Hydra by Adriane Howell

Anja is a young, ambitious antiquarian. When her career goes awry, Anja finds herself adrift. Cast out from the world of antiques, she stumbles upon a beachside cottage that the neighbouring naval base is offering for a 100-year lease. The property is derelict, isolated, and surrounded by scrub. Despite of, or because of, its wildness and solitude, Anja uses the last of the inheritance from her mother to lease the property. Yet a presence – human, ghost, other – seemingly inhabits the grounds.

‘Without a doubt, Hydra is one of the strongest debut novels of the year.’ — Jackie Tang, editor of Readings Monthly. Read the full review here.

Diary of a Void by Emi Yagi

Thirty-four-year-old Ms Shibata works for a company manufacturing cardboard tubes and paper cores in Tokyo. Her job is relatively secure: she’s a full-time employee, and the company has a better reputation than her previous workplace. But the job requires working overtime almost every day. Most frustratingly, as the only woman, there’s the unspoken expectation that Ms Shibata will handle all the menial chores.

One day, exasperated and fed up, Ms Shibata announces that she can’t clear away her colleagues’ dirty cups, because she’s pregnant. She isn’t. But her ‘news’ brings results: a sudden change in the way she’s treated. Immediately a new life begins.

Every Version of You by Grace Chan

In late twenty-first century Australia, Tao-Yi and her partner Navin spend most of their time inside a hyper-immersive, hyper-consumerist virtual reality called Gaia. They log on, go to work, socialise, and even eat in this digital utopia. Meanwhile their aging bodies lie suspended in pods inside cramped apartments. Across the city, in the abandoned ‘real’ world, Tao-Yi’s mother remains stubbornly offline, dwindling away between hospital visits and memories of her earlier life in Malaysia.

When a new technology is developed to permanently upload a human brain to Gaia, Tao-Yi must decide what is most important: a digital future, or an authentic past. Read our review here.

Everything Feels Like the End of the World by Else Fitzgerald

Everything Feels Like the End of the World is a collection of short speculative fiction exploring possible futures from an Australia not so different from our present day to one thousands of years into an unrecognisable future.

At the heart of each story is the anchor of what it means to be human: grief, loss, pain and love. A young woman is faced with a terrible choice about her pregnancy in a community ravaged by doubt. An engineer working on a solar shield protecting the Earth shares memories of their lover with an AI companion. Two archivists must decide what is worth saving when the world is flooded by rising sea levels. Read our review here.

The Immortal King Rao by Vauhini Vara

Athena Rao must reckon with the memory of her father, King Rao – literally. Through biotechnological innovation, he has given her his memories. His Dalit childhood on an Indian coconut plantation in the 1950s is as alive to her as her own existence in a prison cell, accused of her father’s murder.

Egocentric, brilliant, a little damaged, King Rao had a visionary idea: the personal computer known as the Coconut. His wife, Margie, was an artist with a marketing genius. Together they created a new world order, led by a corporate-run government. Athena’s future is now in the hands of its Shareholders – unless she can rejoin the Exes, a resistance group sustaining tech-free lifestyles on low-lying islands.

The Whitewash by Siang Lu

It sounded like a good idea at the time – A Hollywood spy thriller, starring, for the first time in history, an Asian male lead. With an estimated $350 million production budget and up-and-coming Hong Kong actor JK Jr, who, let’s be honest, is not the sharpest tool in the shed, but probably the hottest, Brood Empire was basically a sure thing. Until it wasn’t. So how did it all fall apart?

Brood Empire is now remembered as a fiasco of seismic proportions. The Whitewash is the definitive oral history of the whole sordid mess. Read our review here.

Electric and Mad and Brave by Tom Pitts

Matt Lacey is in a mental health facility recovering from a breakdown. To work through his myriad of conflicting thoughts and feelings, he writes. He unwinds the story of his teenage years with the beautiful, impassive, fierce Christina. As Matt tries to unlock the secrets of his past, he has to learn, finally, to look directly at the pain and love that have made him what he is now.

Electric and Mad and Brave is a heightened and technicolour story about the soaring joy and numbing nightmare of being young and hopelessly in love. Read our review here.