Australian fiction to pick up this month
Woo Woo by Ella Baxter
Sabine is having a moment. Her new exhibition, Fuck You, Help Me, is opening soon and, as her gallerist says, 'Hell is an artist three days before their exhibition opens.' But it's not only this coming milestone that is causing Sabine to melt down.
She is being stalked. As exhibition day draws closer, so too does the man who has been watching her. As his approaches become more overt and threatening, Sabine's fear amplifies and transforms into something feral and primal. And then things start to get really strange.
Read our staff review here.
Bird by Courtney Collins
Himalayas: unknown year. Seeking her own life and truth, almost 14-year-old Bird flees her home to escape an arranged marriage. Attempting to vanish into a crowd of pilgrims she doesn’t know that violence already has its eyes on her.
Darwin: present day. Waking in a hospital bed, Bird tries to remember what brought her here. A man whose gaze she knew to fear, a stolen car, a plastic gun, and a real bullet in her shoulder. Kindness is being offered here, so why is her instinct always to run?
Two Daughters by Alison Edwards
For Ava, heading to university in Sydney is her escape from a poverty-stricken upbringing. Her mother is long gone, her father able to provide love but little else. On the other side of the world, Laurie tolerates university only at the insistence of her father, a Marxist professor. Her mother died in childbirth, and Laurie dreams of freedom, far from the Cambridge cloisters.
It is within these college grounds that Ava and Laurie cross paths. They could not be more different, and yet as each grapples with the lasting effects of losing a mother, their lives become entwined in ways neither could have anticipated.
Highway 13 by Fiona McFarlane
In 1998, an apparently ordinary Australian man is arrested and charged with a series of brutal murders of backpackers along a highway. The news shocks the nation, bringing both horror and resolution to the victims' families, but its impact travels even further – into the past, as the murders rewrite personal histories, and into the future, as true crime podcasts and biopics tell the story of the crimes.
Highway 13 takes murder as its starting point, but it unfolds to encompass much more: through the investigation of the aftermath of this violence across time and place, from the killer's home town in country Australia to the tropical Far North, and to Texas and Rome, McFarlane presents an unforgettable, entrancing exploration of the way stories are told and spread, and at what cost.
Read our staff review here.
All the Missing Children by Zahid Gamieldien
Ilene is struggling to survive and desperate to reconnect with her children, Jack and Lonnie, after a near-fatal tragedy. But her children vanish, setting off a chain reaction within the community. Suspended detective Omar helps with the investigation but keeps getting pulled away by a cold case. Benji, a recovering addict has his life upended by a menacing threat, and Nera wants to find who killed one of her animals.
In this gripping tale of human frailty each character must confront what really happened to Jack and Lonnie.
Dirrayawadha (Rise Up) by Anita Heiss
Miinaa was a young girl when the white ghosts first arrived. She remembers the day they renamed her homeland ‘Bathurst’. Now she lives at Cloverdale and works for a white family. The Nugents are kind, but Miinaa misses her miyagan. Her brother Windradyne is a Wiradyuri leader and visits when he can, bringing news of unrest across their ngurambang. When Irish convict Daniel O’Dwyer arrives at the settlement, Miinaa’s life is transformed again. Can their love survive their differences and the turmoil that threatens to destroy all around them?
Love Unleashed by Melanie Saward
When Bigambul woman Brynn Wallace leaves Brisbane to pursue her dreams in New York City, she imagines herself landing a fabulous career at a publishing house, not working in a doggy daycare with a boss from hell. Yet good things are always possible in New York, especially when you believe in them hard enough. And Brynn has a collection of NYC missions to set her on her way. When she meets a handsome dog-dad who happens to be a literary editor she hopes her dreams will finally come true.
Winter of the Wolf by Amanda Willimott
Eastern France. Winter. 1572: When Sidonie’s guardian dies, she flees Paris seeking sanctuary in the home of her estranged aunt, Apolline, in Dole. Apolline left behind a violent and troubled past, hoping for a new life with her husband, where she can sell her herbs and assist women from the privacy of her forest home. But it is dangerous to be different.
As Sidonie and Apolline’s lives become intertwined, they are soon being hunted, fanned by a priest’s flames of fear and hatred and a witch hunter desperate for respect and power.
Due for release on 13 August
The Echoes by Evie Wyld
Max didn’t believe in an afterlife. Until he died. Now, as a reluctant ghost trying to work out why he remains, he watches his girlfriend Hannah lost in grief in the flat they shared and begins to realise how much of her life was invisible to him.
In the weeks and months before Max’s death, Hannah is haunted by the secrets she left Australia to escape. A relationship with Max seems to offer the potential of a different story, but the past refuses to stay hidden. It finds expression in the untold stories of the people she grew up with, the details of their lives she never knew and the events that broke her family apart and led her to Max.
Read our staff review here.
