Our booksellers have been loving these new books from emerging authors! Read them now to discover what has us excited.
Discipline
Randa Abdel-Fattah
Sydney, May 2021. Ashraf is an academic whose career and personal life are in freefall. Hannah is a young journalist struggling to honour the voices of her community.
When a Year 12 student from a local Islamic college is arrested for protesting a university's ties to an Israeli weapons manufacturer, Ashraf sees an opportunity to exploit his personal connection to the situation for professional redemption. Meanwhile Hannah, who is juggling the demands of new motherhood and family trauma, fights racism in the newsroom. As Israel's bombardment of Gaza intensifies into the final weeks of Ramadan, Ashraf and Hannah must reckon with their choices, values and places in their communities. Will they be prepared to make sacrifices in the pursuit of what is right?
With a focus on two of today's most contested fields, academia and the media, Discipline tallies the price we all pay when those with privilege choose to remain silent.
Read our staff review here.
Hollow Air
Verity Borthwick
Isolation can be hard on a person. It can be hard on the mind, especially when the bush closes in on you in the darkness of night.
In the tin fields of Far North Queensland, Sarah, a fly-in-fly-out geologist, is working alone at a remote mine site. She spends her time in a sort of limbo, never quite fitting into her life at site or back home in Sydney with her fiancé.
Strange things keep happening at the mine site, and Sarah can try to explain them away as the ramblings of a lonely mind, but there are dead bodies from a mining accident a century ago at the old Dulcie Ada mine, still buried beneath more than a hundred metres of rock.
Read our staff review here.
Honeyeater
Kathleen Jennings
A richly imagined dark fantasy that pulses with the beautiful destruction of a town reclaimed by the natural world.
Subtropical Bellworth is founded on floodplains and root-bound secrets. And Charlie, remarkable only for vanished friends and a successful sister, plans to leave for good, as soon as he deals with his dead aunt's house. Then Grace arrives, with roses pressing up through her skin, and drags Charlie into the ghost-choked mysteries of Bellworth, uncovering the impossible consequences of loss and desire – and a choice Charlie made when he was a boy. But peeling back the rumours and lies that cocoon the suburb disturbs more than complacent neighbours and lost souls. And Charlie and Grace are forced to a decision that threatens not only their lives, but all they believed those lives could be.
Read our staff review here.
Very Impressive for Your Age
Eleanor Kirk
Twenty-six-year-old Evelyn is well on her way to becoming an international opera star, until one night, mid-performance, when she inexplicably loses her voice. With no cure in sight, she's forced to put her dreams on pause, flying back to her hometown to wait out her recovery.
Stuck in limbo, Evelyn balances her time attending overpriced doctors' appointments and accidentally-on-purpose running into her ex on the street outside his apartment. Then she discovers that her old high school is hiring a debating coach (no experience needed!) and realises this might just be her ticket back to relevance.
While re-entering the gates of her alma mater is a welcome reminder of the glory days, being faced with a bunch of starry-eyed teenagers,who haven't had their dreams blown to pieces yet, makes clear just how thin the line can be between drive and delusion – forcing Evelyn to consider whether she could ever be truly satisfied living a life away from the spotlight.
Read our staff review here.
The Farm
Jessica Mansour-Nahra
When 37-year-old Leila suffers a health tragedy, she doesn't recover as quickly as she expected. Her partner, James, suggests a year away from the city – they'll stay on his family farm, where the wide, open spaces and clean country air will help her come to terms with her grief.
But the property is remote and the house oppressive. Leila is disturbed by strange noises, fleeting visions and intrusive dreams. James worries that her medication is causing hallucinations. As Leila's isolation grows amid the haunted landscape, so does her suspicion that she isn't the first woman James has relocated to the farm. Is what she's experiencing real? Or is it all in her head?
Compulsive and claustrophobic, The Farm is a Gothic ghost story ripe for book club discussion. It asks confronting questions about women's bodies, what is expected of them, and who is really in control. And in Jessica Mansour-Nahra, Australia has a stunning and remarkable new talent.
Read our staff review here.
Here are My Demands
Andrew Roff
In a near-future Australia, Maggie Garewal knows that her moment has arrived. Working on policy with a newly installed government, she is desperate to use what leverage she has to secure real change: a redistributive program to help millions, stricken jobless by automation, into a purposeful life.
But progress never comes easily, especially in an augmented reality that blends truth, illusion and misdirection. Navigating manipulative politicians, public shaming, religious fundamentalists and foreign powers, Maggie is confronted with impossible decisions about the kind of future she wants for herself and her society.
Daringly speculative and yet all too recognisable, Here are My Demands is a story about fighting on in the face of resistance, and the unprecedented hazards of a world our children have already started to inhabit.
Read our staff review here.
Roadkill
Amil, translated by Archana Madhavan
With strong roots in feminist science fiction and fantasy, Roadkill's exhilarating stories transport us to strange new worlds.
In a near future where women are an endangered minority, two young friends try to break free from a facility designed for those few who can still give birth. Every year in a secluded seaside village, a maiden is sacrificed to a divine sea serpent. In a daring thriller about a woman's fragmentation of her self, a writer in an abusive marriage becomes obsessed with a mysterious woman in a purple dress. The last female shaman of an indigenous tribe tells her stories to a visiting research team. And in South Korea's Alps Grand Park, the residents exist in an exclusive world dominated by giant air purifier towers as others are left to live in the shade.
The women in these stories find themselves trapped – by circumstance, society or tradition – as they fight for a means of escape. This sweeping and subversive collection celebrates their strength and their courage, their desire for independence and self-expression.
Hot Desk
Laura Dickerman
You've Got Mail meets The Hating Game meets The Office in this story of two rival editors fighting for the career opportunity of a lifetime – while sharing the same desk.
What starts as a battle of passive-aggressive post-it notes escalates with the death of literary titan Edward David Adams, A.K.A. The Lion. His estate is up for grabs, and Rebecca and Ben are thrown into a fierce competition to land it. But when secrets about the Lion emerge, they are forced to ask – what role do they want to play in his legacy?
And most importantly, is their post-it war actually flirting?
A Family Matter
Claire Lynch
It's 2022, and Heron, an old man of quiet habits, has just had the sort of visit to the doctor that turns a life upside down. Sharing the diagnosis with Maggie, his only daughter, seems impossible. Heron just can't find the words to tell her about it, or any of the other things he's been protecting her from for so long.
It's 1982, and Dawn is a young wife and mother penned in by the expectations of her time and place. Then Hazel comes into her life like a torch in the dark. It's the kind of connection that's impossible to resist, and suddenly Dawn's world is more joyful, and more complicated, than she ever expected. But Dawn has responsibilities, she has commitments: Dawn has Maggie.
A Family Matter is an immersive and tender debut, at once heart-breaking and hopeful, that asks how we might heal from the wounds of the past, and what we might learn from them.
Thirst Trap
Gráinne O’Hare
Sometimes friends hold you together. Sometimes they’re why you’re falling apart.
Maggie, Harley and Róise are friends on the brink: of triumph, catastrophe, or maybe just finally growing up. Their crumbling Belfast houseshare has been witness to their roaring twenties, filled with questionable one-night stands and ruthless hangovers. But now fault-lines are beginning to show. The three girls are still grieving the tragic death of their friend, Lydia, whose room remains untouched. Their last big fight hangs heavy over their heads, unspoken since the accident. And now they are all beginning to unravel.
Thirst Trap by Gráinne O'Hare is a blazing, bittersweet, bitingly funny, and painfully relatable story about the friendships that endure through the very best and the very worst of times.
📚 Find more fantastic debut fiction by emerging authors here.
