Apples Never Fall
Liane Moriarty

From the outside, the Delaneys appear to be an enviably contented family.

Even after all these years, former tennis coaches Joy and Stan are still winning tournaments, and now that they’ve sold the family business they have all the time in the world to learn how to ‘relax’. Their four adult children are busy living their own lives, and while it could be argued they never quite achieved their destinies, no-one ever says that out loud.

But now Joy Delaney has disappeared and her children are re-examining their parents’ marriage and their family history with fresh, frightened eyes. Is her disappearance related to their mysterious house guest from last year? Or were things never as rosy as they seemed in the Delaney household?

The Man Who Died Twice (#2 Thursday Murder Club)
Richard Osman

It’s the following Thursday, and Elizabeth has just had a visit from a man she thought was dead. It’s (one of) her ex-husbands, and he’s being hunted. His story involves some diamonds, some spies, and a very angry mobster.

Elizabeth puts it down to his normal grandstanding, but then the bodies start piling up. So she enlists Joyce, Ibrahim and Ron in the hunt for the killer. If they find the diamonds – well, that’s just a bonus…

But this time the murderer isn’t some small-time criminal, and it soon becomes terrifying clear that they wouldn’t bat an eyelid at killing four septuagenarians. Can our team find the killer before the killer finds them?

The second novel in the number one Sunday Times bestselling Thursday Murder Club series featuring the old (but far from past-it) team as they pursue a brand new mystery.

Beautiful World, Where Are You
Sally Rooney

Alice, a novelist, meets Felix, who works in a distribution warehouse, and asks him if he’d like to travel to Rome with her. In Dublin, her best friend Eileen is getting over a break-up, and slips back into flirting with Simon, a man she has known since childhood.

Alice, Felix, Eileen and Simon are still young-but life is catching up with them. They desire each other, they delude each other, they get together, they break apart. They have sex, they worry about sex, they worry about their friendships and the world they live in. Are they standing in the last lighted room before the darkness, bearing witness to something? Will they find a way to believe in a beautiful world?

Harlem Shuffle
Colson Whitehead

Ray Carney was only slightly bent when it came to being crooked…

To his customers and neighbours on 125th street, Carney is an upstanding salesman of reasonably-priced furniture, making a life for himself and his family. He and his wife Elizabeth are expecting their second child, and if her parents on Striver’s Row don’t approve of him or their cramped apartment across from the subway tracks, it’s still home.

Few people know he descends from a line of uptown hoods and crooks, and that his facade of normalcy has more than a few cracks in it. Cracks that are getting bigger and bigger all the time. See, cash is tight, especially with all those instalment plan sofas, so if his cousin Freddie occasionally drops off the odd ring or necklace at the furniture store, Ray doesn’t see the need to ask where it comes from. He knows a discreet jeweller downtown who also doesn’t ask questions.

Then Freddie falls in with a crew who plan to rob the Hotel Theresa – the ‘Waldorf of Harlem’ – and volunteers Ray’s services as the fence. The heist doesn’t go as planned; they rarely do, after all. Now Ray has to cater to a new clientele, one made up of shady cops on the take, vicious minions of the local crime lord, and numerous other Harlem lowlifes. Thus begins the internal tussle between Ray the striver and Ray the crook.

As Ray navigates this double life, he starts to see the truth about who actually pulls the strings in Harlem. Can Ray avoid getting killed, save his cousin, and grab his share of the big score, all while maintaining his reputation as the go-to source for all your quality home furniture needs? 

I Shot the Devil
Ruth McIver

I used to think that I’d escaped Southport . . . Now I realised, Southport had been coming for me all this time.

Erin Sloane was sixteen when high school senior Andre Villiers was murdered by his friends. They were her friends, too, led by the intense, charismatic Ricky Hell. Five people went into West Cypress Road Woods the night Andre was murdered. Only three came out. Ativan, alcohol and distance had dimmed Erin’s memories of that time.

But nearly twenty years later, an ageing father will bring her home. Now a journalist, she is asked to write a story about the Southport Three and the thrill-kill murder that mesmerised the country.

Erin’s investigation propels her closer and closer to a terrifying truth. And closer and closer to danger.

An unforgettable story of murder, trauma and childhoods lost, I Shot the Devil is a taut, page-turning debut novel from an electrifying new talent.

Modern Marriage
Filip Vukasin

Everything in Klara’s life is perfect, from her boutique cosmetic clinic to her svelte physique, her modern home in Melbourne’s coveted inner east to Dante, her adoring husband with movie-star good looks. If all goes to plan, she and Dante will soon have a perfect baby too.

Then one phone call shatters it all: Dante’s in a coma, after being discovered unconscious in a gay sauna. Suddenly Klara’s perfect life begins to spiral and her husband’s secrets threaten to disrupt everything she thought she knew about love, marriage and family.

From Australia’s most exciting new author, Modern Marriage reveals what lies beneath the veneer of perfection.

The Magician
Colm Toibin

When the Great War breaks out in 1914 Thomas Mann, like so many of his fellow countrymen, is fired up with patriotism. He imagines the Germany of great literature and music, which had drawn him away from the stifling, conservative town of his childhood, might be a source of pride once again. But his flawed vision will form the beginning of a dark and complex relationship with his homeland, and see the start of great conflict within his own brilliant and troubled family.

Colm Tóibín’s epic novel is the story of a man of intense contradictions. Although Thomas Mann becomes famous and admired, his inner life is hesitant, fearful and secretive. His blindness to impending disaster in the Great War will force him to rethink his relationship with Germany as Hitler comes to power. He has six children with his clever and fascinating wife, Katia, while his own secret desires appear threaded through his writing. He and Katia deal with exile bravely, doing everything possible to keep the family safe, yet they also suffer the terrible ravages of suicide among Thomas’s siblings, and their own children.

In The Magician, Colm Tóibín captures the profound personal conflict of a very public life, and through this life creates an intimate portrait of the twentieth century.

A Slow Fire Burning
Paula Hawkins

‘What is wrong with you?’

Laura has spent most of her life being judged. She’s seen as hot-tempered, troubled, a loner. Some even call her dangerous.

Miriam knows that just because Laura is witnessed leaving the scene of a horrific murder with blood on her clothes, that doesn’t mean she’s a killer. Bitter experience has taught her how easy it is to get caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Carla is reeling from the brutal murder of her nephew. She trusts no one- good people are capable of terrible deeds. But how far will she go to find peace?

Innocent or guilty, everyone is damaged. Some are damaged enough to kill.

Look what you started.

The Cat Who Saved Books
Sosuke Natsukawa

Release date: 16 September

Bookish high school student Rintaro Natsuki is about to close the secondhand bookshop he inherited from his beloved grandfather. Then, a talking cat named Tiger appears with an unusual request. The cat needs Rintaro’s help to save books that have been imprisoned, destroyed and unloved.

Their mission sends this odd couple on an amazing journey, where they enter different labyrinths to set books free. Through their travels, Tiger and Rintaro meet a man who locks up his books, an unwitting book torturer who cuts the pages of books into snippets to help people speed read, and a publisher who only wants to sell books like disposable products.

Then, finally, there is a mission that Rintaro must complete alone . . .

An enthralling tale of books, first love, fantasy, and an unusual friendship with a talking cat, The Cat Who Saved Books by Sosuke Natsukawa, translated by Louise Heal Kawai, is a story for those for whom books are so much more than words on paper.

Empire of the Vampire
Jay Kristoff

It has been twenty-seven long years since the last sunrise.

For nearly three decades, vampires have waged war against humanity; building their eternal empire even as they tear down our own. Now, only a few tiny sparks of light endure in a sea of darkness.

Gabriel de León, half man, half monster and last remaining silversaint – a sworn brother of the holy Silver Order dedicated to defending the realm from the creatures of the night – is all that stands between the world and its end.

Now imprisoned by the very monsters he vowed to destroy, the last silversaint is forced to tell his story. A story of legendary battles and forbidden love, of faith lost and friendships won, of the Wars of the Blood and the Forever King and the quest for humanity’s last remaining hope:

The Holy Grail.

Return to Berlin
Ellen Feldman

Young Meike Mosbach and her brother escape Berlin just before the horror of Kristallnacht, leaving their parents and little sister to follow them to America. But their family never arrives.

Haunted by their loss, Meike becomes Millie and graduates from college to work as a magazine journalist while David enlists in the army to work in intelligence. After the war, they both return to a shattered Berlin, hoping against hope to find their family.

Postwar Berlin is a wild west where drunken soldiers brawl, spies ply their trade and ‘werewolves’ – unrepentant Nazis – scheme to rise again. Consumed with rage at her former country, Millie’s job for the army rooting out Nazis from regaining a voice seems the perfect outlet. But her anger begins to thaw as she is faced with the daily reality of what the war has done to everyone, and the enigmatic Major Harry Sutton, who seems too eager to be fair to the Germans and far too perceptive about Millie.

In the rubble of postwar Berlin, Millie must come to terms with a devastating secret and find the courage to embrace love – and a new beginning.

Sweet Jimmy
Bryan Brown

It was a gentle knock. Agnes had been waiting for it. Hoping he would be on time. Such a lovely fella, she thought…
‘Come on through. Got a surprise for you,’ she said.
He had one for her too.

Phil and Sweet Jimmy are cousins. Phil grows orchids . . . spider orchids . . . learnt about them in the nick. Jimmy likes orchids, too, but there are other things he likes even more . . .

Trish Bennett didn’t like her life. Hadn’t liked it for a long time. Been on the streets. Bit of this for a bit of that. The ‘that’ wasn’t always nice. Then Ahmed found her.

Sam is a tea-leaf, a thief. Likes nickin. . . anything . . . always has . . . until the day he knocked off more than the Volvo.

Fell for the sexy and beautiful Sue May from Hong Kong, Frank Testy did. Silly old prick. What price for ego? A huge bloody price it turns out.

Taut and crackling with character, these gritty, raw and sometimes very funny stories from Australian great Bryan Brown are Aussie Noir at its best. Crime doesn’t discriminate . . . it can happen to anyone . . . it could happen to you . . . in any ordinary suburb . . . at any time.

The Banksia House Breakout
James Roxburgh

When Ruth Morris is moved into Banksia House by her workaholic son Michael, she is eighty-one years young, mourning her loss of independence, and missing her best friend Gladys terribly.

So when she learns Gladys is dying a state over in Brisbane, Ruth is determined to say goodbye. Enlisting the help of her fellow residents, Ruth makes a daring departure from Banksia House alongside renowned escape-artist Keith, and her formidable new friend Beryl.

The journey from Sydney is far from straightforward, featuring grimy hostels, hitchhiking, and a mild case of grand theft. This unlikely trio finds themselves on the trip of a lifetime, where new connections blossom amidst the chaos. But the clock is ticking and Gladys awaits – will they make it across the border in time?

