Australian fiction
Edenglassie by Melissa Lucashenko
‘Edenglassie’ was the original colonial name for Magandjin-Brisbane, a portmanteau of ‘Edinburgh’ and ‘Glasgow’. Half of Edenglassie the novel is set in 1854–55, the other half in 2024. Shuttling between these two time periods means Melissa Lucashenko can deliver us…
Body Friend by Katherine Brabon
Body Friend is told by an unnamed narrator who is suffering from a chronic autoimmune illness and living with daily debilitating pain. Her hostile body fights against itself, and to mitigate some of its pain, she is booked in for…
Something Bad is Going to Happen by Jessie Stephens
A writing teacher once told me that it’s difficult to write about characters experiencing depression, without depressing the reader. However, this is not the case in Jessie Stephens’ novel, Something Bad is Going to Happen. Even though we meet the…
Others Were Emeralds by Lang Leav
Acclaimed poet and author Lang Leav’s new novel, Others Were Emeralds, follows a group of teenagers living in the New South Wales town of Whitlam in the late 1990s. Whitlam is known for its large refugee population and…
Doll's Eye by Leah Kaminsky
Karin Magnussen was a Nazi scientist who was complicit in research into the pigmentation of irises to provide scientific proof of Nazi racial theories. Originally, her research was done on rabbits, but later it was conducted on humans with the…
One Day We're All Going to Die by Elise Esther Hearst
Despite having a job that she loves, 27-year-old Naomi isn’t quite sure what she is doing with her life. She has never really had to forge her own path; coming from a privileged Jewish family in Melbourne (her parents even…
Everyone and Everything by Nadine J. Cohen
It hasn’t been Yael Silver’s year. She’s just found out (the hard way) that a suicide attempt is surprisingly awkward, and that recovery is confusing, and arduous. Nevertheless, armed with erotic literature of dubious quality and a worrying number of…
The Modern by Anna Kate Blair
The Modern is a playful and introspective debut novel that interrogates queerness and urban social life through a lens of art history. Sophia is on the cusp of 30, living in New York with her well-off boyfriend and working as…
Ordinary Gods and Monsters by Chris Womersley
Chris Womersley is one of the most interesting and inventive writers in this country, in my extremely humble opinion. He began his publishing career with The Low Road, a gritty crime novel, his next, City of Crows, was…
A Light in the Dark by Allee Richards
Iris loves musical theatre. She loves dissecting the words of plays, listening to a chorus belt out a number, and investigating the depths of even the most minor characters. There’s just one person standing in her way to great success…
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