{"id":871964,"date":"2026-08-28T22:44:20","date_gmt":"2026-08-28T22:44:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/871964\/"},"modified":"2026-08-28T22:44:20","modified_gmt":"2026-08-28T22:44:20","slug":"best-new-books-out-in-august-including-big-little-truths-by-liane-moriarty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/871964\/","title":{"rendered":"Best new books out in August, including Big Little Truths by Liane Moriarty"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fans have been waiting 12 years for Liane Moriarty to publish a sequel to her international bestselling novel, Big Little Lies \u2014 and now it’s here. Claire Nichols read Big Little Truths ahead of her conversation with Moriarty<\/a> on ABC Radio National’s The Book Show this month, and shares her thoughts on the book below.<\/p>\n

Also in the mix this month is a “bravura” novel by a Tasmanian author that is a single 278-page-long sentence; and an intoxicating foray into the intimate world of female friendship by a prize-winning Dominican American writer.<\/p>\n

Happy reading!<\/p>\n

Sophie, Standing There by Meg Mason<\/p>\n

Fourth Estate<\/p>\n

\"Cover<\/p>\n

Like her narrator Sophie, New Zealand-born Meg Mason grew up in a religious sect. (Supplied: HarperCollins Australia)<\/p>\n

Meg Mason’s follow-up to her award-winning novel Sorrow and Bliss introduces us to Sophie, a lonely sound technician who develops an obsession with an author she’s never met.<\/p>\n

Sophie works at a writers’ festival, where her official job is to put headset microphones on big-name authors before they go on stage. Unofficially, her job is to be invisible. Don’t bother the talent, keep quiet and let them shine.<\/p>\n

Sophie loves her job, and she’s good at it too. The friendly community of people she works with is a welcome contrast to her home life, where she is recently, painfully separated from her husband, estranged from her best friend and missing her beloved brother, who has moved out of town.<\/p>\n

Listen to the podcast<\/a><\/p>\n

Your favourite fiction authors share the stories behind their latest books on ABC Radio National’s The Book Show.<\/p>\n

In the midst of her loneliness, Sophie remembers a quote from a famous author, which seems to speak to just how she’s feeling. Before she knows it, she’s read another quote and then another. Then she’s reading and re-reading the author’s books, listening to podcast interviews and quietly developing a one-way relationship with a stranger.<\/p>\n

If it all sounds a bit weird, don’t worry \u2014 Sophie knows it, too. But she figures there’s no problem. She’ll never actually meet the object of her affections \u2014 or will she?<\/p>\n

Mason’s third novel is strange and singular in the best way possible. It’s not always immediately clear why Sophie behaves in the way she does, and her desperate loneliness can be discomfiting. But stick with this. There’s a bigger story here about power and those who wield it, and it packs a punch.<\/p>\n

\u2014 Claire Nichols<\/p>\n

Now, Autonomy by Max Easton<\/p>\n

Giramondo Publishing<\/p>\n

\"Cover<\/p>\n

Now, Autonomy is the third novel in a trilogy of books by Max Easton about Sydney. (Supplied: Giramondo Publishing)<\/p>\n

In the small hours of the morning after the Penrith Panthers’ historic comeback win in the 2023 NRL grand final, old friends Helen, Sunny and Sio walk home down a dilapidated stretch of Sydney’s Parramatta Road, wondering if they’ll ever get a moment of transcendence like Panthers halfback Nathan Cleary enjoyed in that game.<\/p>\n

Helen’s housemate Pat shares their melancholy. Constantly tired or hungover, he rarely leaves home except to work the sound desk at gigs. He rediscovers his unpublished memoir, which covers his early 2000s glory days when he was a regular at protests and part of a collective which squatted in Homebush’s Midnight Star Theatre and turned it into a community hub before police shut it down.<\/p>\n

Omar Musa wins Miles Franklin Literary Award<\/a><\/p>\n

Malaysian Australian author Omar Musa has taken out the Miles Franklin Literary Award with his second novel, Fierceland, set between Malaysian Borneo and Sydney.<\/p>\n

Featuring some of the same cast as The Magpie Wing (2021), longlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award, and Paradise Estate (2023), Now, Autonomy continues Easton’s hyper-specific excavation of activist and underground music scenes in Sydney’s Inner West. It traces the characters’ frustration with the gentrification around them and rails at the illogic of a city at once pockmarked with vacant premises and dogged by a housing crisis.<\/p>\n

Now, Autonomy finds these idealists burned out. As Pat muses, “When had everyone he knew grown so jaded? When had everything begun to feel like an inferior photocopy of something that had already happened?” The group’s mindset shifts when they rent the Lewisham Hotel (one of the real venues featured in this unusual blurring of fact and fiction) and turn it into The Quarterly, a headquarters for small punk rock shows. It’s a short-lived victory, but one that emboldens them for more ambitious projects.<\/p>\n

