Australian fiction debuts of 2020

Maggie’s Going Nowhere

Rose Hartley

Maggie’s Going Nowhere is a fierce and funny debut introducing a thoroughly relatable and offbeat heroine. If you enjoy Fleabag, you’ll adore Maggie!

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Jane in Love

Rachel Givney

Jane Austen time-travels to the future and falls in love. But will she choose happiness in the present, or her career as a writer in the past?

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The Origin of Me

Bernard Gallate

A beguilingly original and satirical debut novel of friendships, imagination, and the bodies we live in

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Cherry Beach

Laura McPhee-Browne

Beautifully written and intimate, Cherry Beach is a revelatory story of friendship and desire.

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Shirl

Wayne Marshall,Wayne Marshall

A lonely yowie emerges from the bush to attend the Desperate and Dateless Ball. Mysterious creatures descend from the sky to place a ban on footy. A shark named Bruce…

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Wild, Fearless Chests

Mandy Beaumont

Brutal. Uncompromising. Magnificent. Complex. Unforgettable. A timely debut short story collection that breaks open the idea of women from a powerful new Australian literary voice.

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A Couple of Things Before the End: Stories

Sean O'Beirne

This brilliant collection mixes the storytelling originality of George Saunders and Lydia Davis with a sensibility all its own, taking the reader on an extraordinary tour of old and new…

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Where the Truth Lies

Karina Kilmore

She was slipping away. The further she fell, the closer the clouds seemed to come. Wispy transparent slipstreams of white. Cirrus. Pain smashed her head. Floating …

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Sticks and Stones

Katherine Firkin

It’s winter in Melbourne and Detective Emmett Corban is starting to regret his promotion to head of the Missing Persons Unit, as the routine reports pile up on his desk…

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Melting Moments

Anna Goldsworthy

Sometimes events occur as one might wish but sometimes they do not.

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The Salt Madonna

Catherine Noske

The Crucible meets The Natural Way of Things in this stunning novel from debut author Catherine Noske.

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The Loudness of Unsaid Things

Hilde Hinton

If you loved Boy Swallows Universe and Lost and Found, you will love this debut novel. A stunning story about family, loneliness and isolation that will make you laugh, cry…

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The Octopus and I

Erin Hortle

A stunning debut novel set on the Tasmanian coast that lays bare the wild, beating heart at the intersection of human and animal, love and loss, and fear and hope.

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Night Lessons in Little Jerusalem

Rick Held

A powerful debut novel based on a true story for those who loved The Tattoist of Auschwitz and All the Light We Cannot See

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In the Time of Foxes

Jo Lennan

With an exhilarating span of people and places, In the Time of Foxes shows the short story collection at its most entertaining and rewarding, and introduces Jo Lennan as an…

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The Spill

Imbi Neeme

In 1982, a car overturns on a remote West Australian road. Nobody is hurt, but the impact is felt for decades.

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The Things She Owned

Katherine Tamiko Arguile

Beautiful and mysterious, The Things She Owned explores the complexity of lives lived between cultures, the weight of crossgenerational trauma, and a mother and daughter on a tortuous path to…

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The Fogging

Luke Horton

A compelling tale of the slow disintegration of a relationship and the unravelling of a man.

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A Lonely Girl is a Dangerous Thing

Jessie Tu

A finalist for the 2020 Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction, this is a dazzling and original debut from a young writer with a fierce, intelligent and audacious voice.

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Kokomo

Victoria Hannan

Winner of the 2019 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript. Both tender and fierce, heartbreaking and funny, Kokomo is a story about how secrets and love have the…

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Man in Armour

Siobhan McKenna

How much money is enough? How powerful do you want to be? And what price will it extract from you?

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State Highway One

Sam Coley

A stunning debut novel about what it means to come home, from the winner of the 2017 Richell Prize for Emerging Writers.

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Everything in its Right Place

Tobias McCorkell

Everything in its Right Place tackles themes of class, love and sexuality with humour, truth and grit. It is a story of the legacies and dilemmas that families bring, of…

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Life, Bound

Marian Matta

Free agents or captives of our past? In Life, Bound, characters find themselves caught in situations not of their own making, or trapped by ingrained habits, walking in grooves carved…

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