Gleaner June/July 2024

Gleaner

June-July 2024

Living Hot

Extract: Clive Hamilton and George Wilkenfeld on developing resilience in the face of the climate crisis p21

Q&A: Only the Astronauts author Ceridwen Dovey on the poetry of the moon p10

Snuggle up: Our staff choose the best winter reads p14

From David’s desk

Another spectacularly popular Sydney Writers’ Festival is over, and a few observations from the festival bookseller are worth making. It seems that people have finally, and warmly, adjusted to Carriageworks as its new “home”. As wistful as many are about those glorious piers at Walsh Bay, the rugged grandeur of the refurbished industrial hub of our old railway service yards is quite something, and very convenient for public transport and access. And writer and public response to the atmosphere and connection is strong and positive.

As booksellers we see virtually nothing, but the feedback from events with some star performers including Bonnie Garmus, Paul Lynch, Katy Hessel, Anna Funder and Richard Flanagan, has us ready for the podcast release of their, and many other, sessions. (I’ve already seen, courtesy of iview, the delightful conversation Garmus shared with Caroline Baum.) Richard Fidler’s conversation with David Wengrow (The Dawn of Everything) was riveting – chase it up. Special mention also to the wonderful schools and kids’ programs that the festival has worked so hard to boost over the last few years. The kids’ gigantic entertainment space at Carriageworks was a heartwarming sight to behold on the weekend, and the school days program across various city and suburban locations was very well received. Any children’s author would be thrilled to be part of it.

Meanwhile, back in the regular Gleebooks world, things are getting closer to what we used to call normal. Our cafe will be open in the evenings, Wednesday to Saturday, at the end of the month. Come and check it out, day or night. Our events program

is back in full swing, check our website, or subscribe to our gleemail to see all our upcoming events and book launches.

Upstairs at 49 is lovely and welcoming space.

I’ve slowly been able to get back to that indispensable part of my work, indeed, of my life, reading and recommending new books. Here are some you will know about, some brand new, some forthcoming.

The Sunbird by Sara Haddad: A beautifully, delicately fashioned parable about belonging, about home, about rights and the tragedy and catastrophe that is Palestine.

My Friends by Hisham Matar A lovely, meditative novel about displacement (a Libyan man who can never go home) and cultural identity. A brilliant, deeply thoughtful writer. Loved it.

The Echoes by Evie Wyld: London born and living (but Australian raised) Wyld has written a novel set between London and a hard-scrabble rural Australia. Tough-minded, yet tender, daring and ambitious in scope. She’s very good. (Out August)

Western Lane by Chetna Maroo: Ostensibly about a young migrant-family girl’s journey from childhood to maturity through her excellence at squash (who would have thought?), this is a subtle, clever and wonderfully original first novel(la).

Because I’m Not Myself, You See by Ariane Beeston: A gripping, sometimes breathtaking and sometimes humorous, account of the author’s journey through postnatal psychosis. Candid and unflinching, this is a brave and important book which will enlighten anyone who reads it.

David Gaunt

Festival-goers browse the stands at the Gleebooks pop-up store at Carriageworks.

AUSTRALIAN FICTION

$35, Text. Out June

Things I Need You to Know

Mark Lamprell

When Ned dies, he leaves behind a document for Birdie – “Things I Need You to Know” – full of guidance on everything from household maintenance to the intimate details of each daughter’s emotional landscape. Composed in his dying days, it’s his last act of fatherly devotion. When more calamities rock her family, Birdie starts to wonder, could the legacy of “Things I Need You to Know” save her family from the catastrophic end barrelling towards them? A brilliantly observed novel about families and secrets, from acclaimed writer and film director Mark Lamprell.

$35,

$35, Fremantle.

Out June

The Honeyeater

Jessie Tu

Mrs Hopkins

Shirley Barrett

On a rainy night in 1871, an idealistic schoolmistress arrives at the notorious Biloela Industrial School for Girls on Cockatoo Island in Sydney Harbour. An unconventional school requires unconventional methods, and Mrs Hopkins is going to have to find her own ways to reach her lively, lost charges. But her own ghosts have followed her, and refuse to stay hidden for much longer. This witty, surreal and poignant final novel from Shirley Barrett is about what destroys us, what sustains us, and what we carry with us from one world into the next.

$33, Allen & Unwin. Out June

Edenhope

Louise Le Nay

Marnie is 63 and downwardly mobile. Her middle-class marriage is long gone and she’s living in a granny flat behind a stranger’s house. Still, things could be worse. Her daughter Lenny has just brought Marnie’s adored grandchildren to stay. She has also brought her repellent boyfriend and his raging drug habit. Marnie can see with absolute clarity the danger the children are in. And this time she’s going to do something about it. Edenhope is a warm, heroic story of a grandmother’s determination to save her family from themselves.

The Skeleton House

Katherine Allum

Meg’s life is woven into the fabric of St Stephens. It’s a tapestry made of two precious children, a hidden truth and a husband whose ideas of a perfect wife do not match her own. When Meg puts her foot down on a third kid, gets a job and is empowered by the same book group that was meant to keep her in her place, her marriage begins to disintegrate. Set in a tiny Mormon community, this is a novel about resilience and courage – the fierceness of mother-love and the power that comes with never forgetting who you really are.

When Fay receives the news that her former lover has died, she seeks solace from her mentor, Professor Samantha EganSmith, who offers her a spot at a prestigious translation conference in Taipei. When a shocking allegation is made, Fay chooses to keep it secret. Career opportunities abound at the conference, but it’s ghost month in Taiwan and her mother warns that she would be susceptible to dangers and threats. A chilling and intoxicating story of betrayal, ambition and love, The Honeyeater confirms that Jessie Tu is one of our most original and exciting writers.

$33, Allen & Unwin. Out July

Hurdy Gurdy

Jenny Ackland

In a near-future Australia, matriarch Queenie and her small circus caravan travel the countryside performing for dwindling audiences. By night, they gather under the dark sky; by day, they offer other services – hairdressing for women and a close shave for men. But while women come to them for help, men tend to disappear. In the distance, a reverend and his nun-like companion preach against alcohol, adultery and abortion. Hurdy Gurdy is compelling and haunting; a feminist revenge tale about the choices that women have to make.

$33, Allen & Unwin. Out June

ALSO OUT

Something Blue

Alex Sarkis

$25, Ultimo. Out July

Lowbridge

Lucy Campbell

$24.99, Ultimo. Out July

Text. Out June

AUSTRALIAN FICTION

The End and Everything Before It

Finegan Kruckemeyer

Emma watched her mother’s kayak disappear among icebergs in the Arctic Sea. Six years later, her brother warns Emma of a fatal family curse. Emma consigns herself to a solitary life at sea, where she can do no harm. After years alone, she is mysteriously drawn to land. She docks at an island, afraid of what her arrival might mean for the welcoming man and his daughter waving from the jetty. A debut novel from one of Australia’s most internationally celebrated playwrights, The End and Everything Before It is a kaleidoscopic story about the way love and loss shape a community.

$35, Text. Out July

The Director and the Daemon

Pitaya Chin

The Director and the Daemon follows the director of a big budget Australian sci-fi TV show grappling with the dilemma of corporate sponsorship, and an unnamed young radical struggling to find themselves as their political movement implodes around them. Their worlds become increasingly interconnected as they’re forced to take action in the face of civil unrest. The Director and the Daemon is beautiful, funny and provocative. It pokes fun at the arts industry, but still values creativity and art-making. It challenges all of us to think about how we can move from passivity to change, especially in the face of climate change.

$33, Puncher and Wattman. Out June

Heartsease

Kate Kruimink

Charlotte (‘Lot’) and Ellen (‘Nelly’) are sisters who were once so close a Venn diagram of the two would have formed a circle. But a great deal has changed since their mother’s death, years before. When the pair meet at a silent retreat in a strange old house in the Tasmanian countryside, the spectres of memory are unleashed. Heartsease is a sad, sly and darkly comic story about the weight of grief and the ways in which family cleave to us, for better and for worse

$35, Picador. Out May

$35, Vintage. Out July

$33, Transit Lounge. Out July

Jade and Emerald

Michelle

See-Tho

Lei Ling Wen is lonely. Bored with her demanding after-school schedule of tuition, study and violin lessons, she struggles to see eye to eye with her strict Chinese-Malaysian mother. When Lei Ling is befriended by worldly socialite Gigi Nu, she is enchanted by the realm of luxury and freedom that opens up to her. Then tragedy strikes, and Lei Ling discovers secrets that lead her to question everything she thought she knew about the two central women in her life. Jade and Emerald is a fierce and deeply felt novel from the winner of the 2023 Penguin Literary Prize.

Oblivion

Patrick

Holland

As the influence of the West falls away, an unnamed narrator drifts through the East’s floating world of non-places – chain hotels, airports, mega-cities – finalising often covert operations and deals. When he meets the enigmatic and beautiful Tien, a 21st-century floating world courtesan, he becomes involved with people and events that threaten his plan to escape life through various forms of oblivion. Evocative and sparely written, this is a novel where the journey becomes the story, filled with acute observation, desire and dreams.

The Little Clothes

Deborah

Callaghan

Audrey Mendes is a clever lawyer but has never made partner. Her weeks are filled with long hours in the office, visits to her ageing parents, trivia nights at the local and evenings at home with her pet rabbit, Joni. When she tries to buy wine at the pub and is ignored, she walks out without paying. Soon she starts rebelling in small and creative ways against a world in which she is unseen. Wry, humorous and provocative, this is an affectionate novel about sorting out the past, grabbing onto life and claiming your place in it.

$35, Viking. Out June

Imperial Harvest

Bruce Pascoe

Yen Se has lost everything to the Khan’s brutality. Left with one eye and one leg, he is forced out of his home village to work in the city as a horse handler. Witness to the Khan’s violent crusade, their raids sweeping across Eurasia, he travels with the theatre of war, but exists outside of it; stunned every morning to find himself alive. Imperial Harvest is a timely book that speaks to the universal lessons of war, tracing imperialist tactics all the way back to the rise of the Khan empire in the 13th century.

$33, Melbourne Books. Out June

Untitled 2.0

untitled /ʌnˈtʌɪtld/ adjective

1. (of a book, composition, or other artistic work) having no name

Gleaner readers of a certain age, or should I say, those who have been Gleebooks members since the 1990s, may remember the column I wrote for this august journal titled, Untitled. Hence the above title. So 21st century. As in the first iteration, readers can expect news on anything book related, book reviews and recommendations, with a personal, not to say opinionated bent. Those opinions are mine and mine alone.

I’m taken with the fact that it was a 71-year-old poet who shot Slovak PM Robert Fico. The poet was a “lone wolf who had radicalised himself after the presidential election” according to the interior minister. It made me wonder how many artists of any stripe have assassinated political leaders (as opposed to being engaged activists, like those who fought in the Spanish Civil War).

I can only think of John Wilkes Booth, an actor from a theatrical family who “radicalised himself” into the Confederate cause and assassinated Abraham Lincoln for abolishing slavery. (Read

CHILDREN’S EVENTS @ GLEEBOOKS

Book clubs are back with lots of free activities for kids of all ages each weekend.

Ashleigh Barton: Freddie Spector Fact Collector Years 1-2, Saturday 29 June, 2pm

Belinda Murrell: Daredevil Princess Party Year 1-2, 6 Saturday July, 2pm

STORYTIME

Meet the authors of your favourite books on weekends at 10.30am. This month includes Sarah Ayoub, author of How to Be a Friend, reading her picture books on Saturday 29 June; Debra Tidball reading Lights Out Little Dragon on Saturday 6 July; and Running With Wings with Sam Squires and Laura Porter on Sunday 7 July. Amanda Lieber reads My Giant Sea Shell on Saturday 20 July; and on Sunday 29 July it’s How to Move a Zoo author Kate Simpson.

Keep an eye on the website and our Instagram @gleebooks_kids or email rachel@gleebooks.com.au for more details.

