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How Decent Folk Behave (Maxine Beneba Clarke, Hachette)
Released November 2021
How Decent Folk Behave is an exploration of the systemic failures that have led to lockdowns, massacres, violence against women and worsening natural disasters over the past decade. This collection... Read more
How to Repaint a Life (Steven Herrick, UQP)
Released October 2021
How to Repaint a Life is the latest offering from Steven Herrick, author of award-winning young adult titles including The Simple Gift and The Bogan Mondrian. This is gritty, heartbreaking prose that delves into... Read more
Norton and the Borrowing Bear (Gabriel Evans, Berbay)
Released October 2021
Gabriel Evans is fast becoming one of the most consistently delightful Australian picture book creators of recent years. With each release he adds to his oeuvre with such apparent ease,... Read more
She’s a Killer (Kirsten McDougall, VUP)
Released October 2021
This fun, dark-comedy thriller is led by one of the most memorable characters I’ve encountered in recent contemporary fiction. Alice is in her late 30s, a near-genius (IQ: 159) content to waste her life away in a... Read more
The First Scientists (Corey Tutt, illus by Blak Douglas, Hardie Grant)
Released October 2021
In The First Scientists, Corey Tutt, founder of the Deadly Science charity and NSW Young Person of the Year 2020, brings us an extremely engaging, informative and at times funny account of... Read more
Wild Abandon (Emily Bitto, A&U)
Released October 2021
Emily Bitto’s second novel paints a portrait of a young man as he grapples with love, relationships and his place in the world. In the spring of 2011 Will finds... Read more
The Dancer: A biography for Philippa Cullen (Evelyn Juers, Giramondo)
Released October 2021
Dead in 1975 at 25 years old, the Australian avant-garde dancer, teacher and artist Philippa Cullen lived a tragically short life. And yet, at the time, her artistic activity cast... Read more
Social Queue (Kay Kerr, Text)
Released October 2021
Neurodiverse teenager Zoe is undertaking an internship at an online media company when her first assignment, about the struggles of navigating the online dating scene as an autistic person, goes... Read more
A Duck Called Brian (Al Murphy, Scholastic)
Released October 2021
Brian the duck is unique—unlike all his yellow duck friends, he is bright blue. When Brian wakes up one morning to find he has run out of his favourite cereal,... Read more
My Brother Ben (Peter Carnavas, UQP)
Released October 2021
Acclaimed Australian children’s writer Peter Carnavas has followed up his wonderful first novel The Elephant with another book equally full of heart. An ode to sibling relationships, growing up and the natural world, My... Read more
Leaping into Waterfalls: The enigmatic Gillian Mears (Bernadette Brennan, A&U)
Released October 2021
Gillian Mears’s comparatively short life is truly a gift for the brave biographer. A fiction writer of immense talent, Mears received a bounty of accolades, grants and awards, but was... Read more
Permafrost (S J Norman, UQP)
Released October 2021
Permafrost is a decadent, artistic delight, full of sensory pleasure for the reader. S J Norman, a visual and performance artist who won the inaugural Kill Your Darlings Manuscript Award with this collection, makes a... Read more
Bodies of Light (Jennifer Down, Text)
Released October 2021
Bodies of Light is Jennifer Down’s third book and her best yet. It begins with fierce, ageing Maggie (now living in the US under a new identity) being prompted to revisit... Read more
How to Make Friends: A Bear’s Guide (Cat Rabbit, Berbay)
Released October 2021
Bear loves writing, drawing and collecting stickers. But with only the company of her toys, Bear is a bit lonely and would like to make some friends. She sets off... Read more
Dark Rise (C S Pacat, A&U)
Released October 2021
Will is on the run from the men who killed his mother. When a terrifying artefact is unleashed on the Thames docks, Will finds himself thrust into a hidden world... Read more
Scary Monsters (Michelle de Kretser, A&U)
Released October 2021
Montpellier, France, 1981. Twenty-two-year-old Lili is teaching English at a local high school and navigating a new experience of displacement in her adopted European home—after emigrating to Australia with her... Read more
The Stoning (Peter Papathanasiou, Transit Lounge)
Released October 2021
At dawn one Sunday, homicide detective George Manolis is woken with a call: a schoolteacher has been murdered in the outback town of Cobb, and the local police need his... Read more
Out Here: An anthology of Takatāpui & LGBTQIA+ writers from Aotearoa (ed by Chris Tse & Emma Barnes, Auckland University Press)
Released October 2021
The whakataukī (Māori proverb) ‘ka mua, ka muri’ means ‘to walk backwards into the future’; we look to the past to inform our future. Out Here: An anthology of Takatāpui & LGBTQIA+ writers from... Read more
The Accidental Penguin Hotel (Andrew Kelly, illus by Dean A Jones, Wild Dog)
Released October 2021
The fairy penguins, or little penguins, that nest on the breakwater in St Kilda, Victoria haven’t always been there—precisely because the breakwater itself was only built in the 1950s. The... Read more
Into the Rip (Damien Cave, Scribner)
Released October 2021
Damien Cave’s Into the Rip considers how we calculate and cope with risk in Australia. As the first bureau chief of the New York Times Australian outpost, Cave leverages his journalistic point... Read more