In this joyous and captivating read, debut author James Roxburgh delivers a heartwarming tale that will have you cheering for Ruth from beginning to end.

The New Kingdom
Wilbur Smith

In the heart of Egypt
Under the watchful eye of the gods
A new power is rising

In the city of Lahun, Hui lives an enchanted life. The favoured son of a doting father, and ruler-in-waiting of the great city, his fate is set. But behind the beautiful facades a sinister evil is plotting. Craving power and embittered by jealousy, Hui’s stepmother, the great sorceress Isetnofret, and Hui’s own brother Qen, orchestrate the downfall of Hui’s father, condemning Hui and seizing power in the city.

Cast out and alone, Hui finds himself a captive of a skilled and powerful army of outlaws, the Hyksos. Determined to seek vengeance for the death of his father and rescue his sister, Ipwet, Hui swears his allegiance to these enemies of Egypt. Through them he learns the art of war, learning how to fight and becoming an envied charioteer.

But soon Hui finds himself in an even greater battle – one for the very heart of Egypt itself. As the pieces fall into place and the Gods themselves join the fray, Hui finds himself fighting alongside the Egyptian General Tanus and renowned Mage, Taita. Now Hui must choose his path – will he be a hero in the old world, or a master in a new kingdom?

Tenderness
Alison Macleod

D. H. Lawrence is dying. Exiled in the Mediterranean, he dreams of the past. There are the years early in his marriage during the war, where his desperation drives him to commit a terrible betrayal. And there is a woman in an Italian courtyard, her chestnut hair red with summer.

Jacqueline and her husband have already been marked out for greatness. Passing through New York, she slips into a hearing where a book, not a man, is brought to trial.

A young woman and a young man meet amid the restricted section of a famous library, and make love.

Scattered and blown by the winds of history, their stories are bound together, and brought before the jury. On both sides of the Atlantic, society is asking, and continues to ask: is it obscenity – or is it tenderness?

The Heron’s Cry (#2 Two Rivers)
Ann Cleeves

North Devon is enjoying a rare hot summer with tourists flocking to its coastline. Detective Matthew Venn is called out to a rural crime scene at the home of a group of artists. What he finds is an elaborately staged murder – Dr Nigel Yeo has been fatally stabbed with a shard of one of his glassblower daughter’s broken vases.

Dr Yeo seems an unlikely murder victim. He’s a good man, a public servant, beloved by his daughter. Matthew is unnerved though to find that she is a close friend of Jonathan, his husband. Then another body is found, killed in a similar way.

Matthew finds himself treading carefully through the lies that fester at the heart of his community and a case that is dangerously close to home. The Long Call and The Heron’s Cry are part of Ann Cleeves’ Two Rivers series and have been recently commissioned for ITV.

Snow Country
Sebastian Faulks

1914 – Young Anton Heideck has arrived in Vienna, eager to make his name as a journalist. While working part-time as a private tutor, he encounters Delphine, a woman who mixes startling candour with deep reserve. Entranced by the light of first love, Anton feels himself blessed. Until his country declares war on hers.

1927 – For Lena, life with a drunken mother in a small town has been impoverished and cold. She is convinced she can amount to nothing until a young lawyer, Rudolf Plischke, spirits her away to Vienna. But the capital proves unforgiving. Lena leaves her metropolitan dream behind to take a menial job at the snow-bound sanatorium, the Schloss Seeblick.

1933 – Still struggling to come terms with the loss of so many friends on the Eastern Front, Anton, now an established writer, is commissioned by a magazine to visit the mysterious Schloss Seeblick. In this place of healing, on the banks of a silvery lake, where the depths of human suffering and the chances of redemption are explored, two people will see each other as if for the first time.

Sweeping across Europe as it recovers from one war and hides its face from the coming of another, Snow Country is a landmark novel of exquisite yearnings, dreams of youth and the sanctity of hope. In elegant, shimmering prose, Sebastian Faulks has produced a work of timeless resonance.

The Women of Troy
Pat Barker

Troy has fallen and the Greek victors are primed to return home, loaded with spoils. All they need is a good wind to lift their sails.

But the wind does not come. The gods are offended – the body of Priam lies desecrated, unburied – and so the victors remain in uneasy limbo, camped in the shadow of the city they destroyed. The coalition that held them together begins to fray, as old feuds resurface and new suspicions fester.

Largely unnoticed by her squabbling captors, erstwhile queen Briseis remains in the Greek encampment. She forges alliances where she can – with young, rebellious Amina, with defiant, aged Hecuba, with Calchus, the disgraced priest – and she begins to see the path to revenge…

Sequel to critically acclaimed bestseller The Silence of the Girls, an extraordinary retelling of one of our greatest classical myths from one of best writers of war fiction.

The Housemate
Sarah Bailey

Three housemates. One dead, one missing and one accused of murder.

Dubbed the Housemate Homicide, it’s a mystery that has baffled Australians for almost a decade.

Melbourne-based journalist Olive Groves worked on the story as a junior reporter and became obsessed by the case. Now, nine years later, the missing housemate turns up dead on a remote property. Olive is once again assigned to the story, this time reluctantly paired with precocious millennial podcaster Cooper Ng.

As Oli and Cooper unearth new facts about the three housemates, a dark web of secrets is uncovered. The revelations catapult Oli back to the death of the first housemate, forcing her to confront past traumas and insecurities that have risen to the surface again.

What really happened between the three housemates that night? Will Oli’s relentless search for the murderer put her new family in danger? And could her suspicion that the truth lies closer to home threaten her happiness and even her sanity?

A riveting, provocative thriller from the bestselling author of The Dark Lake, Into the Night and Where the Dead Go.

The Silence of Scheherazade
Defne Suman

Set in the ancient city of Smyrna, this powerful novel follows the intertwining fates of four families as their peaceful city is ripped apart by the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire.

On an orange-tinted evening in September 1905, Scheherazade is born to an opium-dazed mother in the ancient city of Smyrna. At the very same moment, a dashing Indian spy arrives in the harbour with a secret mission from the British Empire. He sails in to golden-hued spires and minarets, scents of fig and sycamore, and the cries of street hawkers selling their wares. When he leaves, seventeen years later, it will be to the heavy smell of kerosene and smoke as the city, and its people, are engulfed in flames.

But let us not rush, for much will happen between then and now. Birth, death, romance, and grief are all to come as these peaceful, cosmopolitan streets are used as bargaining chips in the wake of the First World War. Told through the intertwining fates of a Levantine, a Greek, a Turkish, and an Armenian family, this unforgettable novel reveals a city, and a culture, now lost to time.

Corporate Hitler’s Pistol
Tom Keneally

How did Corporal Hitler’s Luger from the First World War end up being the weapon that killed an IRA turncoat in Kempsey, New South Wales, in 1933?

When an affluent Kempsey matron spots a young Aboriginal boy who bears an uncanny resemblance to her husband, not only does she scream for divorce, attempt to take control of the child’s future and upend her comfortable life, but the whole town seems drawn into chaos.

A hero of the First World War has a fit at the cinema and is taken to a psychiatric ward in Sydney, his Irish farmhand is murdered, and a gay piano-playing veteran, quietly a friend to many in town, is implicated.

Corporal Hitler’s Pistol speaks to the never-ending war that began with ‘the war to end all wars’. Rural communities have always been a melting pot and many are happy to accept a diverse bunch … as long as they don’t overstep. Set in a town he knows very well, in this novel Tom Keneally tells a compelling story of the interactions and relationships between black and white Australians in early twentieth-century Australia.

The Good Life
Hannah Moloney

For Hannah Moloney of Good Life Permaculture, a good life is one built around community and sustainability. In The Good Life, she shares inspiration and practical advice to help you live happily and sustainably.

From growing your own tea, to building a DIY water tank, making yoghurt and co-housing, with The Good Life you’ll gain the skills, self-reliance and confidence needed to engage meaningfully with your space, your food and your community. Whether you have a half-acre, a backyard, a tiny balcony or no balcony at all, there are tips and tricks to suit everyone.

Full of wisdom, hope and inspiration, The Good Life is your ultimate guide to improving your wellbeing and the wellbeing of those around you to create a better world for all.

Australia’s Game
Matthew Nicholson, Bob Stewart, Greg de Moore & Rob Hess

Release date: 29 September

Australia’s Game is the definitive history of Australian football, tracing the evolution of the game from its earliest, rudimentary forms – in the period preceding the first recorded game, in 1858 – to the totally professional game of the modern era.

The authors, all passionate about the history of Australian football, have provided readers with the fine detail of every important evolutionary point in the game’s development, in every state and territory. 

Australia’s Game also explores historical AFL issues including a deeper discussion on Australian women in the AFL as both supporters and players, as well as new evidence on the theory that the game was developed as an offshoot of an Aboriginal game.

The book traces the pathway to the national game, including forensic detail on how the Victorian Football League, on its knees in the eighties, with several clubs on the verge of bankruptcy, made the bold step to creating the monolithic national League.

Signs and Wisdom
Delia Falconer

Release date: 29 September

In Signs and Wonders, Falconer explores how it feels to live as a reader, a writer, a lover of nature and a mother of small children in an era of profound ecological change.

Building on Falconer’s two acclaimed essays, ‘Signs and Wonders’ and the Walkley Award-winning ‘The Opposite of Glamour’, Signs and Wonders is a pioneering examination of how we are changing our culture, language and imaginations along with our climate. Is a mammoth emerging from the permafrost beautiful or terrifying? How is our imagination affected when something that used to be ordinary – like a car windscreen smeared with insects – becomes unimaginable? What can the disappearance of the paragraph from much contemporary writing tell us about what’s happening in the modern mind?

Scientists write about a ‘great acceleration’ in human impact on the natural world. Signs and Wonders shows that we are also in a period of profound cultural acceleration, which is just as dynamic, strange, extreme and, sometimes, beautiful. Ranging from an ‘unnatural’ history of coal to the effect of a large fur seal turning up in the park below her apartment, this book is a searching and poetic examination of the ways we are thinking about how, and why, to live now.

Beautifully observed, brilliantly argued and deeply felt, these essays show that our emotions, our art, our relationships with the generations around us – all the delicate networks that make us who we are – have already been transformed.

Lies, Damned Lies
Claire G. Coleman

This is a difficult piece to write. It cuts closer to the bone than most of what I have written; closer to my bones, through my blood and flesh to the bones of truth and country; there is truth here, not disguised but in the open and that truth hurts.

In Lies, Damned Lies acclaimed author Claire G. Coleman, a proud Noongar woman, takes the reader on a journey through the past, present and future of Australia, lensed through her own experience. Beautifully written, this literary work blends the personal with the political, offering readers an insight into the stark reality of the ongoing trauma of Australia’s violent colonisation.

Colonisation in Australia is not over. Colonisation is a process, not an event – and the after-effects will continue while there are still people to remember it.

