Debut fiction to read this month

Greta and Valdin by Rebecca K Reilly

Siblings Greta and Valdin have, perhaps, too much in common. They're flatmates, beholden to the same near-unpronounceable surname, and both make questionable choices when it comes to love.

Valdin is in love with his ex-boyfriend Xabi, who left the country because he thought he was making Valdin sad. Greta is in love with fellow English tutor Holly, who appears to be using her for admin support. But perhaps all is not lost. Valdin is coming to realize that he might not be so unlovable, and Greta, that she might be worth more than the papers she can mark.

Helping the siblings navigate queerness, multiracial identity, and the tendency of their love interests to flee, is the Vladisavljevic family – Maori-Russian-Catalonian, and as passionate as they are eccentric.


Rabbit Hole by Kate Brody

Teddy Angstrom is no stranger to morbid public interest in her family's tragedies. And when her father dies suddenly, ten years to the day after her sister Angie's disappearance, she intends to maintain as much privacy as she always has.

Clearing out her father's office, however, Teddy discovers her father's double life: a decade-long investigation into wild conspiracies from a Reddit community of true crime fans fixated on Angie. Repelled and compelled in equal measure by this new online dimension, Teddy finds herself falling down that same rabbit hole.

So when nineteen-year-old Mickey, a charming amateur internet sleuth, materialises in real life, Teddy determines that the two of them are going to team up to find out what really happened to Angie and whether there's any chance she might still be alive.


Jaded by Ela Lee

Jade isn't even my real name. Jade began as my Starbucks name, because all children of immigrants have a Starbucks name.

Jade has become everything she ever wanted to be. Successful lawyer. Dutiful daughter. Beloved girlfriend. Loyal friend.

Until Jade wakes up the morning after a work event, naked and alone, with no idea how she got home. Caught between her parents who can't understand, her boyfriend who feels betrayed, and her job that expects silence, the world Jade has constructed starts to crumble. Jade thought she was everything she ever wanted to be. But now she feels like nothing at all.


Argylle by Elly Conway

A luxury train speeding towards Moscow and a date with destiny. A CIA plane downed in the jungles of the Golden Triangle. A Nazi hoard entombed in the remote mountains of South-West Poland. A missing treasure, the eighth wonder of the world, lost for seven decades.

One Russian magnate’s dream of restoring a nation to greatness has set in motion a chain of events which will take the world to the brink of chaos. Only Frances Coffey, the CIA’s most legendary spymaster, can prevent it. But to do so, she needs someone special. Enter Argylle, a troubled agent with a tarnished past who may just have the skills to take on one of the most powerful men in the world. If only he can save himself first.


How I Won a Nobel Prize by Julius Taranto

Helen, a graduate student on a quest to save the planet, is one of the best minds of her generation. But when her irreplaceable advisor's student sex scandal is exposed, she must choose whether to give up on her work or accompany him to RIP, a research institute which grants safe harbour to the disgraced and the deplorable. As Helen settles into life at the institute alongside her partner Hew, she develops a crush on an older novelist, while he is drawn to an increasingly violent protest movement. As the rift between them deepens they both face major choices.

Hilarious and thought-provoking, How I Won a Nobel Prize approaches our moral confusion in a genuine and fresh way, examining the price we're willing to pay for progress and what it means, in the end, to be a good person.


My Brilliant Sister by Amy Brown

While Stella Miles Franklin took on the world, her beloved sister Linda led a short, domestic life as a wife, mother and sister. In a remarkable, genre-bending debut novel, Amy Brown thrillingly reimagines those two lives – and her own – to explore and explode the contradictions embedded in brilliant careers and a woman's place in the world.

In this reflective, witty and revealing novel, Amy Brown rescues Linda, setting her in counterpoint with Stella, and with the lives of two contemporary women: Ida, a writer whose writing life is on hold as she teaches and raises her young daughter; and Stella, a singer-songwriter who has sacrificed everything for a career, now forcibly put on hold. Binding the two is the novella that Linda might have written to her sister Stella – a brilliant alternative vision of Stella Miles Franklin's, My Brilliant Career.


Tidelines by Sarah Sasson

It's Sydney in the early 2000s, and Grub is spending the summer with her universally adored older brother, Elijah, and his magnetic but troubled best friend, Zed. Their days are filled with surfing, swimming and hanging out; life couldn't be better.

But years later, Elijah disappears and Grub's family unravels. At first, Grub blames Zed: he was the one who derailed Elijah from a bright future in the arts. But as Grub looks back at those dreamy summer days, the sanctuary of her certainty crumbles. Was Zed really responsible for her brother's disappearance? Was anyone?

Cover image for Greta and Valdin

Greta and Valdin

Rebecca K Reilly

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