Book Club 2026
Join our in store book club and extend your reading experience!
Our Book Clubs focus on new releases, with our Fiction Book Club having two session times available each month and our new Non-Fiction Book Club is one monthly session. Participation in a session is $50 per month and multiple months can be booked at one time.
Each session includes:
- copy of the new release book
- moderated discussion
- drink on arrival, light refreshments (evening sessions) or takeaway coffee / tea, biscuits (daytime sessions)
(Please note: drink orders for the day sessions will be taken prior to each session via email in order to be prepared at a local café)
Places in each session are limited. A participant may only attend one Fiction session per month.
We can’t wait to welcome everyone for some great discussions and extension of our reading experience in the new year. Bookings are open with links below.
How to book your 2026 Book Club Sessions
We have a slightly different booking system this year. You can now book multiple monthly sessions for Fiction Morning, Fiction Evening or Non-Fiction Morning under the same booking.
Follow the links below to your preferred genre & session, and once you are in TryBooking click through the calendar months to select your preferred months.
All titles will be announced at least a month prior to the sessions to ensure plenty of reading time. A waitlist function will activate on the booking links if sessions sell out.
If you have any questions please feel free to reach out to us on 59755034 or email us at [email protected]
THIS MONTH
JULY fiction: The Secrets of Strangers (Jess Kitching)
After suffering a loss, Janine and her husband, Kamal, need a fresh start. They leave their family and everything they know in Manchester and move to Bamblethorpe, a picturesque Lancashire village where they expect nothing but peace and quiet. It’ll be just what Janine, a thriller writer, needs to work on her next manuscript.
But the peace of their new village life is disrupted when longtime local Alexa Clarke goes missing. Did she leave her husband, like some people suspect? Or is there credibility to the rumours that something more nefarious has happened to Alexa?
Frozen by writer’s block, Janine stumbles into investigating Alexa’s disappearance, and the more she discovers about Alexa’s life, the more complicated things become. Nothing is as it seems, and Janine begins to realise that there are disturbing parallels between Alexa’s life and her own.
What starts as curious procrastination quickly spirals into a tangled web of secrets, lies and a truth Janine may not be ready to face … if she survives.
A propulsive thriller about a writer who gets caught up in the case of a missing woman, for fans of Lisa Jewell, Paula Hawkins and Ruth Ware.
Session Times:
- Tuesday 28 July 6:00 pm -7:00 pm
- Friday 31 July 10:30 am – 11:30 am
JULY non-fiction: London Falling (Patrick Radden Keefe)
In 2019, a London teenager, Zac Brettler, mysteriously fell to his death from a luxury apartment building on the banks of the Thames. When his grieving parents began their desperate quest to understand how their son had died, they made a terrible discovery: Zac had been leading a fantasy life, posing as the son of a wealthy Russian oligarch.
In his inimitably gripping and forensic prose, Baillie Gifford Prize winner and New Yorker writer Patrick Radden Keefe follows Zac’s parents on a dark journey to find out what brought Zac to the balcony that night – and how a teenager’s world of make-believe drew him into the city’s terrifying underworld.
London Falling is at once a devastating family tragedy, a riveting story of greed, power and deception, and an indictment of the culture that has transformed London into a haven for the malignant forces that have come to influence us all.
Session Time:
- Tuesday 14 July 10:30 am – 11:30 am
COMING MONTHS
AUGUST 2026 fiction: Rat Daniels (Alex Sawyer)
I was six, turning seven, and all I really remember is the loneliness, and the lumpy feeling that I was somehow doing everything wrong. And then I met Rat.
Jimmy Quinn is only a boy when he meets Rat Daniels down by the creek. Until that moment, Rat wasn’t called Rat, and Jimmy didn’t have a best friend. That day at Edens Ridge is the beginning of everything. Mercurial, wild and rebellious, Rat is thrillingly far from Jimmy’s tidy world. But there is a dangerous current in Rat that scares Jimmy sometimes. So do the things that happen in Rat’s house: the yelling, the fighting and, most of all, Rat’s hatred for a man named Davey Callaghan.
As they get older, Rat slips toward the darker elements of the Ridge. Ziplock bags and wadded-up foil balls – there’s money to be made, and Rat has a plan that needs money. For the two friends, allegiances will be stretched and intentions questioned. Some days, Jimmy’s not sure if he even likes Rat anymore. Then a devastating fire on the Callaghan farm forces Jimmy to wrestle with his conscience and his memories. People are dead. The police are investigating. Jimmy will have to decide how far his loyalty will go, and just who his friend really is.
