Restless Dolly Maunder

Kate Grenville

Text $45

Dolly Maunder was born at the end of the 19th century, when society’s long-locked doors were starting to creak ajar for women. Growing up in a poor farming family in country New South Wales but clever, energetic and determined, Dolly spent her restless life pushing at those doors. In this compelling new novel, Kate Grenville uses family memories to imagine her way into the life of her grandmother, a woman whose battles and triumphs helped to open doors for the women who followed.

The Unearthed

Lenny

Bartulin

After decades-old human bones are discovered in the Tasmanian wilderness, Antonia Kovács returns home with questions for her father, a retired police inspector in Queenstown. Meanwhile, Tom Pilar receives news of an inheritance, from a man he barely remembers. Set amid the harsh terrain of the timber and ore industries of the west coast, The Unearthed is a haunting novel that reveals the tragic connections between the disparate lives of post-war migrants and local workers, and the fallibility of memory, the illusion of truths and the repercussions on real lives.

Vincent & Sien

Silvia Kwon

The Hague, 1882. A howling winter’s night, Sien and her daughter are on the brink of surrendering to the bitter cold, when a good Samaritan appears. Vincent van Gogh, a struggling artist, provides them with warmth and food for the night. Fascinated by Sien, Vincent offers her work sitting for him. From model to muse, the two soon become lovers in a relationship that draws hostility from the town. This is the breathtaking and visceral intertwining of one woman’s need for survival and one man’s road to genius.

Thaw

Dennis Glover

In 1912, five British explorers struggle across the freezing Antarctic landscape seeking the safety of their camp. Today, as the world’s ice sheets begin to melt and surrender their secrets, renowned glacial archaeologist Missy Simpson works to discover the true cause of the explorers’ deaths. Her colleague Jim Hunter is working on his own scientific mysteries. Drawn from the pages of history and cutting-edge science, Thaw is a gripping read that will forever change how you see the frozen continent – and those who seek to conquer it.

The Sitter

Angela O’Keeffe

A writer is confined to her Paris hotel room during the early days of the pandemic, struggling to finish a novel about Hortense Cézanne, wife and sometime muse of the famous painter. Dead for more than a century, Hortense has been reawakened by this creative endeavour, and now shadows the writer through the locked-down city. Heartbreaking and perfectly formed, The Sitter explores the tension between artist and subject, and between the stories told about us and the stories we choose to tell.

West Girls

Laura Elizabeth Woollett

Luna Lewis is white. But her friends aren’t, nor are her brothers, nor her one-time Princess of Indonesia-finalist stepmother. After transforming from pudgy preteen to “exotic” beauty, Luna reinvents herself as “Luna Lu”. However, as her international modelling career approaches its expiry date, Luna must grapple with what she has sacrificed – and who she has become. Featuring an intersecting cast of WAGs, mining heiresses, backpacker-barmaids, and cosmetic nurses, West Girls examines beauty, race, class divisions, and social mobility in Australia.

Fanatic Heart

Tom Keneally

John Mitchel is one of the most celebrated of Irish rebels. In the middle of the dreadful famine of the 1840s, his exhortations to his countrymen to stand up against the British were as controversial as they were compelling. Charged with treason felony, he was transported to Van Diemen’s Land. In this vivid reimagining of Mitchel’s life, Tom Keneally, proud Irishman and descendant of convicts, confronts some of the biggest conflicts of our time – slavery, industrialisation, dispossession of land and famine.

WHAT WE’RE READING

The Wind Knows My Name

Isabel Allende

Here, Allende tells the stories of four people displaced from their birthplace and families as children and how they survive the trauma, through determination and the kindness of others. Going from past to present, Europe to Central America and then all coming together at the end in the US, this book is poignant, relevant – and a really good read. -

Victoria Bloomsbury, $34.99

Firelight

John Morrissey

A wildly imaginative, page-turning collection featuring ghost stories, science fiction and satire, with Aboriginal characters at its heart. An imprisoned man with strange visions writes letters to his sister. A controversial business tycoon leaves his daughter a mysterious inheritance. A child is haunted by a green man with a message about the origins of their planet. In this striking collection of stories, the award-winning John Morrissey investigates colonialism and identity without ever losing sight of his characters’ humanity.

God Forgets About the Poor

Peter Polites

“I will tell you why you should draft my story. Because migrant stories are broken. Some parts in a village where we washed our clothing with soot. Some parts in big cities working in factories. How we starved for food in Greece and starved for Greece in Australia.” In this stunning new novel from Polites, a son reflects on his mother’s life, from the mountain village in Greece where she was born to her arrival in Sydney in the ’80s and her experiences in her new home.

