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 appeal to a wide range of readers and provide plenty to talk about.
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.
Read our staff review here.
International fiction
Annihilation by Michel Houellebecq & Shaun Whiteside (trans.)
It is 2027. France is in a state of economic decline and moral decay. As the country plunges into a closely-fought presidential campaign, the French state falls victim to a series of mysterious and unsettling cyberattacks. The sophisticated nature of the attacks leaves the best computer scientists at the DGSI – the French counter-terrorism agency – scrambling for answers.
An advisor to the country’s Finance Minister, Paul Raison is close to the heart of government. His wife Prudence is a Treasury official, while his father Édouard, now retired, has spent his career working for the DGSI. When Édouard has a stroke, his children have an opportunity to repair their strained relationships, as they determine to free their father from the medical centre where he is wasting away.
Read our staff review here.
Crime fiction
No One Will Know by Rose Carlyle
Eve Sylvester is young and broke and needs a job fast. After years of foster homes, backpacking and a sailing trip across the Pacific Ocean, she has lost contact with friends and family. She is alone, desperate – and pregnant. Then she meets Julia and Christopher Hygate, a charming and glamorous couple, who seem to have the perfect life: loads of money and a breathtakingly beautiful mansion on a remote Tasmanian island. They make her a lucrative offer. Eve can move into their empty summerhouse and take up a very easy job.
Eve thinks she's fallen on her feet: she has found a home, and her child will grow up in the aptly named Paradise Bay. But some things about the job don't add up. Why must Eve stay out of sight? Why have the Hygates employed an ex-con to run their yacht-charter business? And what about the mysterious boats sailing in and out of the Hygates' private marina? Has Eve made a deal with the devil? It's too late to ask questions. Eve is already in far too deep.
Read our staff review here.
Biography
We Are the Stars by Gina Chick
From day one of her wildly unconventional childhood, Gina Chick blazed her own trail, which led her to dance through the hidden world of 90’s Sydney nightlife into the arms of a conman. She fled to the wilderness to find healing, began a wondrous love affair with the deepest lessons life – and death – can offer, and found that all the answers are written in the wisdom of the body and the whirling silence of stars.
If you’re ready to get lost in jungles, wander into wolf-dens, sing with storms, rescue orphaned animals, dive to the depths, dance ‘til your knees wobble, fall in love, find yourself by losing it all, and most of all be real; this book is for you.
Read our staff review here.
Romance fiction
The Cinnamon Bun Book Store by Laurie Gilmore
When a secret message turns up hidden in a book in the Cinnamon Bun Bookstore, Hazel can't understand it. As more secret codes appear between the pages, she decides to follow the trail of clues . . . she just need someone to help her out.
Gorgeous and outgoing fisherman, Noah, is always up for an adventure. And a scavenger hunt sounds like a lot of fun. Even better that the cute bookseller he's been crushing on for months is the one who wants his help!
Hazel didn’t go looking for romance, but as the treasure hunt leads her and Noah around Dream Harbor, their undeniable chemistry might be just as hot as the fresh-out-of-the-oven cinnamon buns the bookstore sells . . .
Sci-fi, fantasy & speculative fiction
The Great When by Alan Moore
The year is 1949, the city London. Amidst the smog of the capital is Dennis Knuckleyard, a hapless eighteen-year-old employed by a second-hand bookshop. One day, on an errand to acquire books for sale, Dennis discovers a novel that simply does not exist. It is a fictitious book, a figment from another novel. Yet it is physically there in his hands. How?
Dennis has stumbled on a book from the Great When, a magical version of London beyond time and space, where reality blurs with fiction and concepts such as Crime and Poetry are incarnated as wondrous, terrible beings. But this other, magical London must remain a secret: if Dennis cannot find a way to return this book to where it belongs, he risks bizarre and disastrous repercussions, such as his body being turned inside out.
Read our staff review here.
Debut fiction
Matia by Emily Tsokos Purtill
Sia is a young Greek woman who has emigrated from Greece to Perth, Western Australia in 1945 for a better life. She carries with her four prophecies and four pieces of protective jewellery, matia, one for herself, her daughter, her granddaughter, and great-granddaughter. With a dooming prophecy hanging over each woman's head, will their lives unfold as they want or are they chained to the fate that's been destined for them?
Over four generations and three continents, linking back and forth over 125 years from Greece to Perth to New York and back to Greece, Emily Tsokos Purtill has weaved a story that is utterly captivating and deeply moving.
LGBTQIA+
Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst
Dave Win is thirteen years old when he first goes to stay with the sponsors of his scholarship at a local boarding school. This weekend, with its games and challenges and surprising encounters, will open up heady new possibilities, even as it exposes him to their son Giles’ envy and violence.
As their lives unfold over the next half a century, the two boys’ careers will diverge dramatically: Dave, a gifted actor struggling with convention and discrimination, Giles an increasingly powerful and dangerous politician.
Our Evenings is Dave Win’s own account of his life as a schoolboy and student, his first love affairs, in London, and on the road with an experimental theatre company, and of a late-life affair, which transforms his sixties with a new sense of happiness and a perilous security.
Read our staff review here.
Young adult fiction
My Family and Other Suspects by Kate Emery
Ruth is not thrilled to be spending the weekend at the family farm visiting the ancient GG, her coolly distant step-grandmother. With no internet or phone coverage, Ruth occupies herself by re-reading old Agatha Christie novels, eavesdropping on the adults, and definitely not daydreaming about her sort-of-cousin Dylan.
But when GG dies under suspicious circumstances, Ruth's dull weekend turns into an enforced-family-holiday-slash-possible-murder-investigation – and she's not about to let the police get in the way of her chance to solve a real-life murder mystery. With Dylan as the Watson to her Holmes, Ruth soon discovers that plenty of people had reasons to be rid of GG, and her list of suspects grows to comprise everyone in the house.
Read our staff review here.