It's hard to believe we're already in August and publishers have finalised (mostly!) their lists for Summer 2025. It's difficult to eclipse the first half of what has already been a very strong year, but we think you'll agree from the preview below that there's much to look forward to in the coming months! Many of our favourite authors are releasing books, so we hope you're as excited as we are to begin seeing them in our shops and online collections.
📖 Australian literary highlights
The Rot
Evelyn Araluen
The Rot is a recalcitrant study of the decaying romances, expired hopes and abject injustices of the world. A liturgy for girlhood in the dying days of late-stage capitalism, these poems expose fraying nerves and tendons of a speaker refusing to avert their gaze from the death of Country, death on Country, and the bloody violence of settler colonies here and afar.
Across sleepless nights, fractured alliances and self-destructive coping strategies, The Rot is what happens when poetry swallows more rage than it can console, quiet or ironise – this book demands you ready yourself for a better world.
Pictures of You
Tony Birch
Pictures of You: Collected Stories brings together the best of acclaimed writer Tony Birch’s short fiction from the past two decades. Cherrypicking from across his oeuvre, this anthology showcases his skills at finding the extraordinary in ordinary lives, and the often-unexpected connections and kindnesses between strangers. His work is by turns poignant, sad, profound and funny – and always powerful.
Throughout this stellar collection, Birch’s preoccupation with the humanity of those who are often marginalised or overlooked and the search for justice for people and the natural environment shines bright.
Gravity Let Me Go
Trent Dalton
There are one thousand stories up and down your street. There are nine thousand stories in your neighbourhood. This is the one about true crime journo Noah Cork, and the most important story he almost missed in pursuit of his dreams.
Dark, gritty, hilarious and unexpected, Gravity Let Me Go is a novel about marriage and ambition; truth-telling and truth-omitting; self-deception and self-preservation. It's a novel about the stories we want to tell the world and those we shouldn't, and how the stories we keep locked away are so often the stories that come to define us.
It's the story of a murder. It's the story of a marriage. It's the story of a lifetime.
Chosen Family
Madeleine Gray
Books about friendship are not often described as love stories, but this is one. Nell Argall and Eve Bowman are both brilliant, odd and friendless. Traumatised in their first year of high school, their lives are changed forever when they meet.
Set in Sydney over eighteen years, Chosen Family follows Nell and Eve as they grow into themselves, as they both love and destroy each other. From school, to university, to careers, to motherhood, Nell's and Eve's is a relationship that is a life-raft that is also a poison apple that is also a Medusan stare, frozen in time.
Together, Nell and Eve are a double helix. Love, guilt, shame, joy – these emotions twist and turn between them. Can the wounds of adolescent betrayal ever really heal? Can we ever really understand what is going on in someone else's head? And what's love got to do, got to do with it?
The Transformations
Andrew Pippos
In the fading glow of Australia's print journalism era, The National is more than a newspaper – it's an institution, and the only place that George Desoulis has felt at home. A world-weary subeditor with a poetic streak and a painful past, George is one of nature's loners.
As George grapples with shifting newsroom dynamics, the legacy of clerical abuse at his childhood school resurfaces, and a late-night encounter with a journalist named Cassandra begins to unravel his carefully managed solitude. As his colleagues depart and the final decline of the paper plays out, George is obliged to navigate an affair, learn to care for a daughter who has only recently become part of his life, and reckon with his own childhood trauma.
A Great Act of Love
Heather Rose
Caroline will tell the story of how she came to Tasmania, when it was still called Van Diemen's Land, many times. She will cast her inventions into the future. Those who carry them on will call it history, but she will call it her life.
Van Diemen's Land, 1839. A young woman of means arrives in Hobart, with a young boy in her care. Leasing an old cottage next to an abandoned vineyard, Caroline Douglas must navigate an insular colony of exiles and opportunists to create a new life on this island of extreme seasons and wild beauty. But Caroline is carrying a secret of such magnitude it has led her to cross the world, and it will take all she is made of to bring it into the light.
Soaring from the champagne vineyards of revolutionary France to London and early colonial Australia, A Great Act of Love is a spellbinding novel of legacy, passion and reinvention. At its heart is a family with champagne in their blood and a fearless daughter determined to rewrite fate.
Also look forward to books by: Randa Abdel-Fattah, Maxine Beneba Clarke, Miranda Darling, Eleanor Elliott Thomas, Pip Finkemeyer, Toni Jordan, Eleanor Kirk, Sofie Laguna, Bri Lee, Kate Mildenhall, Omar Musa, Zoe Terakis, and more!