Karen Joy Fowler’s terrific 2021 novel, Booth). It seems tome, and I may be wrong, that as a rule, artists and writers don’t go around shooting people, except on occasion, each other. Maybe for the Slovakian gunman poet, shooting Fico, an increasingly pro-Russian autocrat, was a crime of passion – political passion. Maybe the gunman poet wrote quite a few poems denouncing the government which went unheeded, and he felt more brutal action was needed. It begs the question – is the pen mightier than the sword?

It was so sad to learn of the death of the brilliant short story writer, Alice Munro. I was working in a bookshop in London’s Charing Cross Road in 1978 when the first five titles for the Women’s Press were published, including Munro’s first and only novel, Lives of Girls and Women. It had a profound effect on the 24-year-old me, as did Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, which alerted me to the hitherto buried history of women’s writing, which both the Women’s Press and Virago did so much to revive and promote. I also read agog Fay Weldon’s (1971) Down Among the Women and the seminal The Women’s Room by Marilyn French was also published that year. In the backroom of the bookshop, Words and Music, I found an old wooden door. I wrote the word “Ladies” then crossed it out and wrote “Women” instead and we put it in the window display with a pile of the books. Nowadays I would have posted it to our socials, but back then it didn’t occur to anyone to even take a photo.

I’ve just found my first edition of Chopin’s The Awakening which I read on a beach on a Greek island. In the back is a beer label I glued in, thinking at the time that the older me would one day find it and remember that day – and so it has come to pass. But I’m cross that I can’t find my original Munro which goes to show you should never, ever cull!

Elizabeth Strout’s new novel, Tell Me Everything is out in August. What an amazing universe Strout has created with the characters of all her books appearing and reappearing in each other’s lives. She has this beautiful way of inviting the reader in, starting a paragraph with “As we mentioned earlier …” or “You may remember …” which is really quite helpful, because sometimes you have forgotten that person or incident. In the very beautiful Tell Me Everything, the worlds of Olive Kitteridge and Lucy Barton come together. They meet to tell each other stories and they are stories about the lives of girls and women –and sometimes about the men they love, or don’t.

Sorry to whet your appetite so far in advance.

Morgan Smith

INTERNATIONAL FICTION

Blessings

Chukwuebuka Ibeh

When Obiefuna’s father witnesses an intimate moment between his teenage son and the family’s apprentice, he banishes Obiefuna to a Christian boarding school. Surrounded by unknown faces that soon become friends, lovers and enemies, Obiefuna finds and hides who he truly is, while his mother Uzoamaka struggles to hold onto her favourite son, her truest friend. Told from the alternating perspectives of Obiefuna and his mother, Blessings is an elegant and exquisitely moving story that asks how we can live freely when politics reaches into our hearts and lives.

$35, Viking. Out June

Queen Macbeth

Val McDermid

A thousand years ago in an ancient Scottish landscape, a woman is on the run with her three bosom companions – a healer, a weaver and a seer. If the men hunting her find them, they will kill her because she is the only one who stands between them and their violent ambition. She is no lady: she is the first queen of Scotland, married to a king called Macbeth. Shakespeare fed us the myth of the Macbeths as power-hungry murderous conspirators. But now Val McDermid drags the truth out of the shadows, exposing the patriarchal prejudices of history.

$25, Polygon. Out May

ALSO OUT

A Cage Went in Search of a Bird

Various authors

$33, Abacus. Out June

How It Works Out

Myriam Lacroix

$35, Jonathan Cape. Out June

$35, Chatto & Windus. Out June

$35, Scribe. Out June

$35, Jonathan Cape. Out July

The Horse

Willy Vlautin

Al Ward is several years into an isolated stint living on old mining land in Nevada left to him by his great uncle. One morning, a horse arrives outside his home, seemingly unable to feed itself or stay safe from coyote attacks. Fifty kilometres from the nearest town and broken by alcoholism and anxiety, Al must decide what to do. Intercut with Al’s presentday story are episodes from his long life as a songwriter and guitarist. Vlautin’s new novel is a gorgeous homage to the uncelebrated musicians who make our lives more joyful, and an exploration of loneliness, humanity and resilience.

$33, Faber Fiction.

Out July

Welcome to Glorious Tuga

Francesca Segal

London vet Charlotte Walker has taken up a fellowship on the tiny, remote island of Tuga de Oro to study the endangered gold coin tortoises in the jungle interior. But Charlotte has a secret that connects her to the island, and has finally decided to solve the mystery that has dominated her life. A complete and vivid world to escape to, Welcome to Glorious Tuga celebrates a fictional island, and the eccentric community who live there. Enchanting, uplifting and very funny, this is a captivating novel about love, belonging, and what it really means to come home.

The Hairdresser’s Son

Gerbrand Bakker

Simon is a hairdresser, just like his father and grandfather before him, but he is not passionate about cutting and shaving: every customer is a person, and people suck the energy from him. But there is one client he regularly interacts with – the writer. The writer is looking for a subject for his next book, and becomes captivated by the story of Simon’s father, supposed to have died in 1977. This is a deeply humane and beautifully observed portrait of loneliness from one of Europe’s greatest storytellers.

A Short Walk Through a Wide World

Douglas Westerbeke

Paris, 1885. Aubry Tourvel, a spoiled and stubborn nine-year-old girl, comes across a wooden puzzle ball on her walk home from school. She tosses it over the fence, only to find it in her satchel that evening. Days later, at the family dinner table, she is stricken by a mysterious illness. When a visit to a doctor only makes her worse, she flees to the outskirts of the city, where she discovers it is this very act of movement that keeps her alive. So begins her incredible lifelong journey on the run from her condition. A Short Walk Through a Wide World is a life-affirming debut novel of adventure, wonder and self-discovery.

INTERNATIONAL FICTION

$33, Virago.

Out June

$35, Ultimo.

Out July

Exhibit

R.O. Kwon

At a lavish party in the hills outside of San Francisco, Jin Han meets Lidija Jung and nothing will ever be the same for either woman. A brilliant young photographer, Jin is at a crossroads in her life and finds herself telling Lidija about an old familial curse. She’s been told that if she doesn’t keep it a secret, she risks losing everything. As Jin and Lidija become more entangled, they realise they share more than the ferocity of their ambition, and begin to explore hidden desires. Urgent, bold, and deeply moving, this novel asks: how brightly can you burn before you light your life on fire?

Tehrangeles

Porochista Khakpour

Iranian-American multimillionaires Ali and Homa Milani have it all – a McMansion in the hills of Los Angeles, a microwaveable snack empire, and four spirited daughters. There’s Violet, the bighearted aspiring model; Roxanna, the chaotic influencer; Mina, the chronically-online overachiever; and the impressionable health fanatic Haylee. On the verge of landing their own reality TV show, the Milanis realise their deepest secrets are about to be dragged out into the open before the cameras even roll. Dramatic, biting yet full of heart, Tehrangeles is a tragicomic saga about high-functioning family dysfunction and the ever-present struggle to accept one’s true self.

The Son of Man

Jean-Baptiste Del Amo

In the soft morning light, a man, a woman, and a child drive to Les Roches, a dilapidated house, where the man grew up with his own ruthless father. After several years of absence, the man has reappeared in the life of his wife and their young son, intent on being a family again. Haunted by his past and consumed with jealousy, the father slips into a kind of madness that only the son will be able to challenge. The Son of Man is an exceptional novel of nature and wildness, and a blistering examination of how families fold together and break apart under duress.

$35, Text. Out June

At the Grand Glacier Hotel

Laurence Fearnley

Following a disastrous family holiday, Libby and Curtis make a promise: if they ever visit the west coast of the South Island again, it will be to stay at the majestic Grand Glacier Hotel. Twenty years later, the couple finally return to the resort. Except the glacier has retreated, nothing goes to plan, and after a storm separates her from Curtis, Libby finds herself alone in the isolated hotel. At the Grand Glacier Hotel is award-winning novelist Laurence Fearnley’s third novel responding to the five senses and a moving portrait of physical and emotional recovery.

$35, Penguin. Out June

Misrecognition

Madison Newbound

Elsa is struggling. Her formative, exhilarating relationship with an older couple has abruptly ended, leaving her depressed and directionless. In the relationship’s wake, she searches the internet looking for meaning, and finds a new obsession: a charismatic young actor whose latest feature is a gay love story that illuminates Elsa’s crisis. But her obsession shifts from the actor to his companion, an alluring, androgynous person called Sam. As this confusing connection develops, Elsa is forced to grapple with her sexuality and the uncomfortable truths about her last relationship. Misrecognition is an unforgettable debut novel about the internet, post-postmodern adulthood and queer identity.

$33, Bloomsbury. Out July

‘Original, brilliant, funny, fierce— everything I want in a writer.’

ANNABEL CRABB

‘A

loving, courageous account of the black mess of grief and the slow return to a flourishing life.’

CHARLOTTE WOOD

INTERNATIONAL FICTION

The Orange Room

Rosie Price

Rhianne has returned home to the west country, seeking distraction in heat and noise. Art school in London has ripped away her confidence; now she’s working in a hotel kitchen, where the pressure is high and the dangers are obvious. But then there’s Callum, just across the chef’s pass. There’s attraction. There’s everything that comes next. The Orange Room is about the narrow line between passion and control, and the kind of violence that is difficult to name.

$35, Harvill/Secker. Out July

Babylonia

Costanza Casati

According to Mesopotamian myth, Semiramis was a queen, an ambitious warrior, a commander and builder whose reputation reached the majestic proportions of Alexander the Great. Historical record, on the other hand, falls eerily quiet. In her second novel, Costanza Casati brilliantly weaves myth and ancient history together to give Semiramis a voice, charting her captivating ascent to a throne no one promised her.

$35, Michael Joseph. Out July

ALSO OUT

Grow Where They Fall

Michael Donkor

$37, Fig Tree. Out July

The Heart in Highway

Kevin Barry

$33, Canongate. Out June

Shadows of Winter

Robins

Louise Wolhuter

$35, Ultimo. Out June

$37, Chatto & Windus. Out June

Scaffolding

Lauren Elkin

In 2019, Anna, a psychoanalyst, is processing a recent miscarriage. Her husband, David, takes a job in London so she spends days obsessing over renovating the kitchen. Meanwhile, in 1972, Florence and Henry are redoing their kitchen. Florence is finishing her degree in psychology while hoping to get pregnant. Both sets of couples face the challenges of marriage, fidelity, and pregnancy. A novel in the key of Eric Rohmer, Scaffolding is about the bonds we create with people, and the difficulty of ever fully severing them.

$30, Scribe. Out July

Choice

Neel Mukherjee

Bear

Parade

Rachel Cusk

Midway through his life, the artist G begins to paint upside down. Eventually, he paints his wife upside down. He also makes her ugly. The paintings are a great success. In Paris, a woman is attacked by a stranger in the street. Her attacker flees, but not before turning around to contemplate her victim. A mother dies, leaving her children to confront her legacy. Her death is a kind of freedom. Rachel Cusk once again expands the notion of what fiction can do in this startling, exhilarating novel.

$33, Faber. Out June

Julia Phillips

On the island off the coast of Washington where they were born and raised, Sam and her sister Elena struggle to make enough money to survive. When the bear turns up near their home, Sam, terrified, is more convinced than ever that it’s time to leave the island. But Elena is enchanted by the bear’s presence, throwing into doubt the plan to escape the island and their dreary lives. Bear is a propulsive, mythical, rich novel story about the bonds of sisterhood and the mysteries of the animals that live among us – and within us.

Sandwich

Catherine Newman

A publisher, who is at war with his industry and himself, embarks on a radical experiment in his own life and the lives of those connected to him; an academic exchanges one story for another after an accident brings a stranger into her life; and a family in rural India have their lives destroyed by a gift. These three ingeniously linked but distinct narratives form a breathtaking exploration of freedom, responsibility and ethics.

$33, Atlantic. Out June

For two decades, Rocky has looked forward to her family’s yearly escape to Cape Cod. Their rustic beach-town rental has been the site of sweet memories, and now, sandwiched between her children who are adult enough to be fun but still young enough to need her, and her parents who are alive and healthy, Rocky wants to preserve this golden moment forever. But every family has its secrets, and the perfectly balanced seesaw of Rocky’s life is tipping towards change.

