Looking for something juicy to discuss in your book club? Try one of these new releases, chosen by our booksellers to appeal to a wide range of readers and provide plenty to talk about.
Australian fiction
One Story
Pip Finkemeyer
In the sun-drenched chaos of 2010s Silicon Valley, a tech company's meteoric rise culminates in a devastating fall. Dot Van Jensen, the trailblazing CEO-turned-fugitive, narrates her story from a hidden corner of Indonesia. A scandal has painted her as the villain, a puppet-master who fractured democracy and paved the way for a darker future. But is the truth as cut and dry as the headlines seem to imply?
While Dot weaves a tale of One Story's genesis, her co-founders – her son, Jon, whose formative years saw him sheltered from technology on a secluded ranch, and Rae, the enigmatic partner who saw in Dot a path to power – grapple with their own legacies. As a documentary crew digs for the truth, a chorus of over a thousand voices, the company's employees, fill the pages with their own narratives. They always believed the work they were doing was putting them on the right side of history, and they’re not going to let it be told any other way. If anyone is going to take the fall, it’s going to be Dot, and if she won’t fall, there are plenty who will push her.
Read our staff review here.
International fiction
Buckeye
Patrick Ryan
May, 1945. As news of the Allied victory in Europe reaches the small town of Bonhomie, Ohio, a woman named Margaret Salt walks into a hardware store and asks the man behind the counter, Cal Jenkins, for a radio. What happens next will change both of their lives forever.
While the country reconstructs in the post-war boom, a secret grows in Bonhomie and nothing can remain hidden in a small town. The consequences of that long-ago encounter will intertwine the fates of two families, rippling through the next generation and compelling them to re-examine who they thought they were and what the future might hold.
Read our staff review here.
Crime fiction
Last One Out
Jane Harper
In a dying town, Ro Crowley waits for her son on the evening of his 21st birthday. But Sam never comes home. His footprints in the dust of three abandoned houses offer the only clue to his final movements. One set in. One set out.
Five long years later, Ro returns to Carralon Ridge for the annual memorial of Sam's disappearance. The skeletal community is now an echo of itself, having fractured under the pressure of the coal mine operating on its outskirts. But Ro still wants answers. Only a few people remain. If the truth is to be found in that town, does it lie among them?
See our staff review here.
Nonfiction: biography & memoir
All the Way to the River
Elizabeth Gilbert
In 2000, Elizabeth Gilbert met Rayya. They became friends, then best friends, then inseparable. When tragedy entered their lives, the truth was finally laid bare: the two were in love. They were also a pair of addicts, on a collision course toward catastrophe.
What if your most beautiful love story turned into your biggest nightmare? What if the dear friend who taught you so much about your self-destructive tendencies became the unstable partner with whom you disastrously reenacted every one of them? And what if your most devastating heartbreak opened a pathway to your greatest awakening?
All the Way to the River is a landmark memoir that will resonate with anyone who has ever been captive to love or to any other passion, substance or craving and who yearns, at long last, for liberation.
Read our staff review here.
Sci-fi, fantasy & speculative fiction
Alchemised
SenLinYu
Once a promising alchemist, Helena Marino is now a prisoner – of war and of her own mind. Her Resistance friends and allies have been brutally murdered, her abilities suppressed, and the world she knew destroyed.
In the aftermath of a long war, Paladia's new ruling class of corrupt guild families and depraved necromancers, whose vile, undead creatures helped bring about their victory, holds Helena captive. According to Resistance records, she was a healer of little importance within their ranks. But Helena has inexplicable memory loss of the months leading up to her capture, making her enemies wonder- Is she truly as insignificant as she appears, or are her lost memories hiding some vital piece of the Resistance's final gambit?
To uncover the memories buried deep within her mind, Helena is sent to the High Reeve, one of the most powerful and ruthless necromancers in this new world. Trapped on his crumbling estate, Helena's fight – to protect her lost history and to preserve the last remaining shreds of her former self – is just beginning. For her prison and captor have secrets of their own ... secrets Helena must unearth, whatever the cost.
Debut fiction
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?
LGBTQIA+
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.
Romance fiction
A Smart Girl’s Guide to Second Chances
Steph Vizard
Rebecca, a super-smart consultant, is determined to defy the family marriage curse, which claims no woman marries their first fiance, and prove that Matt is The One.
Although the wedding planning lurches from one disaster to the next and she has to steer a major work project before the big day, Rebecca is sure she can stay on top of things. That is until Alex – the ex who dramatically broke her heart at Oxford University – reappears in the boardroom as her new client. How dare he still be as infuriatingly clever and hot as before? And since when did he start wearing shirts with collars?
As Rebecca's past and present collide, she realises her choices can't be resolved with a trusty pros and cons list. Before she makes it down the aisle, she'll have to finally come to terms with the age-old question: head or heart?
Young adult fiction
Catch
Sarah Brill
The summer Grace turns sixteen, she grows. She grows so fast her bones hurt and she feels like throwing up. Everyone – including Etienne, the boy who lives over the road – looks at her differently. Then she starts catching people. People who are falling out of trees or from tall buildings.
Soon Grace discovers that helping strangers sometimes hurts. Sometimes it also hurts or annoys the people she loves. It isn't great for her school grades, either. Is there a way to balance family and friendship and basketball and romance and ... catching?
Read our staff review here.
