to ease the process of discovering her ex-husband's whims and quirks. She turns her children's bedtime stories into retellings of Chinese folklore passed down by her own mother, in an attempt to make them fall in love with their shared culture – and to maybe save herself in the process.
Read our staff review here.
King Tide
Luke Johnson
A storm batters the seaside town of Lagunes Bay, unleashing a king tide across the wintry beach. As the water recedes, it reveals a long-buried secret: a body, framed and exposed in the sand.
When the body is identified as a young woman who vanished years ago – with little effort ever made to find her – the entire community comes under suspicion. How did she meet such a gruesome end? What did those closest to her know? Was Tate, the town's golden boy, her final boyfriend? And why has the return of an Anglican priest and his daughter left everyone so tense?
This isn't the first disappearance to rock this small town, but the local families aren't giving much away. As Detective Harper Lewis investigates this insular world, the mystery deepens with every uncovered clue. In Lagunes Bay, everyone has something to hide and every shadow tells a story.
Read our staff review here.
Stillwater
Tanya Scott
After years away from his home town of Melbourne, Luke Harris is back on track. All he wants is a normal job, his own house and a dog. But Luke is a man with a past, when life was anything but peaceful and his skills ran to the dark side. A past not easily forgotten – or forgiven.
When he crosses paths with Gus Alberici – the brutal criminal he worked for as a teenager – he's dragged reluctantly back to his old life. Luke's father has vanished, along with a chunk of Gus's cash. And something is up with his new girlfriend's father. As his past and present collide, can Luke keep his long-held secrets – and outsmart a man who will stop at nothing to get what he wants?
📚 Find more fantastic debut fiction by emerging authors here.