$35, Doubleday. Out June

INTERNATIONAL FICTION

A Woman of Pleasure

Kiyoko Murata

The year is 1903, and tenacious and spirited Aoi Ichi is sold to the most exclusive brothel in Kumamoto, Japan, becoming the protegee of Shinonome, the highest-ranking courtesan. Outside the cloistered world of the red-light district, rumours of local worker strikes grow, and as the seasons change in Kumamoto, Ichi, Shinonome and their fellow courtesans begin to wonder how they might redistribute the power and wealth of the brothels among themselves. Kiyoko Murata has crafted a dazzling historical novel, based on real-life events, about the courtesans whose strike brought down a red-light district.

$27, Footnote. Out July

The Mires

Tina Makereti

Three women give birth in different countries and different decades. In the near future, they become neighbours in a coastal town in Aotearoa New Zealand. When Janet’s son Conor arrives home without warning, sporting a fresh buzzcut and a new tattoo, the quiet tension between the neighbours grows – but no one suspects just how extreme Conor has become. No one except Wairere, who can feel the danger in their midst. The Mires is a tender and fierce novel that asks what we do when faced with things we don’t understand. Is our impulse to destroy or connect?

$35, Ultimo. Out July

Ask Me Again

Clare Sestanovich

Eva meets Jamie by chance. She is 16, living in middle-class Brooklyn; he is the same age, but from the super-rich of upper Manhattan. She’s observant, cautious, eager to seem normal; he’s bold, mysterious, eccentric. Despite having little in common, they instantly forge a deep friendship. As Eva goes off to college and falls in and out of love, Jamie drops out of school and is drawn toward radical experiments in politics and religion. This coming-of-age novel explores how relationships can define us, change us and point us towards futures we might not have imagined for ourselves.

$35, Picador. Out July

ALSO OUT

The Third Love

Hiromi Kawakami

$33, Granta. Out July

Whale

Fall

Elizabeth O’Connor

$27, Picador. Out July

EVENTS @ GLEEBOOKS

Here are some highlights from our packed program of literary events and book launches at our Gleebooks store. To find out about more go to gleebooks.com.au

LITERARY EVENTS

Clive Hamilton and George Wilkenfeld: Living Hot

Tuesday 18 June

The authors discuss their new book about Australia’s climate change predicament. Read an extract on p21.

Iain McCalman: John Büsst

Wednesday 19 June

Iain McCalman discusses his biography of Australian artistturned-environmental campaigner John Büsst with James Bradley.

Alice Robinson: If You Go

Thursday 27 June

If You Go is a moving, captivating and unforgettable novel about hope and grief and family. In conversation with James Bradley.

Jim Moginie: Silver River

Wednesday 10 July

Founding Midnight Oil member Jim Moginie will perform at this event to discuss his moving memoir, Silver River He is in conversation with Adam Gibson and the event will also include a Q&A: come along and ask everything you ever wanted to know about one of Australia’s most unique and influential bands.

Eric Beecher: The Men Who Killed News

Tuesday 6 August

The inside story of how media moguls abused their power, manipulated the truth and distorted democracy.

Andrew Ford: The Shortest History of Music

Wednesday 7 August

From prehistory to now, the fascinating story of why music is vital to the human experience.

BOOK LAUNCHES

Alexandre Lefebvre: Liberalism as a Way of Life

Thursday 11 July

In conversation with Dr Vafa Ghazavi, executive director of the James Martin Institute.

Courtney Collins: Bird

Thursday 1 August

In conversation with Kylie Needham.

Our shop literary events are $12 & $9 concession (pensioner/ student) and free to members of our Gleeclub rewards program. Book launches are free unless otherwise noted. Prices for external events vary. Weekday events generally begin at 6pm for 6.30pm, and weekend events at 2.30pm for 3pm. Bookings are essential; book online or phone 02 9660 2333. Listings are subject to change without notice. For more details go to gleebooks.com.au

Ceridwen Dovey

Sydney author Ceridwen Dovey has developed a unique voice in Australian fiction, informed by her award-winning nonfiction work. In her 2014 book, Only the Animals, the souls of 10 animals reflected on the best and worst of humanity. In her remarkable new book, Only the Astronauts (Hamish Hamilton, $35), objects in space observe our world and its inhabitants from on high.

What inspired you to write Only the Astronauts from nonhuman perspectives?

As a writer, I’ve always been really interested in empathy and how literature takes us into other people’s minds in a way that nothing else can. For me as a reader, the joy of reading has always been the sense of meeting another mind halfway, but in solitude.

So when writing, I’ve always wanted to find ways to reproduce the feeling that I get when I read literature, but also experiment and push the limits of what empathy might be, testing how far the reader will follow me into a certain narrator’s consciousness.

I think of Only the Astronauts and my previous book, Only the Animals as collections of fables. The origin of the word fable is “to give voice”, and I chose to use animal narrators in Only the Animals and object narrators in this new book because it’s a way of giving them sweetness and earnestness and innocence, but also wisdom. Sometimes, it’s quite hard to combine all of that into a human narrator.

How did your background in journalism and nonfiction writing prepare you for researching this book?

It’s wonderful, as a writer, to work across the divide between fiction and nonfiction. As I get a bit older, I’m starting to appreciate what each form gives me. Every time, fiction gives me this sense of enormous relief in the exploratory nature of it. With this book, a lot of the stories come from material that I discovered when researching as a journalist or essayist but never used.

Each one is based on a real space object that has been launched into space by humans, so they’re all informed by real history. But then I take that history into a speculative zone and use a lot of creative and poetic license.

Is there a particular story in the book that you’re excited about?

I think it would probably be The Fallen Astronaut. The story is told from the perspective of Neil Armstrong’s spirit, who, after death, has found himself inhabiting a little statue that is actually on the moon. I’m trying to have Neil leave behind that old identity, the inability to find the right words, and draw on the modes of nature writing, to find poetry that speaks to what he is seeing on the moon. There’s a political reason behind

it. If we have a natural language for the moon, if we begin to see the moon as a nature place, a wilderness, we can begin to think of conserving it as a wilderness.

Another story in the book that’s very close to my heart is the longest story, Requiem. It’s written from the perspective of the International Space Station (ISS). It imagines the ISS giving one last tour of itself before it’s deorbited, so it’s set slightly in the future.

As I started to write about the ISS, I felt so much love for the humans who lived within its walls. Just that sense of humans caring for each other, making room for each other under difficult circumstances. At the end of the story, the remaining astronauts who are about to leave the space station all write a poem of farewell to the ISS, each in their own language.

It was lovely to work with friends and colleagues to translate the sonnets into different languages, to capture that sense of the ISS as a home for all humans and a place where diversity was thriving, and is still thriving, and will thrive until it comes down. I think that’s something we can hold on to.

Only the Astronauts is out now.

Picture: Shannon Smith

CRIME & THRILLER

$35, Penguin. Out July

Resolution

Irvine Welsh

Ray Lennox is determined to move on from his darkest days. The maverick former detective has left Edinburgh for a fresh start in Brighton. Then Lennox meets Mathew Cardingworth. Rich, smooth-talking and immaculately dressed, he presents himself as a successful, and respectable, property developer. Yet their encounter reawakens memories that have haunted Lennox for decades. But the more he identifies the links between Cardingworth, the disappearance of a group of foster care boys and the violence of his past, the more he finds himself asking, what will he sacrifice to achieve resolution at last?

$35, Jonathan Cape. Out July

The Bookshop Detectives

Gareth Ward and Louise Ward

When a mysterious parcel arrives at Sherlock Tomes bookshop in small-town Havelock North, New Zealand, husband-and-wife owners Garth and Eloise are drawn into the baffling case of a decades-old missing schoolgirl. Intrigued by the puzzling, bookish clues, the two ex-cops are soon tangled in a web of crime, drugs and floral decapitations, while endeavouring to pull off the international celebrity book launch of the century. The Bookshop Detectives is a witty debut, full of literary clues, comedic insights and the kinds of Kiwis you only ever meet in bookshops.

In a Place of Darkness

Stuart MacBride

Detective Constable Angus MacVicar has been assigned to Oldcastle’s biggest ongoing murder investigation. Every two weeks another couple is targeted. One victim is left at the scene, the second body is never seen again. This should be the perfect chance for Angus to prove himself, but instead of working on the investigation’s front line, he’s lumbered with the forensic psychologist from hell. A sarcastic know-itall American, on loan from the FBI, who seems determined to alienate everyone while dragging Angus into a shadowy world of conspiracies, lies and violence.

$35, Bantam. Out June

What Have You Done?

Shari Lapena

Nothing ever happens in sleepy little Fairhill, Vermont. The teenagers get their kicks telling ghost stories in the old graveyard. The parents trust their kids will arrive home safe from school. But this morning all of that will change. Because Diana Brewer isn’t lying safely in her bed where she belongs. Instead she lies in a hayfield, circled by vultures. How quickly a town of friendly, familiar faces becomes a town of suspects. Everyone wants answers. And one innocent question could be deadly. A new unputdownable thriller from the “queen of the one sit read”.

$35, Bantam. Out July

ALSO OUT

A Grave in the Woods

Martin Walker

$35, Quercus. Out June Crime

Murder at the Castle: 1

David Safier

$25, Old Street Publishing. Out July Crime

CRIME & THRILLER

Murder in Punch Lane

Jane Sullivan

When dazzling theatre star Marie St Denis dies in the arms of her best friend, fellow actress Lola Sanchez, everyone believes it was suicide by laudanum overdose. Everyone except Lola. After journalist Magnus Scott publishes a compassionate obituary about her friend, Lola decides to seek his help. A fraught attraction develops between the two amateur detectives from opposite sides of society, and their volatile relationship soon begins to compromise their investigation. Inspired by real events and people, Murder in Punch Lane is a dark and gripping crime novel that maps the sins and secrets of 19thcentury Melbourne.

All the Colours of the Dark

Chris Whitaker

Late one summer, the town of Monta Clare is shattered by the abduction of local teenager Joseph “Patch” Macauley. Nobody more so than Saint Brown, who is broken by her best friend’s disappearance. Patch lies in a pitch-black room – all alone – for days or maybe weeks. Until he feels a hand in his. Her name is Grace and, in this hopeless place, they fall in love. But when he escapes there is no sign she ever even existed. As he embarks on an epic search to find her, Saint shadows his journey, on a darker path to hunt down the man who took them.

$33,

Storm Child

Michael Robotham

The most painful of Evie Cormac’s memories has been locked away ever since she was held prisoner as a child. Forensic psychologist Cyrus Haven’s mission is to guide her to something near normality. But one day, on a British beach, 17 bodies wash up in front of them. Whatever happened all those years ago lies at the core of this new tragedy. The same dark forces are reaching out, dragging Evie back into the storm. She must now call upon Cyrus’s unique skills, and her own, in their search for the missing pieces of this complex and haunting puzzle.

The Book of Elsewhere

Keanu Reeves and China Miéville

There have always been whispers. The warrior who cannot be killed. Who’s seen a thousand civilizations rise and fall. He has had many names; these days, he’s known simply as \”B.\” And he wants to be able to die. In the present day, a U.S. black-ops group has promised him they can help with that. And all he needs to do is help them in return. But then a mysterious force emerges – one at least as strong, and one with a plan all its own. Keanu Reeves and China Mieville team up on this genre-bending epic of ancient powers, modern war, and an outcast who cannot die.

$35, Del Rey. Out July

The Widows

Pascal Engman

In the sequel to Femicide, two bodies are discovered in a Stockholm park, one a policeman and the other an unidentified young woman. With the police believing the woman to be nothing more than collateral damage, they focus on the murder of the police officer. But Detective Vanessa Frank takes a different approach and her investigation turns out to be more personal than she could have imagined.

