Our top picks for book clubs this month
Looking for something juicy to discuss in your book club? Try one of these new releases, chosen by our booksellers to provide plenty to talk about, and to appeal to a wide range of readers.
Australian fiction
Jade and Emerald by Michelle See-Tho
Lei Ling Wen is lonely. Bored of her demanding after-school schedule of tuition, study and violin lessons, she struggles to see eye to eye with her strict Chinese-Malaysian mother. When Lei Ling is befriended by elegant, worldly socialite Gigi Nu, she is enchanted by the realm of luxury and freedom that suddenly opens up to her. Gigi encourages Lei Ling to flout her routines and treats her to desiger products and expensive meals, and soon Lei Ling finds herself caught between two lives, and increasingly at odds with her exasperated mother.
Then tragedy strikes, and Lei Ling discovers long-held secrets that lead her to question everything she thought she knew about the two central women in her life, and the friendship she'd held at the heart of it.
Available 16 July
Read our staff review here.
International fiction
Hard Copy by Fien Veldman, translated by Hester Velmans
A customer service assistant spends her long workdays printing letters. Her one friend is the printer and, in the dark confines of her office, she begins to open up to him, talking about her fears, her past, her hopes and dreams. To her, it seems like a beautiful friendship is blossoming. To her boss, it seems like she's losing her mind.
Diagnosed with burnout and placed on leave, she faces severance and worse, separation from her beloved printer. But she's not about to give up on her only friend without a fight. And, it turns out, neither is he.
Read our staff review here.
Crime fiction
Murder in Punch Lane by Jane Sullivan
Melbourne, 1868. When theatre star Marie St Denis dies in the arms of her best friend, fellow actress Lola Sanchez, everyone believes it was suicide by laudanum overdose, except Lola. On the brink of stardom herself, she risks everything on a quest to find Marie's killer. When journalist Magnus Scott publishes a compassionate obituary about her friend, Lola decides to seek his help. A fraught attraction develops between them, and their volatile relationship soon begins to compromise their investigation.
Lola keeps a secret from Magnus. She traverses the corrupt underbelly of the brash young metropolis just as he does, but disguised as a boy, entering spaces where the lives of the rich and privileged intersect with the city's underclass and outsiders. Neither are prepared for the truths they will uncover about the powers that rule Melbourne, and now they must race to find the murderer before the city destroys them both.
Read our staff review here.
Nonfiction
Patrimonies: Essays on Generational Thinking by George Kouvaras
Combining elements of criticism, cultural history and memoir, Patrimonies addresses the questions: How do we take from and give back to those who came before? How have their actions and choices left their mark on us? The instigation for these questions is an awareness of precariousness – people, places and histories on the brink.
This is what gives George Kouvaros's essays their sense of occasion and responsibility – to those who came before and those still to come. The outcome is a form of writing that is deeply moving and alert to the tension between survival and transformation, preservation and appropriation that defines the engagements with our forebears.
Read our staff review here.
Romance fiction
Under Your Spell by Laura Wood
Dumped by her cheating ex, fired from her dream job, about to lose her flat: Clementine Monroe is not having a good day. So when her sisters get her drunk and suggest reviving a childhood ritual called the breakup spell, she doesn't see the harm in it.
But now Clemmie has accidentally ruined a funeral, had her first one-night stand, and she's stuck with a new job she definitely doesn't want – spending six weeks alone with the gorgeous and very-off-limits rock star, Theo Eliott.
He's the most famous man on the planet. Her life's a disaster. When it comes to love, Clemmie is learning you should be careful what you wish for.
Sci-fi, Fantasy & Speculative fiction
The Book of Elsewhere by Keanu Reeves & China Miéville
There have always been whispers. Legends. The warrior who cannot be killed. Who’s seen a thousand civilisations rise and fall. He has had many names. And he wants to be able to die.
In the present day, a U.S. black-ops group has promised him they can help with that. And all he needs to do is help them in return. But when an all-too-mortal soldier comes back to life, the impossible event ultimately points toward a force even more mysterious than B himself. One at least as strong. And one with a plan all its own.
Available 23 July
Debut Fiction
The End and Everything Before It by Finegan Kruckemeyer
Emma watched her mother's kayak disappear among icebergs in the Arctic Sea. Six years later, her brother, who had not spoken since their mother was lost, warns Emma of the curse of death that she brought to anyone who looked on her face-before tragedy befalls him too. Emma consigns herself to a solitary life at sea, where she can do no more harm.
After years alone, she is mysteriously drawn to land. And she docks at an island, afraid of what her arrival might mean for the welcoming man and his daughter waving from the jetty. But who knows where our stories begin and end or how they are entwined? Who knows whether now, on the island, she begins a new tale, or takes a role in a story that began generations ago with a feast in the forest, or a chest of gold coins plunged into the sea, or an orphan in a bookshop beguiled by an elusive and troubled woman?
Read our staff review here.
LGBTQIA+
A Language of Limbs by Dylin Hardcastle
The first love of a teenage girl is a powerful thing, particularly when the object of that desire is her best friend, also a girl. It's the kind of power that could implode a family, a friendship, a life. On a quiet summer night in Newcastle, 1972, a choice must be made: to act upon these desires, or suppress them? To live an openly queer life, or to try desperately not to?
Over the following three decades, these two lives almost intersect in pivotal moments, the distance between them at times drawing so thin they nearly collide. Against the backdrop of an era including Australia's first Mardi Gras and the AIDS pandemic, we see these two lives ebb and flow, with joy and grief and loss and desire, until at last they come together in the most beautiful and surprising of fashions.
Read our staff review here.
Young Adult
Return to Sender by Lauren Draper
After three years away, seventeen-year-old Brodie McKellon has returned to live with her eccentric grandmother above the last remaining Dead Letter Office – the place letters go when no one is left to claim them.
Soon, Brodie is consumed by an unsolved mystery – the unclaimed letters of a group of teens who seemed to vanish many years ago – while also attempting to reconcile with her former best friends, Elliot and Levi.
As the trio is drawn into the riddle of the dead letter writers, they discover that the past is never truly past, and that it's never too late for old wrongs to be put right.
Read our staff review here.