A deeply personal exploration of Australia’s colonisation past, present and future by one of Australia’s finest contemporary authors

Into the Rip
Damien Cave

Release date: 29 September

When Damien Cave brought his young family to Sydney to set up the New York Times’ Australian Bureau, they encountered the local pursuits of Nippers and surfing – and a completely different approach to risk that changed the way they lived their lives.

Damien Cave has always been fascinated by risk. Having covered the war in Iraq and moved to Mexico City with two babies in nappies, he and his wife Diana thought they understood something about the subject.

But when they arrived in Sydney so that Cave could establish The New York Times‘s Australia Bureau, life near the ocean confronted them with new ideas and questions, at odds with their American mindset that risk was a matter of individual choices. Surf-lifesaving and Nippers showed that perhaps it could be managed together, by communities. And instead of being either eliminated or romanticised, it might instead be respected and even embraced.

And so Cave set out to understand how our current attitude to risk developed – and why it’s not necessarily good for us.

Into the Rip is partly the story of this New York family learning to live better by living with the sea and it is partly the story of how humans manage the idea of risk. Interviewing experts and everyday heroes, Cave asks critical questions like: Is safety overrated? Why do we miscalculate risk so often and how can we improve? Is it selfish to take risks or can more exposure make for stronger families, citizens and nations? And how do we factor in legitimate fears and major disasters like Cave has covered in his time here: the Black Summer fires; the Christchurch massacre; and, of course, Covid?

The result is Grit meets Phosphorescence and Any Ordinary Day – a book that will change the way you and your family think about facing the world’s hazards.

Accidental Prime Minister
Annika Smethurst

‘Critics have repeatedly underestimated Morrison’s political skill and overplayed the impact of his missteps. But Morrison seems to understand, more than most, what gets through to mainstream Australians and what they ignore.’

Nine months after the spill that catapulted Scott Morrison to the top job, he won the 2019 election, surprising politicians and pundits throughout the nation. Yet, little was really known about the former marketing man whose hard-nosed political instincts and ‘daggy dad’ persona took him all the way to Kirribilli House.

A devout Christian family man on one hand, ambitious and poll-obsessed on the other, the seemingly blunder-prone Morrison has surpassed expectations of his tenure and voter popularity more than once, making him one of Australia’s most underestimated modern political figures.

In this first biography of the thirtieth prime minister of Australia, multi-award-winning political journalist Annika Smethurst examines the fundamental question about Morrison: is his success a case of being in the right place at the right time, or is he one of the most strategic and shrewd political operators to ever hold the office?

Chance
Andrew Rule

If you want to bet on numbers, go to a casino. If you want theatre, go to the races.’ – Les Carlyon

All his life, Andrew Rule has watched racing’s heroes and villains, dreamers and schemers. In Chance, he distils the daring, the desperation and danger of the track, peeling back some of racing’s most famous and infamous moments, its celebrations and its secrets, the grittiness behind the glitz.

There are stories of those who set the odds and those who take them, betting plunges planned more carefully than bank robberies, of tricky trainers, reckless jockeys and bold bookmakers.

Tough and sometimes tender, dark and sometimes funny, Chance transcends the industry they call the sport of kings to provide an insider’s account of the characters, triumphs and scandals that have propagated the grand spectacle of Australian horseracing.

Ten Thousand Aftershocks
Michelle Tom

After Michelle Tom’s house was damaged by a deadly magnitude 6.3 earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2011, she and her young family suffered through another 10,000 aftershocks before finally relocating to the stability of Melbourne, Australia. But soon after arriving, Michelle received the news that her estranged sister was dying. Determined to reconnect before her sister died, Michelle flew home to visit, and memories of childhood flooded back.

Told through the five stages of an earthquake via remembered fragments, Michelle Tom explores the similarities between seismic upheaval and her own family’s tragedies: her sister’s terminal illness, her brother’s struggle with schizophrenia and ultimate suicide, the sudden death of her father, her own panic disorder and, through it all, one overarching battle – her lifelong struggle to form a healthy connection with her mother.

A powerful, poetic and moving memoir of family, violence and estrangement, Ten Thousand Aftershocks weaves together a series of ever-widening and far-reaching emotional and seismic aftershocks, in a beautifully written and compelling account of a dark family drama. For readers of The Erratics and One Hundred Years of Dirt.

The CSIRO Gut Care Guide
Michael Conlon, Pennie Taylor, Dr Cuong Tran and Megan Rebuli

We know that the gut – in particular, our gut microbiome – plays a crucial role in our wellbeing, helping to maintain the health of our immune system, brain and metabolism. Eating the right types of foods, especially those high in dietary fibre and resistant starch, can support a healthy population of gut microbes and benefit our overall health.

In this follow-up to the bestselling Healthy Gut Diet, leading CSIRO research scientists and dieticians share the latest findings on gut health, including:

• the essential role of fibre in creating a diverse and resilient gut microbiome;

• how the gut barrier and microbiome changes as we travel through life;

• the influence of gut microbes on the rest of our body, including our mood; and

• the potential benefits of probiotics, prebiotics and fermented foods.

Also included are go-to lists of good fibre choices for your pantry, fridge and freezer; simple tips and sample meal plans; and 60 delicious fibre-fuelled recipes, including Banana nut granola, Crispy chilli eggs, Golden fish tacos and Sumac chicken with tahini yoghurt – all designed to deliver a range of different fibres and nutrients to boost your gut health.

The Great Forest: The Rare Beauty of Victorian Central Highlands
Chris Taylor

The city of Melbourne lies on the edge of a vast plain surrounded by a green and blue mountainous rim, whose hills and peaks are home to the magnificent Mountain Ash, the tallest flowering plant on the planet. The Mountain Ash forests were 20 million years in the making, and deep within the valleys are even more ancient, Gondwanic rainforests. The Great Forest showcases these forests as well as the world’s tallest moss, breathtaking snow gum plateaus and the remnants of massive extinct volcanoes.

The Great Forest is a tribute to extraordinary landscapes now under severe threat from logging and wildfires, such as the catastrophic fire that struck on Black Saturday in 2009. It uncovers the intricate webs of life that make Mountain Ash forests so much more than their towering trees. It explores the unique forests that have sustained the Gunaikurnai, Taungurung and Wurundjeri peoples for tens of thousands of years, and that provide a home for creatures found almost nowhere else. The exquisite photographs reveal the Central Highlands of Victoria to be one of Australia’s largely undiscovered natural treasures.

Daring to Fly
Lisa Millar

Lisa Millar has spent her whole life showing up, getting things done and making things happen. As a child growing up in country Queensland, she dreamed of a big life. Working as a foreign correspondent gave her that, but it also meant confronting the worst that humanity can bring. Three decades as a journalist witnessing tragedy had a cost. And an ever-escalating fear of
flying threatened to rob her of her ability to work at all.

For that young girl from small-town Kilkivan, who had to push herself to keep going, push herself to conquer fear, push herself to tell important stories, finally came the realisation that sometimes all we really need is what we already have. And she shows us that we are all stronger and more resilient than we give ourselves credit for if we just dare to let ourselves fly.

The Brumby Wars
Anthony Sharwood

It’s not just a war over horses. It’s a battle for the soul of Australia.

This is a book about the intense culture war raging around Australia’s wild horses, known as brumbies. It pits a vision of the legendary Man from Snowy River and the iconic ANZAC Light Horse against the spectre of ecosystems destroyed by feral pests. The debate involves powerful politicians and media commentators, and stars an animal mythologised in Australian poetry and prose. But in essence, this is about us. The Brumby Wars is about Australians at war with each other over their vision of an ideal Australia.

To ecologists and people who ski, walk and fish in the High Country and other areas where the brumbies proliferate, they are a feral menace which must be removed to save delicate alpine landscapes. To the descendants of cattle families and many Australians in urban and regional areas, brumbies are untouchable, a symbol of wildness and freedom.

Something has to give. But what? The land or the horses? This war is set to escalate dramatically before we have an answer. Featuring interviews with characters from all sides of the debate, The Brumby Wars is the riveting account of a major national issue and the very human passions it inspires. It is also a journey, a quest to understand what makes us tick in our increasingly polarised country.

Rogue Forces
Mark Willacy

Rogue Forces is the explosive first insiders’ story of how some of Australia’s revered SAS soldiers crossed the line in Afghanistan, descending from elite warriors to unlawful killers.

Mark Willacy, who won a Gold Walkley for exposing SAS war crimes, has penetrated the SAS code of silence to reveal one of the darkest chapters in our country’s military history.

Willacy’s devastating award-winning Four Corners program, ‘Killing Fields’ captured on film for the first time a war crime perpetrated by an Australian: the killing of a terrified, unarmed Afghan man in a field by an SAS soldier. It caused shockwaves around the world and resulted in an Australian Federal Police war crimes investigation. It also sparked a new line of investigation by the Brereton inquiry, the independent Australian Defence Force inquiry into war crimes in Afghanistan. It was a game changer.

But for Willacy, it was just the beginning of a much bigger story. More SAS soldiers came forward with undeniable evidence and eyewitness testimony of other unlawful killings, and exposed a culture of brutality and impunity.

Rogue Forces takes you out on the patrols where the killings happened. The result is a gripping character-driven story that embeds you on the front line in the thick of the action as those soldiers share for the first time what they witnessed. Willacy also confronts those accused about their sides of the story.

At its heart, Rogue Forces is a story about the true heroes who had the courage to come forward and expose the truth.

This is their story. A story that had to be told.

The Yes Woman
Grace Jennings-Enquist

In a world that teaches girls to become Yes Women, learning to say ‘no’ is a radical feat.

For most of her life, Australian journalist Grace Jennings-Enquist had been keen to please. From school to career, in her appearance, friendships, and even everyday interactions, she was always anxious not to disappoint. Becoming a mother finally tipped her over the edge, and she wound up in a mental-health unit. Her attempts to be everything to everyone – and to do it all perfectly – had taken their toll.

Grace could no longer avoid the truth: she was chronically addicted to saying yes. And she was not alone. Grace discovered that, in a phenomenon that crosses class, culture and sexuality, Yes Women are everywhere, and there’s a bit of Yes Woman in just about everyone.

Interviewing scores of people in Australia and overseas, both ordinary women and experts, Grace gained a deeper understanding of the patriarchal origins of the Yes Woman, and developed a plan to seize control of her own life. The Yes Woman is a practical guide to recognising your own Yes Woman tendencies, measuring their cost on your health, and resisting that need to please. It won’t be easy, but it’ll be worth it.

Dear Son
Thomas Mayor

Dear Son shares heartfelt letters written by First Nations men about life, masculinity, love, culture and racism. Along with his own vivid and poignant prose and poetry, author and editor Thomas Mayor invites 12 contributors to write a letter to their son or father, bringing together a range of perspectives that offers the greatest celebration of First Nations manhood.

