Looking for something juicy to discuss in your book club? Try one of these new releases, chosen by our booksellers to appeal to a wide range of readers and provide plenty to talk about.
Australian fiction
The Occupation
Chloe Adams
In the autumn of 1949, two women convene in the parlour of a Melbourne hotel. Tess is married and childless. Mary, unwed and pregnant. Surrendering to the unimaginable, Mary agrees to a life-altering pact: she will give her child to Tess. One year earlier, Mary stands on the deck of an Australian naval ship, awaiting arrival in the ruined Japanese city of Kure. There, thousands of Australians have established an occupation of the Hiroshima prefecture.
As she settles into her new life, Mary finds carefree expats touring the countryside, hosting picnics and even throwing parties, all while the war-ravaged locals try to rebuild their lives. When she meets Sully, an Australian journalist, Mary's idealised notion of the occupation crumbles. Confronted by moral ambiguity on such a grand scale, she becomes reckless. Returning home may seem the answer, but even there, echoes of the occupation linger.
Read our staff review here.
International fiction
Death and the Gardener
Georgi Gospodinov, translated by Angela Rodel
My father was a gardener. Now he is a garden.
A man sits by his father's bedside and reports radically and gently until a final winter morning. His father was one of that generation of tragic smokers born right after the World War II in Bulgaria, who clung to the snorkels of their cigarettes. A rebel without a cause, he knew how to fail with heroic self-deprecation.
The garden he created out of a barren village yard first saved him, then killed him It remains his living legacy: peonies and potatoes, roses and cherry trees – and endless stories. But without him, his son's past, with all its afternoons, began to quietly crack. Because the end of our fathers is the end of a world.
Read our staff review here.
Crime fiction
The Peak
Sam Guthrie
Political hatchet man Charlie will do anything to protect Sebastian, government minister and his best friend since their brutal private school days. Rising to power and prominence through international diplomatic postings and then the rough and tumble of Australian politics, they are as close as brothers – or so Charlie thinks – while both keep the secret that lies at the very heart of their relationship – a secret that in one way or another will change the world.
But then a single phrase in Mandarin is spoken in Sebastian's ear and he does the unthinkable. As Charlie tries to piece it all together – from their youth spent in Hong Kong to the recent past in Beijing and Washington – things in the outside world start to fall apart too. Planes can't land, the phone lines go down and the power is out. Then the secret intelligence services comes knocking. Charlie wonders, what the hell did Sebastian do?
Read our staff review here.
Australian Studies
Deep History: Country and Sovereignty
Edited by Ann McGrath & Jackie Huggins
For Aboriginal people, the past is the present. Competing histories form and transform the lands, peoples and nations of Oceania, from the Pacific Islands, New Guinea and Aotearoa/New Zealand to Australia. In nations impacted by colonialism, such questions are particularly pertinent. First Nations peoples have long made history, living on their Country far longer than the colonial invaders.
In Deep History: Country and Sovereignty, edited by Ann McGrath and Jackie Huggins, leading historians and thinkers explore Indigenous histories of caring for places and people over millennia. With contributions from Brenda L. Croft, Anna Clark, Lynette Russell and many more, Deep History considers how stories of the past and the future are inscribed on land, waterways and skies. Walking on Country, gardening and agriculture and rock art are historical practices that continue to play an important role in asserting sovereign rights.
While colonial powers crafted historical narratives of entitlement, First Nations people continue to perform deep histories of sovereignty. Deep History offers readers an invitation to walk the Country, to see how it reveals the most crucial of all histories for the planet.
Read our staff review here.
Romance fiction
Love Overdue
Ali Berg & Michelle Kalus
The last time Lauren Green saw Jamie Sultana, they were seventeen and he'd just shredded her heart. Back then, Lauren was a frizzy-haired bookworm who dreamed of becoming the next Margaret Atwood. Jamie was the impossibly charming boy who thought Atwood was a type of cheese.
Twenty years later, Lauren is the vice principal of North Caulfield Primary. She's built a quiet, orderly life, burying her old heartache and writing aspirations under a stack of responsibilities. So when she calls a meeting with notorious truant April Reidman's absent parents, the last person she expects to walk into her office is Jamie, still with those dazzling blue eyes. And as if things couldn't get any worse, he's acting like he has no idea who she is!
Sci-fi, fantasy & speculative fiction
A Forbidden Alchemy
Stacey McEwan
Nina Harrow and Patrick Colson are only twelve years old when they are whisked from their disenfranchised mining towns to dazzling Belavere City to be tested for magical abilities. Nina’s lifelong dream is to become an Artisan, a powerful elemental mage who fulfills the city’s grand ambitions, while Patrick wants only to return to his family of Craftsmen.
Together, they discover a devastating secret: Artisans aren’t born, but chosen. With this information, they take their future into their own hands. Patrick departs for home, while Nina finds her place as one of the rarest, most coveted types of Artisan.
When a Craftsman revolution ignites years later, Nina is captured by Patrick’s rebel group – and despite the years, he hasn’t forgotten her. In fact, he needs her help for a mission that could shift the tides against Belavere City, which she reluctantly accepts, battling the sparks between them. But when Nina’s first love reappears, asking her to betray Patrick for the Artisans, she faces an impossible choice that will determine the fate of their world.
Debut fiction
Great Black Hope
Rob Franklin
An arrest for cocaine possession in the Hamptons leaves Smith, a young Black Queer graduate, in a state of turmoil. He finds himself in an absurd but dangerous situation: his class protects him but his race does not. Just weeks before, his beloved roommate Elle died and he is still reeling. How well did he know his closest friend and what really happened to her the night she disappeared? Will his search for the truth cost him his freedom and his future?
Great Black Hope is a propulsive, glittering story about what it means to exist between worlds, to be upwardly mobile yet spiralling downward, and, ultimately, how to find a way back to hope.
LGBTQIA+
Dead Ends
Samantha Byres
All-round chaos merchant Nell Jenkins has returned to her small hometown to fulfil family duties for the mother and brother she's barely seen since making her escape as a teen. But her homecoming isn't the triumph it should be. She has nothing to show for her time in Sydney but a string of failed relationships, crappy jobs and an ongoing HR complaint against her ex-girlfriend, now former boss.
Settling right back into old habits, Nell finds herself sparking a relationship with her dead best friend's brother Mick, as well as the newly arrived and equally unreliable Katya, who is working for the once-famous TV psychic Petronella Bush. Driven by her lust for Katya, an empty bank account and the need to come to terms with two life-defining deaths from her past, Nell is drawn deeper into Petronella's charismatic web.
Read our staf review here.
Young Adult fiction
Of Flame and Fury
Mikayla Bridge
A fiery alliance. An explosive secret. The race is on.
Phoenix racing: it's profitable, it's deadly. No one knows this better than Kel Varra and her crew, the Crimson Howlers. They live on the edge of survival. When a mysterious tech billionaire offers them a place at his training facility, it gives them hope – but also forces Kel to team up with Coup, her arrogant, infuriating rival.
Embroiled in political scheming, volatile phoenix magic and a smouldering romance, Kel and Coup discover a conspiracy that threatens them all. For in this world of extreme stakes, there are two options only: win or burn
Read our staff review here.
