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
Crimson Light Polished Wood
Monica Raszewski
Leonora, a British teacher, has relocated to Melbourne and falls in love with Margaret, a fellow female teacher who three years later dies of cancer. While still grieving for Margaret, Leonora meets and befriends Anna, the Polish woman who lives next door. As Leonora becomes increasingly involved with Anna and her family, the novel illuminates with subtle ease the influence Leonora has on Anna's daughter, Lydia, introducing her to the wonderful world of literature and art.
This is a novel about the ways we all long for acceptance and the ways in which those we might feel most in touch with, including parents, siblings and mentors, can often have different values and views about us. As such it is a beautiful work about art, gender, disappointment, understanding and celebration.
Read our staff review here.
International fiction
Mayra
Nicky Gonzalez
It's been years since Ingrid has heard from her childhood best friend, Mayra, a fearless rebel who fled their hometown of Hialeah, a Cuban neighbourhood just west of Miami, for college in the Northeast. But when Mayra calls out of the blue to invite Ingrid to a weekend getaway at a house in the Everglades, she impulsively accepts.
From the moment Ingrid sets out for the house, danger looms – the directions are difficult, she's out of reach of cell service, and as she drives deeper into the Everglades, the wet maw of the swamp threatens to swallow her whole. But once Ingrid arrives, Mayra is, in many ways, just as she remembers – with her sharp tongue and effortless, seductive beauty, still thumbing her nose at the world.
Before they can fully settle into the familiar intimacy of each other's company, their reunion is spoiled by the reemergence of past disagreements and the unexpected presence of Mayra's new boyfriend, Benji. The trio spend their hours eating lavish meals and exploring the labyrinthine house, which holds as much mystery and danger as the swamp itself. Indoors and on the grounds, time itself seems to expand, and Ingrid begins to lose sense of the outside world, and herself.
Read our staff review here.
Crime fiction
King Tide
Luke Johnson
A storm batters the seaside town of Lagunes Bay, unleashing a king tide across the wintry beach. As the water recedes, it reveals a long-buried secret: a body, framed and exposed in the sand.
When the body is identified as a young woman who vanished years ago – with little effort ever made to find her – the entire community comes under suspicion. How did she meet such a gruesome end? What did those closest to her know? Was Tate, the town's golden boy, her final boyfriend? And why has the return of an Anglican priest and his daughter left everyone so tense?
This isn't the first disappearance to rock this small town, but the local families aren't giving much away. As Detective Harper Lewis investigates this insular world, the mystery deepens with every uncovered clue. In Lagunes Bay, everyone has something to hide and every shadow tells a story.
Read our staff review here.
Nonfiction: Environmental studies
Human Nature
Kate Marvel
Scientist Kate Marvel has seen the world end before, sometimes several times a day. In the computer models she uses to study climate change, it's easy to simulate rising temperatures, catastrophic outcomes, and bleak futures. But climate change isn't just happening in those models. It's happening here, to the only good planet in the universe. It's happening to us. And she has feelings about that.
Human Nature is a deeply felt inquiry into our rapidly changing Earth. In each chapter, Marvel uses a different emotion to explore the science and stories behind climate change. As expected, there is anger, fear, and grief – but also wonder, hope, and love. With her singular voice, Marvel takes us on a soaring journey, one filled with mythology, physics, witchcraft, bad movies, volcanoes, Roman emperors, sequoia groves, and the many small miracles of nature we usually take for granted.
Read our staff review here.
Romance fiction
The Enchanted Greenhouse
Sarah Beth Durst
Terlu Perna broke the law because she was lonely. She cast a spell and created a magically sentient spider plant. As punishment, she was turned into a wooden statue and tucked away into an alcove in the North Reading Room of the Great Library of Alyssium.
This should have been the end of her story … Yet, one day, Terlu awakes in the cold of winter on a nearly-deserted island full of hundreds of magical greenhouses. She's starving and freezing, and the only other human on the island is a grumpy gardener. To her surprise, he offers Terlu a place to sleep, clean clothes and freshly baked honey cakes – at least until she's ready to sail home.
But Terlu can't return home and doesn't want to – the greenhouses are a dream come true, each more wondrous than the next. When she learns that the magic that sustains them is failing – causing the death of everything within them – Terlu knows she must help. Even if that means breaking the law again.
Sci-fi, fantasy & speculative fiction
The Society of Unknowable Objects
Gareth Brown
The world of unknowable objects – those seemingly ordinary items that most people have no idea possess magical powers – has been quiet for years. But just in case, there exists a secret society whose sole purpose is to gather these artefacts together, and keep them safe from the outside world. And the outside world safe from them. Called the Society of Unknowable Objects, it meets every six months in the basement of a London bookshop, and it's at one of these meetings that Frank Simpson, the society's longest-standing member, reveals that a previously unknown item has surfaced in Hong Kong. And he asks the newest member, author Magda Sparks, to investigate.
Within hours of her arrival in the city, Magda is confronted by a killer who seems to know all about these unknowable objects. She manages to escape, but only by using a magical artefact of her own that the society knows nothing about. Safely back in London, Magda learns that hers is not the only secret that's been kept from the other members. And that the most pernicious secret of all seems to concern the very nature of the society itself. The enormity of what Magda discovers takes her on a perilous journey – across the Atlantic to the deep south of the United States – in pursuit of an unknowable object and a seemingly unknowable individual; in pursuit of answers about her legacy and the society she serves.
Debut fiction
Plastic Budgie
Olivia De Zilva
‘There was no use googling am I cursed because the search engine algorithm would always say yes.’
Olivia was named after a lycra-clad singer her parents saw on Rage. As a child, she lost the ability to speak and spent a year barking like a dog. Her Gong Gong bought her a yellow bird in a shoebox from the Adelaide Central Markets. Her heart was broken by a guitar teacher after a school disco. She started university and learnt to run and travelled to Guangzhou for her cousin’s wedding.
In her brutally funny, genre-defying debut, Olivia De Zilva collects stories on shelves: neat coming-of-age anecdotes and sitcom characters trapped behind glass. Then she breaks it all apart.
Read our staff review here.
LGBTQIA+
In Spite of You
Patrick Lenton
When Jeremy is invited to the 10-year reunion of his prestigious writing program, his life is a horrible mess. He's a pop-culture journalist with no money, he's permanently single and he now has to face his cheating ex-boyfriend – the reunion's guest of honour.
Like any well-adjusted individual, Jeremy develops a revenge plan: fix his life by becoming super hot and successful and, most importantly, find a handsome and successful boyfriend to bring to the reunion.
Enter Sam – irritatingly perfect, disgustingly hot and generous to a fault – who agrees to help with Jeremy's scheme. When Sam suggests they start fake-dating each other, the simmering tension between them threatens to boil over. Now Jeremy must choose between nursing his grudges and giving himself another chance at love.
Read our staff review here.
Young adult fiction
This Fatal Kiss
Alicia Jasinska
Cursed to haunt the river running through the magical spa town where she drowned, water nymph Gisela dreams of returning to the living world and the family she left behind. All it takes to regain her humanity is a kiss from a mortal ... if only others didn't see her as monster.
Kazik, the brooding, interfering, spirit-hunting grandson of a local witch is determined to rid the world of unholy creatures like Gisela, but his plans go awry. So, Gisela strikes up a deal: she won't tell the other spirits that he's losing his magic, if he agrees to play matchmaker. But trouble arises when both she and Kazik set their sights on the same, devilishly handsome, young man ...
Expertly crafted, this hauntingly opulent quest through the spirit world is a slow burn enemies-to-lovers story told in multiple perspectives.
Read our staff review here.