This beautifully designed anthology comes at a time when First Nations peoples are starting to break free of derogatory stereotypes and find solace in their communities and cultures. Yet, each contributor also has one thing in common: they all have a relative who has been terribly wronged – enslaved, raped and dispossessed – because of their Aboriginality. 

Featuring letters from Stan Grant, Troy Cassar-Daley, John Liddle, Charlie King, Joe Williams, Yessie Mosby, Joel Bayliss, Daniel James, Jack Latimore, Daniel Morrison, Tim Sculthorpe and Blak Douglas.

A gentle and loving book for families from anywhere in the world. Artwork by proud Kaurna/Ngarrindjeri/Narrunga/Italian Australian artist Tony Wilson, with illustrations and design by Gamilaraay designer Tristan Schultz of Relative Creative.

The Nazis Knew My Name
Magda Hellinga and Maya Lee

In March 1942, twenty-five-year-old kindergarten teacher Magda Hellinger and nearly a thousand other young Slovakian women were deported to Poland on the second transportation of Jewish people sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp. The women were told they’d be working at a shoe factory.

At Auschwitz the SS soon discovered that by putting Jewish prisoners in charge of the day-to-day running of the accommodation blocks, camp administration and workforces, they could both reduce the number of guards required and deflect the distrust of the prisoner population away from themselves. Magda was one such prisoner selected for leadership and over three years served in many prisoner leader roles, from room leader, to block leader – at one time in charge of the notorious Experimental Block 10 where reproductive experiments were performed on hundreds of women – and eventually camp leader, responsible for 30,000 women.

She found herself constantly walking a dangerously fine line: using every possible opportunity to save lives while avoiding suspicion by the SS, and risking torture or execution. Through her bold intelligence, sheer audacity, inner strength and shrewd survival instincts, she was able to rise above the horror and cruelty of the camps and build pivotal relationships with the women under her watch, and even some of Auschwitz’s most notorious Nazi senior officers including the Commandant, Josef Kramer.

Based on Magda’s personal account and completed by her daughter Maya’s extensive research, including testimonies from fellow Auschwitz survivors, this awe-inspiring tale offers us incredible insight into human nature, the power of resilience, and the goodness that can shine through even in the most horrific of conditions.

Blueprint
Ross Edgley

Ross Edgley has spent decades perfecting the principles and practice of extreme fitness to achieve the impossible. Following a career-threatening injury in 2018, Ross was forced to reassess his training and take the next steps in a lifelong journey of redefining what the human body is capable of.

In Blueprint, Ross shares the cutting-edge training program that empowered him to rebuild his body from surgery and a doctor’s gloomy prognosis in just 365 days to complete a world record swim.

Whether it’s climbing a mountain, swimming the English Channel, or a gruelling triathlon, Blueprint will teach you the tried and tested principles of sports science that have been used for decades by Olympians, explorers and adventurers at the limits of peak physical endurance.

Blueprint is Ross Edgley’s complete training journey that shows you how to:

• Divide a 365-day training plan into seasons (winter, spring, summer and autumn);

• Rebuild your body using evolutionary medicine;

• Build a superhuman work capacity with forgotten Spartan-style training;

• Gain bulletproof resilience through Soviet-inspired strength training;

• Boost your aerobic base with Olympian techniques.

Blueprint applies the exact same principles that enabled Ross to complete extreme feats such as the World’s Longest Sea Swim, World’s Longest Rope Climb, World’s Heaviest Triathlon and World’s Strongest Marathon.

Ross is your elite guide to achieving the impossible in the gym and beyond. Featuring almost 30 tailored workouts for different phases of training, packed with digestible sports science to help you optimise your workouts, and interspersed with Ross’ own daring adventures across the world, Blueprint is the ultimate guide to optimising your time and training to make the impossible possible.

Big Panda and Tiny Dragon
James Nordbury

Friends Big Panda and Tiny Dragon journey through the seasons of the year together, day and night, in rain and in sun. Travelling through nature, they find hope and inspiration in the world around them, realising that even in the darkest of days, Spring will always return.

Feel the calming influence of Big Panda, who reminds us of the bigger picture while appreciating the simplicity of small moments.

Explore your surroundings with the inquisitive eye of Tiny Dragon, our friend who is big in heart if not in stature.

And on their journey through the ever-changing seasons, join these two friends as they learn how to live in the moment, be at peace with uncertainty, and find the strength to overcome life’s obstacles, together.

Inspired by Buddhist philosophy and spirituality, James Norbury has captured in these whimsical characters the ideas that have helped him through his most difficult times.

The Silence Between Us
Oceane Campbell with Cecile Barral

The Silence Between Us is a raw and original double memoir tracing a mother and daughter as they try to understand and rebuild their relationship after the daughter’s suicide attempt.

Because Oceane had just turned eighteen when she tried to end her life, the hospital had to respect her request: to not notify her parents. Years later, when Oceane asked her mother, Cécile, to write something together about this period of their lives, she never expected that Cécile would already have so many pages hidden away, filled with words that she began to write when she eventually learned of Oceane’s suicide attempt.

In The Silence Between Us, Oceane pieces together her story through old diary entries, emails, hospital records and psychiatric reports, interspersed with Cécile’s own intense account of caring for her fiercely independent daughter. Slowly we learn about the intergenerational trauma that forced the chasm between Oceane and Cécile, as well as the campus sexual assault that pushed Oceane over the edge. As Oceane lets Cécile back into her life and they attempt to negotiate both the mental health and legal systems, we also see the fractures start to mend.

At once delicate and unflinching, The Silence Between Us dares to say all the things we’d rather avoid when it comes to mental health, women’s voices and family relationships.

Includes foreword by psychiatrist Pat McGorry AO, professor of youth mental health and former Australian of the Year.

Yates Garden Guide
Fully Revised Australia New Zealand Edition

This new edition of the Yates Garden Guide has been fully revised and updated to help today’s gardeners tame big backyards, create stylish retreats, tend productive and decorative plantings, and get the most out of smaller spaces.

With chapters on planning gardens, choosing feature plants and growing trees, shrubs, fruit, vegetables, flowers, indoor plants and lawns, the new Yates Garden Guide provides details on more than 1000 exotic and native plants, advice on soils, climate, planting, feeding and maintaining gardens, guides on what to sow and grow throughout the year, and comprehensive problem-solving charts to help you identify and deal with all kinds of pests and diseases.

My Friend Fox
Heidi Everett

The fox sits on the outer waiting for me to discover him because at the moment, I am on the outer too. He watches me. Can you see him? He’s clever at hiding.

Just like fox, Heidi has lived on the outer. The ”official record” of her life has been her mental health record: Primary diagnosis – Schizoaffective; Comorbidity – Major depression, juvenile autism, and not her own memories. This is the living, breathing version of Heidi’s mental health file that psych wards, doctors, mental health staff or rehab workers know little about or worse, use as evidence of diagnoses. This is Heidi’s account of what happened, shadowed by the story of a fox who knows he’ll never belong. 

Part parable, part memoir, My Friend Fox  is a story that might be familiar to some – searching everywhere to finally feel at home. With fox as her guide, Heidi comes to know how to live authentically, and venture into a future of her own making.

A literary memoir about the the wonder, the humour, and the realities that exist beyond what is printed in a mental health file. Alongside Heidi’s beautifully lyrical words are her exquisite line drawings, making My Friend Fox a book to be read, treasured, and gifted.

Work Love Body
Edited by Helen McCabe and Jamila Rizvi

In 2020, the lives of Australian women changed irrevocably. With insight, intelligence and empathy, Jane Gilmore, Santilla Chingaipe and Emily J. Brooks explore this through the lenses of work, love and body, and ask: Will the Australia of tomorrow be more equal than the one we were born into? Or will women and girls remain left behind?

While our country was shrouded in smoke in the early months of 2020, Australian women went about their daily business. They worked, studied, cleaned, did school runs, made meals. And they postponed looking after themselves because life got in the way.

Then, in March, Australians were told to lock down. For all the talk of equality, it was primarily women who held the health of our communities in their hands as they took on the essential jobs to care, to nurse and to teach, despite an invisible danger. One year later, women across the country would march on behalf of those who were not safe in workplaces and their own homes.

Never before has change been thrust so abruptly on modern Australian women – 2020 impacted our working lives, relationships and our health and wellbeing. And as a growing number of women agitate for change, it is time to demand what women want. So where do we go from here?

One thing is very clear: the future is now, and it is female.

This Much is True
Miriam Margolyes

BAFTA-winning actor, voice of everything from Monkey to the Cadbury’s Caramel Rabbit, creator of a myriad of unforgettable characters from Lady Whiteadder to Professor Sprout, Miriam Margolyes, OBE, is the nation’s favourite (and naughtiest) treasure. Now, at the age of 80, she has finally decided to tell her extraordinary life story – and it’s well worth the wait.

Find out how being conceived in an air-raid gave her curly hair; what pranks led to her being known as the naughtiest girl Oxford High School ever had; how she ended up posing nude for Augustus John as a teenager; why Bob Monkhouse was the best (male) kiss she’s ever had; and what happened next after Warren Beatty asked ‘Do you fuck?’

From declaring her love to Vanessa Redgrave to being told to be quiet by the Queen, this book is packed with brilliant, hilarious stories. With a cast list stretching from Scorsese to Streisand, a cross-dressing Leonardo di Caprio to Isaiah Berlin, This Much Is True is as warm and honest, as full of life and surprises, as its inimitable author.

Puff Piece
John Safran

The folks that bring you Marlboro – Philip Morris – are wheezing, slowly dying. Cigarettes are out of favour with everyone, from world governments and investors to, increasingly, smokers. So, what’s their plan?

Prepare to be dazzled. Or, at the very least, befuddled.

Philip Morris has announced they will shut down as a cigarette company, and relaunch as a health enterprise, dedicated to convincing the one billion smokers of the world to quit.

The ever-curious John Safran leaves his apartment to find out what on God’s green earth is going on. As he starts digging away he discovers a company up to brand new shenanigans, wangling their way into unexpected places, desperately trying to keep their tobacco business alive by brandishing a mysterious new doohickey called an IQOS.

And not only that, now they’re upending language itself, changing the meaning of words. Will they slip past bans by convincing governments they don’t sell ‘cigarettes’ but rather ‘HeatSticks’, and that these don’t emit ‘smoke’ but ‘aerosol’? Can John get the real story out of them without his life catching fire?

Wild, hilarious and thought-provoking, Puff Piece is a probing look into Big Tobacco and the vaping industry, and how words can be literally a matter of life and death.

The Dressmakers of Auschwitz
Lucy Adlington

The powerful chronicle of the women who used their sewing skills to survive the Holocaust, stitching beautiful clothes at an extraordinary fashion workshop created within one of the most notorious WWII death camps.

At the height of the Holocaust twenty-five young inmates of the infamous Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp – mainly Jewish women and girls – were selected to design, cut, and sew beautiful fashions for elite Nazi women in a dedicated salon. It was work that they hoped would spare them from the gas chambers.

