Easter Long Weekend Sorry to Disrupt the Peace | Patty Yumi Cottrell | $29.99 | Text Publishing Helen Moran - thirty-two, single and childless - returns to her childhood home after the death of her adoptive brother and faces her estranged family. A bleakly comic debut that is by turns poignant, uproariously funny, and unsettling.
FICTION
BETTER READ THAN DEAD’S Guide to the Exit West | Mohsin Hamid | $32.99 | Penguin Random House From the author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, an astonishingly timely love story that brilliantly imagines the forces that transform ordinary people into refugees as they’re driven from their homes to the uncertain embrace of new lands.
The Animators | Kayla Rae Whitaker | $32.99 | Scribe Dean says: Two women meet in art school and develop a friendship and creative partnership. Both from difficult family backgrounds, they seek solace in their friendship and begin drawing out biographical animations which quickly rise to cult status. Completely engaging and moreish, this novel explores passion and creativity perfectly!
The Roanoke Girls | Amy Engel | $29.99 | Hachette Lane Roanoke is fifteen when she comes to live with her grandparents and fireball cousin at the Roanoke family’s rural estate following the suicide of her mother. Darkly sensual and deeply atmospheric, this is a novel about the twisted secrets families keep - perfect for fans of Emma Cline’s The Girls.
Storyland | Catherine McKinnon | $27.99 | Harper Collins Set on the banks of Lake Illawarra and spanning four centuries, Storyland is a unique and compelling novel of people and place - told in an unfurling narrative of interlinking stories. McKinnon’s characters are all connected; not only through the land and water they inhabit over the decades, but also by tendrils of blood, history, memory and property.
Record of a Night Too Brief | Hiromi Kawakami | $19.99 | Murdoch Books Three prize-winning stories from one of the most highly regarded and provocative contemporary Japanese writers. Filled with fantastically multicoloured images and unexplained collapses in time and place, contained are highly surreal, meticulously worked short stories of longing and disappearance, love and loathing.
The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley | Hannah Tinti | $29.99 | Hachette Dean says: An original coming-of-age novel that visually plays out like a Tarantino film. It is cool and rugged, violent yet full of heart. Loo lives with her father Hawley. She is used to packing up and moving states in an instant. She likes it this way, and hangs a shrine to her dead mother in every new hotel they stop to live in. Suddenly they settle in Olympia near her estranged grandmother where Loo starts displaying violent tendencies just like her father. Hawley wears his past on his body in the form of twelve bullet holes. Each wound carries a story revealing a past he is hiding from Loo, a past that is slowly creeping upon them.
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CRIME FICTION / FANTASY
The Fall of Lisa Bellow | Susan Perabo | $29.99 | Simon & Schuster Meredith and nemesis Lisa, the most popular girl in the 8th grade, are held at gun point in a sandwich shop, then Lisa is abducted. An edgy and original novel and a hair-raising exploration of the ripple effects of an unthinkable crime.
See What I Have Done l Sarah Schmidt | $32.99 | Hachette On 4 August 1892 Andrew and Abby Borden were murdered in their home in Massachusetts. During the inquest into the deaths, Lizzie Borden was arrested. A deeply atmospheric novel by a startling new Aussie talent; an incredibly unique look inside the mind of Lizzie Borden, famously accused of murdering her father and stepmother in 1892. The Fourteenth Letter | Claire Evans | $29.99 | Hachette A mysterious keepsake, a murdered bride, a legacy of secrets... London 1881. A bride is murdered at her engagement party, setting in chain a twisting, riveting mystery full of memorable characters in Claire Evans’ dramatic debut novel perfect for fans of Kate Mosse’s Labyrinth, Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s The Shadow of the Wind and Jessie Burton’s The Miniaturist.
All the Missing Girls | Megan Miranda | $29.99 | Allen & Unwin Miranda’s novel is a nail-biting, breathtaking story about the disappearances of two young women - a decade apart. With twists and turns that lead down dark alleys and dead ends, you’ll be left wondering just how far you’d go to protect the ones you love. Ragdoll | Daniel Cole | $29.99 | Hachette A body is discovered with the dismembered parts of six victims stitched together like a puppet, nicknamed by the press as the ‘ragdoll’. A pulse-pounding, gripping police procedural with the pace of a thriller. The beginning of an exciting new series starring detectives Wolf and Baxter.
Carnivalesque | Neil Jordan | $24.99 | Hachette Andy becomes trapped in a mysterious carnival, while an identical version of him from the hall of mirrors returns home to his parents. Carnivalesque is a dark, twisted tale of identity and metamorphosis; confinement and freedom; adolescence and the loss of innocence.
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Domina | L. S. Hilton | $29.99 | Allen & Unwin She thought her troubles were over but they’re only just getting started. Everything you thought you knew about Maestra... you don’t. Judith Rashleigh returns in the stunning new thriller from the author of the worldwide bestselling crime novel Maestra.
Strange the Dreamer | Laini Taylor | $19.99 | Hachette Since he was five years old Lazlo Strange, war orphan and junior librarian, he’s been obsessed with the mythic lost city of Weep, but it would take someone bolder than he to cross half the world in search of it. A new epic fantasy by bestselling author Laini Taylor.