Released at a moment of crisis in the Sydney live music scene<\/a> due to multiple venue closures, Now, Autonomy fizzes with righteous anger and topical relevance. There’s a satirical undercurrent \u2014 no-one seems to realise they live in the most fortified of echo chambers \u2014 but also a deep compassion for the characters as they dream of a better world, all while struggling not to be crushed under the weight of late-stage capitalism.<\/p>\n

\u2014 Daniel Herborn<\/p>\n

Mine by Adam Ouston<\/p>\n

Transit Lounge<\/p>\n

\"Cover<\/p>\n

Adam Ouston’s debut novel, Waypoints, was longlisted for the 2023 Miles Franklin Literary Award. (Supplied: NewSouth Books)<\/p>\n

After travelling four hours from Bridgewater to a rain-soaked corner of western Tasmania, a “university lecturer, poet, bushwalker, activist” has fallen and can’t get up, to put it mildly. In his eighth decade, he is “old, so old” (and miserable) and, having parked his Land Rover to investigate an abandoned mine, is now trapped at the bottom with no way out.<\/p>\n

He is pursuing a project that has taken decades and might finally be reaching its conclusion: a work exploring the “hauntology” of ghost towns. Oh, and spoiler alert \u2014 this novel is a single 278-page-long sentence. So what? Nothing to be afraid of. With a style that resists ‘in a nutshell’ reformulation, it’s a book that is hard to summarise: the nutshell is the voice itself, its capacity to hold different ideas and points of view inside one glorious unfolding monologue.<\/p>\n

ABC Radio National\u2019s Top 100 Australian Books Countdown<\/a><\/p>\n

We take over Radio National on Saturday, 17 and Sunday, 18 October to count down the Top 100 Australian books as voted by you.<\/p>\n

Ouston’s talent is that this long, winding narrative doesn’t become amorphous or fuzzy. Instead, it is precisely imprecise. The story expands and contracts as we follow the narrator through time, memory, place and almost every possible pronoun he can find: you, he, we. There are little internal forms of punctuation and chapterisation, too: recurring refrains and ideas, all of which keep you tethered while the narrator digs himself deep into Tasmania’s colonial history and the disaster of resource extraction, culminating in a brilliant set piece about the 1912 North Mount Lyell disaster<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The sense of ‘mine’ here is as a place, a way of moving, a marker of possession. Like Jen Craig \u2014 another local author indebted to Thomas Bernhard, one of the long sentence’s patron saints \u2014 Ouston writes narratives that explore characters driven by projects that consume them, obsessively pursuing them while remaining, in some existential sense, trapped.<\/p>\n

Luckily, the same cannot be said of Ouston. This is a bravura piece of work. No sophomore slump here: Mine builds upon and exceeds the promise of his debut<\/a>. It is funny. It is tender. It is furiously good.<\/p>\n

\u2014 Declan Fry<\/p>\n

Take What You Can by Naima Coster<\/p>\n

Trapeze<\/p>\n

\"Cover<\/p>\n

Naima Coster was one of the US National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 honourees in 2020. (Supplied: Hachette Australia)<\/p>\n

There’s something intoxicating about the mix of intimacy and competition in stories of complex female friendship. I would happily line my shelves with these novels \u2014 and give Dominican American writer Naima Coster’s third novel, Take What You Can, pride of place.<\/p>\n

Valeria and Milena are the sort of friends who are more like family. They immediately bonded on a university trip to Paris where they were the only two Black girls in the group. Both had sacrificed and scrimped to be there and they clung to each other among the privileged nonchalance of their peers.<\/p>\n

Debut memoir deals with dating-app fatigue and fertility anxiety <\/a><\/p>\n

Sheree Joseph always wanted to write the Great Australian Novel. Instead, her first book is a memoir about what happens when life doesn’t live up to expectations.<\/p>\n

Despite their lives diverging through adulthood, that moment always stays with them. As Val reflects: “She could see them together, sunlit, wandering. On the shore of a placid, green lake. Smoking on the steps of an ancient church \u2026 Their first summer was still alive to her as if it had never stopped happening.” Also present on this trip was the enigmatic Helene, an older woman who formed the third in their trio. However, in the present day, Helene is conspicuously missing, a ghost in their friendship whose absence has caused a silent rift.<\/p>\n

The novel focuses on a time of change as both women navigate the all-encompassing experience of new motherhood. Battling their own histories and shortcomings, both characters are fulsome and rich. We see their relationship from both perspectives and it’s as tender as it is fraught, with secrets and past resentments bubbling just beneath the surface, waiting to erupt.<\/p>\n

This is sensational writing. You taste the French wine, hear the rumble of the ocean and feel the deep love between these two characters. Coster tempers the rich language with frank and insightful meditations about money, power and attachment.<\/p>\n