$28, Legend. Out June

Deliver Me

Malin Persson Giolito

Dogge is from affluent Rönnviken in Stockholm. Billy lives in the concrete towers of Våringe, a few hundred yards across a highway but a world apart. They met as six-year-olds in the playground and have been unlikely best friends ever since. When gangs tighten their grip on Våringe, Dogge and Billy are runners by the time they’re 12. But when Billy wants to leave the boys must face the violent rules of the adult game they tried to play. Deliver Me is at once a poignant portrayal of the power of friendship and a shattering depiction of what happens when society fails to protect those that need it most.

$33, Simon & Schuster. Out July

Gretchen Felker-Martin

Invasion of the Body

Snatchers meets Tell Me I’m Worthless in this relentless and visceral horror about a group of queer kids trying to survive the conversion camp from hell, from the author of the criticallyacclaimed Manhunt

$25, Titan. Out June

$33, Orion. Out June

Hachette. Out June

$33, Echo. Out July

HORROR

Cuckoo

FANTASY

CRIME & THRILLER

$25, Pushkin Vertigo. Out July

The Noh Mask Murder

Akimitsu

Takagi

Strange things are happening in the Chizurui mansion. At night, a figure clad in a Hannya mask is spotted wandering around the house. The amateur crime fiction writer, Akimitsu Takagi, is sent to investigate, but then tragedy strikes. The head of the family is found dead inside his study, locked from the inside, with only a Hannya mask and the scent of jasmine as clues to his mysterious death. The Noh Mask Murder is a gripping locked-room mystery written by one of Japan’s most celebrated crime writers.

We Used to Live Here

Marcus Kliewer

Young couple Charlotte and Eve can’t believe the killer deal they got on an old house in a beautiful neighbourhood deep in the mountains. One day, there’s a knock at the door. A man stands there with his family, claiming to have lived there years before and asking if it would be alright if he showed his kids around. As soon as the family enters their home, strange things start to happen. Then Charlotte vanishes and Eve begins to lose her grip on reality. The Turn of the Key meets Parasite in this gripping, eerily haunting debut.

$35, Bantam, Out June.

Smoke

Michael Brissenden

Years after leaving Jasper, Detective Alex Markov has been sent back under the shadow of an LAPD corruption investigation. She is convinced that the man, a family friend, was murdered opportunistically under the cover of the fire. As the smoke clears, Alex reveals a town corrupt to its core – but exposing that corruption could destroy her and the people she loves. Will she ignore the crookedness and deceit, or face the consequences of pursuing an inconvenient truth?

$35, Affirm. Out June

The Wilder Aisles

There has been a lot of talk about cosy crime, especially from the UK. The sort of book where people still get murdered, but you don’t have to read the upsetting parts – the awful violence and cruelty. As part of the cosy genre, I have chosen The Mystery Guest by Nita Prose. Molly Gray, the head maid at the Regency Grand Hotel, is proud of her position, and spends her day, cleaning bedrooms, plumping cushions and sweeping up secrets. Her routine is disrupted when a well-known mystery writer drops dead in the recently restored tearoom.

As a child, Molly was very close to her gran, who had worked as a maid in a large house. One day, Gran takes her to work. There, Molly, an intelligent and curious child, takes to wandering around the house instead of staying in the basement kitchen.

On one of her wanderings she finds the library and inside, a secret wall. Try as she might, she cannot get through it, although she hears typing, so she knows someone is there. What is beyond the wall and how it is connected to the death

The Community

Christine Gregory

Investigative journalist

Lars Nilsson has moved to an idyllic retreat in the Sunshine Coast hinterland for a quiet life, leaving behind a public fall from grace and the crime reporting he was once feted for. But when a body is found floating in a waterhole and his best friend’s daughter is reported missing, Lars is compelled to investigate. What he finds may not only destroy his tight-knit community but also the life he has worked so hard to rebuild.

$35, Ultimo, Out June

ALSO OUT

The Last Trace Petronella McGovern

$33, Allen & Unwin. Out July Crime

Fantasy

The Bonehunters

Steven Erikson

$33, Pen Transworld. Out May

of the writer in the Grand Tearoom, makes for a light, but entertaining read. If you want some creepy thrills, icy hands on your back, a bell on a gate that rings and there is no one there, a woman that stands outside a door in the falling snow, begging to be let in, and then vanishes when someone goes to her, Yrsa Sigurdardottir’s The Prey is for you. Two married couples go missing after talking a guide into taking them camping in the mountains, in the very depths of winter, sparking a search and rescue effort.

The second story revolves around two brothers, Kolbeinn and Horvar. When their family home is sold, the buyer contacts Kolbeinn to say that a box of photos has been found and the brothers set off to discover what happened when they were young. In the present, Horvar has feelings of being watched at the radar station where he works. He hears a gate bell ringing but no one is there and, in his solitude, becomes more and more disturbed. The Prey is a great big rollicking ride of a crime story, and I couldn’t put it down.

Janice, Glebe

Staff Picks

Cool reads

There is nothing better than getting cosy with a good book as the days grow shorter and the nights get colder. Grab a blanket and snuggle up with some of the best reads for the season as chosen by Gleebooks staff.

Safe Haven

Shankari Chandran

Straight off the back of her Miles Franklinwinning Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens, Chandran proves that she has plenty more marvellous stories to tell in Safe Haven Its protagonist, Fina, is an asylum seeker who struggles to find a home and escape persecution. Her determination to help others who are also struggling to survive is deeply moving, and emblematic of the current of kindness and beauty that flows through this story.

– Imogen (Glebe)

Dirt Poor Islanders

Winnie Dunn

Winnie Dunn’s mesmerising debut novel bubbles with the unstoppable life-force of Meadow Reed, a half-Tongan, half-white girl who is trying to navigate her culture and community while yearning for a bigger life outside her family. The novel is a powerful response to dangerous and detrimental stereotypes that are often echoed by white Australians (think Chris Lilley’s character, Jonah from Tonga). It’s a potent gift that swirls with humanity and humour.

– Jody (Blackheath)

Dune (Book 1)

Frank Herbert

The films tried to tell this mind-blowing story in a few short hours. It’s not enough to get the nuances, the rich detail, the sheer, staggering scope. It’s social science fiction, it doesn’t bog you down with the mathematics of folding space and so forth, it focuses on the people, culture, politics and environmental impacts of society on nature. Give yourself time to enfold yourself into the story.

– Jane (Glebe)

Hard by a Great Forest

Leo Vardiashvili

Words from Hansel and Gretel give this great novel its title. Two boys and their

Human? A Lie That Has Been Killing Us Since 1788

Ziggy Ramo

Award-winning Wik musician and producer Ziggy Ramo has written an important and confronting book that adds so much to the conversation about colonisation and its devastating impacts. Taking a truly unique approach to presenting his distinct and clear vision, it’s a book, art exhibition and album rolled into one powerful clarion call.

– Tiff (Blackheath)

father flee war-torn Tbilisi, Georgia but have to leave their mother behind. Years later the father goes back to find answers but disappears. The brothers then take up the search. Written with a quirky sense of humour, this story takes you on an extraordinary journey of history, memories and sadness but like Grimm’s fairy tale ... it has a happy ending ... of sorts.

– Victoria (Blackheath)

My Friends

Hisham Matar

During a single night in 2016, after saying goodbye to a friend at St Pancras Station, a man walks home, across London, recollecting a momentous, shocking event that took place in 1984, only a short distance away. As he walks, an intricate, gripping story emerges of political revolution, exile, friendship and how the place you once called home can now only exist in the rediscovery of it elsewhere. I urge you to read it.

– Jack (Glebe)

Butter

Asako Yuzuki

Desire, power and food are all entangled in this exploration of femininity in Japan. Every inch of this novel is drenched with butter and blood, indeed they are the same thing. What it is to be a woman and a wife and a lover are wrapped in the societal constraints of desire, of body image, of service – all are pulled apart and challenged with deeply confronting

and complex relationships between beautifully flawed characters. Take a bite. It’s delicious.

– Tilda (Glebe)

Long Island

Colm Toibin

Ignore Long Island’s status as a sequel to Toibin’s bestselling Brooklyn. This book is very much its own beast. It fits snugly alongside Toibin’s other Enniscorthy novels, and is an intricately layered, acutely well-observed thing of beauty. Deftly comic, delicately poignant, and ultimately devastating. For a quiet social novel, exploring the interior world of its characters, it actually has the momentum of a thriller. If you are new to Toibin I suggest you read Long Island immediately and then enjoy Brooklyn as a “prequel”.

– Andy (Glebe)

Alien Earths

Lisa Kaltenegger

Thanks to the James Webb Telescope, humans now observe the Universe ever further and with ever greater clarity. Thus, the search for other life within it takes on fresh impetus. Exoplanets, first identified in 1995, are the most likely candidates. In Alien Earths, Lisa Kaltenegger looks at a handful that could harbour some form of life. Any form of life would probably be microbial, but the author has fun with other otherworldly possibilities.

– Stephen (Blackheath Secondhand)

PICTURE BOOKS

$27, Dirt Lane. Out now

$26, Walker. Out July

$33, Walker. Out July

$33, Wide Eyed Editions. Out June

A Leaf Called Greaf

Kelly Canby

Bear is all alone. His brothers and sisters have left him. Bear embraces his grief in the form of Greaf – the greenest, most beguiling leaf Bear has ever seen. Bear holds Greaf tight. But as the season wanes, Greaf changes, and so too does Bear. This is a poignant, lyrical story gently touching on the changing nature of sorrow in the aftermath of loss that gently introduces the concept of grief to children. A stunning picture book by awardwinning author and illustrator Kelly Canby. $25, Fremantle. Out June

A Teaspoon of Light

Peter O’Connor and Nisaluk Chantanakom

Marley’s dream cloth reminds her of the people she loves, and of safe and happy times. When times get tough and the cloth rips in two, those memories begin to slide away. Marley must make new loving memories before she can bring back the old ones and begin to imagine the future anew. A Teaspoon of Light is a story about making and saving loving memories.

The Wobbly Bike

Darren McCallum and Craig Smith

How do you fix a wobbly bike? Could it be the tyres, the terrain, or could it be a new rider? A joyful, multi-layered story, celebrating the unique culture of Australia’s urban Top End, the precious roles of grandparents in families, the fact that kindness and encouragement, combined with practice, are the key to success, bound together with gentle humour ... because laughter is always the best medicine.

The Seal on the Beach

Mara Bergman and Brita Granström

Little Maggie is on holiday with her aunt and uncle. Meanwhile her mum waits for Maggie’s baby brother to come home from hospital. On a walk across the wild Norfolk shoreline, Maggie finds a seal pup stranded on the beach – without her mum, how will the seal survive? Will she ever be returned to the sea, and find her family again? Maggie longs for the rescue and survival of this dear little seal pup while hoping with all her heart to be reunited with her own mum and baby brother again.

Everybody Travels

Kristin Roskifte

An eye-opening collection of stories about our interconnected human experience. Because everybody on planet earth is on a journey. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday ... any day ... you may be travelling to the supermarket, the park, or the seaside. But it’s not only youeverybody travels, all the time. This is a book jam-packed full of lovely stories, big and small, all about the human experience. It is a beautiful reminder that we are all ultimately on a journey together.

Reading to Baby

Margaret Wild and Hannah Sommerville

Dora has doting big brothers who play with her, look after her, and guide her as she grows. But Peter reads to her, which turns out to be the greatest gift of all. From award-winners

Margaret Wild and Hannah Sommerville comes a story to remind us of the wonder and magic of reading.

$25, Affirm. Out now

Moon Bear

Clare Helen Welsh

In this enchantingly illustrated, almost wordless picture book, a story of courage and creativity unfolds when a girl who is afraid of the dark meets a magical moon bear who is afraid of the light.

$25, Frances Lincoln. Out June

Who Ate Steve?

Susannah Lloyd and Kate Hindley

Meet Marcel and Steve, a bird and worm who will help us learn about size ... and how to resist our mischievous side when we need to focus. This funny, surprising, tale, perfectly coupled with Kate Hindley’s illustrations is a laugh and a lesson for every reader.

