First Name Second Name
Steve MinOn
Stephen Bolin leaves a bizarre note by his deathbed, asking his sisters to take his body back to his birthplace in Far North Queensland. When they ignore his request, Stephen's corpse makes the nocturnal pilgrimage alone. But what is compelling him and what will he find there?
His journey, as a kind of jiangshi, takes him back through his turbulent family history- from his Chinese great-grandfather's life on the goldfields in 1860s Queensland, to his Scottish grandparents' migration to Australia as ten-pound Poms, and to his own coming of age and coming out in Brisbane and London.
Original and satirical, First Name Second Name follows four generations of one family through a reckoning with racial, familial and sexual identity.
Read our staff review here.
Eat Your Heart Out
Victoria Brownlee
Chloe Bridgers, Australian food blogger in Paris, has landed an interview to write the tell-all memoir of controversial celebrity chef Carla Duris. The only catch? To nab the role, she has to compete against a group of cut-throat, world-class food writers during a weekend-long job interview at the Duris family villa on the glistening Cote d'Azur.
Already feeling like a fish out of water, Chloe starts to worry that old-school French journalist Henri de la Fontaine has been sabotaging her from the get-go. But is winning the only thing he has in mind?
As the weekend unfolds, interviewees are seemingly sent packing at random and tensions among those remaining boil over. Does Chloe have what it takes to land the job, or will she become the next casualty in the fight to write for Madame Duris?
Read our staff review here.
The Buried Life
Andrea Goldsmith
Adrian is a renowned scholar, an expert on death in the modern age whose life has stalled.
Kezi, a young and passionate artist, has been rejected by her family. She hurtles through her days with defiance and regret.
Laura is a successful town planner submerged in a seemingly perfect marriage.
In The Buried Life Andrea Goldsmith brilliantly dissects the conflicts and complexities of contemporary life in a story of love and friendship, faith and fundamentalism, subtly underscored by the power of poetry and music.
Read our staff review here.
Time Together
Luke Horton
Once they were just them. Now they're forty-something and there's kids. Whose time is this?
Phil is trying to feel closer to his recently passed mother by spending time alone at his parent's house on the coast. But he is lonely, and stupidly he's invited a bunch of old friends to visit. It's bound to be a mistake. All those children! But it's too late now, and tomorrow Bella and Tim will arrive with their two kids, one on the brink of puberty, and the next day Jo and Lucas will come too, with their little one. Then there's Annie, who will be by herself.
The story of a beach holiday told by four different people, Time Together is a novel about different kinds of love, different kinds of loneliness, and the way spending time together can bring out the best and worst in each other.
Read our staff review here.
Love Unedited
Caro Llewellyn
Edna gave up everything when she fell in love with an acclaimed writer, leaving Australia and moving to New York where the publishing and literary scene was the backdrop to their secret story. When Molly, an Australian editor working in New York, discovers a novel by an anonymous author, she is drawn intimately into the story. She becomes determined to find the author and know how the story ends - not imagining that she will uncover shocking truths about her own life along the way.
A compelling literary mystery about desire, creativity, food, longing and the ever-shifting power dynamics of love.
Read our staff review here.
Somebody Down There Likes Me
Robert Lukins
The Gulch family have led a charmed existence in the ultra-wealthy enclave of Belle Haven, Connecticut. Now, the empire they have built is on the edge of collapse, and as the decades of fraud and criminality that lies beneath the family's incredible wealth is exposed, the Gulch children are summoned.
Kick Gulch, desperate and broke, is drawn back into the unreal world she thought she'd escaped forever. Her brother, Lincoln, one of Belle Haven's shining stars, is revelling in its culture of power and excess, and masterminding his ascendancy. At the head of the family are Honey and Fax, circling each other as the authorities close in. Fax is drawn out of his dreamlife of drug-fuelled fantasies, while Honey is willing to reshape the world to see what they have built survive.
As tensions rise and conspiracies are forced to the surface, the truth behind the disappearance of Kick's high school friend comes into question, with each of them facing the complicity of their silence. The ramifications of the family's decades of ruthlessness and inaction are tragic and far-reaching.
Read our staff review here.
Signs of Damage
Diana Reid
The Kelly family’s idyllic holiday in the South of France is disturbed when Cass, a thirteen-year-old girl, goes missing. She’s discovered several hours later with no visible signs of injury. Everyone present dismisses the incident as a close brush with tragedy.
Sixteen years later, at a funeral for a member of the Kelly family, Cass collapses. The present and the past start to collide as buried secrets come to light and old doubts resurface. What really happened to Cass in the South of France? And what’s wrong with her now?
A gripping tale of unravelling memories and moral ambiguities, Signs of Damage wrestles with the difference between understanding other people, and trying to explain them.
Read our staff review here.
The Knowing
Madeleine Ryan
From the author of A Room Called Earth, a brilliant new novel about the mess that comes before salvation.
Camille lives in the country.
She's forgotten her phone.
She's taking the train to work.
She's got period pain.
She can't escape herself ... or her toxic boss, Holly. And it's Valentine's Day.
Read our staff review here.
By Her Hand
Marion Taffe
Peak District, Mercia, AD 910: a young girl, Freda works hard to avoid her father's temper, while longing for his approval. She loves foraging in the woods and hearthside stories of heroes. Secretly she thinks in poetry and dreams of one day being able to write; her quills are grass stalks and sticks, her parchment the sky, the earth, her skin. But Freda's world is at war, and when her village is decimated in a savage raid and her father goes missing, Freda must find the strength to survive.
Taken in by the church, her only options are a life of servitude or prayer. But the cunning bishop sees an opportunity. As well as teaching Freda to write, he uses her survival as evidence of a miracle, to attract pilgrims who bring wealth. As Freda chafes against the bishop's increasing control, she develops a friendship with the Mercian leader Ethelflæd, Lady of the Mercians, who shows her what it is to lead as a woman in a world that worships warrior kings.
Soon Freda must choose. Does she remain the powerless, subservient quill whose fate lies in the hands of another, or does she fight for the right to create – and write – her own story?
Read our staff review here.
Elegy, Southwest
Madeleine Watts
In November 2018 Eloise and Lewis rent a car in Las Vegas and take off on a two-week road trip across the American southwest. While wildfires rage, the married couple make their way through Nevada, California, Arizona, and Utah, tracing the course of the Colorado River, the aquatic artery on which the Southwest depends for survival. Lewis, an artist working for a prominent land art foundation, is grieving the recent death of his mother, while Eloise is an academic researching the past and future of the Colorado River as it threatens to run dry.
Over the course of their trip, Eloise, beginning to suspect she might be pregnant, helplessly witnesses Lewis's descent as he struggles to find a place for himself in the desert where he never quite felt at home.
Elegy, Southwest is a novel which entwines a tragic love story with an intelligent and profound consideration of the way we now live alongside environmental breakdown; an elegy for lost love and for the landscape that makes us.
