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
Blue Giant
Jordan Prosser
Abby always believed she was destined for great things. But her dream career as an industry-disrupting fashion designer went up in smoke, and her aspirations to become a world-renowned yogi and/or save the endangered tigers proved equally fruitless. She's in her early thirties, suffering the unbearable burdens of adulthood and anonymity, when she wakes up after a drunken bender with an all-new, all-consuming purpose in life: to be the first person on Mars.
Perfect timing – Danish tech entrepreneur Tor Skovgaard is currently recruiting for a one-way mission to colonise the red planet. Abby knows this is it: her last-ditch bid for purpose and glory. And if she can't be humanity's saviour ... she'll settle for being its martyr.
International fiction
Nerve Damage
Annakeara Stinson
When Clarice broke up with P.T., he refused to be dumped. He sent non-stop emails and made hundreds of phone calls from dozens of different numbers. He showed up outside her office. He staked out her apartment. He sent her flowers and poems and, perhaps most sinister of all, a link to a Dido music video. Equal parts bewildering (who knew he listened to Dido?) and terrifying (am I going to die?), the harassment stopped only when Clarice filed a restraining order and bought a one-way ticket from New York to L.A.
Years later, as the restraining order is set to expire, Clarice spots a man who looks suspiciously like P.T. at a nightclub near her new apartment, flirting with the bartender. Clarice is certain her ex has returned to ruin her life, but with scant evidence pointing one way or another she spirals deeper in an unhinged, single-mined pursuit for the truth. As reality and paranoia start to merge, and boundaries start to blur, Clarice must decide how far she’s willing to go to wrest back control of her own life …
Crime fiction
Teeth Kicker
Glenn Orgias
Vincent Silk is back in the decaying maw of Australia's Steel City after losing everything – his money, his self-respect, and his friends and family. He wants to make amends but first he has to pay off his debts to an unhinged loan shark. With no way to make good, Vincent is forced to take on a brutal new role: working as an enforcer, a Teeth Kicker, collecting debts in a town where everyone owes someone something.
Vincent is big and imposing, so he should be a natural at hunting down late-payers, but he hates the violence and his conscience weighs heavy. Every knock on a door tests his resolve, especially when his next target turns out to be Henrietta, the woman who once saved him from an OD – and the someone he's in love with. Vincent wants to protect her, and he knows running isn't an option. The shark would come for their families, including Vincent's younger brother, Ray.
Vincent and Ray have a complicated past, scarred by a horrific car accident that left Ray an amputee and left Vincent with a metal plate in his head. As Ray spirals into his own trouble, Vincent decides to take matters into his own hands and solve everyone's problems – until it all unravels, and he's left with an impossible choice between the two people he loves the most.
Nonfiction: Australian Studies
Three Shocks
George Megalogenis
For decades our politics has failed to keep up with a changing Australia. The federal elections of 2022 and 2025 were an overdue wake-up call to three shocks that have reshaped our national identity:
- For the first time since federation, we have a population that's majority migrants and their children
- Professional women are now the largest segment of the workforce, replacing blue-collar men
- On the world stage, both our allies and our key trade partners have proven unreliable
Together, these shocks have changed the electoral maths for our politicians. For too long both major parties operated on outdated assumptions about Australia that go back to the Howard era.
With original interviews and research, Three Shocks tells the inside story of how our politicians caught up to the times or were left behind. Labor learned how to win again by embracing our new diversity; the Liberals suffered back-to-back landslide defeats that have threatened their very existence.
These three shocks will define our national politics in the future, but they should change how we all think about Australia and who we are becoming in the twenty-first century.
Debut fiction
I Want You to Be Happy
Jem Calder
Chuck and Joey meet in a bar. He's in his mid-thirties; she's twelve years younger. He's long abandoned his ambition of becoming a novelist and now works as a copywriter at a big ad agency. 'Lead copywriter,' he corrects himself. Joey lives paycheck to paycheck on her barista wages and privately dreams of making it as a poet. They go back to Chuck's luxury flat – a world away from Joey's cramped house-share and the crumbs in her bed. Soon, Joey's imagining a future between them, and Chuck's moving on from a mistake in his recent past. Amazing, how meeting a new person can make you feel so new.
Funny, excruciating, and true, I Want You to Be Happy is a sharp-eyed tale of two people searching for meaning and connection in modern times, missing the mark maybe, but still trying.