Translation State

Ann Leckie

I devoured this book. A standalone novel set in the same universe as Leckie’s Imperial Radch Trilogy, it is vast and detailed, with fascinating politics and species dynamics. It quickly picks up into a moving adventure about identity and belonging. Part of its beauty is watching how these personal journeys impact the larger political turmoil at play, and characters come into their own in the face of governments denying their existence.

- Tilda Hachette, $32.99

The Dictionary of Lost Words

Pip Williams

Williams effectively encapsulates the misogyny in the academic world during the late 1800s and early 1900s. She investigates the complexity of life as a woman juggling her personal and professional lives and how the political situations of the suffragette/suffragist movements and the first and second world wars impacted the women of England. -

Lars Affirm Press, $19.99

Pan Macmillan

$34.99

The Vitals

Tracy

Sorensen

As a carrier of the BRCA1 gene, Tracy Sorensen underwent risk-reduction surgery to try to dodge the “death sentence” that has stalked so many of her family members. So her 2014 cancer diagnosis came as a shock. Her cancer memoir is an actionpacked dose of speculative fiction narrated by her internal organs. It will make you infinitely more aware of the peculiar world inside your body, and illuminate all the hidden parts that make you human.

Judas Boys

Joel Deane

Pat Pinnock is a Judas Boy – a private schoolboy gone to seed. He’s lost his job as a political staffer. He sleeps in the garage of his estranged wife. He has finally run out of friends and must face his accusers – both the living and the dead. Judas Boys is the eagerly-awaited new novel from Joel Deane: a searing de profundis that reads like the secret history behind today’s political headlines.

Good as Gold

Justin

Smith

But the Girl

Jessica Zhan Mei Yu

Penguin

$32.99

From the acclaimed author of Cooper Not Out comes a novel set in the goldrush era that reimagines the running of the inaugural Melbourne Cup. The story is told through the adventures of Jesus Whitetree, an escaped orphan with no knowledge of his new world; Jack, a little-known bushranger; and police constable Harry Logan with Mary, a young Aboriginal girl in his custody. With the announcement of the first Melbourne Cup, all three parties descend upon the town. Good as Gold is a heart-warming story about triumph and the things that mean more than riches.

The Things that Matter Most

Gabbie

Stroud

Allen & Unwin $32.99

The staff of St Margaret’s Primary School are hanging by a thread. There’s serious litigation pending, the school is due for registration, and a powerful parent named Janet Bellevue has a lot to say about everything. As teachers they’re trying to remain professional, as people they’re unravelling fast. A powerful and moving debut novel about a school community in crisis.

Girl is spending the spring at an artist’s residency in Scotland. Far from her home in Australia and her tight-knit Malaysian family, she is working on a PhD on the poetry of Sylvia Plath. But she can’t stop thinking about the stories of her parents and grandmother who raised her. How can she reconcile their dreams for her with her lived reality? Did Sylvia Plath have this problem? What even is a “postcolonial novel”? But the Girl is a story of belonging, alienation, and the exquisite pleasure and pain of girlhood.

The Hummingbird Effect

Kate

Mildenhall

An epic, kaleidoscopic story of four women connected across time and place by an invisible thread and their determination to shape their own stories, from the acclaimed author of The Mother Fault. What is the link between these women separated by decades and geography? Could the mysterious Hummingbird Project hold the key? Propulsive, tender and engrossing, this genre-bending novel is a feast for the heart as well as the mind and senses.

Butter

Gayl Jones

Gayl Jones’s long career began with her blistering 1975 debut, Corregidora, which was edited by Toni Morrison, and she is increasingly recognised as one of the great literary writers of the 20th century. In this new collection of short fiction, Jones tells tales of spies, baristas, cartoonists and revolutionaries with sharp observation, wit and poignancy, exploring complex identities and unorthodox longings

Hachette, $39.99

Crook Manifesto

Colson Whitehead

From two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author Colson Whitehead comes the thrilling sequel to Harlem Shuffle. Set in ’70s New York, Whitehead chronicles a city that runs on cronyism, threats, ego, ambition, incompetence and pride – through the eyes of those caught in the crossfire. In scalpel-sharp prose and with unnerving clarity and wit, Crook Manifesto is a kaleidoscopic portrait of Harlem, and a searching portrait of how families work in the face of chaos and hostility.

