Our booksellers have been loving these new books from emerging authors! Read them now to discover what has us excited.
Australian fiction
Soft Serve
George Kemp
Stuck in a regional McDonald's, as bushfires close in, three twenty-somethings and their dead friend's mum all face a reckoning. Fern longs for Ethan, Ethan longs for Jacob, and Jacob struggles to long for anything. Meanwhile, Pat just wants her grief to ease up.
Soft Serve proves that small-town lives are huge, and that anyone can get stuck in limbo between their past and their hoped-for future. From celebrated playwright and actor George Kemp comes this charming and poignant novel: it's drive-thru Chekhov, and full of heart.
Read our staff review or hear Kemp on The Readings Podcast.
Aubrey Wants to Die
Pip Knight
Aubrey is not what she seems. She's young, beautiful, romantic, obsessive and a vampire. All she wants is to be human again, and failing that, she wants to die. But the problem is, she can't. Not by stake through the heart or holy water or crucifix or garlic or fire. And she'd know, she's tried every method. Twice. So she's stuck here on this earth, all alone. Even the vampire who made her this way – an aristocratic douchebag called Oscar – has abandoned her.
But everything changes when one fateful night, she meets Jonathan. He's everything Aubrey's ever dreamed of, and what's more, he's her soulmate. Her Bella-Edward story. For the first time in 150 years, she has a reason to hope – eternal life might be bearable after all. So when Jonathan unexpectedly breaks up with her, she'll do anything to get him back. But that's the exact moment Oscar swoops back into her life. And he has other plans for her.
Life Drawing
Emily Lighezzolo
Maisie and Charlie meet at a life drawing class as undergraduates: she's the model, he's an artist. Their immediate connection carries them across two decades as they navigate the slippery dynamics of friendship, estrangement and family.
Maisie's story is every woman's, and Emily Lighezzolo's bold debut interrogates the collision of art and gaze, desire and consent, muse and meaning. This is a love story. At its core is a woman's body – seen, touched, loved, hated, commodified and reclaimed. Life Drawing is an award-winning and unflinching novel for our times.
Read our staff review here.
The Last Poem
Courtney Peppernell
Wren Paisley is living her dream: she’s a successful author and poet, she adores the New York brownstone she calls home and, most importantly, she’s about to marry the love of her life. But everything changes when her fiancée, Lucy, dies in a tragic car crash that leaves a young bystander paralysed. Unable to escape the media frenzy, Wren goes on a road trip and winds up staying in the charming small town of Everston, Colorado.
It feels fortuitous when she learns that the local library holds a weekly grief support group that reads, of all things, poetry. Hesitantly, she joins, and slowly begins to build community with the other members, including Henry, a librarian mourning the loss of his brother; Emerson, a young woman recovering from a life-altering car accident; and Olivia, a complicated reporter who gives Wren butterflies. Finally, she can breathe again, and maybe even love again. But how long can Wren keep her old life in the rear-view?
Iluka
Cassie Stroud
After their grandfather's death, siblings Helen, Sylvie and Brendan, and Helen's daughter, film student Tig, are gathered together at Iluka, a typical fibro beach house in a small town on the south coast. Iluka is the house they grew up in when their troubled mother ran away to the bright lights of the city, leaving their grandparents to raise them.
As they slowly clear the house for sale and relive various memories, they find a bundle of letters addressed to each of them from their missing mother, Marguerite, that were sent long after they'd been told she died. Their world shifts on its axis, as the siblings begin to question everything they have been told. Why did their grandmother hide these letters? Was their grandfather complicit? And could the mother they thought they had lost still be alive?
Side Character Energy
Olivia Tolich
Gertrude is Bee's best friend since forever (and also her flatmate, workmate and Insta content videographer). She's happy for Bee – just as she's been sad for Bee during those romantic missteps, and supportive of Bee in everything else. Actually, now she thinks about it, Gertrude isn't sure there even is a Gertrude that isn't determined by what Bee wants or thinks or feels …
Panicked to realise she's not the main character in her own life, she turns to William's best friend, Arthur. He isn't the obvious choice for life coaching – apart from anything else, Gertrude doesn't really like him – but everyone else is … Well, there is no everyone else. Just Bee.
