The Sun Was Electric Light
Rachel Morton
Disillusioned with her life in New York, Ruth returns to a lake town in Guatemala where she had been happy a decade earlier. There, in Panajachel, she meets two very different women – the calm and practical Emilie, and the turbulent and intoxicating Carmen.
Deciding to stay and build a life at the lake, Ruth finds work first as a nanny to a wealthy local family, then as an English teacher at a village school. Meanwhile, she becomes increasingly infatuated by her friendship with Carmen, pushing away the stability of her connection with Emilie. As Carmen's fragile relationship with the world splinters, the difference between being a visitor and truly belonging becomes clear, and Ruth is forced to act.
The Sun Was Electric Light is a sublime novel about searching for belonging and a life that makes sense.
Read our staff review here.
Mother Tongue
Naima Brown
What if being true to yourself means hurting everyone around you?
Brynn is a claustrophobic suburban mother on the brink … Eric, her husband, is transforming in dark and dangerous ways … Their daughter, Jenny, can't fathom the storm barrelling towards her … When Brynn awakes from a coma speaking fluent French, she seizes the opportunity to start a new life in Paris, a seismic personal transformation that leaves a slew of shattered lives in its wake.
Darkly funny and profoundly insightful, Mother Tongue challenges our expectations of motherhood and our beliefs about women's lives. It is at once an exhilarating tale of escape and a warning about the cost of renewal.
Read our staff review here.
Orpheus Nine
Chris Flynn
In the small, sleepy town of Gattan, population 7448, it happened at eleven o'clock on a Saturday morning. At the local soccer field, only one boy, aged ten years and one week, remained standing as the brothers, sisters and parents of his teammates realised the horror they were witnessing. Their screams split the sky. One hundred and thirty million died that first day.
Every day since, on the morning of a child's ninth birthday, it happens again. No one knows why. The ongoing horror becomes known as Orpheus Nine and bereft parents cruelly labelled Orpheans. Global leaders have no answers as riots and chaos take hold. Supply chains are broken, violence and conspiracy theories spread as scientists wrestle with the ongoing death toll and militant Orpheans try to take matters into their own hands.
In Gattan, the chasm between life before and after grows wider between three old friends, now parents. They will wrestle with waves of grief at one child's loss, guilt at one child's survival and anger as another child edges closer to their birthday. In different ways these three friends will fight the unfathomable and attempt to defy this new reality. No matter the cost. But the truth is, the clock keeps ticking, the world order is crumbling and the gods are watching …
Read our staff review here.
The Passenger Seat
Vijay Khurana
Seeking escape from their small-town existence, two teenagers impulsively drive north, with no particular place to go and no particular sense of who is at the wheel.
Adam and Teddy hope to leave boyhood behind, but as the journey progresses their friendship becomes a struggle to prove themselves. When Adam harasses a young couple they meet on the highway it lands them in trouble they cannot run from.
In taut and stylish prose, The Passenger Seat examines how men learn and perform masculinity. Rejecting easy answers, it keeps our eyes trained on the vanishing point where vulnerability edges into violence, alienation into aggression.
Read our staff review here.
The Confidence Woman
Sophie Quick
Christina is a single mother living in the Melbourne suburbs, but to her online clients she is the esteemed Dr Ruth Carlisle, an 'executive coach and mindset expert, specialising in high-performing individuals'.
Dr Ruth gains her clients' trust through her coaching business, discovering their secrets and deepest fears. Through this elaborate scam, she's saving money for the ultimate unobtainable Australian dream: a home deposit. But when she blunders, and her worlds begin to collide, suddenly everything is at stake.
The Confidence Woman is a novel about more than one kind of confidence game. It explores and hilariously skewers contemporary cults of self-optimisation, while also creating a moving and too-real portrait of what it's like to strive for success (or just security) in a rigged system.
Read our staff review here.
Out of the Woods
Gretchen Shirm
In the year 2000, an Australian woman travels to The Hague to work as the secretary for an Australian judge. There, she sits through the trial of a former military man who has been charged with war crimes. As the trial proceeds, she is confronted with two conflicting impulses: being deeply affected by the testimony of witnesses, while at the same time plagued by an enduring doubt as to the defendant's guilt.
Meanwhile, she begins an unexpected romance and friendship, and these relationships help her to understand the stories of extraordinary survival she hears about during the trial. When she is called back to Australia to reckon with her own childhood, she finds she can't quite leave everything she's heard behind. Out of the Woods asks what it means to bear witness to the suffering of people who have experienced real tragedy and whether it is possible, afterwards, to resume a normal life.
Read our staff review here.
Consider Yourself Kissed
Jessica Stanley
Coralie has grown up in Australia but needs to escape some ghosts there. At twenty-nine, adrift in London, she meets witty, sexy, generous Adam – and his charming four-year-old daughter. Falling in love is fun, romantic and reassuring. And then?
Coralie yearns for children of her own, and to become a writer. Gradually, with Adam, who has a blossoming career as a political commentator, she builds the home and family she's longed for.
But her trips back to Australia change her perspective. Ten years on, she realises something important is missing – herself. When she reaches breaking point, the results surprise everyone.
Read our staff review here.
I Am Nannertgarrook
Tasma Walton
From her idyllic life in sea country in Nerrm (Port Phillip Bay, Victoria), Nannertgarrook is abducted and taken to a slave market, leaving behind a husband, daughter and son. Pregnant when seized, she soon gives birth to another son, whom she raises with the children of her fellow captives.
Nannertgarrook is separated not only from her Boonwurrung family, but from her birthright – the ceremonies she once was so joyously part of, the majestic whales who are her totem, the land and sky and sea country and its creatures. All these things she loves as deeply as she does her blood kin.
But now, as her reality becomes profoundly different, she must keep that family and her old life alive in her mind. Their rich, pulsating elements sing to us through her beautiful voice, even while Nannertgarrook herself is subjected to the worst of humanity. This sweeping novel asks us to consider who, in colonial history, were the real savages, and what it truly means to be civilised.
Read our staff review here.
📚 More fantastic New Australian fiction can be found here!
