For book clubs who know fact is stranger than fiction…

The Believer by Sarah Krasnostein

What do we believe? Who do we believe? Why do we believe? Sarah Krasnostein spent the last four years in Australia and the US talking to some extraordinary people-people holding fast to belief, even as it rubs against the grain of more accepted realities. Some of them believe in things most people don’t. Ghosts. UFOs. Heaven and the Devil. The literal creation of the universe in six days. Some of them believe in things most people would like to. Dying with autonomy. Facing transgressions with an open heart.

For bookclubs interested in buzz-worthy debut about gender, motherhood, and sex…

Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters

Reese nearly had it all: a loving relationship with Amy, an apartment in New York, a job she didn’t hate. She’d scraped together a life previous generations of trans women could only dream of; the only thing missing was a child. Then everything fell apart and three years on Reese is still in self-destruct mode, avoiding her loneliness by sleeping with married men. When her ex calls to ask if she wants to be a mother, Reese finds herself intrigued. After being attacked in the street, Amy de-transitioned to become Ames, changed jobs and, thinking he was infertile, started an affair with his boss Katrina. Now Katrina’s pregnant. Could the three of them form an unconventional family - and raise the baby together?

For book clubs that love unputdownable memoirs…

Emotional Female by Yumiko Kadota

Yumiko Kadota was a young, gifted medical student - the top of her class - on her way to becoming an outstanding plastic and reconstructive surgeon. For fourteen years she’d studied and worked hard. She put in 70-hour weeks at the public hospital as a plastic surgery registrar, accepted everything her superiors threw at her because that’s what you do to get on, right? Her life revolved around her work, but it was okay because it would all amount to a stellar, dream career down the track. In 2018, she walked away from it all.

For book clubs ready to grapple with grief, identity, and becoming…

Friends and Dark Shapes by Kavita Bedford

A group of friends moves into a share house in Redfern. They are all on the cusp of thirty and big life changes, navigating insecure employment and housing, second-generation identity, online dating and social alienation-and one of them, our narrator, has just lost her father. How do you inhabit a space where the landscape is shifting around you, when your sense of self is unravelling? What meaning does time have in the midst of grief?

For book clubs unafraid of reading hard truths…

Monsters by Alison Croggon

A hybrid of memoir and essay that takes as its point of departure the painful breakdown of a relationship between two sisters. It explores how our attitudes are shaped by the persisting myths that underpin colonialism and patriarchy, how the structures we are raised within splinter and distort the possibilities of our lives and the lives of others. Monsters asks how we maintain the fictions that we create about ourselves, what we will sacrifice to maintain these fictions - and what we have to gain by confronting them.

For book clubs who enjoy gut-punching-ly good short stories…

The Office of Historical Corrections by Danielle Evans

In The Office of Historical Corrections, Evans zooms in on particular moments and relationships in her characters’ lives in a way that allows them to speak to larger issues of race, culture, and history.

We meet Black and multi-racial characters who are experiencing the universal confusions of lust and love, and getting walloped by grief - all while exploring how history haunts us, personally and collectively. Ultimately, she provokes us to think about the truths of American history - about who gets to tell them, and the cost of setting the record straight.

For book clubs seeking poetry with bite…

Dropbear by Evelyn Araluen

This fierce debut from award-winning writer Evelyn Araluen confronts the tropes and iconography of an unreconciled nation with biting satire and lyrical fury. Dropbear interrogates the complexities of colonial and personal history with an alternately playful, tender and mournful intertextual voice, deftly navigating the responsibilities that gather from sovereign country, the spectres of memory and the debris of settler-coloniality. This innovative mix of poetry and essay offers an eloquent witness to the entangled present, an uncompromising provocation of history, and an embattled but redemptive hope for a decolonial future.

For book clubs that understand all is not what it seems…

The Long, Long Afternoon by Inga Vesper

It’s the summer of 1959, and the well-trimmed lawns of Sunnylakes, California, wilt under the sun. At some point during the long, long afternoon, Joyce Haney, wife, mother, vanishes from her home, leaving behind two terrified toddlers and a bloodstain on the kitchen floor…

A beguiling, deeply atmospheric debut novel from the cracked heart of the American Dream, The Long, Long Afternoon is at once a page-turning mystery and an intoxicating vision of the ways in which women everywhere are diminished, silenced and ultimately under-estimated.

For book clubs wanting an insightful sojourn into another’s mind…

A Room Called Earth by Madeleine Ryan

A young woman gets ready to go to a party. She arrives, feels overwhelmed, leaves, and then returns. Minutely attuned to the people who come into her view, and alternating between alienation and profound connection, she is hilarious, self-aware, sometimes acerbic, and painfully honest.

And by the end of the night, she’s shown us something radical about love, loss, and the need to belong.