Gleaner August-September 2026

August-September 2026

Country Is Our Teacher Join us in celebrating Indigenous Literacy Day 2026 Plus: Read an extract from Jaclyn Moriarty’s Time Travel for Beginners

Shop Talk

From David’s desk

A

s Spring rolls around, and, as our cover picture highlights, it is time to remind you of the outstanding work the Indigenous Literacy Foundation does. And to ask you to support their programs, which you can do all year round, of course. But the first Wednesday (the 2nd) in September is Indigenous Literacy Day, which has a special focus on fundraising. So please, go to the website ilf.org.au (it’s great), familiarise yourself with the fantastic array of programs: book and resource provision, publishing in dual and own language, mentoring and others. Then, if you are able, offer your financial support to celebrate the ILF’s achievements thus far, and help continue their good work. Gleebooks is proud to have been very engaged throughout their nearly 20-year history, and we know that this engagement will continue into the future.

I am sometimes asked about the Gleaner and promotion of our events program. Our move a couple of years ago to a bimonthly Gleaner schedule, coupled with the readily available information on our website meant that advising and promoting our events program became impractical in the printed magazine.

So can I please ask everyone still relying on the Gleaner to check gleebooks.com.au to see what’s on the program. Of course we would still love to let you know, where possible, of great things coming up, so be on your marks for three outstanding author events, partnering with the Seymour Centre, for Suzie Miller,

Bruce Pascoe, and Tim Winton.

My reading has been horribly circumscribed by overwork, but I’m sure I’m telling at least some of you nothing new. I was particularly struck by Make Strange ($33, W&N, out now), from Irish novelist Niamh Campbell. In beautifully measured, at times funny, or melancholic, prose, we travel a year with a young family under the pressures of modern life. There’s a striking complication involving their four-year-old child, who seems to have lived before. It’s an uneven novel but haunting and arresting, and Campbell is a very good writer. I’ve also thoroughly enjoyed Kate Grenville’s The Country Schoolmaster: a mystery in 88 letters. Too hard to summarise, but it’s excellent – a nonfiction work that is part mystery and part historical investigation.

And please check out Suzie Miller’s Inter Alia, a splendid but unconnected follow-up to Prima Facie.

– David, Gleebooks director

Lessons from Country

I

ndigenous Literacy Day (ILD) is a national celebration of First Nations people’s stories, cultures and languages, presented by the Indigenous Literacy Foundation (ILF). Held annually on the first Wednesday of September – this year, Wednesday 2 September – ILD shares the richness and diversity of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages and cultures with audiences across the country.

The ILF plays a vital role in providing culturally relevant books to remote First Nations Communities and the publication of stories written and illustrated by children and adults from remote Communities.

Since it was established, the ILF has delivered more than 1 million culturally relevant books, published 158 books, sharing their stories and languages across 500 remote communities.

In 2024, the ILF received Sweden’s prestigious Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, which is given to authors, illustrators, oral storytellers and people or organisations that work to promote reading. Earlier this month, seven books published by the ILF were selected for the inaugural IBBY-UNESCO Collection of Remarkable Books for Young Readers in Indigenous and Endangered Languages.

For 2026, the ILF invites everyone to join a free film screening and livestream celebrating the theme Country Is Our Teacher.

The film journeys into Australia’s Central Desert with Niningka and Chris, two children living in Mparntwe (Alice Springs) and Nyirripi, Northern Territory. They showcase their Communities and their unique connections to Country, stories, their languages, and cultures, describing life on Warlpiri Country in Nyirripi and teaching words in Warlpiri language. From there it’s off to

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Shop Talk

Mpartntwe to learn words in Arrernte with children and Elders.

ILF Ambassadors and remote Community authors will also headline a live celebration at the Sydney Opera House, featuring song, dance and storytelling for audiences of all ages. Head to ild. org.au/ild to register and watch the ILD film and livestream.

This year’s featured book is My Walk Through the Seasons on Ngaanyatjarra Country, written and illustrated by respected Ngaanyatjarra Elder Daisy Tjuparntarri Ward with Sharon Naparulla Burns, Sandy Robertson and students from Ngaanyatjarra Lands School.

Written in English and Ngaanyatjarra, it follows a young girl through the seasons, celebrating the bond between people, place and culture – a meaningful way to mark ILD at home, work or in your local library.

You can also support ILD by buying books and merch from the website, making a donation, or hosting a Great Book Swap at your school, library, workplace or social club. Go to ilf.org.au for more details.

SET IN SYDNEY’S BLEAK UNDERBELLY, A REFORMED CRIMINAL MUST DO EVERYTHING SHE CAN TO STOP HER DAUGHTER FROM MAKING THE SAME MISTAKES... AT WHATEVER COST NECESSARY. ‘Sydney’s bright, indifferent edges frame this controlled and inescapable noir. This is lean, exacting prose with teeth.’

ROBERT LUKINS, author of Somebody Down There Likes Me

AFTER 80 YEARS IN THE SHADOWS, CRAIG COLLIE UNEARTHS THE MYSTERY OF JAPANESE MILITARY INTELLIGENCE OFFICER MAJOR SEI HASHIDA, A FASCINATING SPY STORY SET IN WORLD WAR II AUSTRALIA. ‘An ingenious piece of historical reconstruction. It reads like a spy thriller.’

TOM GILLING, author of Start Digging, You Bastards!

Photos: Nyningka and Chris (left), the stars of the ILD film and the Warakurna Community (top).

AUSTRALIAN. INDEPENDENT. FOR READERS.

August-September 2026

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Fiction AUSTRALIAN LITERATURE

The Second Child

And in the Morning

1945: as the war ends, a triumphant but paranoid Stalin grows suspicious that his security chief, Lavrentiy Beria, is plotting against him.

Beria’s secret weapon is Melor Murtova, his best friend’s daughter, returned from exile to become his adopted daughter and his spy among the Kremlin’s nepo babies. Amid palace intrigue, Melor must outwit treacherous rivals while secretly hunting her parents’ murderer before time runs out. Set against the true history of the war’s final days, The Second Child is a chilling black comedy about survival in the court of madmen.

In the winter of 1919, Lily and her young son rush through Melbourne’s streets to welcome home her husband, Bert, back from four years fighting with the Light Horse.

Twenty-three years later, as the city braces for Japanese invasion, WAAAF recruit Frankie meets airman Ed at a dance. Nearly three decades on, amid anti-war protests, single mother Fran prepares to bury her only son, a conscript killed in Vietnam. And in the Morning traces how war’s tragedies – great and small – reshape the intimate lives of the mothers, wives and lovers left to carry them. $35, UQP. Out August

Malcolm Knox

Lenny Robinson

$35, Allen & Unwin. Out September

Six Days

Blue Giant

Daniel, an Australian expatriate who has lived in Paris for more than 40 years, is determined to atone for a lifetime of mistakes and become the “good man” his friend Marcelline believes him to be.

When Marcelline disappears, Daniel’s search leads to a single misjudgment that threatens everything he values. Set over six winter days in Paris’s Latin Quarter, the novel unfolds into interwoven lives shaped by abandonment, addiction, grief, political upheaval and compassion, while Daniel and his ageing dog wander the city’s streets. $33, Upswell. Out August

Abby is in her early 30s, suffering the unbearable burdens of adulthood and anonymity, when she wakes up after a drunken bender with an all-new, all-consuming purpose in life: to be the first person on Mars. It’s perfect timing – Danish tech entrepreneur Tor Skovgaard is currently recruiting for a one-way mission to colonise the red planet. Abby knows this is her last-ditch bid for purpose and glory. Blue Giant is an unruly eulogy for millennial optimism – a deranged love letter to a generation torn between helplessness and selfishness.

Amanda Curtin

I Love the Whole World!

Victoria Hannan

When Leslie’s physiotherapist husband dumps her for a woman with superior posture, she finds herself lost without a map. A ticket out of her misery comes in the form of an all-expenses paid trip to the bright lights of Las Vegas.

Wonder, Leslie discovers, can be found in the most unexpected of places. Soon she falls in love with the beauty of the desert, its art and its people – and finds her way back to herself. I Love the Whole World! is a novel about friendship, ageing and the extraordinary act of deciding to begin again.$35, Penguin. Out August

Quite the Pair

Jordan Prosser

$35, UQP. Out August

Tobias Madden Austin and Sydney have been best friends for more than a decade, sharing everything from a tiny New York apartment to life’s biggest milestones.

When both of their long-term relationships collapse on the same night, they move back in together and make a pact to break their destructive habits. But old patterns prove hard to escape as new romances and familiar dynamics threaten their resolve. Quite the Pair is a warm, witty novel about friendship, self-discovery and whether people can truly change. $35, Penguin. Out August

Eye of the Needle

Common Places

Christopher Raja

Gillian Hagenus

In 1882, young Afghan cameleer Kadir arrives in Port Augusta with six camels, hired to guide a scientific expedition into the red centre. More than a century later, Kris, who emigrated from India as a boy, comes of age in Melbourne’s suburbs. After his father’s mysterious death, he drifts to St Kilda, into drugs, sex and love, finally learning what it truly takes to write a novel about Kadir’s visionary life. Christopher Raja’s Eye of the Needle is a spectacular novel about desire and ambition, about what love does to us and what we’ll do for it.

The Australian suburbs are stranger than they seem – sun-bleached streets haunted by memory, cul‑de‑sacs edged with bushland that watches back, and homes where dangers lurk behind familiar fences. Between neighbours who know too much, houses that hum with memories best forgotten, and bushfire smoke seeping into backyards, this collection of short fiction reveals the hidden anxieties that shape our domestic lives. Subversive, intimate and darkly imaginative, Common Places reminds us that the most terrifying things are often the ones that feel closest to home.

