Top picks for book clubs this month
Crime fiction
Judgement Day by Mali Waugh
Family law judge Kaye Bailey is found murdered in her chambers. Is this the work of a disgruntled complainant? Or an inside job by a jealous colleague? Or is there something even more insidious at the heart of this brutal act?
Detective Jillian Basset is just back from maternity leave, struggling with new motherhood as she tackles the biggest case of her career. As her work and home lives get messier and messier, though, something's going to give.
Australian fiction
Funny Ethnics by Shirley Le
Funny Ethnics catapults readers into the sprawling city-within-a-city that is Western Sydney and the world of Sylvia Nguyen: only child of Vietnamese refugee parents, unexceptional student, exceptional self-doubter. It's a place where migrants from across the world converge, and identity is a slippery, ever-shifting beast.
Jumping through snapshots of Sylvia's life - from childhood to something resembling adulthood - this novel is about square pegs and round holes, those who belong and those on the fringes.
International fiction
I Have Some Questions For You by Rebecca Makkai
A successful film professor and podcaster, Bodie Kane is content to forget her past: the family tragedy that marred her adolescence, her four largely miserable years at a New Hampshire boarding school, and the 1995 murder of a classmate, Thalia Keith. Though the circumstances surrounding Thalia's death and the conviction of the school's athletics coach, Omar Evans, are the subject of intense fascination online.
But when The Granby School invites her back to teach a two-week course, Bodie finds herself inexorably drawn to the case and its increasingly apparent flaws. In their rush to convict Omar, did the school and the police overlook other suspects? Is the real killer still out there?
Romance fiction
End of Story by Kylie Scott
When Susie inherits her beloved aunt's house, the last person she expects to help renovate it is Lars – her ex's best friend. The same man who witnessed their humiliating public breakup six months ago. She isn't exactly eager to have him around, but the sooner the renovation is done, the sooner she can get back to embracing singledom and moving forward.
However, things go from awkward to unbelievable when Lars discovers a divorce certificate hidden in a wall – and dated ten years in the future – with both their names on it. It couldn't possibly be real ... could it?
Sci-fi, fantasy & speculative fiction
A Day of Fallen Night by Samantha Shannon
This book can be read as a standalone, but we highly recommend you read The Priory of the Orange Tree first.
Tunuva Melim is a sister of the Priory. For fifty years, she has trained to slay wyrms – but none have appeared since the Nameless One, and the younger generation is starting to question the Priory’s purpose. To the north, in the Queendom of Inys, Sabran the Ambitious has married the new King of Hroth, narrowly saving both realms from ruin. Their daughter, Glorian, trails in their shadow – exactly where she wants to be. The dragons of the East have slept for centuries. Dumai has spent her life in a Seiikinese mountain temple, trying to wake the gods from their long slumber. Now someone from her mother’s past is coming to upend her fate. When the Dreadmount erupts, bringing with it an age of terror and violence, these women must find the strength to protect humankind from a devastating threat.
LGBTQIA+
Dress Rehearsals: A Memoir Made of Poetry by Madison Godfrey
In their brilliant new poetry collection, Madison Godfrey documents a decade of performing womanhood, from teenage fangirl to tender femme. Godfrey's poems approach the autobiographical body as a site of the everyday and the surreal: experiencing first crushes, mosh pits, sharpened nails, gender euphoria, and the complicated colours of desire and memory.
Darkly witty and deeply confessional, Dress Rehearsals is a love story to the queer self.
Debut fiction
The Dream Builders by Oindrila Mukherjee
Creative writing professor Maneka Roy has not returned to India in years, and when she arrives in her home country to mourn the loss of her mother, she finds herself in a new world. The booming city of Hrishipur where her father now lives is nothing like the historic neighborhood where she grew up, and the more she sees of this new, sparkling city, the more she learns that nothing – and no one – in Hrishipur is as it appears.
In smart, propulsive prose, written from the perspectives of ten different characters, Oindrila Mukherjee's incisive debut novel explores class divisions, gender roles, and stories of survival within a society that is constantly changing and becoming increasingly Americanised. Her story of Hrishipur is not only the story of India today, but the story of people impacted by globalisation everywhere - a tale of ambition, longing, love, and bitter loss that asks what it really costs to try and build a dream.