📖 International literary highlights
Midnight Timetable
Bora Chung, translated by Anton Hur
From the author and translator of the National Book Award finalist and Booker Prize shortlisted Cursed Bunny, comes a new novel-in-ghost-stories, set in a mysterious research centre that houses cursed objects, where those who open the wrong door might find it’s disappeared behind them, or that the echoing footsteps they’re running from are their own …
The acclaimed Korean horror and sci-fi writer’s goosebump-inducing new book follows an employee on the night shift at the Institute. They soon learn why some employees don’t last long at the centre. The handkerchief in Room 302 once belonged to the late mother of two sons, whose rivalry imbues the handkerchief with undue power and unravels those around it. The cursed sneaker down the hall is stolen by a live-streaming, ghost-chasing employee, who later finds he can’t escape its tread. A cat in Room 206 reveals the crimes of its former family, trying to understand its own path to the Institute’s halls.
But Chung’s haunted institute isn’t just a chilling place to play. As in her astounding collections Cursed Bunny and Your Utopia, these violent allegories take on the horrors of animal testing, conversion therapy, domestic abuse, and late-stage capitalism. Equal parts bone-chilling, wryly funny, and deeply political, The Midnight Timetable is a masterful work of literary horror from one of our time’s greatest imaginations.
The Four Spent the Day Together
Chris Kraus
On the Iron Range of northern Minnesota, at the end of the last decade, three teenagers shot and killed an older acquaintance after spending the day with him. In a cold, rundown town, the three young people were quickly arrested and imprisoned. No one knows why they did it.
At the time of the murder, Catt Greene and her husband, Paul Garcia, are living nearby in a house they'd bought years earlier as a summer escape from Los Angeles. Undergoing a period of personal turmoil, moving between LA and Minnesota - between the urban art world and the rural poverty of the icy Iron Range – Catt turns away from her own life and towards the murder case, which soon becomes an obsession. In her attempt to pierce through the mystery surrounding the murder and to understand the teenagers' lives, Catt also finds herself travelling back through the idiosyncratic, aspirational lives of her parents in the working-class Bronx and small-town, blue-collar Milford, Connecticut.
Katabasis
R.F. Kuang
Katabasis, noun, Ancient Greek. The story of a hero's descent to the underworld.
Grad student Alice Law has only ever had one goal: to become the brightest mind in the field of analytic magick. But the only person who can make her dream come true is dead and – inconveniently – in Hell. And Alice, along with her biggest rival Peter Murdoch, is going after him.
But Hell is not as the philosophers claim, its rules are upside-down, and if she’s going to get out of there alive, she and Peter will have to work together. That’s if they can agree on anything.
Will they triumph, or kill each other trying?
Will There Ever Be Another You
Patricia Lockwood
The world might be in disarray, but for one young woman, the very weave of herself seems to have loosened. Time and memories pass straight through her body, she's afraid of her own floorboards, and 'What is Love? Baby Don't Hurt Me' plays over and over in her ears. I'm sorry not to respond to your email, she writes, but I live completely in the present now.
But tearing through the slippery terrains of fiction and reality, the possibility for human connection seems to beckon from the other side – and with it, the chance for a blinding re-emergence into the world.
From one of our most original, inventive and prodigiously funny writers, Will There Ever Be Another You is a phosphorescent, wild and profound investigation into what keeps us alive in unprecedented times.
What We Can Know
Ian McEwan
2014: A great poem is read aloud and never heard again. For generations, people speculate about its message, but no copy has yet been found.
2119: The lowlands of the UK have been submerged by rising seas. Those who survive are haunted by the richness of the world that has been lost.
Tom Metcalfe, a scholar at the University of the South Downs, part of Britain's remaining archipelagos, pores over the archives of the early twenty-first century, captivated by the freedoms and possibilities of human life at its zenith.
When he stumbles across a clue that may lead to the great lost poem, revelations of entangled love and a brutal crime emerge, destroying his assumptions about a story he thought he knew intimately.
House of Day, House of Night
Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
A woman settles in a remote Polish village. It has few inhabitants, now, but it teems with the stories of its living and its dead. There's the drunk Marek Marek, who discovers that he shares his body with a bird, and Franz Frost, whose nightmares come to him from a newly discovered planet. There's the man whose death – with one leg on the Polish side, one on the Czech – was an international incident. And there are the Germans who still haunt a region that not long ago they called their own.
From the founding of the town to the lives of its saints, these shards piece together not only a history but a cosmology.
Also look forward to books by: Mona Awad, Solvej Balle, William Boyd, Oyinkan Braithwaite, Kiran Desai, Chloe Michelle Howard, Lily King, Harper Lee, Megha Majumdar, Masashi Matsuie, Thomas Pynchon, Salman Rushdie, Patrick Ryan amd more!
📖 Crime Fiction highlights
Murder on North Terrace
Lainie Anderson
The indomitable Miss Cocks and Ethel Bromley return for Book Two in the bestselling and charmingly cosy Petticoat Police Mystery Series, inspired by one of Australia's first policewomen.
