This month we’re spoilt for choice with new books from three favourite Australian authors. We also get our mitts on the next instalments in several bestselling series, and we announce the shortlist for our very first Readings Young Adult Prize.

(Find our best recommendations for kids’ books this month here.)

LOVEOZYA PICKS

A new book from Vikki Wakefield is always cause for celebration (and a possible stampede to the bookshop…). Her latest is Ballad for a Mad Girl –…

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This month we’re excited by swimming unicorns, the first book of a new series by Sally Rippin, a middle fiction novel with a Tibetan setting and tween crime thrills.

(Find our best recommendations for teen books this month here.)

PICTURE BOOKS

We’re a little bit obsessed with unicorns here at Readings, and Not Quite Narwhal has been a sweet addition to our shelves. Kelp is a sea-dwelling unicorn with an identity crisis – he’s not a narwhal, but he’s…

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The Wainwright Golden Beer Book Prize is awarded annually to the book which most successfully reflects the ethos of renowned nature writer Alfred Wainwright’s work, to inspire readers to explore the outdoors and to nurture a respect for the natural world.

Here are the 12 longlisted books for 2017:

Love of Country by Madeleine Bunting

The Otter’s Tale by Simon Cooper

The Nature of Autumn by Jim Crumley

Foxes Unearthed by Lucy Jones

The Running Hare by John Lewis-Stempel

Where…

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Anything is Possible by Elizabeth Strout

Men Without Women by Haruki Murakami

Ache by Eliza Henry-Jones

The Clever Guts Diet by Michael Mosley

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy

Depends What You Mean by Extremist by John Safran

The Barefoot Investor by Scott Pape

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of George Pell by Louise Milligan

Into the Water by Paula Hawkins

Our bestseller of the week is Anything is Possible, the…

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Storm Whale by Sarah Brennan and Jane Tanner

The Wayward Witch and the Feelings Monster (Polly and Buster Book 1) by Sally Rippin

A Most Magical Girl by Karen Foxlee

Boone Shepard’s American Adventure by Gabriel Bergmoser

All the Bright Places by Jennifer Niven

Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls by Elena Favilli and Francesca Cavallo

The World’s Worst Children 2 by David Walliams and Tony Ross

Family, Friends and Furry Creatures (Tom Gates Book 12) by Liz Pichon

…

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Each week we bring you a sample of the books we’re reading, the films and TV shows we’re watching, and the music we’re listening to.

Nina Kenwood is reading The Dark Lake by Sarah Bailey

The Dark Lake is a terrific Australian crime fiction debut. Set in rural NSW, it opens with a dead body in a lake and a police detective juggling lots of complicated secrets. It has the small town mystery of The Dry, the police procedural…

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Knowing I am among friends, I can confess to expressing inappropriate book-related outrage on occasion. ‘What do you mean you haven’t read The Handmaid’s Tale?’, I exclaimed to a colleague last year. So strong is my feeling that this book must be read, the words involuntarily escaped my mouth. One must be careful, of course, in casting this kind of judgement, because, let’s face it, we all have our own list of Very Important Books we haven’t read. My…

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Jamila Rizvi interviews Briohny Doyle about her memoir of ‘adulthood’, Adult Fantasy.

Briohny Doyle and I are seduced by the same kinds of clickbait.

Acknowledged collectively with the hybrid term ‘listicle’, these are the stories Buzzfeed pioneered but that are now produced en masse by everyone from Cosmopolitan to Business Insider. Thirty things you should know by thirty, 12 signs you’re ready to settle down, What percentage ‘grown up’ are you really? and, of course, How…

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We’re delighted to share the news that three of our wonderful staff members have been shortlisted in the ABA Bookselling Awards by the Australian Booksellers Association. The award recognises a bookseller not only for their exceptional performance within the bookshop that they work but also for their achievements within the book industry as well as the local and wider community.

Readings Kids

, online children’s specialist, and Grants Officer for the

Readings Foundation

. She is a passionate advocate of…

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St Kilda Music Buyer Declan Murphy shares his high-rotation vinyl obsessions of this month.

Wrecking Crew (soundtrack)

Here is the soundtrack to the truly fab 2015 documentary of the same name. In the tradition of Standing in the Shadows of Motown’s tribute to the Funk Brothers, The Wrecking Crew focused on the eponymous collective of West Coast session musicians who played on a bewildering amount of influential records throughout the 60s. From Spector to Sinatra, from the Beach Boys to…

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