Dear Reader,

It’s time to introduce myself as Readings’ new head book buyer! I’m not really properly new, though; visitors to Carlton might recognise me because I’ve been working part time at the shop for the last twelve years (including recently as a buyer of specialist titles). I’ve been bookselling for twenty years or so while pursuing a parallel academic career path, but I’m now a self-described ‘recovering academic’ because I’ve reset my course to follow my first love – books – and I couldn’t be happier. This really is the coolest job.

But what a month to take over from Martin Shaw! After a long handover, including a potentially futile attempt on my part to obtain ‘the knowledge’ (NB: this tutorial would have taken until about 2030) followed by a big shindig/farewell to acknowledge his contribution to the industry, I’m now working solo and my goodness I’ve really had to hit the ground running: we buyers have been busy in meetings this month getting ready for Christmas – yes, you read that right. We’ve started seeing some of the big books that will be on your shopping and reading wish lists for the 2015 festive season, and I must say there are going to be some fantastic offerings this year that we’ll be excited to introduce in the coming months.

In the meantime, what an August we have, with a truly excellent array of mid-winter reads. Gail Jones’s new novel is our book of the month. ‘Masterpiece’ is not a word that gets used lightly in the world of literature, but that is Mark Rubbo’s compelling description of A Guide to Berlin, and I am, therefore, compelled to sit up and take notice. Like our reviewer, I too was impressed by Lucy Treloar’s debut novel, Salt Creek, and its delicate examination of some crucial truths of Australia’s colonial history. Another historically informed piece of new Australian writing comes in the form of Eleanor Limprecht’s Long Bay, an exploration of female confinement as lived experience and as metaphor. Elsewhere, Mireille Juchau adds her erudite voice to the literature of climate change in The World Without Us. Sonja Dechian’s debut short story collection, An Astronaut’s Life, is further evidence of the depth of Australia’s talent in the short form.

Haruki Murakami’s many fans have been waiting patiently for his first two novels, Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973, to be available in English outside Japan, and finally they appear this month, published in a beautiful reversible hardback format. Also in translation are two more works from the extensive oeuvre of the 2014 Nobel Prize-winner, Patrick Modiano: Little Jewel and Paris Nocturne.

I really loved Poe Ballantine’s 2013 memoir, Love & Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere; his new collection of essays, Guidelines for Mountain Lion Safety, is on my ‘must read’ list. Also on my list is the 2015 Pulitzer Prize winner, All the Light We Cannot See, and it’s back in stock again this month. Our reviewer makes an extremely convincing case for Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, a book that is making a huge impact in the United States for its frank discussion of that country’s politics of race. It sounds like a book that will be important for years to come.

If you missed Ali MC’s anarchic self-published travel memoir, The Eyeball End, the first time around, don’t make the same mistake twice – it was a bit of an underground hit here at Readings last year, and it’s available again this month through Australian independent publisher, Xoum.

I like the sound of Gisela Kaplan’s Bird Minds, a book that should give one pause before using the term ‘bird-brained’ as a derogatory term again.

Readers of political writing have much to choose from this month, from the republished writings of John Monash, to the biography of controversial figure B.A. Santamaria, to Joel Deane’s account of the Bracks-Brumby government, Catch and Kill, and the memoirs from Stephen Loosely and Chris Bowen.

And finally, dear reader, is your bookshelf bereft of Butler? Devoid of Derrida? Low on Foucault? If so, then the time is right to come in and peruse our 3-for-2 sale on Routledge Classics (in all our stores except the State Library). It’s a great opportunity to stock up on key titles in cultural theory, philosophy, history, psychology and literary studies, and it’s on for the whole month (while stocks last).

Alison Huber