It’s been a slow beginning for locally published works this year but we’re so excited to finally see a flurry of new local releases hitting our shelves. Below are six excellent titles that landed this February.

28 Questions by Indyana Schneider

When first-year music student Amalia stumbles into her Oxford college bar, she has no idea that everything is about to change. Seated across from her is Alex, a velvety-voiced fellow Australian with eyes the colour of her native sky. They strike up a friendship that is immediate - its intensity both thrilling and terrifying.

Set across four years and five cities, and suffused with music, literature, art, dance, sex, and the exquisite pain and pleasure of first love, 28 Questions is a passionate and unforgettable first novel about love in all its guises, growing up, and figuring out who you are along the way. Read our review

The Keepers by Al Campbell

Jay is devoted to the care of her teenage twins who view the world as differently as it views them. Frank is sweet, sensitive and bullied, while whip-smart Teddy needs an iPad to speak. With an absent husband and battling a nightmare bureaucracy, Jay leans heavily on Keep, her lifelong half-real friend. But in the corner of her eye lurks her mother, and a childhood Jay knows she can’t ever outrun.

An incredible and fiercely honest novel about the damage done by parents who can’t love, the failures of a community, and the resilience of those whose stories mostly go untold. Read our review

The Islands by Emily Brugman

In the mid-1950s, a small group of Finnish migrants set up camp on Little Rat, a tiny island in an archipelago off the coast of Western Australia. The crayfishing industry is in its infancy, and the islands, haunted though they are by past shipwrecks, possess an indefinable allure.

Drawn here by tragedy, Onni Saari is soon hooked by the stark beauty of the landscape and the slivers of jutting coral onto which the crayfishers build their precarious huts. Could these reefs, teeming with the elusive and lucrative cray, hold the key to a good life? Read our review

Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au

A young woman accompanies her mother on a holiday in Japan. They travel by train, visit galleries and churches chosen for their art and architecture, eat together in small cafés and restaurants and walk along the canals at night.

All the while, they talk, or seem to talk: about the weather, horoscopes, clothes and objects; about the mother’s family in Hong Kong, and the daughter’s own formative experiences. How much is spoken between them, how much is thought but unspoken? Read our review

Home and Other Hiding Places by Jack Ellis

When eight-year-old Fin and his mum Lindy travel to spend Christmas with his Gran in Sydney, Fin assumes they’ll return to their isolated country property - the only home he’s ever known. But he soon discovers that this large and crumbling riverside house, surrounded by bush and unwelcoming neighbours, is his home now.

As Lindy’s fragile emotions fracture under the weight of Gran’s disapproval and the pressure of old memories, Fin holds onto a tenderness of spirit. But as the life he has known crumbles around him, Fin learns that no-one is coming to his rescue, and he sets off on a journey to find his way home. Read our review

The Teeth of a Slow Machine by Andrew Roff

This daring, irreverent short-story collection dissects and explores the conundrums of contemporary life and what it is to be human, through a world very like our own.

A corporate satire follows a pair of dark operatives working for a chicken franchise as they take careful revenge on counterfeiters. A coder calculates the odds of her husband’s cold developing complications and killing him, in a story told in code … And an archeologist working for mining companies against the interests of Indigenous communities develops a mysterious psychological condition that causes her to black out and commit extreme acts of generosity.