$35, Text Publishing. Out August

$35, UQP. Out September

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Fiction AUSTRALIAN LITERATURE

Big Little Truths Liane Moriarty

Parenting teens is not for the faint of heart but Madeline, Jane and Celeste have been through worse. It’s been a decade since the school trivia night that changed their lives forever and now they’re living blissfully ordinary suburban lives. But when a grisly package arrives at the local high school, and a man is seen lurking around the kids, everyone in their beachside community is uneasy. Is this history repeating itself or something new and more shocking? Once again, Liane Moriarty examines the complexities of modern women’s lives, shining light on shame and family secrets with wit and compassion. $35, Macmillan. Out August

Loneliness Is a Molecule Helena Fox

Miri was whole, once.

She had a best friend once, too. She knew who she was – or she thought she did. But now she is a million lonely molecules, flying through the air to a new life on the other side of the world. Rome is light and loud with cobblestones and gelaterias, and ancient buildings next to modern ones. Rome is new people and a chance to get out of her head. Or is it into her head she needs to go, to find herself again? Loneliness Is a Molecule is a poetic novel about friendship, family, forgiveness, trauma, love and happiness from an incomparable author. $33, Picador. Out September

Time Travel for Beginners

Now, Autonomy Max Easton

2024: Helen has traded cinema management for bottle-shop shifts, now living with disaffected couch-dweller Pat. Her former housemate Sunny obsesses over their band and has moved in with drummer Sio, the only one with life somewhat together. Their lives entwine through Sydney’s punk underground, a rising protest movement, and the struggle to find creative fulfilment in an indifferent city – until a dilapidated palace offers one last radical act. Max Easton’s third novel explores anarchist collectives, DIY activism, and intergenerational solidarity, tracing how history repeats, even when the lyrics don’t rhyme. $33, Giramondo. Out August

Jaclyn Moriarty

On a Sydney street sits the Time Travel Agency, offering coffee, pastries, and a trip anywhere in the past – no risk of altering the present.

Single mother Anna takes a job there, glimpsing a chance at happiness. Teddy comes as a customer hoping to untangle his imploded marriage.

Jade, harbouring a deeply buried secret, despises the agency for peddling false hope. Is it real, and if so, what’s the catch?

A story of grief, longing, and the pull of the past, asking what we’d risk for one more moment with what we’ve lost. Read an extract on p6. $35, Ultimo Press. Out now

Mine

Adam Ouston Trapped down an abandoned mine in Tasmania’s mountain rainforests, an unnamed poet searching for his final work is visited by memories and voices.

Lost in a fever dream, the poet journeys through a kaleidoscope of Tasmanian history, mining lore, hauntology, poetry, rain and rainbow trout, drilling deep into the contemporaneous horrors of the North Mount Lyell disaster and Mawson’s expedition becoming trapped in Antarctic pack ice. Wondrous, terrifying and haunting, Mine is a story of environmental exploitation and a luminous paean to the beauty that persists in a world spinning out of control.

The Doubles Jacob K. Gallagher

Near Werris Creek on the Liverpool Plains, the Veil separating our world from the Outside is thinning, and children are disappearing, turning up dead. Kring, an Envoy tasked with banishing Trespassers, takes the case – one that will push her abilities to the limit and dredge up memories she’d rather forget. With local magical law officer Dries, she races to stop a demon before it finds what it’s looking for. The Doubles blends First Nations culture with speculative fiction to create a mesmerising mystery. $35, Hachette. Out August

$35,Transit Lounge. Out August

The Burn

The Low Road

Jessica Mansour-Nahra

Katharine Quarmby

2030: after bushfires plunge Australia into lockdown, Carmen finds she’s grown too comfortable in solitude. When restrictions lift, best friend Eleni convinces her to join a road trip with Dan and Rhett. But the friends have all changed, and when they’re stranded in isolated cabins deep in national parkland, secrets spill, ideals clash, and bitter arguments erupt. As new fires close in on their final morning, the group must find a way out – if they can still trust each other. The Burn is a nerve-shredding thriller asking who and what we cling to when everything starts to burn.

Norfolk, 1813: after Mary Tyrell’s suicide, the suspected child-murderess is staked through the heart, leaving her daughter Hannah sent to London’s Refuge for the Destitute. There Hannah meets Annie Simpkins, and friendship deepens into passionate love. But when the girls are caught stealing from the laundry, they’re sentenced to transportation to Botany Bay, setting them on paths that may never reunite. Drawing on real events, The Low Road brings to life forgotten voices – convicts, servants, the rural poor – and a love that blossomed against prejudice and ill fortune.

$35, Hachette. Out August

$23, Lightning Books. Out now August-September 2026

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Extract

Past, present, future Jaclyn Moriarty is one-third of a literary family powerhouse. As children, she and her sisters Liane and Nicola were paid $1.50 by their father for every exercise book they filled with words. This love of writing stories never left her, and while studying for a PhD at Cambridge, she wrote her first published novel, Feeling Sorry for Celia. Jaclyn has written many more books since then and won many prizes, including the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award. Here, in an extract from her captivating new novel, Time Travel for Beginners, she tells the story of Anna, Teddy and Jade, who look to the past to find comfort in the present.

M

onday, 23 June, 9am, a rainy day, I pushed open the door to the Time Travel Agency.

I was immediately struck by dim golden light, along with an impression of colour and cosiness. Cushions, pictures, poppies in a vase, books, musical instruments, a sewing table, plants in pots, even armchairs huddled around a fireplace! I felt like I was in a mountain chalet, the guest of relaxed and friendly hosts. A rug lay at my feet, beckoning me along a kind of passageway of bookcases. This led to four interlocked workstations. At three of these, people typed softly at keyboards, their heads bent. Tap, tap, tap. The sound like mice scuffling behind a wall.

I cleared my throat.

Three heads swung up.

The most striking of these was a beautiful young man. Dark hair falling almost to his shoulders, almost to his eyelashes; features sketched with infinite delicacy; dark eyes shining with kindness. It was the type of beauty that almost demands comment, like a bright blue day. It almost feels rude not to exclaim, “Oh, look at you!”

(If you are judging me as superficial, it’s probably been a while since you’ve encountered one of those quantum-leap beauties.

You’ve forgotten their effect. As when you’ve not had the flu, or given birth, for some time, and you start to think, Well, really, is it all that bad?)

Luckily, I restrained myself, although I’m sure my face turned briefly slack with shock. I forced my eyes across to the others.

These held up reasonably well, considering. One was a middle-aged woman with flyaway hair and that slight overbite that suggests both mischief and shyness. She wore a smock dress with a Peter Pan collar, oatmeal with a lime-green stripe. The other was an older man. Strong face, brown skin, large nose, defiant brow, thick grey hair. His shirwwwt was a royal-blue button-down, the sleeves rolled up. His forearms were hairy. “We didn’t hear you come in!” the oatmeal-smock woman cried.

She was pushing her hair behind her ears repetitively, almost compulsively. “How long have you been standing there? We need a bell!”

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“Or a creaking door,” the young man suggested.They both laughed, as if this was a joke. The older man arched a disapproving eyebrow, as if it wasn’t really.

“It’s OK, I only just arrived,” I told them. “My name is Anna Salone.

Doctor Nastevski told me—“Oh, it’s you!” Oatmeal-smock leaped up, then had to dive back to catch her chair, which had begun to topple. “Katya told us to expect you. I’m Paisley! This is Joon”—indicating the beautiful man (who became, honestly, almost unbearably so when his smile broadened)—“and Roberto.”

The older man nodded, studying me. “Welcome!” Paisley finished. “I’ll give you the tour!”

It was very much like being shown around a holiday resort by a manager anxious for a five-star review.

Paisley had me set my bag on the fourth desk—“Yours! It’s a mahogany pedestal, circa 1920. Bring in whatever you like to personalise it. Photos.

Knick-knacks.”

Then she whirled me around the room, pointing out the kitchenette (“Always treats there—Katya loves to bake—help yourself! Coffee. Tea. Look at the range of herbal teas! I once combined them all. Don’t do that. Awful …”), couches (“Where we bring customers to discuss destinations”), bookcases (“inspiration and research”), the sewing table (“hopefully the machine won’t disturb you”), musical instruments (“Katya thinks playing these helps time lag recovery”), and stacks of games and boxes of toys (“for customers who bring children, although so far no child has paid the slightest attention to these”) before stopping at a bright orange door.

Her pause here was so loaded—she lowered her head and clasped her hands—that I assumed this was the “time travel” door. I felt a jolt and straightened my shoulders, ready.

Here we go, I thought. It wasn’t the past, though. It was a corridor.

“Those are the time travel booths.” Paisley pointed left, to a row

Extract of closed metal doors, each with a flat inlaid screen. “Six booths,” Paisley added, swerving right and pointing out regular wooden doors. “Wardrobe, bathrooms, change rooms, meeting room, tech,” she recited.

Wardrobe?“If customers take the wardrobe option, they can dress in the style of the era they’re visiting. We improvise, of course; we don’t have every era and place.”

She opened the wardrobe door to reveal a surprisingly deep room filled with racks of dresses, suits, jackets, mantles and capes; shelves of shoes (from Roman sandals to button-up leather boots); trees of hats (coifs, bonnets, top hats, straw hats); and cabinets of accessories (canes, gloves, parasols, fans, muffs, cravats, stocks, ties, silk bouquets, tiny bottles of perfume attached to gold chains, and mosaic and cameo brooches). ‘It’s broken down by region, decade, season, time of day and gender,’ Paisley explained. ‘You can check the reference book here.’ She held up a thick book tied to the door handle with ribbon. ‘This also has advisory notes on things, like how a pocket handkerchief should be displayed.’

“This makes it feel real for the customers?” I guessed.“Well, more so they can blend in, which is more immersive. Also, locals are less likely to stare—or worse.”

I raised my eyebrows at the “worse”, but Paisley was still

talking: “Of course, the first question is whether they travel in complete or partial form.”

I waited for her to elaborate. “In complete form, you can talk to people, taste fruit, even drive a car. In partial, you’re invisible and can’t interact with your surroundings. No point dressing up if you’re going partial.”

She pointed to the tech door. “That’s the machinery that runs this place. If something goes wrong, we consult the tech manual.

