Looking for something interesting 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
Sororicidal
Edwina Preston
Well-born Mary and Margot are raised on a vineyard estate above Adelaide in the early years of the last century. Mary, brilliant and beautiful, dazzles all as her quiet, serious sister trails in her shadow. But Mary's high-handed malice finds a match in Margot's growing resentment at mistreatment; her revenge will be served at absolute zero.
Set against a backdrop of privilege and propriety – and unfolding in an era of global conflict and radical new ideas about art and female agency – Sororicidal is an account of Edwardian-era sisterly love that mutates into a very modern tale of rivalry and betrayal. The polite cruelty of their childhood games becomes adult battles where the endgame is to split the nuclear family, releasing utter devastation.
Read our staff review here.
International fiction
Son of Nobody
Yann Martel
Harlow Donne has sacrificed his life to the study of the Classical world. So when he is invited to Oxford University to work on an obscure collection of papyrus fragments it is an academic's dream come true. He must leave behind his daughter and wife in Canada, but offers like this don't come twice and he badly needs a change of fortune. Then, while studying in the Bodleian Library, he unearths a completely undiscovered account of the Trojan War, a glimpse into the founding of Western civilisation itself. He names the poem The Psoad, after its protagonist, a commoner identified only as Psoas, the son of nobody.
As sole translator and author of The Psoad, Harlow dedicates the poem and its footnotes to his daughter Helen, allowing the text to unlock the echoes of the ancient Greeks into the present day, and to share a personal message with his beloved child. Despite the two-thousand-year gap between the two, a thread hasn't frayed – the universal song of homesickness and regret, of ambition, love and grief.
Read our staff review here.
Crime fiction
Click
Sarah Bailey
Melbourne is gripped by fear after a backpacker's body is found with a cryptic note, and two more women vanish without trace. When photographs begin to arrive in the inboxes of the media and police, it's clear the killer isn't hiding – they are performing.
Journalist Oli Groves, founder of a fledgling digital news site, knows the story could make or break her. Rookie detective Penelope Kibbs, still trying to prove herself, is desperate to stop the violence before more women are lost. But they soon realise the danger runs deeper than one killer – and closer than they want to believe.
Read our staff review here.
Nonfiction: Cultural Studies
London Falling
Patrick Radden Keefe
In 2019, a London teenager, Zac Brettler, mysteriously fell to his death from a luxury apartment building on the banks of the Thames. When his grieving parents began their desperate quest to understand how their son had died, they made a terrible discovery: Zac had been leading a fantasy life, posing as the son of a wealthy Russian oligarch.
In his inimitably gripping and forensic prose, Baillie Gifford Prize winner and New Yorker writer Patrick Radden Keefe follows Zac's parents on a dark journey to find out what brought Zac to the balcony that night – and how a teenager's world of make-believe drew him into the city's terrifying underworld.
Debut fiction
The Water Takes
Sarah Walker
Pam is in her mid-seventies, widowed and hiding from the world behind a caustic sense of humour. Her health is declining, and she’s afraid of dying alone, but her most pressing concern is complaining to the council about her waterlogged garden. When Pam’s ten-year-old neighbour, Charlotte, is foisted upon her, a tentative friendship begins to unfurl, cracking open Pam’s hard exterior.
But the puddles in the garden become pools, and then sinkholes. Nowhere seems safe. With no help coming, Pam and Charlotte can only shelter in place for so long – eventually, they know they must attempt to navigate a catastrophically altered world.
Read our staff review here.
LGBTQIA+
The Trap
Fiona Kelly MacGregor
Sydney, October 1942. A wartime city dimmed by brownouts, flush with American cash, rotten with corruption.
For nightclub manager Ray Sayles, a fateful encounter in the Domain turns him into a police target. He's plunged into a system where the rich are untouchable but the marginalised – like notorious queer sly-grogger Iris Webber – are relentlessly targeted, and bent coppers hunt ordinary men whose only crime is desire.
Based on a shocking real-life scandal, The Trap is a blistering, standalone companion to the best-selling Iris. By turns tender and excoriating, it exhumes the hidden history of a city in which the law is a weapon wielded against those deemed deviant – and the most unforgivable vice is the truth.
Read our staff review here.
First Nations
Big Sky: When the Emu Left the Earth
Bruce Pascoe & Professor Ray Norris
Big Sky: When the Emu Left the Earth is an exquisite conversation of sky knowledge between Aboriginal farmer and award-winning writer Bruce Pascoe and astrophysicist Professor Ray Norris.
This meeting of science and philosophy, tempered by holistic knowledge gained from deep observation over a millennia offers a philosophy of peace for our age. It reframes astronomy not only as a science but as ethics and Law in our heavens. This dialogue places First Nations beliefs as rigorous, enduring knowledge, offering ecological and astronomical insights which could help navigate current climate threats.
Sci-fi, fantasy & speculative fiction
The Infinite Sadness of Small Appliances
Glenn Dixon
In a self-running, smart house, a young and sentient Roomba listens as her owner, Harold, reads aloud to his dying wife, Edie. Mesmerized by To Kill a Mockingbird and craving the human connection she witnesses in Harold's stories, the little vacuum renames herself Scout and embarks on a journey of self-discovery.
But when Edie passes away, Scout and her fellow sentient appliances discover that there are sinister forces in their midst. The omnipresent Grid, which monitors every household in the City, seeks to remove Harold from his home, a place he's lived in for fifty years.
With the help of Adrian, a neighborhood boy who grows close to Scout and Harold, as well as Kate, Harold and Edie's formerly estranged daughter, the humans and the appliances must come together to outwit the all-controlling Grid lest they risk losing everything they hold dear.
Read our staff review here.
Romance fiction
The Name Game
Beth O'Leary
The Isle of Ormer: population 500, soon to be 501. Charlie Jones has landed on the island to embark on her brand new life. As the manager at Ormer's only farm shop, this job will be her perfect next chapter. Good riddance to the mainland, this is it – fresh air, and a clean slate. Except there is one small issue ...
Charlie Jones has also just arrived on the Isle of Ormer, to embark on his brand new life. His job at the farm shop feels like fate, and could not have come at a better moment. On Ormer, Charlie has promised himself he'll escape old friends, bad habits and heartbreak.
This second chance is the best thing that could have happened to Charlie ... and Charlie. That is, until they are introduced!
Young adult fiction
Piper at the Gates of Dusk
Patrick Ness
Now, almost twenty years on, Patrick Ness makes a momentous return to New World.
Something has been spotted in the night sky. Something that’s bringing back dreams of Noise, dreams of terror. Brothers Ben and Max have never really gotten on, each being more like one of their parents – Todd and Viola. But now they will have to come together. Something is coming.
Blending sci-fi, speculative fiction and adventure with themes of power, division and hope.
Read our staff review here.
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