$25, Nosy Crow. Out June

EARLY READERS

Worst Week Ever! Saturday

Eva Amores and Matt Cosgrove

Have you ever had a bad week? Justin Chase sure has, and this is it! He miraculously made it through the mayhem of Monday, the trauma of Tuesday and the weirdness of Wednesday. He was throttled by Thursday and frazzled by Friday! It’s time for a nice, relaxing weekend, right? Wrong! Now it’s Saturday and Justin has to somehow survive a zombie apocalypse ... and he lives next door to the cemetery for elite athletes!

Hero Trial (Dungeon Runners)

Kieran Larwood and Joe Todd Stanton

Kit has dreamed of being a Dungeon Runner all his life, although being a gnorf (part gnome, part dwarf) means he’s much smaller than the other competitors. But when a space opens up for a new team in the Dungeon Running League, Kit doesn’t want to miss this chance to try out! With his new friends Sandy and Thorn, they’re ready to take on anything – mazes, puzzles, monsters, treasure and most of all adventure! Young readers will love discovering the world of the Dungeon Runners in this new action-packed adventure.

ACTIVITIES

Picture book

Cluedle: The Case of the Dumpleton Diamond

Hartigan Browne

Team up with world famous private investigator Hartigan Browne and crack the curious case of the Dumpleton Diamond by solving 50 fun brain-busting puzzles. A humorous and intriguing mystery story sets the scene in the village of Dumpleton where detectives need to discover: who pup-napped Dave the dog; what is important about The Flying Goat; how the Dumpleton Diamond went missing; and why a missing key can unlock this case. Packed full of codes to crack, evidence to evaluate, clues to unravel and maps to navigate, Cluedle is puzzling fun for the whole family. Ages 8+

$20, Macmillan. Out now

I Lived Inside a Whale

Xin Li

$33, Little, Brown.

Out August

Picture book

ABC Disability

Sarah Rose with Alley Pascoe and Rebecca Feiner

$25, Lothian. Out June

Fiction 8-12

Olivetti

Allie Millington

$33, Feiwel & Friends.

Out June

Fiction 8-12

My Brother, Finch

Kate Gordon

$18, Riveted Press.

Out July

Shower Land 2: Feel the Freeze

Nat Amoore and James Hart

Felix refuses to shower. Last time, he ended up in another world. But Dad and Olly have noticed he smells pretty bad. At least he’s prepared this time, wearing bathers just in case. He turns on the shower and suddenly finds himself on a mountain ... knee-deep in snow ... and freezing in speedos!

$15, Puffin. Out June

MIDDLE GRADE 8-12

The Riding Gallery

Sally Murphy and Martina Heiduczek

In Melbourne’s St Kilda, as World War 1 begins, Anton, a German immigrant fulfils his dream of creating the most beautiful steam-driven “riding gallery” – a merry go round – in the world.

Evelyn, who has just moved to the city befriends local boy Rory, but the war, and anti-German sentiment, soon takes its toll on the children, Anton, their families, and the riding gallery itself. Based on true events with poems created from contemporaneous newspaper headlines, this is Sally Murphy in her finest form.

$17, Walker. Out July

The Wrong Shoes

Tom Percival

Will has the wrong shoes – he’s always known it but doesn’t know how to change them. Navigating the difficulties of home and school when you feel you stick out is tough, but finding confidence with the help and empathy of friends can be all you need to see the way.

$19, Simon & Schuster. Out June

$17, Nosy Cow. Out August

$16, Scholastic. Out July

NONFICTION

Walking the Rock Country in Kakadu

GRAPHIC NOVELS

$18, Penguin. Out now

$17, Macmillan. Out June

Ben Tyler and Diane Lucas share stories, knowledge and love of the land on a walk through one of Australia’s most ancient and beautiful ecosystems, introducing Kundjeyhmi language, one of the Bininj Kunwok languages of Kakadu and western Arnhem Land, along the way. This is a breathtaking encounter with the magnificent rock country of iconic Kakadu National Park, from the acclaimed creators of Walking in Gagudju Country: Exploring the Monsoon Forest.

Detective Beans and the Case of the Missing Hat

Li Chen

Detective Beans is available 24/7 (except school days and after bedtime) for all your mystery-solving and ice-cream taste-testing needs. Today he’s investigating the case of the missing hat. His missing hat. The clues take Beans all over Cat Town. He encounters philosophical pigeons, dodgy street magicians, lounge singers, soup chefs and even a mysterious trash portal. Ages 8+

Astrid and the Space Cadets: Attack of the Snailiens!

Alex T. Smith

The minute Astrid Atomic goes to bed and the lights are off she blasts off on board the spaceship Stardust, along with her best pals Beryl, Professor Quackers and Zoink. They are on a mission to clean up the Milky Way, but when a nearby alien is in trouble things don’t go exactly to plan. A funny and fast-paced adventure through space from the author of the Claude series. Ages 8+

OUR KIDS’ BOOKS CLUBS ARE BACK!

Come and join us as we eat lots of popcorn and talk about books together with authors and illustrators. We have meet-ups for all ages throughout the month, with years 1-4 on the first Saturday; years 5-6, on the second Saturday; years 7-8 on the third Saturday and years 9-10 on the fourth Saturday. Book clubs are free and once you attend a session and are registered you receive a book club card that entitles you to 10% off all kids’ books for the rest of the year. For more information contact Rachel at rachel@ gleebooks.com.au and be sure to follow our @gleebooks_kids Instagram page to find updates and any last minute schedule changes.

Jiggliest Jellyfish

Tim and Emma Flannery and Katie Melrose

Did you know that jellyfish can thrive in waters that would suffocate other sea creatures? Or that some jellyfish can flash different colours from purple to green? Or that they have the world’s most powerful venom? There is even a jellyfish that is immortal! Come along on an exciting expedition with the world-renowned scientist and explorer Tim Flannery and his daughter Emma as they spotlight some of the world’s weirdest and most fascinating creatures. $27, Hardie Grant. Out July

YOUNG ADULT

The Things We Leave Behind

Clare Furniss

Civil unrest in London has reached an all-time high after years of a growing authoritarian regime, and it’s no longer safe for Clem and her half-sister Billie in the city. Clem tells of their treacherous journey to Scotland, by road and then by sea, fleeing with nothing but a notebook filled with stories and memories of home. But is there something Clem’s not saying? And how will this journey – and the sister’s story – end? With the start of a new life? Or a mirror held up to the past? Ages 14+

$23, Simon & Schuster. Out July

ALSO OUT

Activities

#Queerbook

Malcolm Mackenzie and Emily A. Foster

$20, Farshore, Ages 14+ Out July Nonfiction

Poetry Play Kit

Joseph Coelho

$20, Kaddo. Out August

Diane Lucas, Ben Tyler and Emma Long

$30, A&U Children. Out June

Shop Talk

From the Heathens

Autumn has been glorious in the wilds of Blackheath, the trees are dressed in their seasonal best, and as Emily Brontë beautifully wrote, “Every leaf speaks bliss to me, Fluttering from the autumn tree.” There is the smell of wood smoke in the air as the temperature drops (the only time we embrace fire lighting in the mountains), and we will always find any excuse to sit and read and dream ...

Tiff’s reading faves this season are The Alternatives by Caoilinn Hughes, a blisteringly witty portrait of four unforgettable Irish sisters, their search for meaning, each other and their place in the world. Brimming with philosophy, geology, food, humour, heart and hope. A thoughtful and rewarding read by a stonkingly brilliant writer!

And speaking of brilliantly genius writers, Andrew O’Hagan has skilfully crafted Caledonian Road, an excoriating look at class, entitlement, power, inequality and the dichotomy of what it means to be British in the 21st century. Audacious in its scope, O’Hagan effortlessly weaves and draws together all of the (mainly flawed) characters and their storylines in a way that leaves you unable to put it down. You know it’s not going to end well for Campbell Flynn, but you just can’t look away, as his life and everything he thought he represented unravels so publicly and spectacularly.

Victoria is still travelling through the wilds of the northern hemisphere with her reading selections. Irish writers do seem to be captivating us all at the moment. Victoria’s list starts with The Coast Road by Alan Murrin, a fabulous novel set in a small coastal town in Ireland in the 1990s where divorce is still illegal, and gossip is rife. Colette has come back to the town she left after running away with a married man and she is the talk of the town. Izzy feels sorry for her and they become friends – a friendship that will lead to tragedy for one, and freedom for the other. Unputdownable.

And heading to historical Italy, Victoria has immersed herself in The Glassmaker by Tracy Chevalier describing it as one for those of you who love Venice (yes!), good historical fiction and loved The Girl with the Pearl Earring (yes and yes!). The story, which spans centuries, is about the history of glassmakers from Murano through one woman’s experience. It takes a little time to figure out what is going on timewise, but the art of glassmaking and the magnificent city of Venice are beautifully and accurately described to make a delightful read.

Ava has chosen Wake in Fright, the Australian outback classic that Kenneth Cook published in 1961, which he dismissed as a

“young man’s novel”. He published 16 works of fiction but Wake in Fright was the one that captured readers’ imaginations with its themes of an alien landscape, desperation, poverty, male violence, prejudice and colonial menace. It’s a horrifying classic of Australian noir.

Jody has been reading Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, Salman Rushdie’s (pictured) reflection on his closeness to death after a knife attack as he was preparing to talk about the “importance of keeping writers safe from harm”, in New York. Unflinching and predictably grisly, this is Rushdie’s fever dream combined with the cool intellectual calculation of a seasoned writer. At times his retelling of the attack and the efforts of his wife, frontline medical staff, fellow writers, such as Martin Amis, Paul Auster, Siri Hustvedt and others is compelling but at times Rushdie’s words seem to fail him; the inadequacy of language to describe his attack and the aftermath is clear. It is Rushdie’s voice and descriptions of the physical that are most visceral and powerful. When he shifts to a more philosophical plane he seems to falter. Knife has a dissonance to it and can be difficult to read but perhaps that reflects us all when we try to make sense of something that dramatically changes the direction of our lives. We are all looking forward to welcoming the winter reading season – and wishing for snow so that we have a genuine excuse to stay home and work through our reading lists.

Jody

BIOGRAPHY

$35, Black Inc.

Out June

$35, Allen & Unwin. Out July

$35, Jonathan

$27, Penguin.

Out July

$33, Michael Joseph. Out June

Fragile Creatures

Khin Myint

Khin’s sister Theda has a strange illness and a euthanasia drug locked in a box under her bed. Her doctor thinks her problem is purely physical, and so does she, but Khin is not so sure. He knows what they went through growing up in Perth – it wasn’t welcoming back then for a Burmese-Australian family. With Theda’s condition getting worse, Khin heads to the US to sort things out with his expartner. Events take a very odd turn, and he finds himself in court. This is a family story told with humour, wonderment and honesty.

For Life

Ailsa Piper

When Ailsa Piper’s life is shattered by an unexpected loss, she flees Melbourne in an effort to escape her grief and pain. She migrates north to Sydney and walks the harbour cliffs to the lighthouse, meeting the locals: winter swimmers and shoreline philosophers. But Ailsa is drawn back south, and even further back, to the west’s aqua waters. For Life is a moving insight into loss, hope and starting again, aided by the incredible healing power of nature and a community of unexpected angels.

Alexandra

Fuller

It’s midsummer in Wyoming and Alexandra Fuller is barely hanging on. Grieving her father and pining for her home country of Zimbabwe, reeling from a midlife breakup, freshly sober and embarking on a new relationship with a younger woman, Alexandra vows to get herself back on an even keel. And then – suddenly and incomprehensibly – her son Fi, at 21 years old, dies in his sleep. By turns disarming, devastating and blessedly funny, Alexandra recounts the wild medicine of painstakingly grieving a child in a culture that has no instructions for it. Fi

The Marriage Question

Clare

Carlisle

When she was in her mid-30s, Marian Evans transformed herself into George Eliot – an author celebrated for her genius as soon as she published her debut novel. During those years she also found her life partner, George Lewes – writer, philosopher and married father of three. After “eloping” to Berlin in 1854 they lived together for 24 years. This exceptional new biography shows how George Eliot wrestled with the question of marriage in art and life.