This book is for any reader who (like me) is always looking for their next messy, obsessive and love-filled novel about female friendship.<\/p>\n

\u2014 Rosie Ofori Ward<\/p>\n

Sunrise by T\u00e9a Obreht\u00a0<\/p>\n

W&N<\/p>\n

\"Cover<\/p>\n

T\u00e9a Obreht won the Orange Prize for Fiction (now known as Women’s Prize for Fiction) in 2011 for her debut novel, The Tiger’s Wife. (Supplied: Hachette Australia)<\/p>\n

Serbian-born American novelist T\u00e9a Obreht is interested in Westerns, among many other things \u2014 or perhaps it’s borders, histories and reworking nationhood from a never-obvious perspective that keeps her writing. Her earlier books include The Tiger’s Wife (in a fictional version of the Balkans) and Inland (with ghosts, camels and drought in Arizona in the 1890s). Now, in Sunrise, frontier mysteries and histories emerge from a valley and a ghost town.<\/p>\n

As the story opens in the present, a woman named Nina has apparently fallen from a small plane and emerged from a cold lake into a perplexing landscape. But how do you survive falling from a plane into a lake? Was she pushed? Is she, indeed, even alive?<\/p>\n

Listen to ABC RN’s The Bookshelf<\/a><\/p>\n

The latest and best fiction reviewed by a team of dedicated bibliophiles.<\/p>\n

Wherever she is, her phone isn’t working and when she does find a town, there’s nobody in it, no electricity or charging cords, and no real sign of life. Day by day, we learn about Nina, and then through various found documents and scrounged perspectives, we make our way into the history and myth-making of this place. There are gunslingers and betrayal, a stagecoach stop and a robbery, infected wolves and contested origin stories for a town called Sunrise.<\/p>\n

With enormous skill, Obreht takes us into the lives of characters across 150 years or so of American storytelling, interrogating the deeply ingrained tradition of national myth-making. In this story, cowboys and town founders are Mexican, Native American, women and gay men. As the town both grows and reinvents itself, we meet researchers and historians, as well as locals who want a particular version of commemoration and re-enactment. Meanwhile, what’s going on with Nina and her boyfriend, who was flying the plane that day the novel opened?<\/p>\n

There’s nothing benign and safe about this complex, interwoven story. Our perspectives shift, go underground, peer around corners and then become surprisingly cinematic and filled with action. To hold it all together, the writing is as agile as the plot.<\/p>\n

\u2014 Kate Evans<\/p>\n

Paying Attention \u00a0by Lynne Tillman<\/p>\n

Thames and Hudson<\/p>\n

\"Cover<\/p>\n

Lynne Tillman is the author or more than 20 works of fiction, non-fiction and short story collections. (Supplied: Thames and Hudson)<\/p>\n

For me, criticism isn’t about adjudicating or judging or endorsing or re-litigating a work of art. It’s more exploratory; an invitation for others to engage with the work and make up their own minds.<\/p>\n

This is why reading Lynne Tillman is so refreshing. This compilation of her criticism spanning more than four decades \u2014 from 1973 to 2025 \u2014 is a lovely introduction to her remarkable voice.<\/p>\n

That voice is the thinking-out-loud kind. Tillman has a mesmerising way of dancing through ideas, making unexpected connections, bringing it all back home as she moves from life to the street to poetry, dance, music, film, you name it. You feel you are in conversation with her as you read.<\/p>\n

Max Dupain biography wins $25,000 prize<\/a><\/p>\n

Curator, critic and writer Helen Ennis has won the National Biography Award for her landmark work, Max Dupain: A Portrait.<\/p>\n

I adore her way of practising criticism. Like her fiction, she’s not there to adjudicate or judge. She is there to put things before the reader so that the reader can continue their own conversations with them.<\/p>\n

In Tillman, the critic is the subject of criticism just as much as the work. Not as a form of self-regard but as (I think) its opposite: a form of chance-taking. Of bravery. Refusing to believe the writer somehow exists outside the frame, sitting in silent, invisible judgement. The result is often (seemingly) unassuming.<\/p>\n

So unassuming it might look sloppy \u2014 until you realise it takes a lot of reflection and time and decisive action to elect to do things in ways that allow sloppiness and equivocation and uncertainty and thinking-out-loud to hold the floor. After an unexpected \u2014 and moving \u2014 reflection on the loss of her father, she writes: “Some people are generous and leave big spaces for others. As an author, I hope I am; I know I want to leave space for readers, so they can put their imaginations to work and make a story theirs.”<\/p>\n

\u2014 Declan Fry<\/p>\n

Venus, Vanishing by Rebecca Birrell<\/p>\n

Picador<\/p>\n

\"Cover<\/p>\n

Rebecca Birrell told Frieze she reread Iris Murdoch’s 1978 novel The Sea, the Sea several times while working on her debut novel. (Supplied: PanMacmillan Australia)<\/p>\n