Session Times:
- Tuesday 25 August 6:00 pm -7:00 pm
- Friday 28 August 10:30 am – 11:30 am
AUGUST non-fiction: The Knowledge (Victor Steffensen)
Catastrophic wildfires have overwhelmed countries around the world from Australia, Canada and the United States to Greece and Brazil. Despite our growing climate crisis, changes to Western environmental approaches have been scant and many land management practices continue to destroy the land. It’s time for a ‘new’ way of thinking. The solutions lie in the cultures of First Peoples, if only we’re willing to listen.
As a Tagalaka man from Australia, Victor Steffensen spends his days educating people around the world about Aboriginal fire and land management knowledge. Applying the practices passed onto him by his mentors, Victor is on a mission to teach others the value of this knowledge.
In The Knowledge, Victor shares the simple yet core belief underlying Indigenous knowledge systems: that humans are part of the natural world. The land is not something to be dominated and exploited. Rather, we are nature and the way forward is to realign ourselves with the Earth, recognising our responsibility to care for the planet environmentally and socially. Filled with stories of Victor’s work applying Indigenous solutions, The Knowledge will transform the way you think about our responses to bushfires, floods and the climate crisis.
Never has the call to change our global environmental approach been so strong or so clear. Destined to become a seminal work, The Knowledge is a must-read for anyone concerned about the future of our planet.
Session Times:
- Tuesday 11 August 10:30 am – 11:30 am
SEPTEMBER 2026 fiction: Strange Buildings (UKETSU)
Eleven strange buildings. One terrible secret.
A lonely hut in the woods.
A murder house.
A hidden chamber.
A mysterious shrine.
A home in flames.
A nightmarish prison…
Each of the buildings in this book tells a chilling story. Each one is part of a puzzle. Look closely… and you’ll see that everything is connected.
All leading to a revelation so horrifying you won’t want to believe it. Millions of readers have become addicted to solving Uketsu’s dark mysteries.
Strange Buildings is the strangest, and darkest, of them all.
Session Times:
- Friday 18 September 10:30 am – 11:30 am
- Tuesday 29 September 6:00 pm -7:00 pm
SEPTEMBER non-fiction: Moonlight Express (Monisha Rajesh)
The wonder of the night train: headlamps ablaze, passengers boarding after sunset and leaving before sunrise, slipping in and out of compartments unseen. For Monisha Rajesh, the singular thrill of sleeper trains inspired a new journey around the world one filled with moonlit landscapes, cosy compartments and quirky companions.
From Austria’s Nightjet to the Caledonian Sleeper and the Santa Claus Express, Rajesh invites us on an adventure aboard the world’s most wondrous night trains. Along the way, she samples reindeer stew in Scandinavia, retraces the original route of the Orient Express, sips on pisco sours aboard the Andean Explorer, and watches the sun rise over the Potomac River on the Silver Meteor to New York.
A decade ago night trains were giving way to budget airlines and high-speed rail. But as people search for slower and more environmentally friendly ways to travel, night trains are in the midst of a renaissance. By turns romantic and hilarious, Moonlight Express brings us along for the ride and drops us back at the platform before sunrise.
Session Times:
- Tuesday 8 September 10:30 am – 11:30 am
OCTOBER 2026 fiction: Exit Party (Emily St. John Mandel)
The award-winning, bestselling author of Station Eleven and Sea of Tranquility returns with a breathtaking novel of doubles, shadow worlds, and fractured timelines as a man disappears from a glittering Los Angeles party, and a woman-a gunrunner, an art collector, an operative of the State-searches for answers.
Los Angeles, 2031: The first spring after the collapse of the United States, peacekeeping troops withdraw from the city, the Jacaranda trees blossom, and the curfew is finally lifted. Ari Waker and her roommate pass the gauntlet of bomb-sniffing dogs, the shanty towns, and the Red Cross tents as they walk across Silverlake to a party. The mood is ecstatic inside the apartment, people drink and dance, a woman wears a silver dress, pleated like tinfoil. And then: A shift. A bewildered twin, an uncanny doppelganger stumbles through the crowd and out into the night, and Kareem, the party’s host, vanishes into thin air.