There’s one on your desk for you to study.”

My first instinct was to reply, “Oh, no thank you, I’m not really keen on study.”

Abruptly, though, I recalled that I was working here, not on holiday.

“Great,” I said instead.

An extract from Time Travel for Beginners by Jaclyn Moriarty, $35, Ultimo Press, out now Opposite page: Jaclyn Moriarty.

Photo: Steve Brown. bookseller’s grant.

Shop Talk

A bookseller at large

H

ow amazing that we’re already into the second half of the year – the best time for booksellers and readers alike, as this is when the publishers begin to release all their best titles leading up to Christmas. And the good stuff is already coming thick and fast.

Adelaide writer Sharon Kernot’s verse novel Night Swimming (Text, $35) has been likened to The Monkey’s Mask by Dorothy Porter, published in 1994. Night Swimming is also a psychological thriller, the main character, Clare, a hot mess of neuroses, insomnia and addiction. One day, she sees a man who was with her and her best friend Julie the night Julie died when they were just 14. Like Clare, the reader becomes certain that this handsome, wolfish man had a hand in Julie’s death. Determined to find the truth, she dyes her blond hair and, sure that he doesn’t recognise her, sets out to seduce him. Clare is nothing if not an unreliable narrator and Kernot takes us on a wild ride with her until the very end. It’s a fantastic achievement and I don’t think Night Swimming would have had the same gutsy impact if written in prose.

One of my favourite books of the last few years is Lost Children Archive by Mexican novelist Valeria Luiselli and now she dazzles again with Beginning Middle End (4th Estate GB, $33), a gorgeous, sumptuous autofiction the complexity of which makes it hard to summarise. It is variously about mothers and daughters, history, nature and geography, about language and writing and what it is to be a writer. An un-named mother and

daughter travel to Sicily after the mother, the writer, attends some book readings in Europe. A journalist asks if her work is autofiction which the writer denies as if “denying a petty crime”.

Luiselli can deny as long as she likes, but this is autofiction at its best.

In Beginning Middle End (the title is drawn from the daughter, who questions why the mother can’t write such a book) the two travel through Italy to return a mosaic shard their great grandmother had taken from an archeological site many decades before. They read and write and discourse on a wide variety of topics, including Pliny the Elder, whose nature writing the precocious 12-year-old has discovered. At times her intelligence is so off the charts it’s almost unbelievable, but if, as indicated in the acknowledgements, she is based on Luiselli’s own daughter, then I believe in her completely. Ultimately it matters not what is fact and what fiction. Luiselli has written a discursive, hybrid, fascinating book – with a wholly satisfying beginning, middle and end. Bask in the beauty of the writing and delight in these intelligent, warm and gracious women and of course, in the great Pliny the Elder.

Mirandi Riwoe’s third novel, A Short History of Longans (UQP, $35) is a beguiling Chinese-Australian saga covering four generations of a family, starting with Daniel in 2049, owner of the titular longan tree which collapses in a storm. From there we are taken back to the 1980s and the family’s Chinese forebear, Ah Yang, an unlikely bushranger. On the way we meet wonderful characters – Wendy, Ruby and Maria among others. This is a beautiful, quintessentially Australian novel about family, race and belonging.

– Morgan

August-September 2026

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Fiction INTERNATIONAL LITERATURE

The Weight of Angels

Enchantment

The Bridge

Riikka Pulkkinen

Colm Tóibín

When the Marquis of Queensbury left his calling card at the Albemarle Club in February 1895, it bore only his name and five words: “For Oscar Wilde, posing Somdomite”. The most feted playwright of his day famously sued for libel, which led to his arrest, criminal prosecution and ultimately prison. From then on, his gilded existence spiralled into public disgrace and an early death.

But what if he had simply ignored the insult? In imagining the life that Oscar Wilde never had, John Boyne gives the great Anglo-Irish poet and playwright a fresh new voice and the opportunity to take an entirely different path.

When 17-year-old Philippa is found dead in her yard, police question everyone close to her: the elderly neighbour who found her body and confuses her with his late wife, the best friend hoarding stolen keepsakes, the ex-boyfriend still reeling from their breakup, a woman raging in Philippa’s strange videos, and the older men she met on a dating app. Each offers a different Philippa – confidant, fantasy, mystery, mirror – but did any truly know her? Enchantment is a spellbinding mystery exploring girlhood’s uneasy terrain, weaving power, identity, and the fragile boundary between truth and fiction. $33, Scribe. Out August

Miquel and his father are living an uneasy life together in his mother’s house in the Pyrenees, the house she had been returning to on the day she died. A new bridge, connecting the two valleys, is almost complete, which will end the valley’s isolation and create an easier route for smugglers. Where Miquel’s father imagines opportunity, Miquel foresees disaster and an exposure to the outside world for which his father is desperately unprepared. Colm Tóibín’s exhilarating short novel contains vast inner and outer worlds within its pages, capturing lives caught between the past and the present.

Hollow Bones

Hollywood, Ending

John Boyne

$30, Picador. Out September

$35, Doubleday. Out September

The Newer World Sebastian Barry

Jodi Picoult

Against the rapidly shifting landscape in the aftermath of the American Civil War, Tennyson Bouguereau – freed man, devoted brother, nascent singer, conflicted soldier and wanted man – journeys to find meaning and belonging. From the relative safety of home in Tennessee with his sister Rosalee, he is offered the possibility of a whole new life in Nashville, until a surprising trip to Victorian England changes everything. Exquisitely rendered, and with a rich cast of characters, The Newer World is a lyrical, visceral novel about what it is to survive, and what might be lost along the way.

Molly Fitzgerald and her husband Jesse are no strangers to trauma. Molly’s mum went missing on 9/11 and didn’t come home.

Molly now heads a disaster response unit.

Jesse’s family was torn apart by a court case that pitted his parents against his siblings. He sees deception every day in his work as a police polygraph expert. The couple manage to keep the past behind them until a medical emergency exposes a secret, threatening everything they know to be true. Heartrending, shocking, immersive, Hollow Bones is Jodi Picoult at the height of her storytelling powers.

For rising young actors Kai Laramie and Juniper Castillo, being cast in the buzzy biopic Andy Warhol Never Gets Old is the opportunity they’ve both been waiting for. They’re on the verge of breaking out, and maybe even falling in love. Soon, the movie is blowing up, and so are their lives – in exciting, but also terrifying, ways.

John Green artfully blends a behindthe-scenes Hollywood love story with an unflinching examination of the insatiable attention economy, brilliantly juxtaposing Kai and Juniper’s story with the on-screen study of Warhol’s life at the dawn of celebrity culture.

$35, Faber Fiction. Out September

$35, Macmillan. Out September

$35, Penguin. Out September

Upward Bound Woody Brown Set at a daycare centre for LA’s disabled community, Woody Brown’s vibrant debut follows Carlos, a charismatic aide shaped by his mother’s early death; Jorge, gentle, nonspeaking, and prone to escape; Tom, who pines for summer lifeguard Ann; and Dave, the director who once dreamed of acting. At its heart is Walter, a college student returning after a family tragedy. Around him unfolds a story of friendships forged, connections missed, and dreams shaped and reshaped.

Upward Bound immerses us in life as we’ve never experienced it, told with wit, empathy, and remarkable storytelling gifts. $35, Jonathan Cape. Out August

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John Green

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A Real Animal Emeline Atwood After a sexual assault, college senior Lucy moves away from home, ends her long-term relationship, cuts off her mother, and begins dating a dynamic man with a violent streak.

As she drifts through new cities, friends and partners, an otherworldly force thrums at the edge of her mind, urging her to reject the ordinary while reminding her she is alone. Across a decade of both horrific pain and quotidian happiness, Lucy is drawn back to an altered version of her childhood home, where she must finally confront what it means to be human: alone, wild, and unknowable. $33, Scribe. Out August

Fiction INTERNATIONAL LITERATURE

The Amateur Chris Bohjalian 1978, Tallmadge, New York: 18-year-old Mira Winston spends her summer perfecting her golf swing and carrying on an affair with her father’s married golf buddy. Then a freak accident kills her classmate Kenny, and the day’s events become entangled with the choices Mira has already made, rippling outward with devastating consequences for her family, friends, and herself. Mesmerizing and darkly funny, The Amateur asks what happens when one small moment changes a life, turning a sharp eye on the American middle class’s power, morality, and the weight of blame. $35, Hutchinson Heinemann. Out August

Other People’s Children

The Housekeeper Rose Tremain

Ben Faccini

Tommaso is just about making it work: travelling abroad for his job, helping his girlfriend with her two unruly sons, and keeping up with the eccentricities of his Italian grandmother, Alma. But as Alma grows increasingly troubled by strange and unsettling memories, Tommaso realises that there is much in her past that he doesn’t know. Reaching back to the tumultuous days of the Italian resistance during the Second World War and into the domestic chaos of modern life, this is a story of the past’s long shadow, and the families we have and those we make. $37, Granta. Out August

$35, Chatto & Windus. Out September

The Girl with Seven Lives

I Want You to Be Happy

Devi is a fighter. Growing up in the slums of Delhi, she has learnt that survival comes at a cost. Now she’s being held captive, her life up for sale in an online auction, where the highest bidder will determine her fate. With her existence hanging in the balance, Devi proceeds to give her captor “a confession to beat all confessions” as, over the course of a single night, she unveils the secrets of her seven extraordinary lives. A high-stakes tour-de-force from Vikas Swarup, author of Q & A, the book that inspired Slumdog Millionaire. $35, Apollo. Out August

Each time Joey leaves Chuck’s plush apartment, it’s with a fuller sense that he might just be the person for her. His smile, his maturity. The shared interests. The way he warms her hands in his.