This fashion workshop – called the Upper Tailoring Studio – was established by Hedwig Hoss, the camp commandant’s wife, and patronized by the wives of SS guards and officers. Here, the dressmakers produced high-quality garments for SS social functions in Auschwitz, and for ladies from Nazi Berlin’s upper crust.

Drawing on diverse sources – including interviews with the last surviving seamstress The Dressmakers of Auschwitz follows the fates of these brave women. Their bonds of family and friendship not only helped them endure persecution, but also to play their part in camp resistance. Weaving the dressmakers’ remarkable experiences within the context of Nazi policies for plunder and exploitation, historian Lucy Adlington exposes the greed, cruelty, and hypocrisy of the Third Reich and offers a fresh look at a little-known chapter of World War II and the Holocaust.

Larrikin: Myth, Masculinity and Politics (Quarterly Essay 83)
Lech Blaine

Who can be a larrikin and how is it used politically?

What makes a top bloke? Does the myth of the larrikin still hold sway? And whatever happened to class in Australia?

In this perceptive and often hilarious essay, Lech Blaine dissects some top blokes, with particular focus on Scott Morrison and Anthony Albanese, but stretching back to Bob Hawke and Kerry Packer. This is a riveting narrative of how image conquered politics, just as globalisation engulfed the Australian economy. While many got rich and entertained, look where we ended up.

Blaine shows how first Howard, then Morrison, brought a cohort of voters over to the Coalition side, “flipping” what was once working-class Labor culture. He weaves in his own experiences as he explores the persona of the Aussie larrikin. What are its hidden contradictions – can a larrikin be female, Indigenous or Muslim, say? – and how has it been transformed by an age of affluence? He makes the case that the time has come to bury a myth and for the nation to seize a new reality.

The Fran Lebowitz Reader
Fran Lebowitz

Lebowitz turns her trademark caustic wit to the vicissitudes of life – from children (‘rarely in the position to lend one a truly interesting sum of money’) to landlords (‘it is the solemn duty of every landlord to maintain an adequate supply of roaches’). And her attitude to work is the perfect antidote to our exhausting culture of self-betterment (‘3.40pm. I consider getting out of bed. I reject the notion as being unduly vigorous. I read and smoke a bit more’).

‘Great people talk about ideas, average people talk about things and small people talk about wine’
‘Think before you speak. Read before you think’
‘All God’s children are not beautiful. Most of God’s children are, in fact, barely presentable’
‘There is no such thing as inner peace. There is only nervousness and death’
‘The opposite of talking isn’t listening. The opposite of talking is waiting’

Acerbic, wisecracking and hilarious, this is the definitive essay collection from New York legend and satirist, Fran Lebowitz.

Mortals: How the Fear of Death Shaped Human Society
Rachel Menzies and Ross Menzies

The human mind can grapple with the future, visualising and calculating solutions to complex problems, giving us tremendous advantages over other species throughout our evolution. However, this capability comes with a curse. By five to ten years of age, all humans know where they are heading: to the grave.

In Mortals, Rachel Menzies and Ross Menzies, both acclaimed psychologists whose life’s work has focused on death anxiety, examine all the major human responses to death across history. From the development of religious systems denying the finality of death, to ‘immortality projects’ involving enduring art, architecture and literature, some of the consequences of our fear of death have been glorious while others have been destructive, leading to global conflicts and genocide.

Looking forward, Mortals hypothesises that worse could be to come – our unconscious dread of death has led to rampant consumerism and overpopulation, driving the global warming and pandemic crises that now threaten our very existence. In a terrible irony, Homo sapiens may ultimately be destroyed by our knowledge of our own mortality.

Our Sunburnt Country
Anika Molesworth

Anika Molesworth fell in love with her family’s farm, a sheep station near Broken Hill, at an early age. She formed a bond with the land as though it were a member of her family. When the Millennium Drought hit, though, bringing with it heatwaves and duststorms, the future she’d always imagined for herself began to seem impossible.

As she learned more about the causes of – and the solutions to – the extreme weather that was killing her land and her livelihood, Anika became fired up and determined to speak out. Talking to farmers and food producers all around the world, she soon realised that there was a way forward that could be both practical and sustainable – if only we can build up the courage to take it.

Beautifully written and full of hope, Our Sunburnt Country shows that there is a way to protect our land, our food and our future, and it is within our grasp.

The Everyday Hero Manifesto
Robin Sharma

Aim for Iconic
Rise to Legendary
Make History

For over twenty-five years, leadership legend and personal mastery trailblazer Robin Sharma has mentored billionaires, business titans, professional sports superstars and entertainment royalty via a revolutionary methodology that has caused them to accomplish rare-air results. Now, in this groundbreaking book, he makes this transformational system available to anyone ready for undefeatable positivity, monumental productivity, deep spiritual freedom and a life of helpfulness to many.

In The Everyday Hero Manifesto you will discover:

• The hidden habits used by many of the world’s most creative and successful people to realize their visionary ambitions;
• Original techniques to turn fear into fuel, problems into power and past troubles into triumphs;
• A breakthrough blueprint to battle-proof yourself against distraction and procrastination so that you produce magic that dominates your domain;
• Pioneering insights on installing world-class routines, including rising early, achieving superhuman fitness and becoming the most disciplined person you know; and
• Unusual wisdom knowledge to operate with far more simplicity, beauty and peace.

Part memoir on a life richly lived, part instruction manual for virtuoso-grade performance and part handbook for spiritual freedom in an age of high-velocity change, The Everyday Hero Manifesto will completely transform your life. Forever.

Together: Memorable Meals, Made Easy
Jamie Oliver

Being with our loved ones has never felt so important, and great food is the perfect excuse to get together. Each chapter features a meal – from Curry Night to Last-Minute Feast, Garden Lunch to Autumnal Fare – with a simple, achievable menu that can be mostly prepped ahead.

Jamie’s aim – whether you’re following the full meal or choosing just one of over 120 individual recipes – is to minimise your time in the kitchen so you can maximise the time you spend with your guests.

Jamie’s Together also helps to take the stress out of cooking by arming you with tips, tricks and hacks to stay organised and get ahead of the game.

Inspirational but practical, Together is about comfort, celebration, creating new memories and, above all, sharing fantastic food. This is about memorable meals, made easy. Let’s tuck in – together!

Once There Were Wolves
Charlotte McConaghy

Release date: 3 August 2021

Inti Flynn arrives in Scotland with her twin sister, Aggie, to lead a team tasked with reintroducing fourteen grey wolves into the remote Highlands. She hopes to heal not only the dying landscape, but a broken Aggie, too. However, Inti is not the woman she once was, and may be in need of rewilding herself.

Despite fierce opposition from the locals, Inti’s wolves surprise everyone by thriving, and she begins to let her guard down, even opening up to the possibility of love. But when a local farmer is found dead, Inti knows where the town will lay blame. Unable to accept her wolves could be responsible, she makes a reckless decision to protect them, testing every instinct she has.

But if her wolves didn’t make the kill, then who did? And what will she do when the man she’s been seeing becomes the main suspect?

Propulsive and spellbinding, Once There Were Wolves is the unforgettable tale of a woman desperate to save the creatures she loves. Part thriller, part redemptive love story, Charlotte McConaghy’s profoundly affecting novel will stay with you forever.

Geiger
Gustaf Skoerdeman

Release date: 2 July 2021

The landline rings as Agneta is waving off her grandchildren. Just one word comes out of the receiver: ‘Geiger’. For decades, Agneta has always known that this moment would come, but she is shaken. She knows what it means.

Retrieving her weapon from its hiding place, she attaches the silencer and creeps up behind her husband before pressing the barrel to his temple.

Then she squeezes the trigger and disappears – leaving behind her wallet and keys.

The extraordinary murder is not Sara Nowak’s case. But she was once close to those affected and, defying regulations, she joins the investigation. What Sara doesn’t know is that the mysterious codeword is just the first piece in the puzzle of an intricate and devastating plot fifty years in the making.

The Island of Missing Trees
Elif Shafak

Release date: 3 August 2021

Two teenagers, a Greek Cypriot and a Turkish Cypriot, meet at a taverna on the island they both call home. The taverna is the only place that Kostas and Defne can meet in secret, hidden beneath the blackened beams from which hang garlands of garlic and chilli peppers, creeping honeysuckle, and in the centre, growing through a cavity in the roof, a fig tree. The fig tree witnesses their hushed, happy meetings; their silent, surreptitious departures. The fig tree is there, too, when war breaks out, when the capital is reduced to ashes and rubble, when the teenagers vanish. Decades later, Kostas returns – a botanist, looking for native species – looking, really, for Defne. The two lovers return to the taverna to take a clipping from the fig tree and smuggle it into their suitcase, bound for London. Years later, the fig tree in the garden is their daughter Ada’s only knowledge of a home she has never visited, as she seeks to untangle years of secrets and silence, and find her place in the world.

The Island of Missing Trees is a rich, magical tale of belonging and identity, memory and trauma, nature and renewal, from the Booker-shortlisted author of 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World.

The Last Guests
JP Pomare

Release date: 28 July 2021

Ever have the feeling you’re being watched?

Lina and Cain are doing their best to stay afloat. Money has been tight since Cain returned from active duty, and starting a family is proving harder than they thought. Putting Lina’s inherited lake house up for rent at weekends seems like the solution to at least one of their problems. The secluded house is more of a burden than a retreat, anyway, and fixing up the old place makes Cain feel useful for once. But letting strangers stay in their house might not be the best idea. Someone is watching – their most mundane tasks, their most intimate moments – and all the things Lina and Cain want to keep hidden will be exposed.

A smart, unsettling, unputdownable literary thriller from the award-winning, critically acclaimed writer of Call Me Evie, In the Clearing and Tell Me Lies.

The Bride of the Almond Tree
Robert Hillman

Release date: 2 July 2021

World War II is over and Hiroshima lies in a heap of poisoned rubble when young Quaker Wesley Cunningham returns home to Almond Tree. He served as a stretcher-bearer; he’s seen his fair share of horror. Now he intends to build beautiful houses and to marry, having fallen in love with his neighbour’s daughter Beth Hardy.

Beth has other plans. An ardent socialist, she is convinced the Party and Stalin’s Soviet Union hold the answers to all the world’s evils. She doesn’t believe in marriage, and in any case her devotion is to the cause. Beth’s ideals will exact a ruinously high price. But Wes will not stop loving her. This is the story of their journey through the catastrophic mid-twentieth century-from summer in Almond Tree to Moscow’s bitter winter and back again-to find a way of being together.

A love story about loyalty, belief and idealism, set against the epic sweep of twentieth-century history.

The Long Game
Simon Rowell

Release date: 3 August 2021

A summer of relentless heat. A local surfer named Ray Carlson is found dead in a house not far from Portsea back beach. There’s a kitchen knife deep in his chest, and blood everywhere.