Arthur's mission is to find out whether there's more to Gertrude than she thinks, and if so, what it is. The problem is, that might throw up some hard questions – about her life, her choices and above all, her friendship with Bee.
International fiction
Trip
Amie Barrodale
Sandra dies unexpectedly at a conference in Nepal. Across the world, her teenage son, Trip, has run away from a centre for troubled youth in the North American desert.
But Sandra soon discovers that a mother's work is never done, not even when you're dead. It turns out limbo is a great place from which to keep an eye on your errant son. When Trip is picked up on the side of the road by a strange man, Sandra is the only one who knows where he is.
As Trip ventures further south towards the coast and directly into the eye of a hurricane, Sandra's struggle to save him from the other realm begins.
Lázár
Nelio Biedermann, translated by Jamie Bulloch
Lajos von Lazar is brought into this world with the dawn of the new century, and his birth is both a miracle and a curse, his true patrimony a secret he will never know. The Lazars have ruled their Hungarian lands for generations. In their ancient castle by the edge of a dark forest that compels all who enter it to madness, they succumb to every vice and live only to satiate their desires. But the old order is crumbling, and the days of the Hapsburg Monarchy are numbered.
When Lajos inherits, they at last have a baron who can reignite the old splendours, but not even his abilities are proof against the ravages of war and occupation. It will fall to his children – a boy who talks to shadows and a girl who eschews her blue blood – to find a way to stand against oppression and take the first faltering steps towards freedom.
The Shock of the Light
Lori Inglis Hall
Cambridge, 1942: Twins Tessa and Theo had always shared everything – until the summer Tessa spent studying in France. She hasn’t been the same since. But before Theo can find out why, he is recruited by the RAF and disappears into the skies.
Determined to carve her own path, Tessa joins the clandestine Special Operations Executive, slipping into the shadows of occupied France. It will be dangerous work, but France is the home of her greatest love – and her darkest secret. Tessa has many reasons for wanting to return.
Two years later, only one of them comes home.
Holy Boy
Lee Heejoo, translated by Joheun Lee
Yosep is the passion of everyone’s dreams. An impossibly beautiful K-Pop idol who inspires religious mania among his millions of fans, he seems so perfect he might not be of this world at all. Sacred, angelic: a Holy Boy.
His devoted followers come to find companionship in their shared obsession. From adoring fans Mihee and Nami, Heeae, who has a mysterious connection to Yosep’s past, to Ahnna, the darkly fanatical ringleader of the group. Each wish to possess Yosep more than the other; save him, protect him, from the shackles of fame. But together, they might be able to achieve it. As their fixation spirals into delusion, secrets come to light and shocking acts are committed.
How far will they go to claim what they desire? Deceit? Kidnap? Murder?
Ruins, Child
Giada Scodellaro
With the pulsating sway of its liquid mosaic narrative, Giada Scodellaro's debut novel may recall Virginia Woolf's The Waves, but is entirely its own animal: kaleidoscopic, pointedly disorienting in its looseness, and powered along by snatches of speech from its compelling ensemble cast (often vernacular, often overheard: 'The woman is old, I hear children saying nearby, not in the way we consider all adults to be old, but really old, ancient, she is endless'). It's a book which seems to be drawn from deep wells of Black American reality: her female protagonists push back against authority in the very vivacity of their telling, setting afoot a freeing-up and a mysterious inversion of marginalisation. 'Looseness, that is the thing people fear in a person (in women) and in objects.'
Underspin
E.Y. Zhao
Ryan Lo begins playing table tennis aged eight. His brilliant but ruthless coach sees a talent in him that might be nurtured into greatness.
Through an adolescence marked by hours of practice, matches away from home, clandestine relationships and a determination to win, Ryan ascends to the highest echelons of the game, just as he was supposed to.
But here he is now, dead before his twenty-fifth birthday, leaving grief and confusion in his wake. Ryan Lo was meant to be great. What happened?
