June is another huge month for early career Australian authors. We have debuts from Jane Harper (with her much anticipated work, The Dry), Sean Rabin (with an intriguing tale of a famous author in small-town Tasmania, Wood Green), Julie Koh (with satirical short story collection, Portable Curiosities), Hebe de Souza (with a narrative of family and identity in India, Black British), Jane Abbott (with a novel that joins the growing genre of climate change fiction, Watershed), Micheline Lee (with her account of family estrangement and extreme faith, The Healing Party) and Anna Spargo-Ryan (with a remarkable exploration of mental illness and the crushing weight of grief, The Paper House, our Book of the Month), as well as the second novel from Ann Turner (which takes readers to Antarctica in Out of the Ice) following her hugely successful debut of 2015, The Lost Swimmer.

Impending wintery weather will provide the perfect accommodation for reading Annie Proulx’s 700-page epic, Barkskins. Admirers of the work of Walter Benjamin may not know that he wrote short fiction; this month Verso publishes the first collection of these stories, The Storyteller. I remember loving Rick Moody’s 1994 novel The Ice Storm and so am looking forward to reading his Hotels of North America. Icelandic writer Sjón won a number of followers when he visited Melbourne back in 2012; his new work is called Moonstone. Two old novels in new translations to seek out this month are Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Street Kids (incidentally translated by Ann Goldstein, the translator of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels), and Hans Fallada’s Nightmare in Berlin (finally available in English). Addicts of Justin Cronin’s books The Passage and The Twelve can, at last, read the concluding instalment in this trilogy – The City of Mirrors – and according to fans on our staff (who calmly negotiated who would get to read our advance proofs in which order in spite of obvious desperation), the build-up has been justified.

In nonfiction this month there’s much to explore. Roger Shepherd’s In Love With These Times is the story of Flying Nun, the beloved New Zealand record label he started to record the music of his favourite bands. Lindy West had me at her list of questions she would have googled had Google been around during her adolescence in Shrill. Meanwhile, Secondhand Time: the Last of the Soviets is newly translated work from the 2015 Nobel Prize Laureate, Svetlana Alexievich; Melanie Joosten writes on ageing in A Long Time Coming; Anna Beer returns forgotten female classical composers to the public record in Sounds and Sweet Airs; novelist Cory Taylor reflects on life’s passage in Dying: A Memoir; and Ben Pobjie takes readers on a humorous turn around Australian history in Error Australis.

And finally, dear reader, Fiona Hardy’s name is to be recorded in the annals of staff achievement this month. Fiona, long-time Carlton staff member and voice of the ‘Dead Write’ column in the Readings Monthly, was shortlisted for this year’s Text Prize for Young Adult and Children’s Writing for her manuscript, Rosebud. While the prize ultimately went to Claire Christian for Beautiful Mess (to be published in September 2017– congratulations Claire!), I have no doubt that it won’t be long before we see Fiona’s work in print. Writing for Fiona Hardy is both a compulsion and a talent: remember her name.

Alison Huber