As Ari Waker unravels the mystery of this inexplicable night, Emily St. John Mandel unfurls a story that takes us from a future America splintered by civil war to the seaside cliffs of Greece where weapons dealers hide in an elegant resort, and from the domed city of Paris to a colony on the moon. An unforgettable literary feat, Exit Party is a novel about the price of safety, the perils of the surveillance state, a requiem for a world not unlike our own, and a breathtaking story of resilience in the face of cataclysmic change.
Session Times:
- Tuesday 27 October 6:00 pm -7:00 pm
- Friday 30 October 10:30 am – 11:30 am
OCTOBER non-fiction: Holding Onto Happiness (Jim Rogers)
I understand there may come a day when I read these words and no longer recognise them as my own. But when that day arrives, I hope I still feel something within them. I hope I still recognise the love. Because this is not only a story about what can be taken from us. It is a story about what remains.
When Jim Rogers was diagnosed with Young-onset Alzheimer’s at just 55, it was another devastating blow to a family all too familiar with loss. But with the support of his husband and children, Jim refused to disappear. Instead, he became one of Australia’s most recognisable voices for people living with dementia, and those who love them.
Written with his daughter Millie, in Holding on to Happiness, Jim reflects on a life shaped by heartbreak and extraordinary devotion: from losing his adored wife and raising three young children through grief, to unexpectedly falling in love again and searching for meaning in the face of uncertainty.
Funny, tender and fiercely alive, Jim’s story will crack your heart open and leave it fuller than before. Much more than a memoir about dementia, this is a story about family, identity and resilience. Above all, it is a reminder that when we have the courage to keep our hearts open through life’s hardest moments, there is always happiness to be found.
Session Times:
- Tuesday 8 September 10:30 am – 11:30 am
NOVEMBER 2026 fiction: Partita (Barbara Kingsolver)
Here’s my question: How does a person step in front of a train and leave everything right there?
Livia Bohusz misses her big brother, Cyrus. But since the day he took his own life, a day that changed everything, eleven-year-old Livia has also known she has no choice but to survive. Her solace is music. A gifted pianist, Livia’s only escape is the quiet rapture it brings as she practices. The promise of a new life her talent might offer is intoxicating, a life away from the stifling silence that has enveloped the farm since Cyrus’ death.
When Livia starts college as a music major and scholarship prodigy, it feels as if a new life might begin. Immersing herself in her passions in a world where she excels, even as she struggles to fit in with more urbane classmates, she glimpses the possibilities of a life beyond the farm and her parents. Then one springtime, the smell of reviving grass and crocuses and the sounds of songbirds fill the air, and Livia catches a glimpse of shirt sleeves rolled to the elbow, muscles you wouldn’t miss in the rear view:
Who is that man?’
It is a question Livia may come to wish she had never asked.
Partita is Livia’s story: It is a tale of thwarted ambitions, accumulated pain, of newfound hope, unexpected love, and endless resilience. It is as compelling and profound as the pieces Livia has mastered, and as heart-rending and engrossing as the music that makes, breaks and mends her.
Session Times:
- Tuesday 24 November 6:00 pm -7:00 pm
- Friday 27 November 10:30 am – 11:30 am
NOVEMBER non-fiction: The Country Schoolmaster (Kate Grenville)
‘I stood there holding the hundred-year-old letter with a feeling that was familiar from other archives, other bulging files of dog-eared paper. It was a blood-running-fast, itchy-palm, eyes-wide-open feeling of stumbling on something. A story …’
Rummaging around in the Archives one afternoon, Kate Grenville comes across an innocuous-looking file full of letters about a schoolteacher in country New South Wales. Intrigued, she keeps reading – and discovers a tale far more curious and complex than first appears. Was Joseph Connor savagely beating the students in his care? Or was he the victim of a small-town vendetta? And what went so terribly wrong between him and his daughter?
Ultimately, Grenville simply has to know: was Connor a victim or a villain? Part colonial cold case, part locked-room mystery, part the dance of a writer’s imagination among facts and semi-facts, The Country Schoolmaster is a book like no other. In it, the novelist comes to understand the seductive pleasure of story-making, but also its dangerous limitations.
Session Times:
- Tuesday 10 November 10:30 am – 11:30 am

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