NON-FICTION
Four Seasons in Rome | Anthony Doerr | $24.99 | Harper Collins Exquisitely observed, Four Seasons in Rome describes Doerr’s varied adventures in one of the most enchanting cities in the world. He reads Pliny, Dante, and Keats and visits the piazzas, temples, and ancient cisterns they describe. This intimate, revelatory book is a celebration of Rome and a fascinating story of a writer’s craft by the author of All the Light We Cannot See. Abandon Me | Melissa Febos | $29.99 | Allen & Unwin At once a fearlessly vulnerable memoir and an incisive investigation of art, love, and identity, Abandon Me draws on childhood stories, religion, psychology, mythology, popular culture, and the intimacies of one writer’s life to reveal intellectual and emotional truths that feel startlingly universal. For readers of Maggie Nelson and Leslie Jamison.
Woolloomooloo | Louis Nowra | $34.99 | New South Woolloomooloo is a place as fascinating as its name. Told in his vivid and entertaining style, Louis Nowra writes Woolloomooloo’s biography, drink in hand, from the vantage point of the Old Fitzroy Hotel, the cosy, eccentric and wonderful pub on Dowling Street, Woolloomooloo. Though the pub has a theatre, it’s the cast of real-life people that are the stars of this show.
After | Nikki Gemmell | $29.99 | Harper Collins Australia’s bravest and most honest writer explores the devastating aftermath of her elderly mother’s decision to end her own life. After is the story of Elayn Gemmell - and the often difficult, prickly relationship between mothers and daughters. As anguished as it truthful, After is a deeply intimate, fiercely beautiful, blazingly bold and important book.
Havana | Mark Kurlansky | $35.00 | Allen & Unwin Mark Kurlansky presents an insider’s view of Havana: the elegant, tattered city he has come to know over more than thirty years. Part cultural history, part travelogue, with recipes, historic engravings, photographs, and Kurlansky’s own pen-andink drawings throughout, Havana celebrates the city’s music, literature, and food; aging architecture; and blend of cultures.
Hidden Figures | Margot Lee Shetterly | $24.99 | Harper Collins The phenomenal true story of the black female mathematicians at NASA at the leading edge of the feminist and civil rights movement whose calculations helped fuel some of America’s greatest achievements in space. This book is essential to our understanding of race, discrimination, and achievement in modern America. Now a major motion picture!
The Songs of Trees | David George Haskell | $32.99 | Black Inc. Haskell brings his powers of observation to the biological networks that surround all species, including humans. When we listen to trees, nature’s great connectors, we learn how to inhabit the relationships that give life its source and beauty.
Survivor: A Portrait of the Survivors of the Holocaust | Harry Borden | $49.99 | Hachette Over the course of five years, Borden has travelled the globe photographing survivors of the Holocaust. Survivor is a unique and powerful testimony of what it is to live with memories of the Holocaust.
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CHILDREN’S FICTION
Grandad’s Secret Giant | David Litchfield | $21.99 | Murdoch Billy doesn’t believe his Grandad when he tells him there’s a giant living in his town, doing good deeds for everyone. He knows that a giant is too big to keep himself hidden. And why would he WANT to keep himself a secret? But as time goes on, Billy learns that some secrets are too BIG to stay secret for long. A giant story of belonging and friendship from David Litchfield, author of the prize winning The Bear and the Piano.
Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls | Elena Favilli | $32.99 | Penguin What if the princess didn’t marry Prince Charming but instead went on to be an astronaut? And what if the queen was the one really in charge of the kingdom? Illustrated by sixty female artists from every corner of the globe, Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls introduces us to one hundred remarkable women and their extraordinary lives. These are true fairy tales for young heroines.
I Can Only Draw Worms | Will Mabbitt | $14.99 | Hardie Grant This book is about worms. You might think worms are boring - but you’d be wrong. These worms have incredible adventures! I can’t draw those bits, though, so you’ll have to imagine them. A hilarious and superbly silly book that will have children in stitches and begging for more.
Stinky Street Stories | Alex Ratt | $14.99 | Harper Collins When Brian (‘call me Brain - everyone does’) awakes to a truly putrid pong, he knows it is up to him and his friend Nerf to neutralise it. But that putrid pong is just the beginning, because life on Stinky Street is a riot of rotten reeks, awful aromas and sickening scents. So grab a peg (for your nose) or risk being flattened by the fumes! A laugh-out-loud novel for young readers.
The Secret Science of Magic | Melissa Keil | $19.99 | Hardie Grant Joshua is good at magic tricks, ignoring his homework, and not thinking about life after year twelve. Sophia is smart enough to know that geniuses like her can end up as socially inept recluses. In fact, maybe she’s halfway there already. From YA author Keil comes this heartwarming contemporary novel about what it means to be extraordinary.
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Night Swimming | Steph Bowe | $19.99 | Text Publishing Imagine being the only two seventeen-year-olds in a small town. That’s life for Kirby Arrow and her best friend Clancy Lee, would-be musical star. Clancy wants nothing more than to leave town and head for the big smoke, but Kirby is worried: her family has a history of leaving. Then two things happen that change everything. She finds an article in the newspaper about her father, and Iris arrives in town.
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