The Half Bird

Susan Smillie

When Susan Smillie set sail from the south-west coast of England on her beloved sailboat, Isean, she was unaware this spontaneous departure would lead to a journey spanning several years and countries across the continent. This wasn’t a challenge or a mid-life adventure; it was much gentler than that, but much greater too. The Half Bird is the story of one woman’s solo sailing odyssey – from Land’s End to the shores of Greece – and explores the unexpected joys of solitude.

The Uptown Local

Cory Leadbeater

As an aspiring novelist in his early 20s, Cory Leadbeater was presented with the opportunity to work for Joan Didion. In the nine years that followed, he shared her rarefied world, transformed by her blazing intellect and her generous friendship. But secretly, Cory was spiralling. He was reeling from the death of a close friend. He spent his weekends at a federal prison, visiting his father as he served time for fraud. He struggled to write the novel that would validate him as a real writer. The Uptown Local is a love letter to a cultural icon, exploring the fault lines of class, family, loss and creativity.

$33, Fleet. Out June

Rural Hours

Harriet Baker

Rural Hours tells the story of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann, each of whom moved to the country and was forever changed by it. Invigorated by new landscapes, they emerge from long periods of creative uncertainty and private disappointment. Graceful, fluid and enriched by previously untouched archival material, Rural Hours is a paean to the bravery and vision of three pioneering writers, and a passionate invitation to us all – to recognise the radical potential of rural places, and find new enchantment in the routines and rituals of each day.

$55, Allen Lane. Out July

ALSO OUT

Biography

Metamorphoses

Karolina Watroba

$40, Profile Trade. Out July

Biography

Fighting for Justice

Robert Macklin

$35, Hardie Grant. Out July

Cape. Out July

POLITICS

Crimes Against Humanity

Geoffrey Robertson

Geoffrey Robertson

KC explains why we must hold political and military leaders accountable for genocide, torture and mass murder. He shows how human rights standards can be enforced against cruel governments, armies and multinational corporations. Crimes Against Humanity contains a critical perspective on the invasion of Iraq, the abuses at Abu Ghraib, the killings in Darfur, the death of Milosevic and the trial of Saddam Hussein. This definitive book on human rights law has been updated with a chapter on war crimes in Ukraine. $45, Penguin. Out July

Who Owns This Sentence?

David Bellos and Alexandre Montagu

Battles are raging over copyright in the output of AI programs. Not only books but wallpaper, computer programs and cuddly toys are now deemed to be intellectual properties – making copyright a labyrinthine construction of laws, covering almost all products of human creativity. Who Owns This Sentence? is an enlightening cultural, legal and global history of the idea that intangible things can be owned, and makes a persuasive case for seeing copyright as an engine of inequality in the 21st century.

$33, Welbeck. Out June

ALSO OUT

European studies

New Cold War

Robin Niblett

$33, Atlantic. Out June

Politics

Hype Machine

Joshua Oliver

$37, Heligo. Out June

$37, Viking Out June

$45, 4th Estate. Out July

The Architecture of Modern Empire

Arundhati Roy

Over a lifetime spent at the frontline of solidarity and resistance, Arundhati Roy’s words have lit a clear way through the darkness that surrounds us. This essential collection of interviews with David Barsamian, conducted over two decades from 2001 to the present, is a piercing exploration of modern empire, nationalism and rising fascism that gives us the tools to resist and fight back.

$25, Penguin, Out June.

The Forever War

Nick Bryant

The Forever War tells the story of how America’s political polarisation is 250 years in the making, and argues that the roots of its modernday malaise are to be found in its troubled past. The compromises originally designed to hold the union together – the Amendments made in the Reconstruction era to give rights back to former enslaved people, the apportionment of political power – have never truly been resolved. Today, a country that looked confidently to the future has become captive to its contentious past.

Night of Power

Robert Fisk

In this final work from renowned journalist Robert Fisk, he picks up reporting on the Middle East where his internationally bestselling The Great War of Civilisation left off. Fully immersed in the Middle East and critical of the West’s ongoing interference, Fisk was committed to uncovering complex and uncomfortable truths that rarely featured on the traditional news agenda. An extraordinary chronicle of Fisk’s trademark rigorous journalism, historical analysis and eyewitness reporting.

The Odd Couple

Allan Behm

As rich and powerful first-world nations, America and Australia share a problem: how to recalibrate their relationship to deliver peace and prosperity rather than conflict and disharmony. In The Odd Couple, Allan Behm suggests ways that America and Australia can transcend military glitz to strengthen well-being and human security worldwide. America needs a friend, not a flunky, and Australia may become its best ally.

$30, Upswell, Out July

The Jakarta Option

Jonathan Pearlman

Canberra and Jakarta face similar threats in a changing Asia. Could this lead to closer ties? The next issue of Australian Foreign Affairs examines Australia’s relationship with Indonesia and the prospects of the two neighbours working together to boost their collective security as tensions in Asia increase. It looks at how Canberra should adapt to a changing Indonesia as the world’s fourth-most populous nation enters a new era under its next president, Prabowo Subianto. $25, Australian Foreign Affairs. Out June

Australia’s climate battle

It’s time to get cracking on making Australia resilient to intensifying climate extremes. In this extract from Living Hot (Hardie Grant, $28), Clive Hamilton and George Wilkenfeld argue that if we prepare well, we can give ourselves a fighting chance to preserve some of the best of what we have, build stronger and fairer communities and find a path through the escalating pressures of a warming world.

The transformation of Australia into a climate-resilient nation needs to overcome more than just lack of funding, governmental dysfunction and absence of political vision. The great Australian stubbornness is perhaps exemplified by the residents of North Wagga Wagga, a suburb built on the Murrumbidgee flood plain. Under pressure to move to higher ground after the latest of a string of floods back in 1960, residents instead adopted the defiant slogan “We shall not be moved”. Defying Mother Nature as much as town planners, the slogan remains proudly on the suburb’s signpost today.

White Australians’ history of refusal to listen to what the climate is telling them stretches back to the First Fleet. In 1817, an exasperated Governor Lachlan Macquarie wrote to the colonial secretary in London about farmers building houses on the flood plains of the Hawkesbury-Nepean River system rather than residing in the nearby towns of Richmond, Windsor and others on higher ground that Macquarie had recently proclaimed. Noting “the recent awful Visitation of the Floods in February”, Macquarie felt “extremely displeased and Indignant at their Infatuated Obstinacy in persisting to Continue to reside with their Families, Flocks, Herds, and Grain on those Spots Subject to the Floods and from whence they have often had their prosperity swept away …”

In the 19th century, Indigenous people warned the settlers against building on flood plains that could be inundated by sudden torrents. They were reported as using bark canoes to rescue from rooftops townsfolk who thought they knew better. In a modern twist, in January 2024 the Indigenous community of Pigeon Hole on the flood plain of the Victoria River 700km south of Darwin was flooded, causing dozens of residents to be evacuated to Darwin. It had been only 12 months since the entire town had been evacuated after the previous flood. The ABC reported that town leaders had for decades been calling for Pigeon Hole to be relocated to higher ground, but the Northern Territory government had preferred to throw good money after bad by rebuilding on the same spot each time the settlement was washed away.

Transformative adaptation will be expensive and will require public spending priorities to be upended. Many billions of dollars will need to be devoted to the task. One obvious source of tax revenue is the fossil fuel industry, especially natural gas. The

industry is doomed anyway, either from falling demand due to emissions reduction action or economic stagnation.

Better to tax it to the hilt now rather than pretend that low taxation is needed for future investment, which in any case we should be discouraging.

To avoid social fracturing as the economic pie shrinks, governments will find it harder to deflect demands for a fairer distribution of income by betting on more economic growth. Allowing poorer Australians – who are much more vulnerable to harm from severe weather events – to bear the brunt is deeply unfair and socially corrosive.

We have already crossed six of the nine “planetary boundaries” that define a safe operating space for humanity. In Australia, we have no control over some of these breaches; the climate will change, the oceans will warm and the seas will rise no matter what we do. However, there are vital elements of our environment that we can manage for better or worse – our freshwater flows, soils, forests, biodiversity and natural ecosystems.

We can also, up to a point, moderate our exposure to stressors from the rest of the world, including those caused by global crises – disrupted supply chains, hoarding of resources, disintegrating financial markets. The idea of “de-risking” has gained traction: for example, by reducing investments in China because of Beijing’s policies. Many businesses are instead following strategies of “friend-shoring” and “near-shoring”. Generalising the idea, prudent de-risking of Australia’s trade would give us a buffer in the event of global crises. The alternative is to continue to put our faith in a precarious international system that will surely fray as the Earth’s systems refuse to go along with human demands for more.

Living Hot is out now. Clive Hamilton and George Wilkenfed will discuss their book at Gleebooks’ Glebe store, Tuesday 18 June. See gleebooks.com.au for more details.

Nonfiction

Terra Nova

Harrison Christian

On the 1910 journey across the Antarctic ice, differences between Robert Falcon Scott and his second-in-command Edward Evans became insurmountable. Scott sent Evans back early, making the final push without him, only to find they had been beaten by the Norwegians. When Scott and his remaining men made their desperate return to base, they were met with an inexplicable shortage of supplies, leading to the tragic deaths of the entire party. Terra Nova delves into the lives of these remarkable men, revealing a story of betrayal that was left out of the official narrative.

$37, Ultimo. Out June

The CIA

Hugh Wilford

As World War II ended, the United States stood as the dominant power on the world stage. In 1947, to support its new global status, it created the CIA to analyse foreign intelligence. But within a few years, the agency was engaged in other operations: bolstering pro-American governments, overthrowing nationalist leaders, and surveilling anti-imperial dissenters in the US. The CIA is the story of the birth of a new imperial order in the shadows. It offers the most complete account yet of how the US adopted unaccountable power and secrecy at home and abroad.

$35, Basic Books. Out June

S Goodman BUSINESS

$70, WH Allen. Out July

$27, Penguin. Out June

Vertigo

Harald Jähner

Out of the ashes of the First World War, Germany launches an unprecedented political project – its first democratic government. The Weimar Republic is established. Tradition is shaken to its core as a triumphant procession of liberated lifestyles emerges. Amid a frenzy of change comes a backlash from those who do not see themselves reflected in the new Republic. Deep divisions begin to emerge – divisions that will alter the course of the 20th century and the lives of millions around the world. Vertigo is a vital, kaleidoscopic portrait of a pivotal moment in German history.

A Small Town in Ukraine

Bernard Wasserstein

Decades ago, the historian Bernard Wasserstein set out to uncover the hidden past of the town 40 miles west of Lviv where his family, especially his grandfather Berl, originated – Krakowiec. In the lives of Wasserstein’s own family and the many others he has rediscovered, the people of Krakowiec become a prism through which we can feel the shocking immediacy of history. Original in conception and brilliantly achieved, A Small Town in Ukraine is a masterpiece of recovery and insight.

Tripped

Norman Ohler

First used as a drug capable of treating mental illnesses, then as a “truth serum” by the CIA, Tripped reveals how the fortuitous discovery of LSD in April 1943 led to a mass exploitation of this promising hallucinogen. Using archival material, Norman Ohler brings to light the often misguided interaction between scientific research, state authorities and hedonistic drug culture that shaped drug policy in the 20th century. With a cast of characters including Richard Nixon, Elvis Presley, Aldous Huxley and John Lennon, this is Ohler at his thrilling, revelatory best.

$33, Grove Press Out June

How The World Ran Out of Everything

Peter

The last few years have highlighted the fragility of the global supply chain. Ships were stuck at sea, warehouses overflowed, and delivery trucks stalled. The result was a scarcity of everything from frivolous goods to lifesaving necessities. The scale of the pandemic was unprecedented but it underscored the reality that the system is at risk of collapse. How the World Ran Out of Everything exposes the pathways of manufacturing and transportation that bring products to our doorsteps, and the ruthless business logic that has left local communities at the mercy of a fragile network for their basic necessities.