Ignore the differences – the 12-year-age gap, her small damp house-share, her meagre barista wages. Trying to explain it doesn’t explain it at all. Amazing, how a new person finding you interesting can make you feel so new. She wonders: could he love me? Both funny and excruciating, this is the story of a new couple searching for meaning and connection in modern times. $33, Faber Fiction. Out August

Vikas Swarup

The Left and the Lucky

Jem Calder

The Given World Melissa Harrison

Mrs Danowski – known as Danni – is the housekeeper of a grand house on the wild coast of Cornwall. When a glamorous young writer, Daphne du Maurier, visits Manderville Hall to research her new novel, she and Danni are drawn into a clandestine affair. For Danni, it is an allconsuming love; for Daphne a submission to long-suppressed desires. But when Daphne’s novel launches to triumphant success, Danni is distraught to find herself transformed into a malign and jealous character on the page. The Housekeeper is an epic tale of secret love and a bold imagining of how a classic novel came to be written.

Willy Vlautin

Eddie Wilkens runs his own house-painting business. Fortysomething and living alone, he just wants to take life one day at a time. When his eightyear-old neighbour, Russell, starts hanging around, Eddie sees that this small kid – with his single mother working nights and his violent older brother – is struggling to keep his head above water, and so tries to help. Equal parts heart wrenching and uplifting, The Left and the Lucky is a portrait of this unusual friendship – the ways hurt shatters people and the compassionate acts that can, maybe, hold some of those pieces together. $33, Faber Fiction. Out October

Farewell to Eden

In the ancient Welm Valley, something is shifting. The river is behaving oddly, while the arrival of spring, with its familiar rhythms, is shadowed by an undercurrent of unease. A woman falls while out walking and hopes to be found before nightfall; a doctor realises, too late, that he has long underestimated his wife; across the village, people are plagued by the same vast and unsettling dream. And alone in a converted priory, Clare Grey receives news which will force her to reconsider her family’s past. Luminous and intimate, The Given World is a story of belonging, loss and the richly interwoven connections between people, history and place.

Fresh from Normandy, Philip Deval arrives in Palestine on a peace-keeping mission as the British Mandate nears its end, a fragile paradise on the brink of new conflict. Years later, teaching in the English countryside, he meets enigmatic music mistress Frances Darwood, and their evenings together draw them close. But Philip carries secrets and scars that threaten his future. Farewell to Eden is an epic novel of faith in postwar Britain, asking how we retain our humanity and learn to love again after great suffering.

$35, Hutchinson Heinemann. Out August

$35, Hutchinson Heinemann. Out September

Sebastian Faulks

August-September 2026

9

Fiction INTERNATIONAL LITERATURE

The Strangers Naomi Alderman

Months after her mother’s death, novelist Naomi Alderman sets up a garden camera that captures a strange new animal: the “mimmoth”, badger-sized, trunk-nosed, and soon as common as foxes worldwide. As Alderman navigates grief’s strange logic, the mimmoths spread – harmless yet oddly intelligent, uncapturable, purposeful. She senses a personal connection to them, or is it “mimmoth psychosis”? Pulled into conspiracy theories and global power struggles, she wonders whether grief has coloured reality, or reality itself is changing. The Strangers is a thrillingly original novel blurring fiction and reality, reconsidering what it means to be human. $35, Fig Tree. Out September

Ordinary People Like Us Kelly Ana Morey From the gumfields of the Far North, through inner-city Auckland and across oceans to London, Ordinary People Like Us follows five generations of Maori women as the world around them changes – and they change with it. They love fiercely and have secrets they’ll take to the grave. They endure loss so great the future feels impossible. But their fates are not shaped by history or ghosts.

They forge their own paths, in the everyday choices and small acts of courage that make up the glittering fabric of their lives.

Ordinary People Like Us is the stunning final novel from one of New Zealand’s finest writers. $35, Moa Press. Out September

Our Noble Selves Kate Atkinson Summer 1951: as Britain readies the Festival of Britain to celebrate its postwar recovery, war reporter Harry Flynn seeks redemption after a bad war and a harder peace. Flynn reluctantly joins a team of misfits preparing the festival, and attempts to renew his love life, which founders when a date goes missing – and he’s the last person to have seen her alive. The answer may lie with a precocious 13-year-old, Veronica, and her scruffy terrier, Mrs Betty. Witty and brilliantly plotted, Our Noble Selves affirms Kate Atkinson as one of our greatest chroniclers. $35, Doubleday. Out September

Under Story Chloe Benjamin At an isolated Antarctic research station, biologist-turned-dishwasher Laurel Salter is hiding from her past – her abandoned career, her failed marriage. But when a strange visual phenomenon called the Arc draws physicists to the McMurdo station, her former husband Eli arrives with them. Both sense something uncanny in the Arc’s living glow, though Eli resists the scientists’ wilder theories. It’s Laurel who’s willing to risk everything – to fix what broke between them and live their story again. A haunting novel about grief, second chances, and the pull of undoing the past. $35, Tinder Press. Out September

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Gleebooks Gleaner

Fiction INTERNATIONAL LITERATURE

Agrippa

The Shame Addict Shame is an acquired taste. Nobody knows this better than the young anonymous narrator subjected to repeated instances of sexual abuse, parental beatings and gleefully administered psychological cruelty. After some formative missteps in Zambia and France he arrives in London where he finds the perfect enabler for his shame habit. A career in advertising. Brilliant, depraved and unexpectedly sophisticated The Shame Addict shocks and seduces as we witness the manufacture and installation of one of the most prominent self-destruct buttons ever featured in modern fiction. $23, Corsair. Out September

The Big Cats Dance Party Alexander McCall Smith Mma Ramotswe’s latest adventure begins with a simple shoe-shopping trip for Mr J.L.B. Matekoni’s birthday, but soon spirals into more excitement than a quieter life would allow. Junior mechanic Charlie hatches a scheme with two local jazz musicians, Lion and Leopard, despite Mma Makutsi’s grim predictions, while Mma Ramotswe herself heads to the Okavango Delta to help friends at an elephant sanctuary fend off a hostile campaign. Warm, wise and full of gentle mishaps, this latest instalment in the No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series delivers exactly what fans expect: generosity of spirit and, naturally, a happy ending. $33, Abacus. Out September

The Birthing Tree

Robert Harris

Anonymous

With Julius Caesar dead, 17-year-old Octavius and his closest friend Agrippa must fight Rome’s most powerful figures to claim Octavius’ inheritance – and against all odds, they win. Octavius becomes Emperor Augustus, and together they rule for 20 years. Now 50, ailing and betrayed by his wife’s infidelity, Agrippa retreats to the Bay of Naples to write his memoirs.

From Julius Caesar to the clash with Mark Antony and Cleopatra, the Battle of Actium, and endless wars of expansion, he recounts a life dominated by one man: the cunning, ruthless, unknowable Octavius. $35,Hutchinson Heinemann. Out August

Life of M

Amanda Peters

Raised by her grandmother Kiju near a tree sacred to generations of Indigenous women, Aliet was born as her mother died beneath its roots. As local Indigenous women turn away from traditional birthing rituals and white doctors’ scepticism curdles into condemnation, Kiju and Aliet bear witness to prejudice’s cost. Decades later, Aliet is a nurse in the city, carrying her grandmother’s teachings alongside modern medicine – until Kiju’s sudden death sends her back to the tree to uncover buried secrets and decide what inheritance she’ll carry forward. Spanning decades, The Birthing Tree traces one woman’s fight to protect her land and traditions. $35, Fig Tree. Out September

Rachel Cusk

Film star M’s face has been everywhere since childhood; her fame grants an uncanny freedom where reality itself seems to bend around her.

Now a writer studies M closely, hoping to understand who she really is – though proximity to such radiance breeds its own ugliness and insignificance. Is M playing a character, or is the writer performing M? In this explosive novel, Rachel Cusk hunts for truth without self-deception, probing who we are in an age hypnotised by images, and suggesting life’s value lies not in beauty but in a self that survives the world’s violence. $33, Faber. Out September

The Long Cloud Hector Mackenzie

After a decade riding London’s carousel of validation as a model, Xander’s ride is slowing.

When his much more successful actor girlfriend Tessa K buys him a ticket home to New Zealand for the first time in 10 years, he returns a stranger – the family farm for sale, his mother overbearing, his ex circling back. Then he meets someone younger and vibrant who makes him fall for the small town he fled.

Cure or symptom? The Long Cloud is a tender, funny meditation on masculinity, beauty and mortality, proving you can go home but never truly go back. $30, Scribe. Out September

Sunrise

The Disappearers

Téa Obreht

Marlon James

2024: Nina’s plane crashes into a Wyoming lake, and she stumbles upon Sunrise, an eerily well-kept but abandoned frontier town.

2003: Sunrise’s golden boy Coll is drawn into a scandal that forces him to question a beloved local figure – and himself. 1902: town founder and gunslinger Anton Vargas returns to help search for a missing boy, though his own history remains murky. Three strangers, separated by time, in a town whose secrets wait like gunpowder for a spark. Sunrise is an explosive novel challenging our myths of heroes, villains, and the places we claim as home.

Kingston, 1988: eight gay men answering a casting call for an openly queer play already risk much just by meeting – but nothing prepares them for the mob that descends on their rehearsal, leaving one dead, all injured, two vanished. As survivors heal, each must confront the bigotry the attack exposed: some forget, some rage, some disappear. The story won’t stop until both the disappeared and the perpetrators are traced. Epic and intimate, violent and forgiving, The Disappearers is Marlon James’s unflinching portrait of hatred and shame – and a deeply human story of acceptance.

$35, W&N. Out August

$35, Hamish Hamilton. Out September August-September 2026

11

Fiction INTERNATIONAL LITERATURE

Black September

Sunlight Finds You

Delirious

Summer, 1972. At his family’s summer house in Versilia, Tuscany, 12-year-old Gigio Bellandi’s life is changing: caught on the cusp of adolescence, he finds the familiar places and people newly strange and intoxicating. As he discovers the adult thrills of music and reading, Gigio begins to learn who he is and to see his family without the veils of childhood. When Astel Raimondi enters his life, kindling feelings he’s never known, everything changes – until a storm threatens the golden summer and overturns his world. Reconstructing that lost season with vivid intensity, Black September is an unforgettable comingof-age novel about innocence’s fragility, the irreversible bloom of first love, and the strange wonder of self-discovery.

