Worry Doll by Laura McPhee-Browne<\/p>\n
Fiction, Scribe, $29.99<\/p>\n
From the acclaimed author of Cherry Beach and Little Plum comes her best novel yet: a psychosexual thriller about a passionate new love that plays with readers\u2019 perception.<\/p>\n
When we meet Heloise, she is in her 30s, eight years into a relationship with Ernesto, but obsessively thinking about Lacey, a woman 12 years her junior who she met on a train. The steamy, all-consuming affair has taken over her life, despite the pair barely seeing each other since \u2013 and what starts off as the fresh flush of limerence unravels into a heart-in-mouth tale about the destabilising forces of memory, power and desire that I still haven\u2019t quite shaken off. \u2013 Steph Harmon<\/p>\n
A Short History of Longans by Mirandi Riwoe<\/p>\n
Fiction, UQP, $34.99<\/p>\n
Mirandi Riwoe\u2019s third full-length novel is an expansive, layered book about memory and the cost of silence. It begins with a biography of fictional Chinese Australian bushranger Ah Yang, and the family that begins to branch out from under him in the 1850s. Flash forward to 2049: Ah Yang\u2019s last descendent, Daniel Connolly, is living in a state of profound isolation. But how did he get here?<\/p>\n
Told through the eyes of four characters, each 50 years apart, this multigenerational saga elegantly reveals the many-layered patterns of behaviour, shame, connection and trauma that grow in the roots of this family tree. \u2013 Seren Heyman-Griffiths<\/p>\n
I Made This Just For You by Chris Ames<\/p>\n
Short stories, Hardie Grant, $34.99<\/p>\n
Chris Ames\u2019 wildly inventive and very funny debut collection paints a vivid, surreal and sometimes tender depiction of how it feels to rot in late capitalism. In one story, a couple \u201cgently sledding down a snow hill of ketamine\u201d dissociate so hard they decide to become each other through a series of invasive surgeries. In another story, we\u2019re on a deranged press junket tour with the co-stars of a hit film who have to hold puppies and eat hot wings seemingly forever. In another, a man vox popped on the street does something with his face that becomes a meme he has to repeat ad nauseum at conferences around the world.<\/p>\n
The premises are tight and clever and never draw on longer than they need to. But it\u2019s the sharp observations of the everyday horrors of our increasingly unhinged world that sold this one for me. \u2013 Steph Harmon<\/p>\n
The Outrageous Good Fortune of Living by Jackie Bailey<\/p>\n
Nonfiction, Harper Collins, $36.99<\/p>\n
The Outrageous Good Fortune of Living follows regular Guardian contributor and pastor Jackie Bailey as she navigates her own path from a Catholic childhood through the study of the world\u2019s great religions, and lands in a kind of secular spiritual practice. It is a book, Bailey writes, for people like her; people who feel \u201clike something is missing\u201d.<\/p>\n
Spanning Confucius to Simone de Beauvoir, Bailey explores prayer, loneliness and the soul as part of a quest to find a meaningful place in the world, and a spirituality outside religious belief. \u2013 Celina Ribeiro<\/p>\n
The End of Romance by Maria Takolander<\/p>\n
Fiction, Text Publishing, $29.99<\/p>\n
In The End of Romance, Maria Takolander\u2019s debut novel, the ground is rock-hard and littered with the wreckage of civilisational collapse. One hollow hope is granted the humans who eke out a desolate existence here: a better life on a planet called the Promised Land. We follow a mother into the wastelands of a ruined planet as she tries to find an alternative to bare, brutal survival for her son.<\/p>\n
With record-breaking weather reported seemingly each week, this tense novel is a bracing and urgent rebuke to climate denialism and petrocapitalism. \u2013 Catriona Menzies-Pike<\/p>\n
An Ocean and a Day by Hannah Richell<\/p>\n
Memoir, Harper Collins, $22.99<\/p>\n