Adelaide, September 1917. Six months after solving the Dora Black case, Kate Cocks and Ethel Bromley are back walking the beat. The city is unsettled. Winter won't leave. Soldiers are returning from the Front with broken bodies and troubled souls. And now a powerful board governor has been found dead in the Art Gallery – dumped beneath a scandalous nude painting that has attracted both pious outrage and record crowds.
When Ethel receives an anonymous tip, she's elated at being seconded to the Detective Branch. The murder goes to the heart of Adelaide's elite, where this society girl is in her element. Miss Cocks is left grappling with six o'clock swills, shadows in alleyways and a brutal assault on a schoolgirl. She needs Ethel to catch her killer, and quickly.
Mischance Creek
Garry Disher
Hirsch is checking firearms. The regular police audit – all weapons secured, ammo stored separately, no unauthorised person with keys to the gun safe. He's checking people, too. The drought is hitting hard in the mid-north, and Hirsch is responsible for the welfare of his scattered flock of battlers, bluebloods, loners and miscreants.
He isn't usually called on for emergency roadside assistance. But with all the other services fully stretched, it's Hirsch who has to grind his way out beyond the Mischance Creek ruins to where some clueless tourist has run into a ditch.
As it turns out, though, Annika Nordrum isn't exactly a tourist. She's searching for the body of her mother, who went missing seven years ago. And the only sense in which she's clueless is the lack of information unearthed by the cops who phoned in the original investigation. Hirsch owes it to Annika to help, doesn't he? Not to mention that tackling a cold case beats the hell out of gun audits and admin…
Five Found Dead
Sulari Gentill
When Meredith Penvale and her writer brother, Joe, step aboard the iconic Orient Express, they're embarking on a journey steeped in both luxury and mystery. The train, a literary legend, is a bucket-list destination for detectives and writers alike. But as the train winds through the Italian Alps, a sinister undercurrent begins to emerge.
A virus has infiltrated the train in Paris, trapping its passengers and cutting them off from the world. Then, a passenger vanishes, leaving their cabin a bloody crime scene. Suddenly, the idyllic journey turns deadly. Joe and Meredith find themselves trapped with a motley crew of detectives, each with their own secrets and agendas.
As the body count rises and the train speeds towards its destination, the siblings must unravel the mystery before they become the killer's next victim…
Legacy
Chris Hammer
Someone is targeting Martin Scarsden. They bomb his book launch and shoot up his hometown. Fleeing for his life, he learns that nowhere is safe, not even the outback. The killers are closing in, and it's all he can do to survive. But who wants to kill him and why? Can he discover their deadly motives and turn the tables?
In a dramatic finale, Martin finds his fate linked to the disgraced ex-wife of a football icon, a fugitive wanted for a decades-old murder, and two nineteenth-century explorers from a legendary expedition. Martin Scarsden's most perilous, challenging and intriguing assignment yet.
Last One Out
Jane Harper
He had been here, that was clear from the marks in the dust. And he had been alone.
In a dying town, Ro Crowley waits for her son on the evening of his 21st birthday. But Sam never comes home. His footprints in the dust of three abandoned houses offer the only clue to his final movements. One set in. One set out. Five long years later, Ro returns to Carralon Ridge for the annual memorial of Sam's disappearance. The skeletal community is now an echo of itself, having fractured under the pressure of the coal mine operating on its outskirts. But Ro still wants answers. Only a few people remain. If the truth is to be found in that town, does it lie among them?
The Impossible Fortune
Richard Osman
Who's got time to think about murder when there's a wedding to plan?
It's been a quiet year for the Thursday Murder Club. Joyce is busy with table plans and first dances. Elizabeth is grieving. Ron is dealing with family troubles, and Ibrahim is still providing therapy to his favourite criminal.
But when Elizabeth meets a wedding guest who fears for their life, the thrill of the chase is ignited once again. A villain wants access to an uncrackable code and will stop at nothing to get it. Plunged back into their most explosive investigation yet, can the gang solve the puzzle and a murder in time?
The Long Night
Christian White
Em has lived a quiet life with her complicated mother and is now looking for love and a potential escape from her small hometown. When a masked man kidnaps her in the dark of night, though, she is drawn into a terrifying world.
Jodie has been trying to forget a troubling time in her life, pouring her trauma into her work and out of her mind. Until one night her daughter is kidnapped and Jodie is dragged back into the violence.
As Em and Jodie race into the darkness, the agony of the past rushes up to meet them. It will take all their devotion and courage to escape this night alive.
Also look forward to books by: John Banville, Bryan Brown, Ann Cleeves, Harlen Coben & Reese Witherspoon, Michael Connelly, Kerry Greenwood, Mick Herron, Graeme Macrae Burnet, Bob Mortimer, Benjamin Stevenson and more!
📚 Keep checking our Pre-order collection for updates as more exciting books are announced.