At Postwar America is a time of rigid social rules.

But when effervescent, 17-year-old Nora moves to Florida, she finds paradise – especially after she meets and wins over shy, brilliant Leonard. His mother is welcoming, but his father is suspicious of Nora and her lower-class family. When coerced into breaking off all contact with Leonard, Nora makes a decision that exiles her from the family she loves, and sets off a chain of secrets and betrayals that will follow her for years. Sunlight Finds You explores family, female desire, sexism, motherhood, and prejudice – and our capacity to forgive ourselves and others, finding happiness by refusing to settle for less than a full life.

Mary, an ex cop, and her husband Pete, a former librarian, have decided to move into a retirement village.

Selling their beloved house should be a clean break, but the past has other ideas.

A detective calls with new information about the case of their son, Will, who died in an accident 40 years earlier. Mary finds herself returning to the last months of her sister’s shortened life. And Pete is haunted by memories of his late mother.

An unforgettable novel of rare power and grace, Delirious aks: How do we care for others? How do we face each new phase of life? And how do we ever cope?

Sandro Veronesi

Laura Moriarty

Damien Wilkins

$35, Sceptre. Out August

$35, Text Publishing. Out August

$35, Sceptre. Out August

Hunger and Thirst Claire Fuller 1987: after childhood trauma and years in care, 16-year-old Ursula finds a new job, a halfway house bed, and a new friend in wild-child Sue. Invited into a squat at The Underwood, a house haunted by its owners’ terrible fate, Ursula seizes the promise of belonging – until Sue’s escalating demands push her into a dare with consequences that will haunt her for decades. Thirty-six years later, reclusive sculptor Ursula is living under a pseudonym when a true-crime filmmaker exposes her identity, and her past closes in. Hunger and Thirst is a chilling tale of loneliness, friendship, and how far one will go to belong.

Blue Giant is an unruly eulogy for millennial optimism – a deranged love letter to a generation torn between helplessness and selfishness.

‘An intoxicating trip’ S I N É A D ST U B B I N S

$35, Fig Tree. Out August

Regiment of Women Clemence Dane At a girls’ boarding school, teacher Miss Clare Hartill has a bewitching hold over staff and students alike. When enthusiastic young teacher Alwynne Durand arrives, Clare draws her close, and the two become inseparable – Alwynne increasingly dependent on Clare’s wit and charm. But after tragedy strikes the school, Alwynne begins to see a crueller side to her friend, and must choose between loyalty and independence before Clare decides for her. From the Mermaid forgotten female classics series. $29, Michael Joseph. Out August

W H AT W E ’R E R E A D I N G A prismatic gem of a debut novel that reflects the experiences of women across three wars and the damage done to the men they love.

‘Hauntingly beautiful’ H E AT H E R R O S E

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Gleebooks Gleaner

Shop Talk

The Dully Dispatch

L

et me introduce myself, my name is Chris (Christopher) Hawkins, I’m the new manager at Gleebooks Dulwich Hill. I come to this role as a local – I have resided in neighbouring Summer Hill for eight years. I’m a lifelong book lover, both as a reader and collector of books. My favourite picture book as a child was Dogger by Shirley Hughes.

My continued love of reading came via my grandmother on my mother’s side; she was a prolific reader and just about read every book in her local library in Top Ryde. She passed away when I was only 18 which was devastating, but not surprising, as my mother was the second youngest of 12 children.

My teen reading years were consumed and guided by Anne Rice and the delicious, dramatic vampires she created. I spent the best part of two decades of my adult career working with high-end textiles mostly imported from Europe and the US

working alongside some of the best interior designers in the country. About five years ago I found myself seeking a change and was ecstatic to accept a position as an on-road rep with the exceptional independent Australian publisher Affirm Press (now with Simon & Schuster). My time with Affirm was a career highlight – working with talented, passionate people representing the small but mighty collection of titles produced each month.

It has been a wonderful, overwhelming joy to spend time with the inner west community over the past couple of months.

So, thank you to each person who has visited the store and welcomed me.

I have been championing the incredible third novel by Douglas Stuart, John of John these past few weeks, it truly is a masterwork in literary fiction writing.

Dully booksellers Renee and Lachlan have been singing the praises of the much talked about Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke, the “insta-wife” time-travel novel which was our August book club pick.

Among other books that have been jumping off the shelves the past month is the wonderful Whistler by Ann Patchett, which has been a twin purchase on many occasions with Maggie O’Farrell’s Land.

I am personally excited about the next title from Pip Williams, – her third historical novel The German Ward revolves around one of her most colourful characters from her two previous novels. And the hype for the upcoming sixth instalment in the A Court of Thorn and Roses series from Sarah J. Maas is building to what I think will be an explosive crescendo! Gleebooks Dully plans to open the store at 7am on 27 October, the day of publication.

See you in the store!

Follow us on instagram @gleebooks_dulwich

Chris (centre, bottom row) with the Dully gang.

Books we love White Moss

Anna Nerkagi, tr. Irina Sadovina $30, Pushkin

A book to make your heart ache with its beautiful prose and devastating story about traditional life in a small Nenets community on the Yamal peninsula. Nerkagi gives her readers a harsh but tender insider perspective into this ancient way of life, while Sadovina’s translation not only honours but enhances the reading experience for English-speaking readers. I was mesmerised from page one. – Bronwyn

The Extraordinary Florence Stoker Karen Brooks

$35, HQ Fiction. Out September

I am quite partial to historic novels and this one delivered in spades.

Based on the life of Bram Stoker, author of Dracula, and his mostly unknown wife, Florence. As with many wives of authors of that time, Florence was just “the wife”, but this book has been well researched and we find out a lot more than you ever imagined. Interwoven with literary peers of the same era – Oscar Wilde, Arthur Conan Doyle, Walt Whitman just to name a few – this lengthy book is a page-turner. – Victoria

Little Bones Sandy Bigna $18, UQP

This lovely middle-grade verse novel is about losing a family member and dealing with grief. It follows a kid called Bones, who collects lots of strange objects and has a fascination with death — until the skeleton of a bird she collects magically comes back to life, and she has to figure out how to confront death. – Imogen

This Is Where the Serpent Lives Daniyal Mueenuddin $33, Bloomsbury

An extraordinarily compassionate novel with a violent sting, the title is no lie.

The characters in Mueenuddin’s epic novel are caught like grit in the veneer of a Pakistan urban society that is underscored by intransigent traditional feudalism. Great reading for lovers of Arundhati Roy and Kiran Desai. – Jennifer

August-September 2026

13

Fiction CRIME & THRILLERS

We Chase Shadows

A Violent Masterpiece

Cold Sunset

Richard Osman

Jordan Harper

William Boyd

Richard Osman’s globe-trotting We Solve Murders series returns with the thrilling new mystery, We Chase Shadows. In the Italian hills, a body is found on the steps of a private villa at sunrise. Our mis-matched detective trio Amy, Rose and Steve return, in pursuit of an elusive and ruthless killer. Between Italy and Palm Springs, via Barcelona and Steve’s sleepy village pub, they uncover an impossible case where it seems that everyone is hiding something.

LA is a brutal, burning city. It is America with nowhere to run. Each night Jake Deal captures it on a livestream for his bloodhungry subscribers.

Above board, Doug Gibson is a street lawyer trying to fix the system one case at a time.

Underground, Kara Delgado is working for a private concierge company – a makea-wish foundation for the terminally rich.

When Kara’s best friend Phoebe goes missing, she soon finds herself in the worlds of both Jake and Doug. Will the remaining humanity of this fragile team kill them all or expose one enormous, unspeakable crime?

Gabriel Dax is on route to Russia, tasked with delivering a mysterious package to celebrated defector Kit Caldwell.

But Kit is convinced that the KGB suspects him of treachery and he wants to get out – now. When Gabriel is ordered by his enigmatic handler Faith Green to help, he is pulled into a web of shifting loyalties and dangerous escape plans. As tensions rise and trust fractures, he is forced to confront the fine line between devotion and deception. Cold Sunset takes you deep into a shadow-drenched world where loyalty blurs, motives darken and every step could be fatal.

$25, Faber Fiction. Out September

$35, Viking. Out September

Just Like the Night

In Plain Sight

$35, Viking. Out September

Death Writ Large Susie Dent

When mysterious symbols appear as graffiti around Oxford, lexicographer Martha Thornhill recognises them from a runic alphabet created by a deceased fantasy writer.

Tensions intensify when further graffiti is found near the body of a university lecturer. Martha is not the only one to have doubts when the suspicious death is assumed by police to be a suicide. As new messages portend more death, Martha and her colleagues begin to unearth a tragedy that extends beyond the ancient walls of the university. $35, Bonnier. Out August

Helidon Nikki Mottram Called to a fatal shooting at a Helidon pub after a bikie gang war erupts, child protection worker Dana Gibson finds sisters Savannah and Maddie caught in the crossfire – and a town split between a commune and an outlaw motorcycle gang. As Savannah fights for her life, Dana uncovers corruption eating away at community trust in law enforcement. When key witness Maddie disappears and bushfires close in on the town, Dana races to expose the truth and find her. Helidon is an addictive, suspense-filled page-turner. $35, UQP. Out September

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Gleebooks Gleaner

Michael Caleb Tasker

Robyn Dennison

Out on parole after serving more than eight years in prison, Sera Olin can’t shake her past. As she tries to settle into an honest life in Sydney, all she wants is to see her estranged daughter, Lena. But Lena is grown up now, and involved with people far worse than Sera understands. When Sera is drawn further into the quagmire of Lena’s choices, she is forced to confront the possibility that a mother’s sacrifice might not be enough.

Set in the bleak underbelly of Sydney, Just Like the Night is a gripping exploration of loneliness, conscience and the ties that bind. $35, Allen & Unwin. Out August

A USB drive full of photos gives Detective Lara Wilton clear proof of a crime – but the girls in them, now nearly 18, weave a web of secrets and manipulation that stalls the case without their cooperation.