LGBTQIA+
Rottenheart
Kat Dunn
Odette and Cecilia are young women, living between their grand homes in Hampstead and the imposing, ancient Herne House in Suffolk. Though Odette's artist mother Lydia keeps a tight grasp on her, she and her beloved Cecilia are mostly left free to roam, to learn and to love.
But when Lydia inexplicably sickens and dies, a dark veil falls. As the funeral rites are performed, Odette's aunt, the cold and implacable Claudine, increasingly takes charge of the household, while her father retreats to his study. Odette, lost in grief, disappears into the shadows.
But as Claudine is announced as Odette's new stepmother, a sinister presence in the house makes itself known. To her horror, Odette realises that despite her death, Lydia never really left. And now she wants revenge …
First Nations
Dear Son (Second Edition)
Thomas Mayo
Dear Son (Second Edition) shares heartfelt letters written by First Nations men about life, masculinity, love, culture and racism. Along with his own vivid and poignant prose and poetry, author and editor Thomas Mayo invites nearly twenty contributors to write a letter to their son or father, bringing together a range of perspectives that offers the greatest celebration of First Nations manhood. This beautifully designed anthology comes at a time when First Nations peoples are starting to break free of derogatory stereotypes and find solace in their communities and cultures. Yet each contributor also has one thing in common: they all have a relative who has been terribly wronged – enslaved, raped and dispossessed – because of their Aboriginality.
Featuring previously published letters from Stan Grant, Troy Cassar-Daley, John Liddle, Charlie King, Joe Williams, Yessie Mosby, Joel Bayliss, Daniel James, Jack Latimore, Daniel Morrison, Tim Sculthorpe, Blak Douglas; and new letters from Dane Simpson, Kobie Dee, Kaleb Mabo, Jimmi Bani and Paul Callaghan. This is a gentle and loving book for families from anywhere in the world.
Sci-fi, fantasy & speculative fiction
Everything Happened at Once
Choi Jin-young, translated by Soje
A mutant virus has swept half of the world's population overnight. The known world has collapsed. The new world is a lawless place where children's livers are believed to provide immunity.
In one apartment block, an unlikely pack break out of quarantine in a stolen lorry and brave an achingly empty world once teeming with colour. The desolate reaches of Eurasia are signposted with fellow defectors and found family.
A wandering travel agent. A mixed-race divorcee embracing her sacred desire. A deaf girl traversing the frozen continent barefoot.
How do you find a way forward in a world turned upside down? A novel about our will to live and love until the very end, Everything Happened at Once charts the intimate landscapes of humans making liferafts out of the small miracles of the everyday.
Romance fiction
Once Upon a Breakfast Show
Stephanie MacFie
She’s a breakfast radio star, the queen of witty banter and humorous accounts of her chaotic love life – until a secret from her past makes headlines of its own.
Emily Blake, known to listeners as the fearless, filter-less Blake from Mack & Blake for Breakfast, has built a career out of turning her messy life into radio gold. But when a cheeky on-air stunt spirals out of control, Blake finds herself accidentally crowdsourcing her next date … and unearthing a past romantic encounter she thought was long buried.
Thirteen years ago she spent one unforgettable whirlwind week with a man who then vanished. And now, with her daughter starting high school and asking questions about the dad she never knew, Blake does something she’s never dared before: she asks her radio listeners for help. Can she find the one that got away?
What starts as ratings bait quickly becomes something much more personal. Now, with the whole city listening, Blake must decide if she’s ready to discover the truth … not just for her listeners, but for the person who deserves it most – her daughter.
Young adult fiction
A New Kind of Beautiful
Suzy Zail
Paige Wilding has her future mapped out – the Year 10 Art prize. Graduation. A coveted spot in an elite art school in New York. But when she's diagnosed with an incurable eye disease, the perfect life she’s planned starts to blur.
She makes a choice to keep her condition secret and live louder, love wilder, and paint like her life depends on it. Only her best friend Jazz knows the truth, and is helping her cram a lifetime of colour into a single year.
But as her sight fades and she’s forced to give up painting, it’s Zac, her rival for the art prize, who helps Paige find a way back to her art and a new kind of beautiful; messy and imperfect but also raw, unfiltered and fiercely alive.
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