Detective Sergeant Zoe Mayer is scarcely back from extended leave, and still wrestling with her demons, but she is assigned the case-alongside her new service dog, Harry, whose instincts help her in unexpected ways.

There’s an obvious suspect for the murder, and Zoe makes an arrest. But it’s all too neat, and none of Zoe’s colleagues believes her theory that the whole thing is a stitch-up.

Except now someone is trying to hunt Zoe down.

Superbly plotted, and vividly set in the beachside suburbs and hilly retreats around Melbourne, The Long Game is a mystery about a tough and clever investigator who won’t give up.

The Rabbits
Sophie Overett

Release date: 2 July 2021

How do you make sense of the loss of those you love most?

Delia Rabbit has asked herself this question over and over again since the disappearance of her older sister, Bo. Crippled by grief, Delia and her mother became dysfunctional, parting ways not long after Delia turned eighteen.

Now an art teacher at a Queensland college, Delia has managed to build a new life for herself and to create a family of her own. Only more and more that life is slipping- her partner, Ed, has gone, her daughter, Olive, is distancing herself, and, all of a sudden, in the middle of a blinding heatwave, her sixteen-year-old son, Charlie, disappears too.

Suddenly what was buried feels close to the surface, and the Rabbits are faced not only with each other, but also with themselves.

The Rabbits is a multigenerational family story with a dose of magical realism. It is about family secrets, art, very mild superpowers, loneliness and the strange connections we make in the places we least expect.

The Deep
Kyle Perry

Release date: 2 July 2021

If you encounter the Black Wind while out there at sea, all you can do is race back to shore. There’s no predicting it, no sailing it, no living with it. And if you’re a Dempsey, it can play tricks on your mind. . .

On the Tasman Peninsula, nestled amidst the largest sea-cliffs in the southern hemisphere, is Shacktown. Here the Dempsey family have run a drug ring for generations, using the fishing industry and the deadly Black Wind as cover. But when thirteen-year-old Forest Dempsey walks out of the ocean, bruised and branded, everything is at risk – because Forest has been presumed dead for the last seven years.

Mackerel Dempsey, out of jail on strict bail conditions, is trying to change his fate, doing his best to keep out of trouble before his next court date. His cousin Ahab has renounced the family altogether, in favour of working to keep the town and its fragile tourism economy safe. But in their search for answers about Forest, both Mackerel and Ahab can’t help but be drawn back into the underworld. What happened to the boy all those years ago? And does it have anything to do with the infamous drug kingpin Blackbeard, who is rumoured to be moving in on Shacktown?

When secrets long thought buried at sea wash up on shore, generations of the Dempsey family must stand up for what they believe in, even if it means sacrificing everything. But in the gritty fight between right and wrong, blood isn’t always thicker than water, and everyone is at risk of being pulled under…

From the bestselling breakout author of The Bluffs comes a heart-stopping new thriller set on the rugged coast of Tasmania about modern-day pirates, family bonds and betrayals, and the hidden dangers that lurk in the deep…

Dark as Last Night
Tony Birch

Release date: 3 August 2021

Dark as Last Night confirms, once again, that award-winning Indigenous writer, Tony Birch, is a master of the short story. These exceptional stories capture the importance of human connection at pivotal moments in our lives, whether those occur because of the loss of a loved one or the uncertainties of childhood. In this collection we witness a young girl struggling to protect her mother from her father’s violence, two teenagers clumsily getting to know one another by way of a shared love of music, and a man mourning the death of his younger brother, while beset by memories and regrets from their shared past.

Throughout this powerful collection, Birch’s concern for the humanity of those who are often marginalised or overlooked shines bright.

Just Murdered (Ms Fishers’s Modern Murder Mysteries)
Katherine Kovacic

Release date: 3 August 2021

Peregrine Fisher is unexpectedly summoned to a meeting of the Adventuresses’ Club of the Antipodes, where she learns some incredible news.

When Adventuress Florence Astor is accused of murder, Peregrine jumps at the chance to help on the case. Detective James Steed, initially dismissive, quickly finds Peregrine’s flair for investigating and headstrong nature leave him little choice.

A second shocking death occurs and Detective Steed’s boss, Inspector Sparrow, demands the case be brought to a close with suspicious speed.

With Sparrow issuing threats, time is running out for Peregrine. It seems she’s set herself an impossible task, but then, as Detective Steed says, ‘never underestimate a woman named Fisher’.

Songbirds
Christy Lefteri

Release date: 2 July 2021

‘It began with a crunch of leaves and earth. So early, so cold, the branches shone with ice. I’d returned to collect the songbirds. They are worth more than their weight in gold.’

Yiannis is a poacher, trapping the tiny protected songbirds that stop in Cyprus as they migrate each year from Africa to Europe, and selling them on the black market. He dreams of finding a new way of life, and of marrying Nisha, who works for Petra and her daughter Angela. Nisha is raising Angela, mothering her own child back in Sri Lanka by the screen of a phone.

When Nisha disappears, Yiannis is convinced he is responsible, paralysed by heartbreak and fear. Petra is forced to care for her child again, and when little Angela insists that they find Nisha, she begins to see that Nisha hasn’t simply run away, and that no one else will bother to look for her.

With infinite tenderness and skill, Christy Lefteri has crafted a powerful story about the unseen who walk among us, cleaning our homes and caring for our children – what it is to migrate in search of freedom, only to find yourself trapped. Songbirds is a triumphant exploration of loss, the strength of the human spirit and the unbreakable bonds of courage, and of love.

When You Are Mine
Michael Robotham

Release date: 30 June 2021

For as long as we both shall live?

Philomena McCarthy has defied the odds and become a promising young officer with the Metropolitan Police despite being the daughter of a notorious London gangster. Called to the scene of a domestic assault one day, she rescues a bloodied young woman, Tempe Brown, the mistress of a decorated detective. The incident is hushed up, but Phil has unwittingly made a dangerous enemy with powerful friends.

Determined to protect each other, the two women strike up a tentative friendship. Tempe is thoughtful and sweet and makes herself indispensable to Phil, but sinister things keep happening and something isn’t quite right about the stories Tempe tells. When a journalist with links to Phil’s father and to the detective is found floating in the Thames, Phil doesn’t know where to turn, who to blame or who she can trust.

This exhilarating thriller from the bestselling author – whose books have sold more than 6 million copies – is Michael Robotham’s finest page-turner yet.

The Other Side of Beautiful
Kim Lock

Release date: 7 July 2021

Meet Mercy Blain, whose house has just burnt down. Unfortunately for Mercy, this goes beyond the disaster it would be for most people: she hasn’t been outside that house for two years now. Flung out into the world she’s been studiously ignoring, Mercy goes to the only place she can. Her not-quite-ex-husband Eugene’s house. But it turns out she can’t stay there, either. And so begins Mercy’s unwilling journey.

After the chance purchase of a cult classic campervan (read tiny, old and smelly), with the company of her sausage dog, Wasabi, and a mysterious box of cremated remains, Mercy heads north from Adelaide to Darwin. On the road, through badly timed breakdowns, gregarious troupes of grey nomads, and run-ins with a rogue adversary, Mercy’s carefully constructed walls start crumbling.

But what was Mercy hiding from in her house? And why is Eugene desperate to have her back in the city? They say you can’t run forever…

Exquisite, tender and wry, this is a break-out novel about facing anxiety and embracing life from an extraordinary new talent.

The Others
Mark Brandi

Release date: 30 June 2021

I heard voices talking last night. I’ve never heard my father talk to someone else. Not that I can remember. I was in bed, and I heard my father’s voice first. He was talking to someone, and then I heard another man with a deep voice. The man got angry, I could tell, even though I couldn’t hear exactly what he was saying. Then my father said, ‘I’d kill you first.’

On his eleventh birthday, Jacob’s father gives him a diary. To write about things that happen. About what he and his father do on their farm. About the sheep, the crop, the fox and the dam.

But Jacob knows some things should not be written down. Some things should not be remembered. The only things he knows for sure are what his father has taught him. Sheltered, protected, isolated.

But who is his father protecting him from? And how far will his father go to keep the world at bay? All too soon, Jacob will learn that, sometimes, people do the most terrible things.

From the bestselling author of Wimmera and The Rip comes an unforgettable novel that explores the darkness in our world with the light only a child can find.

Mrs March
Virginia Feito

Release date: 28 July 2021

George March’s latest novel is a smash hit.

None could be prouder than Mrs. March, his dutiful wife, who revels in his accolades and relishes the lifestyle and status his success brings. A creature of routine and decorum, Mrs. March lives an exquisitely controlled existence on the Upper East Side.

Every morning begins the same way, with a visit to her favourite patisserie to buy a loaf of olive bread, but her latest trip proves to be her last when she suffers an indignity from which she may never recover: an assumption by the shopkeeper that the protagonist in George March’s new book – a pathetic sex worker, more a figure of derision than desire – is based on Mrs. March. One casual remark robs Mrs. March not only of her beloved olive bread but of the belief that she knew everything about her husband – and herself – sending her on an increasingly paranoid journey, one that starts within the pages of a book but may very well uncover both a killer and the long-buried secrets of Mrs. March’s past.

A razor-sharp exploration of the fragility of identity and the smothering weight of expectations, Mrs. March heralds the arrival of a wicked and wonderful new voice – Shirley Jackson meets Ottessa Moshfegh meets My Sister the Serial Killer – in a brilliantly unsettling and darkly funny debut novel full of suspense and paranoia.

When Things are Alive they Hum
Hannah Bent

Release date: 28 July 2021

My hum will be in everything – the wind, the sea, the sand, the air, in you.

Marlowe and Harper share a bond deeper than most sisters, shaped by the loss of their mother in childhood. For Harper, living with what she calls the Up syndrome and gifted with an endless capacity for wonder, Marlowe and she are connected by an invisible thread, like the hum that connects all things. For Marlowe, they are bound by her fierce determination to keep Harper, born with a congenital heart disorder, alive. 

Now twenty-five, Marlowe is finally living her own life abroad, pursuing her studies of a rare species of butterfly secure in the knowledge Harper’s happiness is complete, having found love with boyfriend, Louis. But then she receives the devastating call that Harper’s heart is failing. She needs a heart transplant but is denied one by the medical establishment because she is living with a disability. Marlowe rushes to her childhood home in Hong Kong to be by Harper’s side and soon has to answer the question – what lengths would you go to save your sister? 

When Things Are Alive They Hum poses profound questions about the nature of love and existence, the ways grief changes us, and how we confront the hand fate has dealt us. Intensely moving, exquisitely written and literally humming with wonder, it is a novel that celebrates life in all its guises, and what comes after.

