I feel very lucky that my time on Earth coincides with that of Maxine Beneba Clarke’s and her powerful talent. August brings us her much-anticipated memoir, The Hate Race, our Book of the Month. This book is a confronting story about the lived experience of racism in Australia. It’s honest, shocking, and will provide readers with an alarmingly familiar depiction of the casual and overt racism commonplace in the Australia of the 1980s and 90s. It should therefore make readers very, very angry, not least because it is also a depiction of the casual and overt racism that is commonplace in the Australia of today. At a time when our country is becoming less tolerant, less welcoming of diversity, less compassionate, we need the lessons of this book more than ever, and it is absolutely essential reading. And quite aside from its peerless critique, it’s also a beautifully written piece of creative non-fiction.

Other non-fiction highlights this month include Kim Mahood’s memoir of landscape and memory, Position Doubtful, a book which our reviewer calls ‘astonishing’; Keggie Carew’s Dadland, which is getting wonderful press in the UK and sits comfortably alongside the imaginative memoir style of H is for Hawk and The Hare with Amber Eyes; and Ashleigh Wilson’s newly researched biography, Brett Whiteley: Art, Life and the Other Thing. Comedians Amy Schumer and Dave O’Neil both publish memoirs this month, while ABC radio stalwart and former Doug Anthony All Star Richard Fidler brings us Ghost Empire, his story of travel and history in Istanbul. In Other Words is a collection of essays by Indonesian writer and public intellectual Goenawan Mohamad who will appear at this year’s Melbourne Writers Festival; Mikhail Gorbachev writes his insight on The New Russia; and two books are published to mark the fifty-year anniversary of the Wave Hill walk-off (Yijarni from Aboriginal Studies Press, and A Handful of Sand from Monash University Press).

In fiction, Australian blockbusting superstar Liane Moriarty’s new novel, Truly Madly Guilty has had staff readers abuzz with excitement, and our reviewer ‘urge(s) you to take the plunge’ if you are yet to read her work. Melbourne-based Kate Mildenhall’s debut, Skylarking, is a quiet novel of friendship and rivalry based on historical events that took place in the isolation of the Cape St George lighthouse in the 1880s. Ryan O’Neill messes with the genre of literary biography and your head in his inventive novel, Their Brilliant Careers: The Fantastic Lives of Sixteen Extraordinary Australian Writers. I know I made our reviewer’s day when I sent her an advance proof of Megan Abbott’s You Will Know Me: her review indicates she enjoyed reading it more than quite a bit. Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing has the feeling of one of those special books that will make it onto a lot of ‘best of’ lists for 2016. I never did read Eowyn Ivey’s The Snow Child, a finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize and a favourite of a number of Readings staff, but I am currently reading her immersive new novel, To the Bright Edge of the World, a story set in the Alaskan wilderness in the 1880s told through a family archive of correspondence.

And finally, dear reader, I must offer congratulations to the publishing team at the literary journal The Lifted Brow on the release of their first novel, The Island Will Sink by Briohny Doyle. The Lifted Brow has long been known for uncovering local literary talent (as well curating an incredible array of local and international big names), and this move into book publishing promises to open up an important space for Australian long-form literary fiction.

Alison Huber