Our booksellers have been loving these new books from emerging authors! Read them now to discover what has us excited.
Television for Women
Danit Brown
Estie isn't sure she likes being eight months pregnant. She isn't even sure she likes her husband anymore, especially after he hid that he's been fired from his job. Hello parenthood! Goodbye life as Estie imagined it! Now, she's stranded and bloated and alone.
After Estie gives birth, she begins to suspect that all the stories she's been told about motherhood might not be true. Having a child does not 'complete' her. And that mythical connection with her baby? Well, she's still waiting. In fact, Estie fears she is destined to end up like her own mother – divorced and crying in the bathroom while her daughter stands outside the door and wonders if she's okay.
Startlingly honest and unsentimental, Television for Women explores the realities of life postpartum, the demands children make on women's identities and relationships – and the desperate lengths someone might go to in order to reclaim the person she once was.
The Warrumbar
William J. Byrne
On the day man first walks on the moon, thirteen-year-old Robbie Brennan meets Moses, an old man camped by the side of the road. Over the following months, Robbie is drawn to Moses’ stories – tales of hardship, war, and redemption – unearthing a past entwined with his own. When Robbie learns that Moses grew up at the Mission, the Aboriginal reserve that once existed on the outskirts of town, with his mother Delsie, Robbie’s understanding of his family’s history and identity is forever changed.
At home, Robbie must navigate the unpredictable wrath of his beloved but sometimes violent father, a man whose temper keeps the household in a constant state of anxiety. But when Robbie witnesses a tragic event at the Warrumbar dam, his world is shaken further. Haunted by his past in the boys' home and terrified of the consequences, he faces a choice: speak the truth and risk everything or stay silent and carry the burden forever. But in a small country town where a boy like Robbie – poor, on society’s margins, and with ‘some of that black blood in him’ – is rarely believed, does the truth matter?
Songs of No Provenance
Lydia Conklin
Songs of No Provenance tells the story of Joan Vole, an indie folk singer forever teetering on the edge of fame, who flees New York after committing a shocking sexual act onstage. With the threat of an internet storm looming over her, Joan seeks refuge at a writing camp for teenagers in rural Virginia, where she's forced to question her own toxic relationship to artmaking – and her complicated history with a friend and mentee – while finding new hope in her students and a deepening intimacy with a nonbinary artist and fellow camp staff member.
Lydi Conklin boldly explores kink, shame, queer appropriation, fame hunger, cancel culture, trans nonbinary identity and how to make art without ego, all the while asking how Joan might forge a new future for herself.
Dwelling
Emily Hunt Kivel
The world is ending. It has been ending for some time. When did the ending begin? Perhaps when Evie’s mother died, or when her father died soon after. Perhaps when her sister, Elena, was forcibly institutionalised in a psychiatric hippie commune in Colorado. Certainly at some point over the last year, as New York City spun down the tubes, as bedbugs and vultures descended, as apartments crumbled to the ground and no one had the time or money to fight it, or even, really, to notice.
And then, one day, the ending is complete. Every renter is evicted en masse, leaving only the landlords and owners – the demented, the aristocratic, the luckiest few. Evie – parentless, sisterless, basically friendless, underemployed – has nothing and no one. Except, she remembers, a second cousin in Texas, in a strange town called Gulluck, where nothing is as it seems.
And so, in the surreal, dislodged landscape, beyond the known world, a place of albino cicadas and gardeners and thieves, of cobblers and shoemakers and one very large fish, a place governed by mysterious logic and perhaps even miracles, Evie sets out in search of a home.
Secrets
Judi Morison
Ruth, the widowed matriarch of a grown family, has only months to live, and a secret she’s kept for sixty years. Now she must put things right before she dies. But as she has learned, the longer something is kept hidden, the harder it is to bring out of the shadows.
With her grandson in gaol and her family fractured, Ruth must address the past, present and future. She must reveal her secret, reconcile her family, and find a way to keep her beloved homestead, Cora, in the family – and her family in Cora.
A gripping family saga about three generations fractured by secrets, and the three strong women who must bring them into the light.
The Tiny Things Are Heavier
Esther Ifesinachi Okonkwo
The Tiny Things Are Heavier follows Sommy, a Nigerian woman who comes to the United States for graduate school two weeks after her brother, Mezie, attempts suicide. Plagued by the guilt of leaving Mezie behind, Sommy struggles to fit into her new life as a student and an immigrant. Lonely and homesick, Sommy soon enters a complicated relationship with her boisterous Nigerian roommate, Bayo, a relationship that plummets into deceit when Sommy falls for Bryan, a biracial American, whose estranged Nigerian father left the States immediately after his birth. Bonded by their feelings of unbelonging and a vague sense of kinship, Sommy and Bryan transcend the challenges of their new relationship.
During summer break, Sommy and Bryan visit the bustling city of Lagos, Nigeria, where Sommy hopes to reconcile with Mezie and Bryan plans to connect with his father. But when a shocking and unexpected event throws their lives into disarray, it exposes the cracks in Sommy's relationships and forces her to confront her notions of self and familial love.
The Slip
Lucas Schaefer
Austin, Texas: It's the summer of 1998, and there's a new face on the scene at Terry Tucker's Boxing Gym. Sixteen-year-old Nathaniel Rothstein has never felt comfortable in his own skin, but under the tutelage of a swaggering Haitian-born ex-fighter named David Dalice, he begins to come into his own. Even the boy's slightly stoned uncle, Bob Alexander, who is supposed to be watching him for the summer, notices the change. Nathaniel is happier, more confident – tanner, even. Then one night he vanishes, leaving little trace behind.
Across the city, Charles Rex, now going simply by 'X', has been undergoing a teenage transformation of his own, trolling the phone sex hotline that his mother works, seeking an outlet for everything that feels wrong about his body, looking for intimacy and acceptance in a culture that denies him both. As a surprising and unlikely romance blooms, X feels, for a moment, like he might have found the safety he's been searching for. But it's never that simple.
More than a decade later, Nathaniel's uncle Bob receives a shocking tip, propelling him to open his own investigation into his nephew's disappearance.
The Worst Thing I’ve Ever Done
Clare Stephens
It's an ordinary Tuesday morning when Ruby Williams' name starts trending online. She's uploaded an interview that has outraged journalist Felicity Cartwright, a social media personality who has built her profile by policing exactly what women are allowed to say and how they're allowed to say it. Ruby is at the centre of a brutal public shaming, watching on in horror as her reputation is torn apart.
At first Ruby thinks she can get on top of it if she can just explain herself better. But she soon realises she'll never be able to placate the tsunami of strangers baying for her blood. The vitriol pouring in through her phone cracks open a visceral, personal shame from her past that she's refused to face. Because the worst thing Ruby's ever done is not defined by this interview, but by a single, chilling scream.
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