Robyn Dennison’s compelling debut digs into police investigation as more than evidence-gathering, with flawed, human detectives navigating the line between professional duty and personal life. Her unforgettable twin sisters are drawn with dignity and agency, determined to control their own narrative – with consequences they never imagined. $35, Text Publishing. Out September

Bad Neighbours Joanna Jenkins Ruth Dawson finds her ideal living space in an Art Deco building in Potts Point, The Lumen. A 20-minute walk from her office in the city, the apartment boasts parquetry flooring, a wall of books and Harbour Bridge views from the sofa. It’s perfect until Ben, the homeless guy, dies under the corrugated iron lean-to in the garden where he lived. The residents of The Lumen do little to hide their relief. They can cease their half-hearted attempts to find an acceptable solution to “the Ben problem”, and return to more important issues. They’re not happy when Ruth brings in a detective. But she’s certain Ben was poisoned, and one of her neighbours knows it too. $35, Allen & Unwin. Out August

Fiction CRIME & THRILLERS

Gone Guru

Children of Wolves

Nadine Browne

Lawrence Osborne

Broke, jet-lagged and alone in New York, aspiring writer Noni Barlow gets crushed when her idol Joyce Carol Oates declares Born Again memoirs passé. Things get stranger still when her new flatmate – a transcendental meditation guru with a huge following and a trust fund – vanishes after their one meeting. With an octogenarian social worker and her landlady’s sarcastic daughter in tow, Noni digs into the disappearance. Could this be the new plot line she needs to save her writing career?

Diana abandons her car at the Mexican border; Adam walks out of his Athens hotel with nothing but his passport; Marco vanishes from London without a word. All converge on the Turkish Riviera, where comrade Chana awaits – along with Tyler, a private investigator hired to find a billionaire’s troubled daughter. Once the five meet, a train of events is set in motion that will play out in the backstreets and palaces of Istanbul and all the way to Cairo. A clash of generations and ideologies that will test the young friends’ theory that a handful of collaborators can tilt the axis of the world through a single, striking act. $35, Chatto & Windus. Out August

$35, Fremantle Press. Out September

For more than two centuries, humans have ridden sentient, starfaring mountain ranges called Massifs to colonise planets and export Earth’s endless war with Mars. Ship Leader Parnell Shi-Sawahla and the crew of the corvette Sassafras know the drill: ride, fight, repeat. But why do the Massifs help humanity wage war among the stars? Crews aren’t meant to ask, let alone speak with Massif avatars. Now Parnell and his crew must seek answers, to save themselves and humanity’s future.

The Rising

Whitney Fitzsimmons When a catastrophic flood tears through Birradurra, it unearths a shocking cold case: the skeletal remains of a baby. Journalist Bec Carter, haunted by her own traumatic past, is consumed with finding justice – until her friend Harry Adams, who had vowed to help, vanishes in violent circumstances. With Bec now the prime suspect, she must clear her name and uncover the truth before the next flood hits. Twisty and atmospheric, The Rising is a gripping thriller where every secret comes at a cost. $33, Ventura Press. Out now

Free World

David Whish-Wilson Private Investigator Lee Southern is looking for a murderer in a prison full of killers. When an assassination attempt in a prison cell winds up with the wrong man dead, Lee Southern is hired to protect the real target. The millennium is just weeks away and rumours of a complete technological meltdown have guards and prisoners on edge. As violence simmers, tensions ignite, and Lee’s hopes of a quick mission disintegrate. Going undercover in a prison full of killers is his most dangerous assignment yet. $33, Fremantle Press. Out September

SCI-FI

Massif Garth Nix

$34, Allen & Unwin. Out September

Scion

James Islington My name’s Azure. I kill rich idiots for a living. Once the ultra-wealthy realised they had a way to live forever, there was only ever going to be one real deterrent. In the end, it’s like a lot of people’s jobs and I’m only clocking on to crawl out from beneath my debts. Luckily, my genetic enhancements make me really, really good at it. This next job, though, is strange – I haven’t had to protect a client in years. Still, what could go wrong? $35, Text Publishing. Out September

Exit Party

Emily St. John Mandel 2031. America is at war with itself, but for the first time in weeks there is some hope: the Republic of California has been declared, the curfew in Los Angeles is lifted, and everyone in the city is going to a party. Ari arrives with her friend Gloria, but something is very wrong … Years later, Ari remains haunted by that night. Whatever happened at the party fractured her sense of reality – and may hold the key to a very different world. Exit Party is Emily St. John Mandel’s electrifying new novel about freedom and surveillance, art and survival, love and loss in a broken world. $35, Picador. Out September

Survivor

Octavia E. Butler When Alanna flees a plague-scarred Earth to a new planet, she believes she has found a peaceful new home for humanity. Instead, she finds herself caught between two battling civilisations – the Kohn and Tehkohn. Now she must play a dangerous game to survive. Make alliances, while plotting betrayals. Assimilate, while retaining her humanity. Open her heart, while risking everything. Alanna knows that the mission of her fellow colonists is to preserve the human race. But what if the best way to retain her humanity is to leave it all behind? Completing the Patternist series, this is a new edition of Octavia’s cult classic novel, now in print for the first time in 50 years. $35, Headline. Out September August-September 2026

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Fiction FANTASY

Tempest

Carl’s Doomsday Scenario

Victoria Aveyard

Matt Dinniman

Cat Rose has lived two lives: as Lady Catrine of the Meridian Empire, chained to a loathsome lord with a dwindling fortune, and as the Widow Rose, tavern queen of the Lyrian pirates. Now the Empire’s navy bears down to crush the pirate republic, capturing ship after ship – all but one, captained by the legendary, uncatchable Valerian Kane, the only man who might rally the pirates, and the only one Cat has ever loved. Offered an impossible choice – deliver Valerian or hang – Cat must survive as she always has. A storm is rising on the Lyrian Sea; the question is what it will leave behind. $35, Gollancz. Out September

Carl and Donut have already proven that a Coast Guard vet and once-and-forever feline royalty are an almost unstoppable team.

Their ratings are off the chart. The watchers can’t get enough. But the dungeon gets more dangerous each day, and now the Over City, a sprawling, once-thriving metropolis, has been devastated by a mysterious calamity. An undead circus trawls the ruins and murdered women rain from the sky. An ancient spell is finally ready to reveal its dark purpose. Can Carl and Donut solve the mystery in time? And can Carl finally find some pants? $35, Michael Joseph. Out August

ROMANTASY

The Poison Daughter Sheila Masterson Harlow Carrenwell’s kiss kills, a power she wields as her family’s assassin – and secretly as a vigilante hunting abusive men in Lunameade. But when she kisses her new betrothed, Henry Havenwood, he doesn’t die – and now he knows her secret. Rather than exposing her, he spirits her away to his mountain fort to marry him. Trapped with a husband she can’t kill, surrounded by vampire-infested woods, Harlow must uncover his family’s plans while attempting the impossible: making a man who knows she’s a killer fall in love with her anyway. $37, Wayward TxF. Out August

The Knave and the Moon Rachel Gillig With Aisling Cathedral in ruins and Rodrick, Bartholomew and Maude rumored dead, Benji has taken Sybil Delling as his bride and stages tournaments across the hamlets to cement his rule over Traum. Captive and drugged, Sybil is determined to bring him down as she once did the Omens, whatever the cost to the kingdom’s faith – or herself.

Then a nameless, memoryless knave rises through the tournament ranks, perhaps her key to undoing Benji’s power. The gothic romantasy queen returns with higher stakes, darker mysteries, and deeper longing in this spellbinding sequel to The Knight and the Moth. $35, Orbit. Out September

The Lion and the Deathless Dark Carissa Broadbent Under an eternal night ravaged by decade-long war between humans and vampires, bounty hunter Kyrene wields a blessed sword and a hunger for vengeance after devastating loss. A crime makes her a target for mortals and gods alike, forcing an alliance with silver-tongued vampire prince Septimus, who offers one final job: hunting the gods themselves. As prophecies and curses entangle them, Kyrene finds unexpected kinship with the mysterious Septimus – though their attraction is deadly currency in this world. Kyrene will stop at nothing to kill the vampire goddess, even if it costs her love. $35, Tor. Out August

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Gleebooks Gleaner

ROMANCE

Once Upon a Breakfast Show Stephanie MacFie Radio host Blake has built her career on broadcasting her messy life for laughs – until an on-air stunt spirals into crowdsourcing her next date and dredging up a buried memory: a whirlwind week 13 years ago with a man who vanished. With her daughter starting high school and asking about the father she’s never known, Blake enlists her listeners to help track him down. What began as ratings bait turns deeply personal, as Blake must decide whether she’s ready for the truth – for her audience, but especially for her daughter. Witty, sexy, and full of humour, Once Upon a Breakfast Show is a heartwarming love story about missed chances, hot mics, and what happens when a woman finally takes control of her own story. $35, Text Publishing. Out August

The Wild Beneath Kelly Anderson Raised on a boat in the Pacific Northwest, Annie MacLeod always felt tied to the ocean’s rhythms – until a tsunami swept away her parents and stranded her on land, leaving her grieving despite her love for childhood sweetheart Evan. In the wreckage she rescues Walker, a wordless man whose hum only she can hear, and their bond feels instant and elemental. Six years later, with the past buried, Walker’s otherworldly sound returns, forcing a reckoning. The Wild Beneath is a spellbinding story of soulmates, sacrifice, and our ancient ties to the natural world. $35, Text Publishing. Out August

Children PICTURE BOOKS

I Saw a Tree

Kes Gray, illus. Jim Field I saw a tree. The tree saw me. I climbed the tree. The tree raised me.

