Here we are in September, which, as the years go on, is really starting to feel like the official start of the festive season in bookselling and publishing. That means that lots of Big Books for 2016 are about to come your way! For example, you can expect to hear a lot about Ann Patchett’s new novel, Commonwealth (already a firm favourite amongst early readers, including myself ). The new Ian McEwan is – well, it’s the new Ian McEwan, so not much more needs to be said really, does it, aside from that it is called Nutshell and is told with an appropriately McEwan-ish narrative twist. Jay McInerney’s Brightness Falls (published in 1992) is one of my favourite reading memories of the 1990s, so I am excited that the third instalment of Russell and Corinne’s story (following 2006’s The Good Life) is out this month. I saw Matthew Griffin read an extract from his debut novel, Hide, when I was in the US earlier this year, and I was transfixed; I share our reviewer’s enthusiasm for this moving story. The wondrous Mary Gaitskill wrote The Mare in 2015, and it is at last available in an Australian edition this month. Throw in new books from two more former winners of the Booker Prize (Dirt Road from James Kelman; Selection Day from Aravind Adiga), a highly anticipated new novel from Jonathan Safran Foer (Here I Am), the second novel by a recent winner of the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction (The Lesser Bohemians from Eimear McBride), and a few books getting a lot of attention in the international literary pages (Kris Lee’s How I Became a North Korean; Imbolo Mbue’s Behold the Dreamers; Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad), and you’ll see that this month is a big one. Lucia Berlin’s amazing short story collection, A Manual for Cleaning Women, made a lot of people’s ‘best of 2015’ lists, and while I hand-sold quite a few copies of the imported hardcover late last year, it’s finally available in paperback, so please do revisit this book.

So much for international fiction: Australia’s writers bring us great things this month too. One of our most exciting, Steven Amsterdam, publishes his long-awaited new work, The Easy Way Out. This story of a nurse who assists terminally ill patients seeking death on their own terms cannot fail to get people talking and thinking about the ethics, realities and necessity of a dignified exit strategy. Local publishing house Scribe, who celebrated their 40th birthday in August, have Laura Elizabeth Woollett’s exciting debut, The Love of a Bad Man, a cycle of short stories that focus on the women who loved the ‘bad men’ of history. Heather Rose was the inaugural writer in residence at MONA in Hobart during 2012–13, and she spent her time there working on The Museum of Modern Love, which is based on the work of performance artist Marina Abramovic: our reviewer calls it her ‘book of the year so far’!

Our book of the month is Grant and I, the memoir from musician, writer and general hero, Robert Forster. I think I genuinely gasped with excitement when I heard at some point last year that he was writing this book. Forster is the ultimate stylist, and this work will be a treat for fans of Forster and The Go-Betweens, and an education for those yet uninitiated. I suggest you buy a copy immediately. Before I forget, I advise you to look out for The Hidden Life of Trees, by Peter Wohlleben, released mid-month, a book that I suspect might well be on everyone’s ‘want list’ by the end of the year. And finally, dear reader, I urge you to explore the full shortlist for this year’s Readings Prize. As a judge this year, and a vocal participant in the many arguments – I mean ‘discussions’ – we had at the meeting to decide the shortlist, I can say that my fellow judges and I feel very close to all these books, and we know you’ll find much to enjoy and admire in these six outstanding works from Australian early career writers.

Alison Huber