Hachette, $32.99

What You Are Looking for Is in the Library

Michiko Aoyama

Sayuri Komachi is no ordinary librarian. Sensing exactly what someone is searching for in life, she provides just the book recommendation to help them find it. In this uplifting book, we meet five of Sayuri’s customers, each at a different crossroads – can she help them find what they are looking for? This novel is about the magic of community libraries and the discovery of connection.

Random House, $32.99

Tom Lake

Ann Patchett

In the spring of 2020, Lara’s three daughters return to the family’s orchard in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theatre company called Tom Lake. As Lara recalls the past, her daughters are forced to reconsider the world and everything they thought they knew. Both hopeful and elegiac, Tom Lake explores what it means to be happy even when the world is falling apart. The result is a rich and luminous story, told with profound intelligence and emotional subtlety.

Normal Rules Don’t Apply

Kate Atkinson

In the first story collection from Kate Atkinson in 20 years, we meet a queen who makes a bargain she cannot keep; a secretary who watches over the life she has just left; a man whose luck changes when a horse speaks to him. Atkinson presents these 11 interconnected stories with clockwork intricacy, inventiveness and sharp social observation, conjuring a feast for the imagination, a changing multiverse in which nothing is quite as it seems.

Random House, $32.99

Lost on Me

Veronica Raimo

Vero has grown up in Rome with her eccentric family: an omnipresent mother who is devoted to her own anxiety, a father ruled by hygienic and architectural obsessions, and a precocious genius brother at the centre of their attention. As she becomes an adult, Vero’s need to strike out on her own leads her into bizarre and comical situations. Narrated in a voice as wryly ironic as it is warm and affectionate, Lost on Me explores the slippery relationship between deceitfulness and creativity.

Hachette, $29.99

Zero-Sum

Joyce Carol Oates

Zero-sum games are played for lethal stakes in these arresting stories by one of America’s most acclaimed writers. A brilliant young philosophy student bent on seducing her famous philosopher-mentor finds herself outmanoeuvred; diabolically clever high school girls wreak a particularly apt sort of vengeance on sexual predators; a young woman is morbidly obsessed by her unfamiliar new role as “mother”. Provocative and stunning, Zero-Sum reinforces Oates’s standing as a literary treasure and an artist of the mysterious interior life.

HarperCollins, $32.99

The Details

Ia Genberg

In the throes of a high fever, a woman lies bedridden. Suddenly, she is struck with an urge to revisit a particular novel from her past. Inside the book is an inscription: a message from an ex-girlfriend. Pages from her past begin to flip, full of things she cannot forget and people who cannot be forgotten. In exhilarating, provocative prose, Ia Genberg reveals an intimate and powerful celebration of what it means to be human.

Hachette, $29.99

Granta 163

Best of Young British Novelists

Sigrid Rousing

Since the first Best of Young British Novelists issue in 1983, Granta has championed the work of authors who have changed the landscape of British literature. In 1983, featured writers included Kazuo Ishiguro, Salman Rushdie, Julian Barnes, Martin Amis and Pat Barker. Granta 163 introduces readers around the world to a cohort of outstanding new British voices – and some from Canada, Australia and the US – including stories from Eliza Clark, K. Patrick, Tom Crewe and Saba Sams. Granta, $29.99

The Invisible Hour

Alice Hoffman

Sixteen-year-old Ivy is pregnant and alone. Cast out by her family, she runs away and finds safety in the arms of Joel Davis. He offers a simpler life than the one she had in Boston. Little does she realise that Joel is the charismatic leader of a cult, and soon she is trapped and isolated in a rural community with brutal rules. Her daughter Mia one day secretly commits a transgression – reading. Discovering a world beyond the edges of her cloistered life is intoxicating. But breaking rules carries serious consequences. With two fiercely wonderful heroines, The Invisible Hour is an enchanting novel about love, heartbreak, self-discovery and the enduring magic of books.

Simon & Schuster, $32.99

Silver Nitrate

Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Montserrat is a talented sound editor, but she’s left out of the boys’ club running the film industry in ’90s Mexico City. And she’s all but invisible to her best friend Tristan, even though she’s been in love with him since childhood. Then Tristan discovers his new neighbour is the cult horror director Abel Urueta, whose claims of a Nazi occultist imbuing magic into silver nitrate stock sounds like sheer fantasy. Urueta believes he is cursed and wants Montserrat and Tristan to help him shoot a missing scene and lift the curse. Silver Nitrate is a breathtaking blend of Mexican horror movies and dark occultism from the bestselling author of Mexican Gothic Hachette, $32.99