$35, HarperCollins. Out June

Moneta

Gareth Harney

When Gareth Harney was first handed a Roman coin by his father as a child, he became entranced by its beauty, its permanence, and its unique power to connect us with the distant past. He soon learned that the Romans saw coins as far more than just money – these were metal canvases on which they immortalised their sacred gods, mighty emperors, towering monuments, and brutal battles of conquest. Moneta traces ancient Rome’s unstoppable rise, from a few huts on an Italian hilltop to an all-conquering empire spanning three continents, through the fascinating lives of 12 remarkable coins.

$37, Jonathan Cape. Out June

The Stalin Affair

Giles Milton

In 1941, as Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, Stalin’s forces faced a catastrophic defeat which would make the Allies’ liberation of Europe virtually impossible.

To avert this disaster, the UK and the US mobilised an elite team of remarkable diplomats with the mission of keeping the Red Army in the war. Together, they grappled with the ingenious, mercurial Stalin to make victory possible. But they also discovered that the Soviet dictator had a terrifying masterplan for the post-war world. Based on astonishing unpublished diaries, letters and secret reports, The Stalin Affair reveals troves of new material about the most unlikely coalition in history.

$35, John Murray. Out now

$33, Pantera. Out June

$50, UNSW Press. Out July

$35, UQP.

Out July

$33, Black Inc. Out July

Wed By the Wayside

Alana

Valentine

Alana Valentine’s mother, Janice, was married by the charismatic and controversial Methodist minister Ted Noffs at Sydney’s Wayside Chapel in 1969. Not long after, Janice died, leaving behind many unresolved questions for her family. As part of the research for the play that was to become Wayside Bride, Alana set up a website where people could upload stories and photos of their own marriages. This uniquely Australian institution welcomed people in spite of social taboos around race, class, religion and sexuality and these remarkable stories reshape our understanding of this country’s social history.

Critical Care

Geraldine

Fela

HIV and AIDS devastated communities across Australia in the 1980s and 1990s. In the middle of this profound health crisis, nurses provided crucial care to those living with and dying from the virus. They negotiated homophobia and complex family dynamics as well as defending the rights of their patients. Bringing together stories from across the country, historian Geraldine Fela documents the extraordinary care, compassion and solidarity shown by HIV and AIDS nurses. Critical Care unearths the important and unexamined history of nurses and nursing unions as caregivers and political agents who helped shape Australia’s response to HIV and AIDS.

Black Witness

Amy McQuire

Over the past two decades, Amy McQuire has reported on most of the key events involving Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, including numerous deaths in custody, the Palm Island uprising, the Bowraville murders and the Northern Territory Intervention. She has also exposed the misrepresentations and violence of the mainstream media’s reports, as well as their omissions and silences in regards to Indigenous matters. Black Witness is a searing indictment of the media’s failures in reporting Indigenous affairs and shows how Black journalism can pave the way for equality and justice.

Growing Up Indian in Australia

Edited by Aarti Betigeri

Growing Up Indian in Australia reflects and celebrates this vibrant diversity. It features contributions from Australian-Indian writers, both established and emerging, who hail from a wide range of backgrounds, religions and experiences. This colourful, energetic anthology offers reflections on identity, culture, family, food and expectations, ultimately revealing deep truths about both Australian and Indian life.

Shortest History of Japan

Lesley Downer

$28, Black Inc. Out June History

Strange Little Girl

Jessica Knight

$37, Ultimo. Out June Memoir

What’s Her Name

Katie

Nelson and Olivia Meikle

$37, Michael O’Mara. Out July History

Sing Like a Fish

Amorina Kingdon

In Sing Like Fish, award-winning science journalist Amorina Kingdon synthesises historical discoveries with the latest research in this sonic undersea world. From the swimbladder drumming of plainfin midshipman fish to the syntax of whalesong; from the deafening crackle of snapping shrimp to underwater earthquakes and volcanoes, sound plays a vital role in feeding, mating, parenting, navigating, and warning. Our seas also echo with human-made sound, and we are only just learning how these pervasive noises can mask mating calls, chase animals from their food, and even wound these underwater creatures.

$37, Scribe. Out June

What the Bees See

Craig P Burrows

A comprehensive look into the amazing science of bees, this book collects mesmerising ultraviolet-induced visible fluorescence photography of flowers and nature and offers fascinating research that explores every aspect of our relationship with honeybees. Learn about the history of beekeeping, current environmental impacts affecting bees, and the rise of bee products in medical and wellness spaces. $60, Hardie Grant. Out May

ENVIRONMENT

MATHEMATICS

Vector

Robyn Arianrhod

A Thousand Miles From Care

Steve Johnson

In 1988, Steve Johnson’s younger brother Scott went over the edge of a cliff at Sydney’s North Head and died. The police deemed it a suicide, but Steve Johnson never believed his brother would take his own life. He embarked on an arduous quest to find out what really happened. This profoundly impactful book traces the steps Steve and his family and friends took to solve the mystery that resulted in an extraordinary outcome: a stunning turnaround by police who apprehended a suspect, 32 years after Scott’s death.

$35, HarperCollins. Out July

Vector takes readers on an extraordinary 5000year journey through the human imagination. The stars of this book, vectors and tensors, are unlikely celebrities. Yet mathematician and science writer Robyn Arianrhod shows how they enabled physicists and mathematicians to think in a brand new way. Today, you’re likely relying on vectors or tensors each time you pick up your mobile phone, use a GPS, or search online. In Vector, Robyn Arianrhod shows the genius required to reimagine the world – and how a clever mathematical construct can dramatically change discovery’s direction.

$45, UNSW Press. Out July

Love Triangle

Matt Parker

Stand-up comedian and ex-maths teacher

Matt Parker shows why we should all have a lot more love for triangles and the useful trigonometry and geometry they enable. To make his point, he uses triangles to survive a harrowing motorcycle ride, cut a sandwich into three equal parts, and measure tall buildings while wearing silly shoes. But these harebrained experiments reveal an important truth – triangles are the hidden pattern beneath the surface of the contemporary world, used in everything from GPS to CGI via Spotify streaming, the play button and your best mate’s triangle tattoo.

$37, Allen Lane. Out June

Highway to Hell: Climate Change and Australia’s Future

Quarterly Essay 94

Joelle Gergis

Australia is in peril. Do we truly grasp the impact of a warming planet – in particular, what it will mean for the sunburnt country? This searing essay by a leading climate scientist takes aim at the folly of “adaptation” rather than cutting emissions, and at government policy inertia. It shows what rising temperatures will most likely mean for the Australian continent and coastline, and outlines clearly how far Australia is from its most recent promises, let alone what is required.

$28, Quarterly Essay. Out June

$37,

How to Win Friends and Influence Fungi

Chris Balakrishnan, Matt Wasowski and Kristen Orr

Named after Dale Carnegie’s iconic book, How to Win Friends and Influence Fungi features narratives and infographics on all things STEM from scientists around the world. With fascinating details, facts, illustrations, and chapters including “The Importance of Talking Sh*t: How Microbes From Your Poop Can Save Lives” and “Be Annoying: When it’s GOOD to be irritating!” it is sure to reach joyful STEM enthusiasts of all ages around the world.

The Laws of Connection

David Robson

SPIRITUALITY

In My Time of Dying

Sebastian Junger

ANTHROPOLOGY PSYCHOLOGY

$35, Canongate. Out June

When we form meaningful bonds with others, our wounds heal faster, we shake off infections more quickly and our blood pressure drops. We are less likely to have Alzheimer’s, heart attacks or strokes. When people feel that they have strong social support, they perform better on tests of mental focus, memory and problem solving. But making friends can also be daunting. In The Laws of Connection, David Robson takes us through the fascinating science behind the effects of social connection and unpacks the research that shows that we are all better at being social than we might think.

TECHNOLOGY

The Singularity Is Nearer

Ray Kurzweil

Ray Kurzweil is one of the greatest inventors of our time, with more than 60 years of experience in the field of artificial intelligence. Dozens of his longrange predictions about the rise of the internet, AI and bioengineering have been borne out. In this visionary and fundamentally optimistic book, Kurzweil explains how the singularity will occur and explores what it will mean to live free from the limits of biology.

$37, Jonathan Cape. Out June

ALSO OUT

In 2022 Junger was rushed to the hospital after experiencing abdominal pain. Once there, he began slipping away. As blackness encroached, he was visited by his dead father, inviting Junger to join him. That was the last thing he remembered until he came to the next day and was told he had suffered a ruptured aneurysm that he should not have survived. In My Time of Dying is part medical drama, part searing autobiography, and part rational inquiry into the ultimate unknowable mystery.

$33, 4th Estate. Out June

Inheritance

Harvey Whitehouse

Code Dependent

Madhumita Murgia

Through the voices of ordinary people in places far removed from Silicon Valley, Code Dependent explores the impact of a set of powerful, flawed, and often exploitative technologies on individuals, communities, and our wider society. Madhumita Murgia exposes how AI can strip away our collective and individual sense of agency – and shatter our illusion of free will. In this compelling work, she reveals what could happen if we fail to reclaim our humanity.

$37, Picador. Out June

In Inheritance, renowned anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse offers a sweeping account of how our evolved biases have shaped humanity’s past and imperil its future.

Unveiling a pioneering new way of viewing our collective history – one that weaves together psychological experiments, on-the-ground fieldwork, and big data –Whitehouse introduces three biases that shape human behaviour everywhere. Yet today, they are driving us to ruin. By uncovering how human nature has shaped our collective history, Inheritance reveals a surprising new path to solving our most urgent problems.

$37, Hutchinson Heinemann. Out June

Tree Collectors

Amy Stewart

$50, Text. Out July Nature

Artificial Intelligence in Byte-sized Chunks

Peter J. Bentley

$28, Michael O’Mara. Out June Technology

Judith Beveridge $27, Giramondo. Out July Poetry

Tintinnabulum

St Martin’s Press. Out May

VISUAL ART ART THEORY

Greg Hansell: Purity of Australian Light

Lou Klepac

Greg Hansell is a landscape painter known for his exclusive devotion to pastels, some of which he makes himself, and his corrugated iron subject matter. Hansell has lived in New South Wales’ Windsor and Hawkesbury district for many years, a place where Arthur Streeton and Charles Conder worked in the heyday of Australian landscape painting. His most recent works, the result of a greater freedom in his use of pastels, are an impressive series of landscapes which have extended the direction of his work. This book covers Hansell’s work from 1982 to the present day.

$80, Beagle Press. Out July

Caspar David Friedrich: Infinite Landscapes

Ralph Gleis

$115, Prestel. Out June

250 years after the painter’s birth, this luxurious exhibition catalog offers glimpses into the mystery of Caspar David Friedrich’s largely posthumous popularity as well as the latest research into his training and techniques. Friedrich was a meticulous painter of emotionally evocative landscapes, often featuring solitary figures or groups of people against dramatic scenery. This volume examines his unique technique through his sketches, preparatory drawings and underdrawings; and his unconventional selection and use of pigments. With 110 illustrations, including stunning reproductions of 60 paintings.

CULTURAL CRITICISM

Visual art

Monsters

Claire Dederer

Pablo Picasso beat his partners. Richard Wagner was deeply antisemitic. David Bowie slept with an underage fan. But many of us still love Guernica and the Ring Cycle and Ziggy Stardust. So what are we to do with that love? How are we, as fans, to reckon with the biographical choices of the artists whose work sustains us? Wildly smart and insightful, Monsters is an exhilarating attempt to understand our relationship with art and the artist in the 21st century.

$25, Sceptre. Out July

Expressionists

Ed. Natalia Sidlina

$65, Tate Publishing. Out June

The Art of Dying

Peter Schjeldahl

The Art of Dying: Writings, 2019-2022 collects 46 pieces Peter Schjeldahl wrote for The New Yorker before his death in October 2022. These last works express the art critic’s hard-won reflections on art and life, against the backdrop of an intensely anxious period in America, spanning the pandemic, the George Floyd protests, the 2020 presidential election, and the war in Ukraine. Schjeldahl, who was the leading art writer of his generation, wrote with generosity and openness about the art world during these tempestuous three years. With a foreword by comedian Steve Martin.