Deepwater King (#2 Deepwater Trilogy)
Claire McKenna

Release date: 7 July 2021

Since losing her great love to the Queen of the Sainted Isles, Arden must fulfil an impossible promise before she can return home – she must complete the dangerous Rite that will return Jonah’s spirit to the abyssal Court of the Deepwater King. This sets her off on a journey far out at sea to find believers of the old religion on the oil-slick and mysterious islands beyond the horizon.

But such a responsibility will not come without sacrifice, for the Deepwater folk who worship the King require the most desperate payments the soul, and with one man Arden may have to pay the greatest price of all…

Astonishingly original, with world-building to rival the depths of the ocean, McKenna has drawn a rich tale of longing and courage – penning the perfect oceanic steampunk fantasy. The sensational follow up to Monstrous Heart; a magical tale of intrigue on dark waters and a love story for the ages. The perfect gothic, gaslamp fantasy – ideal for fans of V.E. Schwab and China Mieville.

The Cellist
Daniel Silva

Release date: 28 July 2021

The most beautiful music hides the deadliest secrets…

Viktor Orlov had a longstanding appointment with death. Once Russia’s richest man, he now resides in exile in London, where he is waging a crusade against the kleptocrats who have seized control of the Kremlin. His mansion is protected by armed bodyguards.

Yet somehow, on a rainy summer evening, in the midst of a global pandemic, Russia’s vengeful president finally manages to cross Orlov’s name off his kill list. Before him was the receiver from his landline telephone, a half-drunk glass of red wine, and a stack of documents. The documents are contaminated with a deadly nerve agent. The Metropolitan Police determine that they were delivered by one of Orlov’s employees, a prominent investigative reporter. And when the reporter vanishes hours after the killing, MI6 concludes she is a Moscow Center assassin who penetrated the billionaire’s formidable defenses.

But Gabriel Allon believes his friends in British intelligence are dangerously mistaken. His search for the truth will take him to Geneva, where a private intelligence service is plotting an act of violence that will plunge an already divided America into chaos. Only Allon, with the help of a brilliant young woman employed by the world’s dirtiest bank, can stop it….

The Desert Prince (#1 Nightfall Saga)
Peter V. Brett

Release date: 3 August 2021

Fifteen years have passed since the demons were destroyed. Heroes have become legend, and those that remain live in their shadows.

Olive, Princess of Hollow, has her entire life planned out-a steady march toward succession. But the more her mother writes the script, the more Olive rails against playing the parts she is assigned.

Darin is the son of the man people say saved the world. Everyone expects greatness from Darin, but the only thing he’s ever been great at is hiding. But now it’s time to fight the darkness.

When Olive and Darin step across the wards one night, they learn that the demons are not all gone, and those that remain hunger for revenge. Are Darin and Olive ready to be heroes?

Peter V. Brett, bestselling author of The Demon Cycle, begins a brand new epic fantasy adventure set in his beloved world, following a new generation of heroes.

Final Witness
Karin Slaughter

Release date: 3 August 2021

He saw what you did…He knows who you are.
They thought they’d got away with it…they were wrong.

Leigh and her sister Callie are not bad people – but one night, more than two decades ago, they did something terrible. And the result was a childhood tarnished by secrets, broken by betrayal, devastated by violence.

Years later, Leigh has pushed that night from her mind and become a successful lawyer – but when she is forced to take on a new client against her will, her world begins to spiral out of control. Because the client knows the truth about what happened twenty-three years ago. He knows what Leigh and Callie did. And unless they stop him, he’s going to tear their lives apart…

Just because you didn’t see the witness…doesn’t mean he wasn’t there.

So You Think You Know What’s Good For You?
Dr. Norman Swan

Release date: 30 June 2021

We all want to be healthier, but do you know what’s good for you?

For over thirty years, Dr Norman Swan has been delivering straight, honest, common-sense health information to ordinary Australians as both a physician and much-loved broadcaster. And when Australia needed clear, scientifically backed COVID-19 facts and advice, it was Norman Swan who stepped up every day to provide the answers we required.

After many years of listening, Norman Swan knows what medical issues people are curious and concerned about. Drawing on the questions he hears time and again, from millennials to baby boomers and all the generations between, So You Think You Know What’s Good For You? is a one-stop handbook that will settle fruitless anxieties and allow people to focus on what matters to them.

Replace medical myths, half-truths and misconceptions with the information you need to make better decisions about how to eat and how to live to put your mind at ease and ensure your and your family’s health is the best it can be.

So You Think You Know What’s Good For You? is the new authoritative must-have for every health-conscious Aussie household.

Semut
Christine Helliwell

Release date: 2 July 2021

March 1945. A handful of young Allied operatives are parachuted into the remote jungled heart of the Japanese-occupied island of Borneo, east of Singapore, there to recruit the island’s indigenous Dayak peoples to fight the Japanese. Yet most have barely encountered Asian or indigenous people before, speak next to no Borneo languages, and know little about Dayaks, other than that they have been – and may still be – headhunters. They fear that on arrival the Dayaks will kill them or hand them over to the Japanese. For their part, some Dayaks have never before seen a white face.

So begins the story of Operation Semut, an Australian secret operation launched by the organisation codenamed Services Reconnaisance Department – popularly known as Z Special Unit – in the final months of WWII. Anthropologist Christine Helliwell has called on her years of first-hand knowledge of Borneo, interviewed more than one hundred Dayak people and all the remaining Semut operatives, and consulted thousands of military and other documents to piece together this astonishing story. Focusing on the operation’s activities along two of Borneo’s great rivers – the Baram and Rejang – the book provides a detailed military history of Semut II’s and Semut III’s brutal guerrilla campaign against the Japanese, and reveals the decisive but long-overlooked Dayak role in the operation.

But this is no ordinary history. Helliwell captures vividly the sounds, smells and tastes of the jungles into which the operatives are plunged, an environment so terrifying that many are unsure whether jungle or Japanese is the greater enemy. And she takes us into the lives and cavernous longhouses of the Dayaks on whom their survival depends. The result is a truly unique account of the encounter between two very different cultures amidst the savagery of the Pacific War.

Every. Night. Of. The. Week.
Lucy Tweed

Release date: 3 August 2021

Welcome to Every Night of the Week, a cookbook for people who don’t like hard-and-fast recipes, by food and recipe writer, stylist and Instagram genie Lucy Tweed.

Some days you want to cook; other days the goal is simply ‘food in mouths’.

MONDAY has potential. There are lists and ideas. The herbs are fresh and the fridge is full.
TUESDAY the week has begun. Can we have efficient and beautifully delicious please?
WEDNESDAY we wonder what day it is. Cook with a dash of laziness; it tastes great.
THURS … we’re not even typing the full day anymore. What’s in the freezer? What can we pimp?
FRIDAY is family fun. ‘Decorate’ your own pizza, kids, or DIY san choy bau. Time to exhale.
SATURDAY is the flex day, time to stretch the repertoire. Hmm, who’s around for lunch?
SUNDAY is for brunch and linner; two leisurely meals, eaten in absolute comfort.
THAT EXTRA DAY YOU WISHED FOR is the secret day that will save your bacon Tues-Thurs.

A Life in Words
Les Carlyon

Release date: 3 August 2021

Les Carlyon was one of Australia’s greatest journalists and writers. His career in newspapers was stellar, becoming editor of The Age at 33, and going on to become editor in chief of The Herald & Weekly Times. But he was always more about the written word than about management, winning two Walkley Awards and the coveted Graham Perkin Journalist of the Year Award across a career where he covered everything from politics to horse racing.

Yet most Australians will know him as an author, writing books that gave us the very essence of our history and our culture – whether in the trenches of the Western Front, or in the betting ring at Flemington. His epic account of the Gallipoli campaign, Gallipoli (2001), was as ground-breaking in its day as Robert Hughes’ The Fatal Shore, combining incredible research and an ability to capture the human essence with a style that was distinctively his own. Gallipoli went on to sell over 250,000 copies in Australia, and his follow-up book The Great War (2006) won the Prime Ministers Prize for History, and was the 2007 ABIA Book of the Year. The Master (2012), an intimate portrait of Bart Cummings, cemented Les’s place as Australia’s greatest ever horse racing writer.

From Don Bradman to Paul Keating, from Flemington to Flanders, from Henry Lawson to Clive James, A Life in Words is a collection of Les’s very best writing, taken from across his career.

The Reckoning
Mary L Trump

Release date: 17 August 2021

For four years, Donald J Trump inflicted an onslaught of overlapping and interconnected traumas upon the American people, targeting anyone he perceived as being an ‘other’ or an enemy. Women were discounted and derided, the sick were dismissed as weak and unworthy of help, immigrants and minorities were demonised and discriminated against and money was elevated above all else. In short, he transformed America into a macro version of his malignantly dysfunctional family.

How can Americans make sense of the degree to which their institutions and leaders have let them down? How can they negotiate a world in which all sense of safety and justice seems to have been destroyed? How can they – as individuals and as a nation – confront, process and overcome this loss of trust and the ways they have been forever altered by chaos, division and cruelty? And when the dust finally settles, how can they begin to heal, in the midst of ongoing health and economic crises and the greatest political divide since the Civil War?

A new leader alone cannot fix the situation. Donald J Trump is only the latest symptom of a disease that has existed within the body politic since America’s inception – from the original sin of slavery through its population’s unceasing, organised commitment to inequality. An enormous amount of healing must be done to rebuild the lives of Americans, their faith in leadership and their hope for their nation. It starts with The Reckoning.

Relax: A Little Book of Calm
Meredith Gaston

Release date: 7 July 2021

In this delightful and beautifully illustrated book, acclaimed artist Meredith Gaston will show you how to relax through rest and play, building resilience and nurturing your own inner sanctuary by treasuring simplicity and authenticity. The affirmations and inspirations in these ten chapters will assist you to embrace relaxation so that your productivity increases, your health flourishes, and your happiness becomes more abundant.

Explore the joy of peaceful living and a daily state of ease through caring for our mind and body with Meredith Gaston’s Relax: A little book of calm. With practice, time and care, each one of us can cultivate serenity and profoundly transform our experience of life.

Ethel Rosenberg
Anne Sebba

Release date: 29 June 2021

Ethel Rosenberg’s story has been called America’s Dreyfus Affair: a catastrophic failure of humanity and justice that continues to haunt the national conscience, and is still being played out with different actors in the lead roles today.

On 19th June 1953, Ethel Rosenberg became the first woman in the US to be executed for a crime other than murder. She was thirty-seven years old and the mother of two small children. Yet even today, at a time when the Cold War seems all too resonant, Ethel’s conviction for conspiracy to commit espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union makes her story still controversial.

This is an important moment to recount not simply what FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover called the ‘trial of the century’, but also a timeless human story of a supportive wife, loving mother and courageous idealist who grew up during the Depression with aspirations to become an opera singer. Instead, she found herself battling the social mores of the 1950s and had her life barbarically cut short on the basis of tainted evidence for a crime she almost certainly did not commit.