The tree raised me. The tree raised me. This is the story of one girl’s attempt to save her beloved tree from deforestation. With peep-through pages and breathtaking artwork, this magnificent collaboration is a call to action for humanity to protect and save our trees: for today, tomorrow and eternity. $33, Hodder Children’s. Out September

The Bestest Brown Briony Stewart

Hervé Tullet meets Poo Poo Bum Bum Wee Wee in this irreverent early childhood book that mixes toilet humour with colour theory. Fun readaloud rhyme and joyous illustrations will delight readers young and old. $25, Lothian Children’s. Out September

SATURDAY MISCHIEF @ GLEEBOOKS Saturday Mornings Rachel hosts a free storytime every Saturday morning at 10.30am for younger book lovers. All ages are welcome – we’ve never grown out of picture books, and nor should you! We sometimes have some very special guests at these free storytime sessions.

Saturday Afternoons Our Saturday afternoons are free and all ages are welcome to join in the mischief, but please RSVP so we can look after you properly!

Check out the fun we had at two of our recent events and don’t miss out on what’s coming up next. For more information, contact Rachel at rachel@gleebooks.com. au and be sure to follow our @gleebooks_kids Instagram page for last minute updates.

A Bigger Book Hannah Sommerville

Cora loves the smell of books. She loves the stories they contain and the worlds of imagination they open.

But when it’s time to read aloud in class, Cora gets stuck. Stuck on the first word. And on the second. The harder she concentrates, the foggier each word feels. And when her friends move on to bigger books, Cora is left behind and her love of stories starts to fade … A Bigger Book tells a moving and empowering story about books, dyslexia and finding your own way. $25, Bright Light. Out now

Mouse Goes to the Mountain Alice Melvin

Join Mouse on a new adventure as he leaves the urban bustle of a busy railway station and makes his way to a remote and majestic mountain peak. Alice Melvin’s charming illustrations create an immersive world full of wildlife, friendly woodland creatures and stunning scenery.

Interactive flaps and gatefolds throughout draw the reader’s attention to details hidden among the illustrations. $30, Thames & Hudson. Out September

Story Rug

Sophie Blackall, illus. Phoebe Wahl

From left: Gleebooks’ kids’ specialist Rachel with author Jade Goodwin and illustrator Bethany Loveridge for the launch of their book Josie Mack and the Mega Division, and Deborah Abela’s writing workshop with Glebe Public school for the Penguin bookseller’s grant.

Class 203 is in a braiding craze. They started with hair and shoelaces, and now they have brought rags from home. Their braid gets longer and longer until one idea transforms it into an extraordinary surprise for their teacher. Here is the story of a rag rug, woven through with the histories of the scraps used to create it, and the tales told as it was being made. This charming celebration of storytelling is intertwined with an easy-to-learn and impressive craft project, including instructions. $25, Lothian Children’s. Out August

August-September 2026

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Children PICTURE BOOKS

A Hat for Every Harriet

Jess Horn, illus. Zoë Bennett Harriet wears many hats. She has a hat for listening, for following the rules and even for being silly. Harriet wears a different hat for every job, because every job needs a different Harriet. But one day, Harriet has too many hats to wear. Can she find a way to just be herself? From the creators of Bernie Thinks in Boxes comes a beautiful story about thinking differently and accepting yourself in a neurotypical world.

EARLY READERS

Amira Swift: Talent Show Sarah Ayoub, illus. Nina Nill Year One student Amira Swift has three favourite things: her BFFs Ellie (one) and Naya (two), and dancing (three). So when her school holds a talent show, the BFFs can’t wait to enter as a dance group. But soon the girls go from having fun to having fights. Will they stay friends, or will the pressure to put on a perfect performance ruin everything? $16, Harper Collins. Out now

Fair Day Fun (Amira Swift #2) Sarah Ayoub Amira Swift has a problem: All of her friends are bringing special foods that represent their cultures to sell and raise money at the school fair, but Amira comes from two cultures and doesn’t know what to take.

Both her grandmothers want to share their special family recipes with her. Whatever will Amira do? This series celebrates friendship, family and Lebanese-Australian culture. $16, Harper Collins. Out now

$25, Affirm Kids. Out August

Get Snapped! (Worst Pets Ever #2) EARLY READERS

Betsy and Bon Simon Howe Down at the bottom of the garden, where flowers grow tall and roots grow deep, Betsy and Bon play in a world full of whimsy and imagination. They try to find friendly bees to live in their wonderful hive, decide on a game they will both enjoy, and have a picnic in the perfect sunny spot. With enchanting full-colour illustrations, this gentle short story collection is perfect for bedtime reading. $27, UQP. Out September

Dragon Saving (Princess Gem) Meredith Costain, illus. Cheryl Orsini Gem’s real name is Her Royal Highness Princess Gemma of Glimmerdale. And she and her friends want to meet a dragon more than anything. So when it’s time to choose which Pixie badge to earn next, Princess Gemma chooses the most daring one of all: Dragon Saving! $16, Scholastic Australia. Out August

Matt Cosgrove, illus. Matt and Eva Amores Strike a pose! There’s a professional photo shoot at the Worst Pets Ever Obedience School and the freshly primped and preened students are about to get snapped! It could be the perfect distraction Captain Fluffykins needs to escape, unless he can’t resist the camera and a shot at supermodel super stardom. $16, Scholastic Australia. Out August

MIDDLE GRADE

Eighty-Nine Questions for After Ashleigh Barton Germophobe hypochondriac Ester Star, convinced she’s dying, keeps a growing list of questions for the afterlife. When her afternoon care arrangement shifts to her mum’s workplace – a hospice – Ester is anxious about every possible germ. But she meets Joan, a former circus performer who doesn’t believe in an afterlife, yet has one earthly question she can’t shake: why did her sister vanish years ago? With friends Peter and Mackenzie, Ester sets out to solve Joan’s mystery – and maybe learn there’s more to life than fearing death. $17, Lothian Children’s. Out now

The Wave

Sarah Armstrong Max loves his laidback island home – if not the tourists who flood it every summer. When word comes that a tsunami is hours away, Max is home alone and can’t find his dog, Ralph. As time runs out and everyone else speeds toward higher ground, Max faces a choice: go it alone or band together with whichever strangers remain, tourists included. This gripping novel explores courage, misplaced loyalty, and survival in the face of disaster. $19, Hardie Grant Children’s. Out August

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Gleebooks Gleaner

A River I Must Be Kate Foster Rebecca Tapia has started at a prestigious new school and is overwhelmed by the rules and expectations.

With her mum away and her dad facing challenges of his own, Rebecca’s only way of surviving is to mask her autism. A River I Must Be is a compelling and moving verse novel by award-winning author Kate Foster, who combines her heartfelt writing with an authentic view of autism and the daily pressure of masking. And the joy of freeing yourself from that. $19, HarperCollins. Out now

Children MIDDLE GRADE

YA

My Tiny Universe

Our Dark Unravelling

Maryam Master

Margot McGovern

Leif is named for a valiant Viking, but at two-foot-nothing and riddled with phobias, valiant isn’t exactly his brand. A Certified Science Enthusiast with a mind as vast as the universe, Leif doesn’t fit with the cool kids or the geeks – especially since he’s the first kid ever born with CIA (Climate Induced Anomalies). Friendless at West Hershey College, that changes when Albie shows up. That’s when the real trouble starts.

When Jude Sinclair dies in a hunting accident, George is left angry over unfinished business while Lyssa can’t accept he’s gone. Lyssa starts disappearing at night, growing sick and exhausted, and confides she’s been spending nights with Jude and soon, their classmates believe he’s returned to haunt them. Suspecting Lyssa behind the “hauntings”, George follows her at night and uncovers something horrifying that could cost Lyssa her life.

Our Dark Unravelling is a thrilling modern gothic tale of control and manipulation that lingers long after the last page.

$17, Pan Macmillan. Out September

Lottie, Pog and the Runaway Ghost Sally Rippin

Lottie Baker has her dad, Bill, and her dog, Pog. That’s more than enough family for any 10-year-old girl, isn’t it? Besides, their house is already way too crowded without trying to squeeze anyone else in.

But then Lottie meets a runaway ghost called Martha May Claringbold, who is not too young and not too old. Martha doesn’t want to live in the graveyard any more because it’s dark and smelly. She wants to live in Lottie’s room because once upon a time Lottie’s room was her room. Lottie has a secret wish – can Martha help it come true? $19, Pan Macmillan. Out September

Impossible Creatures: the Neverfear

$25, Penguin. Out September

Us in the Bright Lights

Katherine Rundell

It’s the Midsummer Feast on the Islet of Glimt and on this magical moonlit evening, the word on everyone’s lips is “bandits”. Reports of masked men burning villages are spreading throughout the Archipelago, but worse is still to come: Christopher and Anya are ambushed and one of the people they love most is kidnapped. The two children, alongside Ratwin the ratatoska and Jacques the Jaculus dragon, set sail on the Neverfear to recover three precious treasures. Together they must face fearsome giants, win a daring race, and outwit deadly enemies to save those they love most. $19, Bloomsbury Children’s. Out September

How to Make the World Cup and Survive Grade Five Carla Fitzgerald Eleven-year-old Ronni is basically a professional athlete ... at watching sport. If it’s on a screen, she’s glued to it – just like her parents. But when Ronni and her best friend, Kai, are recruited to secretly coach the Australian women’s soccer team through the World Cup qualifiers, she discovers life looks very different on the other side of the screen. A winning middle-grade story about sport, friendship drama and finding the guts to have a go.