$45, Abrams Press. Out June

MUSIC

Radio Birdman

Ian Nathan

Regarded as one of the earliest punk bands, Birdman were feared and loathed by many, yet adored by fiercely loyal fans. Murray Engleheart’s Radio Birdman: Retaliate First is drawn from more than 150 interviews with the band members, their closest associates, devotees and observers. From tales of singer Rob Younger filling his mouth with sheep brains from a human skull to fans breaking limbs while dancing wildly at gigs and publicans cutting the power in a desperate bid to halt their force-of-naturelike performances, the Radio Birdman story is one of confrontation, commitment and inspiration.

$37, Allen & Unwin. Out July

Music

Me & Mrs Jones

Suzi Ronson

$35, Faber. Out June

Visual art

Jacques Majorelle

Felix Marcilhac

$140, Editions Norma Out July

ARCHITECTURE

Glenn Murcutt: Unbuilt Works

Nick Sissons

Glenn Murcutt believes architecture is “about place-making. It’s about prospect, refuge, climate, topography, flora, fauna, it is about making beautiful spaces that link with the landscape.” A thinker considered to be ahead of his time, Murcutt is one of the world’s most celebrated architects. Working in close collaboration with Murcutt, architect Nick Sissons presents a selection of never-before-seen projects documenting some of the architect’s most notable works. Using extraordinary true-to-life renders, Glenn Murcutt: Unbuilt Works reveals 10 previously unknown designs in remarkable detail, including original hand-drawn plans, sections, elevations and sketches from his personal archive. Commentary from Murcott gives a new perspective to his life and works. A revelation for any lover of architecture. $120, Thames & Hudson. Out June

Building with Earth

Rammed earth construction is an ancient technique used worldwide for centuries. Today, it has been revitalised as a sustainable, cost-effective building solution for the 21st century. In this book, architects present their projects through plans and photographs, allowing readers to explore how they have used this method to create aesthetically pleasing, sustainable structures that seamlessly integrate into the natural landscape.

$53, Monsa. Out June

The Legend of Mad Max

Ian Nathan

Buckle up and get ready for a wild ride through the wasteland as you discover the full story behind this classic Mad Max film series directed by visionary filmmaker George Miller. This comprehensive history delves into the making of each film, exploring the unique vision and groundbreaking live action and special effects that have made the series a cultural touchstone for more than four decades. With detailed production information, behind-the-scenes stories, and stunning photography, The Legend of Mad Max is a must-read for fans of this celebrated series.

$50, Hardie Grant. Out May

FASHION

Beyoncé and the Clothes She Wears

Terry Newman

Strutting and sashaying in Valentino leopardprint catsuits and her signature thigh-high boots, Beyoncé is more than just a glamour puss extraordinaire. She’s a leader and an inspiration. Messages of self-empowerment and inner strength define her wardrobe as much as they electrify her songs. Her fashion connoisseurship has led to partnerships with numerous big names, and in 2018 Anna Wintour handed the singer creative control of the September 2018 issue of American Vogue. Beyoncé and the Clothes She Wears charts her sartorial journey, from Destiny’s Child to the present day, in glorious visual detail. With 100 illustrations.

$50, ACC Art Books. Out June

PHOTOGRAPHY

Fitzroy 1974

Robert Ashton

The colonial roots of urban Australia were still on show in Fitzroy in the 1970s when the suburb began to teem with a new diversity, as the children of migrants set about finding their place among the high-rise commission flats. The streets were a sanctuary for First Nations People from all over the Kulin nation and beyond. Painters, musicians, writers and photographers chasing cheap rent moved in, turning the area into a creative hub. Now published with new writing edited by novelist Gregory Day, this compelling collection offers a rare glimpse into one of Australia’s most influential suburbs at a pivotal moment in history.

$60, Hardie Grant. Out July

ALSO OUT

Fashion

Palace

Costume

Mimi Haddon

$45, Chronicle. Out June

Architecture

The Local Project 10

$110, Hardie Grant. Out May

Interior Design

The Makers

Genevieve Rosen and Bed Threads

$65, Hardie Grant. Out July

Chantal Akerman Travelling

Bozar-Centre For Fine Arts

$85, Lannoo. Out June Film

$37, Penguin. Out July

$37, Text. Out July

Healthy Parents, Healthy Kids

Dr Nick Fuller

Healthy Parents, Healthy Kids offers a clinically proven blueprint to total family wellness, including more than 100 tasty recipes, so you’ll never be at a loss for delicious meal ideas for even the fussiest kids, as you reconnect with a variety of fresh, healthy food – and each other – at the kitchen table. Understanding your child’s needs at each stage of their development, and modelling practical boundaries and positive decisions around these areas, will bring energy, joy and freedom to your family.

Demystifying Dementia

Rose Capp

Many of us live in fear of dementia, imagining the horror of losing our memories and our identities. But it doesn’t need to terrify us. A good life can be lived with dementia. In this marvellously informative book, Rose Capp, aged-care specialist and educator, policy advisor and choir-director, tells us how. She shows us how to see the world from the perspectives of people living with dementia. She reveals the importance of loving engagement, of finding the right words and the best forms of communication.

FOOD AND DRINK

$35, UQP.

June

Milk

Matthew Evans

Milk. It’s in our coffee, on our cereal. We see it in processed form – yoghurt, butter, cheese, skimmed and lactose free. It’s there in almond form, or made from oats or soy, and is lauded as the “perfect” food or lambasted as not fit for human consumption and as a toxic planet killer. Milk celebrates the majesty of this noble liquid, and delves into the many pretenders to its throne, from formula to mylk. It’s an exploration of the science, history and politics of what makes mammals different from every other life form on earth.

$35, Murdoch Books. Out July

Everything Is Water

Simon Cleary

Four weeks, 344km and one inspiring river journey. When novelist and experienced hiker Simon Cleary sets off to follow the Brisbane river, he hopes that by walking its banks – from its source to where it empties into the bay – he will better understand the power and impact of this immense waterway on the environment and communities who rely on it. Everything is Water considers our complex relationship with nature through flood, drought, time and place. It is an inspiring pilgrimage that invites us to connect with nature and to navigate our own path.

SELF-HELP

The Everyday Stoic

William Mulligan

From Marcus Aurelius to Seneca, the Stoics have a long and rich history. Today, William Mulligan transforms their principles into a contemporary guide for overcoming the challenges of modern life and cultivating an unshakeable sense of inner calm. Drawing on the wisdom of classical thinkers, this book explores the ancient art of living a good life. It is a simple and accessible handbook, providing actionable advice on how to build resilience and find meaning and happiness in the modern world.

$37, Michael Joseph. Out June

Embracing Hope

Viktor Frankl

During his lifetime, world renowned psychiatrist and Auschwitz survivor Viktor Frankl had an unshakeable optimistic outlook on life. He believed that regardless of circumstance, we can all find meaning and fulfilment, even in the face of great adversity. But how much influence do we have on shaping our own lives? How do we seize opportunities and create a meaningful life while still respecting the dignity of others and tolerating all views? This collection of timeless lessons reveals how to turn tragedy into triumph and lead a fulfilled, purposeful life.

$37, Rider. Out July

ALSO OUT

The Stoic Mindset

Mark Tuitert

$35, Penguin. Out July Self-help

House of Gin

Andy Clarke

$30, Hardie Grant. Out June Drink

Dan Saladino

Prisoner Cathy Scott-Clark Life in a Cold Climate

Laura Thompson

Milk of Paradise: A History of Opium Lucy Inglis

Follow

Mezcla: Recipes to Excite Ixta Belfrage

of Picasso John Richardson

Opium

John Halpern

The Soul of Genius Jeffrey Orens

Understanding Bird Behavior Wenfei Tong

The Year 1000 Valerie Hansen

Off with Her Head

Eleanor Herman

Rebels Against the Raj Ramachandra Guha

Unbelievably Vegan Charity Morgan

Witcraft: The Invention of Philosophy in English Jonathan Rée

Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment Daniel Kahneman

The Pepper Thai Cookbook Pepper Teigan

Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics Stephen Greenblatt

Vanity Fair’s Women on Women Edited by Radhika Jones

Near & Far

Heidi Swanson

Orwell’s Roses Rebecca Solnit

Tandoori Home Cooking Maunika Gowardhan

Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis Jared Diamond

Reid All About It

Curiosity (noun). Etymology: From the Latin curiositas; curiosus. From Old French curiousete. From Late Middle English in which the earliest use is around 1380. Definitions: Something strange or fascinating. A rare or strange object. Something unusual.

In three decades of bookselling, I have seen a number of curiosities pass over my counter. Among them: Maria Rasputin – My Father (1932). Autobiography by the daughter of “The Mad Monk” Grigori Rasputin.

David Icke – The Biggest Secret: The Book That Will Change the World (2nd Edition, 1999).

The “secret” being that the world leaders of the time – Blair, Thatcher, Kohl, Mitterrand, Clinton, George H. W. Bush and Queen Elizabeth II, were/are actually reptilian creatures in humanoid form plotting the world’s alien enslavement. We sold a stack of this title back then, once word got around that we were the only bookshop – I think – brave/crazy enough to stock it.

Here is another one: R.W. Rowland – A Hero from Zero: The Story of Kleinwort Benson and Mohamed Fayed. (Lonrho,

London, UK. 1988). Rowland was the chief executive of Lonrho, a notorious South African mining and property conglomerate controversial both for its treatment of mine workers as well as the breaking of trade sanctions against the apartheid South African regime in the 1970s.

Throughout the 1980s, he broadened Lonrho’s business base by a series of high-profile takeovers in newspapers and property. However he was unsuccessful in a takeover battle for the luxury London department store Harrods of Knightsbridge, against Egyptian businessman Mohamed Fayed (1929-2023) who bought it in 1985. This failure led to an ongoing feud and the appearance of the above publication. Here was Britain’s secret bestseller of 1988. Unobtainable in bookshops, more than 30,000 copies were sent – with the compliments of Lonrho – to select individuals: businessmen, MPs, journalists, etc.

The saga dragged on for 15 years, eventually expanding o engulf UK government departments. Numerous civil court cases were finally settled in 2000 with Rowland’s widow and the Fayed family.

Softcover. vi, 185pp., b/w and colour illustrations. Lightly agetoned text block. Browned edges. Previous owner’s name sticker to inside front cover otherwise clean and unmarked. Some surface scratches, creasing and marks to the covers. $50.

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Fiction

1. The Sunbird

Sara Haddad

2. Prophet Song

Paul Lynch

3. Long Island

Colm Toibin

4. Lessons in Chemistry

Bonnie Garmus

5. Tom Lake

Ann Patchett

6. Caledonian Road

Andrew O’Hagan

7. Prima Facie

Suzie Miller

8. Edenglassie

Melissa Lucashenko

9. Safe Haven

Shankari Chandran

10. The Drowning

Bryan Brown

Nonfiction Children

1. The Dawn of Everything

David Wengrow

2. Bright Shining

Julia Baird

3. Black Duck

Bruce Pascoe

4. The Story of Art Without Men

Katy Hessel

5. The Killing for Country

David Marr

6. Question 7

Richard Flanagan

7. Deep Water

James Bradley

8. The Year I Met My Brain

Matilda Boseley

9. The House that Joy Built

Holly Ringland

10. Wifedom

Anna Funder

1. Frog Squad 1 : Dessert Disaster

Kate & Jol Temple

2. Sick Bay

Nova Weetman

3. The Kindness Project

Deborah Abela

4. The Silver Arrow

Lev Grossman

5. The Dangerous Business of Being Trilby Moffat

Kate Temple

6. The Broken Rainbow, Nerra the Deep Time Traveller Tasma Walton

7. Clap When You Land

Elizabeth Acevedo

8. If You Tell Anyone, You’re Next Jack Heath

9. Borderland

Graham Akhurst

10. Dark Rise C. S. Pacat

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