Anne Sebba’s masterly biography makes full use of the dramatic prison letters Ethel exchanged with her husband, lawyer and psychotherapist over a three-year period. Sebba has also interviewed Ethel’s two sons and others who knew her, including a fellow prisoner. Ethel’s tragic story lays bare a nation deeply divided and reveals what happens when a government motivated by fear tramples on the rights of its citizens.

Take One Fish
Josh Niland

Release date: 28 July 2021

Forget everything you thought you knew about fish cookery with Take One Fish. There are no rules when it comes to cooking fish according to award winning chef Josh Niland, only an endless world of possibilities. With 60 mind-blowing recipes from just 15 global varieties of fish, this cookbook will take you on a gustatory journey – from elaborate to easy, small to large and – always – scale to tail.

Josh’s multi award-winning and bestselling book, The Whole Fish Cookbook, revealed the blueprint for a new and unprecedented kind of fish cookery. In this latest book, Josh continues to open our eyes to the potential of fish in the kitchen, starting from the moment we take our fish home and unpack it – yes that’s right: bring it home, take it out of the plastic, let it breathe uncovered in your fridge. Then you are ready. 

With flair, colour and bucket loads of flavour, Take One Fish unpacks each of Josh’s 15 fish to reveal their true culinary potential, from swordfish cotoletta to pot au feu, to tuna mapo tofu to an ethereal raw flounder. Celebrate the drips, crunchy bits, burnt edges and imperfections that are so central to Josh’s mission – to get more people having fun with fish ingenuity every day.

Brain Reset
David Gillespie

Release date: 29 June 2021

Anxiety, depression and addiction are the scourge of modern-day living. How are they linked? How do we beat them? 

According to bestselling author and researcher David Gillespie, we are more addicted than ever before, which is playing havoc with our dopamine levels. This is fuelling epidemic-like levels of depression, anxiety and stress. Gillespie reveals a large and robust body of research that shows how addictive activities, such as screen use, sugar consumption, drinking, gambling, shopping and smoking, spike our dopamine levels. This, in turn, affects our brain’s ability to regulate our mood.

The good news is that we can break the cycle to make things better. There are myriad root causes of mental illness, many of which are beyond our control; David argues that it makes sense to tackle the thing that is within our control – our see-sawing dopamine levels. Packed with cutting-edge research and practical advice, David’s latest book arms us with the tools we need to break our addictions, conquer uncertainty and reset our brains.

Garden Like a Nonno
Jaclyn Crupi

Release date: 27 July 2021

Jaclyn Crupi is back with more Italian wisdom!

In Garden Like a Nonno, Jaclyn uncovers the secrets of the green-thumbed nonnos from their no-nonsense approach to life to their zero waste gardening.

Whether you have a tiny balcony or a sprawling backyard, you’ll be growing your own fruit and veg in no time with a little guidance from the nonnos.

Featuring gardening tips and tricks, recipes for pickling and preserving your produce, plus classic nonno sayings, Garden Like a Nonno will help you to get in touch with your inner Italian. La dolce vita awaits.

The Comfort Book
Matt Haig

Release date: 1 July 2021

Nothing is stronger than a small hope that doesn’t give up.

The Comfort Book is a collection of little islands of hope. It gathers consolations and stories that give new ways of seeing ourselves and the world. Matt Haig’s mix of philosophy, memoir and self-reflection builds on the wisdom of philosophers and survivors through the ages, from Marcus Aurelius to Nellie Bly, Emily Dickinson to James Baldwin.

This is the book to pick up when you need the wisdom of a friend, the comfort of a hug or just to celebrate the messy miracle of being alive.

Last Shot
Jock Zonfrillo

Release date: 28 July 2021

From reckless drug addict to one of Australia’s top chefs and television stars: MasterChef judge Jock Zonfrillo’s powerful life story will shock and inspire. Jock’s life spiralled out of control when he tried heroin for the first time as a teenager while growing up in 1980s Glasgow. For years he balanced a career as a rising star amongst legendary chefs with a crippling drug addiction that took him down many dark paths.

Fired from his job at a Michelin star restaurant in Chester, England, after a foul-mouthed rant, Jock made his way to London looking for work and found himself in front of the legendary Marco Pierre White. He credits White for saving his life, but Jock continued to struggle with addiction in a world of excess, celebrity, and cut-throat ambition. On New Year’s Eve 1999, Jock shot up his last shot of heroin before boarding a plane to Sydney, where he would find passion and new meaning in life in the most unexpected places. There would be more struggles ahead, including two failed marriages, the closure of his prized restaurant during COVID-19, his time on-country, and some very public battles.

This is his unforgettable story – a coming-of-age memoir of addiction, ambition and redemption in the high-stakes world of Michelin star kitchens. Foreword by Jimmy Barnes.

Parental as Anything
Maggie Dent

Release date: 7 July 2021

How much screen time should you let your children have? How and when do you talk about sex? What can you do when your kid throws a tantrum? Why should you let your children just play?

Maggie Dent, queen of common-sense parenting, has answers to your real-world parenting dilemmas. Focusing on the most engaged-with topics from her popular ABC Parental As Anything podcast, Maggie tells us what the experts have to say, relates the experiences of other parents, and offers her own reassuring guidance to provide practical solutions to the challenges parents and caregivers face today.

This book will give you the means to be the parent you’d like to be, and help you in your quest to raise happy, healthy, thriving, resilient children.

All Day Baking: Savoury, Not Sweet
Michael James

Release date: 7 July 2021

For every two lovers of sweet baked treats, there is at least another who will take the gruyere gougere or the curry pastie every time, thank you. All Day Baking: Savoury, Not Sweet is a baking cookbook – at last – for them. Its mission is to deliver comforting, inventive and wholegrain-forward ideas for pies, sausage rolls, pasties and myriad other mostly pastry-based recipes, alongside gutsy accompaniments that equip the reader with the tools to transform delicious bakes into nourishing any-time-of-day meals.

Author Michael James is a Michelin-restaurant chef by training who was drawn early to the art, precision, and satisfaction of baking. In All Day Baking, his second book, he turns his attention to the pasties of his UK childhood, the pies he creates today for his young family, and the quiches, sausage rolls, palmiers and galettes that have earned him a cultish following in Australia and beyond. As well, he delivers a master class in pastry – from puff to rye to vegan and gluten-free – gifting readers a foundation knowledge that sets them on a path to their own freewheeling baking adventures.

The book is structured across the arc of a day but the recipes at their heart are interchangeable – if you fancy beetroot & shallot galette for breakfast or bacon & onion quiche for dinner – that’s perfectly ok. And throughout there is a nod to Michael and wife Pippa James’ ethos, rooted in sustainability, seasonality and a desire to minimise their waste footprint.

The Mother Wound
Amani Haydar

Release date: 29 June 2021

‘I am from a family of strong women.’ 

Amani Haydar suffered the unimaginable when she lost her mother in a brutal act of domestic violence perpetrated by her father. Five months pregnant at the time, her own perception of how she wanted to mother (and how she had been mothered) was shaped by this devastating murder.

After her mother’s death, Amani began reassessing everything she knew of her parents’ relationship. They had been unhappy for so long – should she have known that it would end like this? A lawyer by profession, she also saw the holes in the justice system for addressing and combating emotional abuse and coercive control.

Amani also had to reckon with the weight of familial and cultural context. Her parents were brought together in an arranged marriage, her mother thirteen years her father’s junior. Her grandmother was brutally killed in the 2006 war in Lebanon, adding complex layers of intergenerational trauma.

Writing with grace and beauty, Amani has drawn from this a story of female resilience and the role of motherhood in the home and in the world. In The Mother Wound, she uses her own strength to help other survivors find their voices.

My Mess is a Bit of a Life: Adventures in Anxiety
Georgia Pritchett

Release date: 17 August 2021

Multi-award-winning television writer and producer Georgia Pritchett knows a thing or two about anxiety.

From worrying about the monsters under her bed as a child (were they comfy enough?), to embracing womanhood (one way of knowing you have crossed from girlhood to womanhood is that men stop furtively masturbating at you from bushes and start shouting things at you from cars. It’s a beautiful moment) to being offered free gifts after an award ceremony (It was an excruciating experience. Mortifying) worry has accompanied her at every turn.

Halliday Wine Companion 2022
James Halliday

Release date: 13 August 2021

For over thirty years James Halliday has been Australia’s most respected wine critic, and his Halliday Wine Companion is recognised as the industry benchmark for Australian wine. A best-selling annual, the Halliday Wine Companion is the go-to guide for wine ratings, regions, best varietals, winery reviews and a curated selection of the best wines in Australia. The 2022 edition has been completely revised to bring readers up-to-the-minute information.

The Halliday team, now led by Tyson Stelzer in the role of chief editor, share their extensive knowledge of wine through detailed tasting notes with points, price, value symbol and advice on best-by drinking, as well as each wine’s closure and alcohol content. The book provides information about wineries and winemakers, including vineyard sizes, opening times and contact details. The perfect self-purchase or gift for the wine lover in your life.

Power Play
Julia Banks

Release date: 7 July 2021

Having won the ‘unwinnable’ seat that secured the Coalition Government majority in 2016, Julia Banks shocked Australia when she announced she would stand as an independent MP in 2018, having experienced a toxic workplace culture in the country’s centre of power – designed by men for their dominance. Julia doesn’t just know what power looks like in a political sense; she made it to the top of her game in the legal and corporate sectors before running for parliament. And at every level, she had to navigate through the bias, barriers and boys’ clubs that aim to silence women or deter them from leadership roles.

Power Play reveals the unvarnished realities of any workplace where power disparities and gender politics collide: from the unequal opportunities, casual sexism and systemic misogyny, to pressures around looks, age and family responsibilities, and the consequences of speaking out. Julia shares personal stories, practical advice, and a resounding argument for why women aren’t the problem – but why more women in decision-making positions will help us find the solution.

For anyone who is aspiring to lead, this book will help you to navigate there. And for anyone who believes that women’s voices need to be heard equally, it will inspire you to strive until that is our reality. Power Play is an honest guide for women who aspire to leadership in the workplace and in the world, from the trailblazing Julia Banks.

Too Migrant, Too Muslim, Too Loud
Mehreen Faruqi

Release date: 2 July 2021

Too Migrant, Too Muslim, Too Loud is a no-holds-barred memoir and manifesto from outspoken senator, trouble¬maker and multicultural icon Mehreen Faruqi. As the first Muslim woman in any Australian parliament, Mehreen has a unique and crucial perspective on our politics and democracy. It is a tale of a political outsider fighting for her right and the rights of others like her to be let inside on their terms.

From her beginnings in Pakistan and remaking in Australia, Mehreen recounts her struggle to navigate two vastly different, changing worlds without losing herself. This moving and inspiring memoir shares shattering insights learned as a migrant, an engineer, an activist, a feminist and a politician.