How utterly intoxicating to imagine the daring audacity of Berlin’s queer nightclub scene in the 1920s and 30s. Bodies and clothes and hair in new formations; revolutionary music and ideas. But don’t forget the danger and risk, because something terrible was coming for all of it \u2014 and in her debut novel, art historian and academic Rebecca Birrell takes us into both the thrill of Weimar and the heart-pounding threat of Nazism through the eyes of her protagonist, Hannah.<\/p>\n

The mention of clothing is not trivial but deliberate. Hannah is a seamstress and a mender of things; a young working-class Jewish woman who understands the intimacy of assessing bodies and rips in fabric, looking at stains and hems and life’s objects worn very thin. She also longs for art and wants a different future for herself than that defined by pinpricks and soap-worn hands. She runs away from home to try to make it alone \u2014 or as alone as you can be in a boarding house, exchanging stories and testing boundaries.<\/p>\n

Lucianne Tonti on Good Witch <\/a><\/p>\n

A visit to a regenerative farm in California sent fashion journalist Lucianne Tonti down a rabbit hole that led her to the witch hunts of the early modern period.<\/p>\n

Hannah wants to draw and paint, and she does it wherever and however she can. She sketches women in the nightclubs she has discovered. “I wanted women with a dark, severe energy, but they were rare,” she thinks to herself. “Most were wild in a temporary way, just as I was.”<\/p>\n

But her art and style are unschooled, not part of the new political modernism that both critiqued and confronted fascism, and her work is co-opted by the Nazis as part of their argument about so-called ‘degenerate art’. This and more of a complicated history is properly embedded into the novel, with nuance and imagination. The result is not a ‘knowing’ novel that gazes back into history with heavy-handed hindsight but one that looks forward \u2014 while we try not to breathe out as we know what’s coming for the world.<\/p>\n

\u2014 Kate Evans<\/p>\n

Big Little Truths by Liane Moriarty<\/p>\n

Macmillan Australia<\/p>\n

\"Cover<\/p>\n

Liane Moriarty is the author of 11 novels and three children’s books. (Supplied: PanMacmillan Australia)<\/p>\n

Australian writer Liane Moriarty is back to her very best with this long-awaited sequel to her 2014 bestseller, Big Little Lies.<\/p>\n

Forget the Californian beaches and Hollywood faces of the Emmy-winning TV adaptation, which starred Reese Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman. This sequel returns the story to its original setting, the fictional coastal suburb of Pirriwee in Sydney. It’s a place where beautiful women practise beachside yoga in designer activewear, and a severed finger has just been mailed to the local school principal.<\/p>\n

How sibling rivalry launched a blockbuster writing career<\/a><\/p>\n

She is one of the world\u2019s most successful authors \u2014\u00a0with more than 20 million copies sold worldwide and high-profile Hollywood adaptations \u2013 however,\u00a0Liane Moriarty might never have started writing if it were not for her sister.<\/p>\n

Moriarty has always had a great talent for plot and pacing, and she is in sparkling form here. The police investigation into the mysterious finger plays out beside interviews with precocious high school students, transcripts of the parent WhatsApp chat (mined for its full comic potential) and the drama-filled lives of our three key mothers, Madeline, Celeste and Jane. These women are a decade older than in the last book, and life has dealt them a whole new raft of challenges. Thirty-something Jane doesn’t want to have a baby with her dreamy husband, Celeste is working through the terrors of dating in her 50s, and Madeline is tackling hormonal change, a daughter’s wedding and a very sick husband, all at once.<\/p>\n

There’s all the darkness you’d expect from a Moriarty novel \u2014 we know that finger belongs to someone \u2014 but despite it all, Big Little Truths is remarkable for how utterly joyful it is. I laughed out loud and was reminded just how sharp Moriarty’s powers of observation can be. With this return to home turf, she skewers modern parenting, politics and perimenopause with laser focus.<\/p>\n

\u2014 Claire Nichols<\/p>\n

Tune in to ABC Radio National at 10am\u00a0Mondays for\u00a0The Book Show<\/a>\u00a0and 10am Saturdays for\u00a0The Bookshelf<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Fans have been waiting 12 years for Liane Moriarty to publish a sequel to her international bestselling novel,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":871965,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[64,63,30854,350540,75664,440477,75661,134,94824,440476,440478,14181,14185],"class_list":["post-871964","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-best-books","tag-best-books-2026","tag-best-new-books","tag-big-little-truths","tag-books-to-read","tag-entertainment","tag-liane-moriarty","tag-liane-moriarty-books","tag-liane-moriarty-new-book","tag-the-book-show","tag-the-bookshelf"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/871964","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=871964"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/871964\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/871965"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=871964"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=871964"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=871964"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}