The Prize

When William Dobell paints a portrait of lover and fellow artist Joshua Smith, he is awarded Australia’s most prestigious art prize. However, Dobell’s celebration is cut short after a protest is lodged by his competitors, who claim the painting is a caricature. Both artist and sitter soon find themselves in the glare of the spotlight when a court case to determine the matter turns into a public spectacle. At the risk of being exposed for their relationship, they must choose between love and artbetween acceptance and exile.

In a small town dominated by a haze cloud, a crazed visionary seeks out donkeys as the solution to the global climate crisis and the economic dependency of the Aboriginal people. His wife seeks solace from his madness in following the dance of butterflies and scouring the internet to find out how she can seek repatriation for her Aboriginal/Chinese family to China. A fabulous novel outlining the cry of outrage against oppression and disadvantage, and a fable for the end of days.

On the Christmas Eve of 1959, a local man makes a terrible discovery beside a creek. A case that would become one of the most baffling murder investigations in the history of South Australia. Years later, journalist Jess finds herself back home in Sydney to take care of her grandmother. She then discovers a true-crime book detailing a long-buried police case, and through its pages she finds a shocking connection between her own family and this murder mystery.

Raymond causes a stir in country town Glaston when he buys Glastonbridge, a house of vast, neo-Gothic fantasy abandoned for decades. As the restoration goes on, Raymond becomes increasingly isolated, unable to trust anyone, alienating his friends and giving courage to his enemies. He believes that unseen forces are trying to remove him from his grand project. Raymond undoubtedly has the ambition and means to make Glastonbridge thrive again, but will he be able to see it through?

Novelist JB Blackwood is on a cruise with her husband, Patrick, to celebrate their wedding anniversary. Her one-time professor, Patrick is much older than JB. He is a film director. A cult figure. But now his success is starting to wane and JB is on the cusp of winning a major literary prize. Then a storm hits. When Patrick falls overboard, JB is left alone, as the search for Patrick’s body, the circumstances of his death and the truth about their marriage begins.

Peta has a plan that she is determined to follow – a timeline, things to prove – but nothing is as expected. She is ghosted by wild dogs, almost trampled by horses, hunted down by the police, dehydrated and flooded-in; but none of this compares to the rollercoaster that is her relationship of the past year. Shifting between Peta’s journey across the Australian Alps Walking Track and her past, we learn about Peta and Ben’s tumultuous connection.

Andre Dao

Penguin, $33.00

A grandson tries to learn the family story. But what kind of story is it? Is it a prison memoir, about the grandfather imprisoned without charge or trial by a revolutionary government? Is it an oral history of the grandmother left behind to look after the children? Or is it a love story? Moving from 1930s Hanoi through a series of neverending wars and displacements, this is a story about memory and inheritance, colonialism and belonging, home and exile.

Priya Guns

Atlantic, $33.00

Damani is tired. Every day she cares for her mum, drives ride shares to pay the bills and is angry at a world that promised her more before spitting her out. That is until the summer she meets Jolene and life opens up. Jolene seems like she could be the perfect girlfriend. So maybe Damani can look past the one thing that’s holding her back: Jolene is rich. And not only rich, but white, too. But just as their romance intensifies, just as Damani learns to trust, Jolene does something unforgivable, setting off a truly explosive chain of events.

Deborah Levy

Penguin, $35.00, HC

Elsa M. Anderson is a classical piano virtuoso. In a flea market in Athens, she watches an enigmatic woman buy two mechanical dancing horses. Is it possible that the woman who is so enchanted with the horses is her living double? Chasing their doubles across Europe, the two women grapple with their conceptions of the world and each other, culminating in a final encounter on a fateful summer rainstorm.

Tom Rachman

Quercus, $33.00

Set during a crisis in democracy, a society in lockdown linked digitally but convulsed by a social media frenzy, and is told by a little-known, little-read Dutch novelist named Dora Frenhofer who has decided that her life as an old woman in this posttruth pandemic world has become too much. Dora spins stories to fend off the evil day, conjuring connections from her past to give meaning to the present.

Soon after losing her own daughter in a tragic accident, Hon returns to her childhood home in the Korean countryside. Her father, a cattle farmer, is elderly and requires her care, and Hon realises that her father is far more complex than she ever realised. The discovery of a chest of letters and conversations with his family and friends help Hon piece together the tumultuous story of his life. As she unravels secret after secret, Hon grows closer to her father, realising that his lifelong kindness belies a past wrought in both private and national trauma.

Max Porter

Things keep slipping up for Shy. All he wants is sex, spliffs and his own turntables, and for all the red noise in his mind to disappear. But he spirals past his senses and ends up with his head in his hands and carnage around him. At Last Chance - a home for ‘very disturbed young men’ - he is surrounded by people who want to help him, but his night terrors aren’t getting any better. So tonight he’s stepping into it, with the haunted beginnings of a plan.

Isabella Hammad

After years away from her family’s homeland, and reeling from a disastrous love affair, actress Sonia Nasir returns to Haifa to visit her older sister Haneen. On her return, she finds her relationship to Palestine is fragile, both bone-deep and new. When Sonia meets the charismatic and candid Mariam, a local director, she joins a production of Hamlet. Amidst it all, the life Sonia once knew starts to give way to the daunting, exhilarating possibility of finding a new self in her ancestral home.

Nicole Flattery

New York City, 1966. Seventeen-year-old Mae lives in a run-down apartment with her alcoholic mother. She is turned off by the petty girls at her high school, and the sleazy men she typically meets. When she drops out, she is presented with a job offer that will remake her world entirely- she is hired as a typist for the artist Andy Warhol. As Mae gets to live her best life, she must grapple with the thin line between art and voyeurism and determine how she can remain her own person as the tide of the sixties sweeps over her.