Most anticipated fiction books for the second half of the year
It's hard to believe we're already in August and publishers have finalised (mostly!) their lists for Summer 2024. It's difficult To eclipse what has already been a very strong year, but we think you'll agree from the preview below that there's much to look forward to in the coming months! Many of our favourite authors are releasing books and we hope to see you as they begin to grace our shelves and online collections.
📚 AUSTRALIAN FICTION
Juice by Tim Winton
Two fugitives, a man and a child, drive all night across a stony desert. As dawn breaks, they roll into an abandoned mine site. From the vehicle they survey a forsaken place – middens of twisted iron, rusty wire, piles of sun-baked trash. They’re exhausted, traumatised, desperate now. But as a refuge, this is the most promising place they’ve seen. The child peers at the field of desolation. The man thinks to himself, this could work. Problem is, they’re not alone.
So begins a searing, propulsive journey through a life whose central challenge is not simply a matter of survival, but of how to maintain human decency as everyone around you falls ever further into barbarism.
Here One Moment by Liane Moriarty
If you knew when you were going to die, what would you do differently?
It all begins on a flight from Hobart to Sydney. The flight will be smooth. It will land safely. Everyone who gets on the plane will get off the plane. But almost all of them will be changed forever. Because on this ordinary flight, something extraordinary happens. 'A lady', unremarkable until she isn't, predicts how and when many of the passengers are going to die. For some, death is far in the future; for others, it is very close.
Theory & Practice by Michelle de Kretser
It's 1986, and 'beautiful, radical ideas' are in the air. A young woman arrives in Melbourne to research the novels of Virginia Woolf. In bohemian St Kilda she meets artists, activists, students – and Kit. He claims to be in a 'deconstructed' relationship, and they become lovers. Meanwhile, her work on the Woolfmother falls into disarray.
Theory & Practice is a mesmerising account of desire and jealousy, truth and shame. It makes and unmakes fiction as we read, expanding our notion of what a novel can contain.
Dusk by Robbie Arnott
In the distant highlands, a puma named Dusk is killing shepherds. Down in the lowlands, twins Iris and Floyd are out of work, money and friends. When they hear that a bounty has been placed on Dusk, they reluctantly decide to join the hunt.
As they journey up into this wild, haunted country, they discover there's far more to the land and people of the highlands than they imagined. And as they close in on their prey, they're forced to reckon with conflicts both ancient and deeply personal.
📖 Also look forward to books by: Alex Miller, Jock Serong, Nardi Simpson, Katerina Gibson, Nina Kenwood, Inga Simpson, David Dyer, Melanie Cheng, Zoe Foster Blake and more.
📚 INTERNATIONAL FICTION
Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout
It's autumn in Maine, and the town lawyer Bob Burgess has become enmeshed in an unfolding murder investigation, defending a lonely, isolated man accused of killing his mother. He has also fallen into a deep and abiding friendship with the acclaimed writer, Lucy Barton, who lives nearby in a house next to the sea. Together, Lucy and Bob talk about their lives, their hopes and regrets, and what might have been. Lucy, meanwhile, befriends one of Crosby's longest inhabitants, Olive Kitteridge, now living in a retirement community on the edge of town. They spend afternoons together in Olive's apartment, telling each other stories. Stories about people they have known – 'unrecorded lives', Olive calls them – reanimating them, and, in the process, imbuing their lives with meaning.
The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami & Philip Gabriel (trans.)
After losing his beloved as a teenager, the narrator finds his way to the Town, a mysterious place where he finds work as a Dream Reader in the library. Back in the real world as an adult he tries to recapture his time in the Town by taking a job as a librarian in a remote location in Fukushima province, where he takes over the job from a ghost. When a boy, M, who visits the library every day, vanishes, the boundaries between spatial and temporal realities, and between individuals, seems to have been breached. A novel about the barriers, imaginary and real, that we put up between and within ourselves.
Intermezzo by Sally Rooney
Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common. Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties – successful, competent and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father's death, he's medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women – his enduring first love Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke.
Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly intertwined. For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude – a period of desire, despair and possibility – a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.
Playground by Richard Powers
Four lives are drawn together in a sweeping, panoramic new novel from Richard Powers, showcasing the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Overstory at the height of his skills. Twelve-year-old Evie Beaulieu sinks to the bottom of a swimming pool in Montreal strapped to one of the world's first aqualungs. Ina Aroita grows up in naval bases across the Pacific with art as her only home. Two polar opposites at an elite Chicago high school bond over a three thousand- year-old board game; Rafi Young will get lost in literature, while Todd Keane's work will lead to a startling AI breakthrough.
They meet on the history-scarred island of Makatea in French Polynesia, whose deposits of phosphorus once helped feed the world. Now the tiny atoll has been chosen for humanity's next adventure: a plan to send floating, autonomous cities out onto the open sea. But first, the island's residents must vote to green light the project or turn the seasteaders away.
📖 Also look forward to books by: Mariana Enriquez, Olga Tokarczuk, Kate Atkinson, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Pat Barker, Michel Houellebecq, Matt Haig, Alan Moore, Rumaan Alam, Niall Williams, Bernhard Schlink, Louise Erdrich, Anton Hur, Alan Hollinghurst, Rachel Kushner, William Boyd, Margaret Atwood, Toshikazu Kawaguchi and more.
📚 CRIME FICTION
The Death of Dora Black: A Petticoat Police Mystery by Lainie Anderson
Summer, Adelaide, 1917. The impeccably dressed Miss Kate Cocks might look more like a schoolmistress than a policewoman, but don't let that fool you. She's a household name, wrangling wayward husbands into repentance, seeing through deceptive clairvoyants, and rescuing young women (whether they like it or not) with the help of a five-foot cane and her sassy junior constable, Ethel Bromley.
When shop assistant Dora Black is found dead on a city beach, Miss Cocks and Ethel are ordered to stay out of the investigation and leave it to the men. But when Dora's workmate goes missing soon after, the women suspect something sinister, and determine to take matters into their own hands. After all, who knows Adelaide better than the indomitable Miss Cocks?
We Solve Murders by Richard Osman
Steve Wheeler is enjoying retired life. He does the odd bit of investigation work, but he prefers his familiar habits and routines: the pub quiz, his favourite bench, his cat waiting for him when he comes home. His days of adventure are over: adrenaline is daughter-in-law Amy’s business now.
Amy Wheeler thinks adrenaline is good for the soul. As a private security officer, she doesn’t stay still long enough for habits or routines. She’s currently on a remote island keeping world-famous author Rosie D’Antonio alive. Which was meant to be an easy job . . .
Then a dead body, a bag of money and a killer with their sights on Amy have her sending an SOS to the only person she trusts. A breakneck race around the world begins, but can Amy and Steve stay one step ahead of a deadly enemy?
The Ledge by Christian White
When human remains are discovered in the forests of regional Victoria, the police are baffled, the locals are shocked, and one group of old friends starts to panic. Their long-held secret is about to be uncovered. It all began in 1999 when sixteen-year-old Aaron ran away from home, dragging his friends into an unforeseeable chain of events that no one escaped from unscathed.
In The Ledge, past and present run breathlessly, tensely parallel, leading to a cliff-hanger nobody will see coming. This is a mind-bending new novel from the master of the unexpected.
The Dream by Iain Ryan
In a city gripped by recession and shattered by violent bank robberies, three lives collide in a web of corruption, ambition, and revenge.
Detective Bruno Karras, haunted by past secrets, receives mysterious photos of a blood-stained house. Amy Owens, a reluctant investigator entangled with the underworld, digs into the dark dealings of a wealthy businessman. Mike Nichols, a backroom player with big dreams, finds himself caught in the crossfire.
As the glittering facade of the Gold Coast crumbles during the 1982 Commonwealth Games, Bruno, Amy, and Mike uncover a sinister plot that threatens to consume them all. In a world where power and deception reign supreme, they must confront their own demons while navigating a labyrinth of danger and betrayal.
