Don't miss these June debuts
Before we dive headfirst into next month's releases, we're looking back at just a few of the outstanding debuts that graced our shelves in June.
Couplets by Maggie Millner
Maggie Millner’s seductive debut is a novel-in-verse about a woman in her late twenties who leaves a long-term relationship with a boyfriend for another woman. The affair thrusts her from an outwardly conventional life into queerness, polyamory, kink, and unalloyed, consuming desire. What ensues is an exploration of obsession, gender, identity-making, sexual experiment, and the art and act of literary transformation.
Couplets is a dazzling fusion of form and content, chronicling the strictures, structures and pitfalls of relationships - the mirroring, the pleasing, the small jealousies and disappointments. Playful, clever, lovestruck, griefstruck, its narrator dances a tightrope of her own invention with captivating passion and skill.
Sad Girl Novel by Pip Finkemeyer
Over the course of a year in Berlin, an aspiring novelist, Kim, and her historian best friend, Bel, confront their twin acts of creation.
Kim is becoming a writer, and is determined to write a bestseller. She's been convinced of this idea by Matthew, an American literary agent who is as emotionally unavailable as he is handsome (very). Kim lives in her own carefully constructed reality, which her imagination is constantly pumping full of hot air. Meanwhile, Bel is becoming a mother, and gives birth, certain it will fulfil her in ways her career does not seem to. Kim and Bel support and deceive each other as only the best of friends can. In the face of probable failure, how do we convince ourselves to try and become something anyway? And how do we live with the choices we make?
Mrs S by K Patrick
In an elite English boarding school where the girls kiss the marble statue of the famous dead author who used to walk the halls, a young Australian woman arrives to take up the antiquated role of ‘matron’. Within this landscape of immense privilege, in which the girls can sense the slightest weakness in those around them, she finds herself unsure of her role, her accent and her body.
That is until she meets Mrs S, the headmaster’s wife, a woman who is her polar opposite: assured, sophisticated, a paragon of femininity. Over the course of a long, restless heatwave, the matron finds herself irresistibly drawn ever closer into Mrs S’s world and their unspoken desire blooms into an illicit affair of electric intensity. But, as the summer begins to fade, both women know that a choice must be made.
Untethered by Ayesha Inoon
Zia secretly longs to go to university but as a young woman in a traditional Muslim family, she does what is expected of her and agrees to an arranged marriage to Rashid, a man she barely knows. Cocooned by the wealth and customs of her family, Rashid's dark moods create only the smallest of ripples in their early life together.
When growing political unrest spurs them to leave Sri Lanka and immigrate to Australia, Zia is torn between fear of leaving her beloved family and the possibility of new freedoms. While on paper their new country welcomes them with open arms, their visas come with many restrictions and for the first time Zia faces isolation, poverty and an increasingly unstable marriage that forms a cage stronger than any she's known before. Determined to carve a place for herself in this new country, Zia sets out on uncertain terrain and discovers friendship, devastating loss and hope for a different future. One that asks her to consider not just who she is, but who she might become.
Y/N by Esther Yi
Surreal, hilarious, and shrewdly poignant – a novel about a Korean American woman living in Berlin whose obsession with a K-pop idol sends her to Seoul on a journey of literary self-destruction.
It’s as if her life only began once Moon appeared in it. The desultory copywriting work, the boyfriend, and the want of anything not-Moon quickly fall away when she beholds the idol in concert, where Moon dances as if his movements are creating their own gravitational field; on live streams, as fans from around the world comment in dozens of languages; even on skincare products endorsed by the wildly popular boy band. Seized by ineffable desire, our unnamed narrator begins writing Y/N fanfic-in which you, the reader, insert [Your/Name] and play out an intimate relationship with the unattainable star.
Then Moon suddenly retires, vanishing from the public eye. She stumbles into total disorientation. As Y/N flies from Berlin to Seoul to be with Moon, our narrator, too, journeys in search of the object of her love.
Your Driver Is Waiting by Priya Guns
Damani is tired. Every day she cares for her mum, drives ride shares to pay the bills and is angry at a world that promised her more before spitting her out. That is until the summer she meets Jolene and life opens up. Jolene seems like she could be the perfect girlfriend – attentive, attractive, liberal – and their chemistry feels genuine. So maybe Damani can look past the one thing that’s holding her back: Jolene is white. But Jolene really doesn’t seem like one of the bad ones – she’s done the reading, she goes to every protest, she even listens. Still, just as their romance intensifies, just as Damani learns to trust, Jolene does something unforgivable, setting off an explosive chain of events.
Your Driver is Waiting is a blackly comic and deeply political novel about anger, love and privilege in all their messy forms.