Zanni L. Arnot

Stevie Jones has always lived in best friend Bella’s shadow – so when Bella disappears, Stevie is left wondering who she even is without her. She moves to Europe for a year to work through Bella’s bucket list, slowly discovering her own likes and dislikes, including an inconvenient attraction to Theodore, Bella’s long-time crush. As her year abroad winds down, Stevie must choose between her old life and the new one she’s building in the light. Us in the Bright Lights is a deeply romantic novel about a girl who loses everything – and finds herself. $20, Lothian Children’s. Out now

$18, UQP. Out September

GRAPHIC NOVELS

Black Hole Howler Mick Elliott

Is this the end for Uranus FC? They may have survived the worst defeat in intergalactic football history ... but now they’re facing their biggest challenge yet ... The black hole league! A cosmic competition so nasty that teams feed their managers to flesh-eating maggots when they lose. But when the team catches the attention of a mysterious trillionaire, Uranus FC could be about to level up ... Do Tyko Brayne and his team of meteoric misfits have the skills to take on the galaxy’s meanest teams? Probably not. Are they going to play anyway? Absolutely! $17, Scholastic Australia. Out September

Lightfall: The Girl & the Galurian (Deluxe Edition) Tim Probert

On the planet Irpa, Bea lives quietly with her adopted grandfather, the Pig Wizard, crafting potions at the Salty Pig’s Tonics & Tinctures. That changes when she meets Cad, a Galdurian who believes the Pig Wizard can help him find his missing people – but when they arrive home, the Pig Wizard has vanished, leaving only the Jar of Endless Flame and a cryptic note. As Bea and Cad search for him, a growing darkness threatens to snuff out Irpa’s last light. Will they find him in time, or has Irpa seen its final sunrise? $40, HarperCollins. Out September

August-September 2026

19

Nonfiction POLITICS

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

Betrayal: Trump, Putin and the new age of conquest Luke Harding Betrayal charts the collapse of the post-1945 international order: an America under Trump endorsing Putin’s Ukraine land-grab, casting Europe as an adversary, and toppling Venezuela’s president, while China, Russia, Iran and North Korea forge an anti-Western alliance. It’s a return to 19th-century imperialism, armed with modern firepower. Luke Harding reports from Ukrainian villages under bombardment, talks to Greenlanders about a US takeover, tours the divided Korean peninsula, and sits down with Zelenskyy. Betrayal is an essential, clear-eyed guide to the brutal return of Great Power politics. $37, Guardian Books. Out September

This Is Fascism: a wake up call Rosan Smits Fascism is back. This time no swastikas, Nazi flags, or deadly bureaucracy, but MAGA hats, rightwing extremist memes, and a triumphant fist held high. For the first time in modern history, far-right parties in some European countries have won a larger share of the votes than the Conservatives and the Social Democrats. Fascism hollows out democracies from within. It starts with language, not tanks. With democratic elections, not a coup. This urgent book outlines how fascism has returned to western democracies – and how we can stop it. $25, Atlantic. Out September

On Speech, Equality and Politics Waleed Aly In this wonderfully clarifying essay, Waleed Aly examines what happened to liberalism. As a set of ideas, it offered formal equality and guaranteed freedoms. But more and more, we live in a post-liberal world. Aly looks at how and why this has happened. He discusses what has taken liberalism’s place as we tackle thorny questions of freedom of speech and equality of opportunity. And he examines the limits of liberalism, the rise of illiberal democracy and the new battles over identity. This is a supple and original essay about the forces transforming our politics. $30, Quarterly Essay. Out September

End Times Fascism Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor The far right is resurging with a new twist: an apocalyptic alliance of religious fundamentalists, Silicon Valley billionaires and ethnonationalists, united in welcoming collapse, believing themselves among the saved. Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor investigate this man-made Armageddon complex worldwide, from private islands to nations bunkering against a dehumanised “other”, and show how to resist it. To defend what remains of democracy, they argue, we must break the doom loop and tell a story not of end times, but of better ones. $37, Allen Lane. Out September

Profits, Prophets, Coaches and Kings Jared Diamond We often read history as the biographies of “great men” who shaped the world. But are leaders, whichever field they are in, really that influential? Should CEOs be given large bonuses when a company performs well? Why, when a political leader is assassinated, is their successor as likely to improve as damage a country? When do we know if firing a coach has changed the fortunes of the team? Jared Diamond argues that leaders are neither heroic exceptions nor products of circumstance. Looking at four difference spheres: history, business, sport and religion, he asks under which conditions is a leader most likely to make a difference and why. $40, Allen Lane. Out September

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Gleebooks Gleaner

Ambivalance Brian Dillon After his mother died when he was 16, Brian Dillon abandoned schoolwork, courting exam failure while quietly educating himself through books, music, film and television. When his father died halfway through university, the stakes of reading and writing grew even higher.

Ambivalence explores what learning meant to Dillon between 17 and 26, before he left Dublin. Part memoir of that city in the 1980s and 90s, part uncynical portrait of the young adult mind, it’s an intimate defence of radical thinking about literature and life. $35, Fitzcarraldo. Out August

Heresies Richard Flanagan From Manus to MONA to birds to the Black Summer, from the destruction of our natural world to the hope offered by Indigenous Australia to the growing corrosion of democracy, from Salman Rushdie to the Segal Report, family and love, Flanagan’s non-fiction writings carry the author’s trademark elegance, subversive wit, and humanity.

This showcase of Richard Flanagan’s heretical brilliance over 20 years speaks to the heart of our troubled times now. $37, Penguin. Out August

Alan Joyce: Riding the jet stream Alan Joyce Alan Joyce: Riding the jet stream is a candid memoir from one of Australia’s most consequential CEOs, drawing on a network spanning seven prime ministers and countless industry leaders. Testing decisions from the Global Financial Crisis to bitter industrial battles, relentless public scrutiny and aviation’s nearcollapse during COVID, Joyce sets the record straight in his own words – recounting the pressure of decisions made in real time. From grounding the Qantas fleet to steering through a global pandemic, his tenure is woven into some of the nation’s most significant moments. $50, Hardie Grant. Out now

Nonfiction HISTORY

A History of the World in 51 Heroes & Villians Tom Holland & Dominic Sandbrook Welcome to a shadowy realm where the divide between the noble and the nefarious isn’t quite as clear as it seems.

Where supposed saints appear suspiciously traitorous, and so-called scoundrels reveal unexpected glimmers of virtue.

Prepare for sword fights, scandals and enough moral ambiguity to make Machiavelli blush, from the imperial court of 11th-century Japan to the studios of 20th-century Hollywood. $37, Bloomsbury. Out August

The Sea-King and the Sorceress Neil Price Most of us picture Vikings as seafaring raiders, but warriors were only a small slice of a far more diverse people. In this eye-opening book, Neil Price journeys across the Viking world – from the eastern Steppe to Newfoundland – revealing richly varied lives through the intimate lens of burials: townsfolk and farmers, the free and enslaved, diplomats, shamans, sorceresses, and sea-kings. Unexpected discoveries, like a woman of Persian ancestry in the richest Viking grave ever found, challenge received wisdom about Norse culture and identity, asking how these individuals truly saw themselves and each other. $60, Allen Lane. Out September

Redwood Ben Macintyre The year is 1981. Tehran is in violent turmoil in the wake of the Iranian Revolution. The Soviets are planning to overthrow the Ayatollah’s fledgling Islamist regime. If they do so, one response from America – unknown to the public – would be to use nuclear weapons. This is the story of how at the height of the Cold War, one mysterious double agent, known to MI6 as “Redwood”, revealed the Kremlin’s secret plot and prevented Armageddon. This is the gripping tale of one man’s courage; about friendship, marriage, betrayal and sexual dysfunction; and about how decisions made in secret can have huge, long-term ramifications. $37, Viking. Out September

The Cauldron Simon Sebag Montefiore The Middle East has long been the source of religions, the prize of empires, and the epicentre of global conflict, yet its real history remains widely misunderstood. In The Cauldron, Simon Sebag Montefiore delivers a fresh history of the region from 1900 to the present, journeying from the Ottoman sultanate to the Trump presidency, Morocco to Iran.

Populated by kings, warriors, poets, terrorists and peacemakers, it’s a dazzling panorama of faith and fanaticism, creativity and tolerance, dictatorship and democracy. $55, W&N. Out August

Event Ambivalence Winton Higgins Ambivalence: Glimpses of an Australian life gives voice to the generation before the Boomers, tracing Australia’s social and ethical arc from World War II’s final years to the present. Spanning outback goldmining and pastoralism, urban legal practice and academic social science, this personal, eventful memoir sees Winton grapple with loving his country while unflinchingly examining its failures: its treatment of Indigenous peoples, its abandoned egalitarianism, environmental neglect and questionable allegiances in global affairs. $33, Brandl & Schlesinger. Out September

Hear Winton in conversation with Andy Leigh at Gleebooks, 49 Glebe Point Rd, Glebe, 6pm for 6.30pm Wednesday 9 September. See gleebooks.com.au for more details.

Nuclear Archipelago Elizabeth Tynan Nuclear Archipelago tells the shocking story of Britain’s two atomic test series at Western Australia’s Monte Bello Islands in 1952 and 1956, which sent fallout across vast distances. The largest test, Mosaic G2 in 1956, sparked panic that it was a nuclear accident. In both Mosaic tests, a British ship’s crew was deliberately placed in the path of the fallout. The islands’ biodiverse environment remains contaminated to this day. The book uncovers the politics, secrecy and controversy behind the tests, including Mosaic G2’s true role in Britain’s clandestine hydrogen bomb development. $40, NewSouth. Out August

August-September 2026

21

Nonfiction ABORIGINAL STUDIES

The Burden and the Blessing Edith Wright Edith Wright grew up hearing stories of her great-grandfathers, Harry Hunter and Adrien D’Antoine, European pearling magnates who reshaped the Kimberley region – fathering many mixed-race children while gaining reputations for violence and exploitation toward the Bardi Jawi people. The Blessing and the Burden draws on eyewitness accounts and archives to illuminate cosmopolitan Broome’s pearling heyday, the WWII bombing of Broome, the Bungarun leprosarium, and the north’s rapid development, all from a descendant’s perspective. Edith confronts the painful, complicated legacy of two men who forever changed the Kimberley’s history. $35, Magabala. Out September

Yijarni Felicity Meakins & Erika Charola On 23 August 1966, around 200 Gurindji stockmen and their families walked off Wave Hill Station, protesting poor conditions and stolen land. Led by Vincent Lingiari, the action sparked the equal wages case and the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976. Less known are the decades of massacres, stolen children and abuses that preceded it. Told in English and Gurindji, these oral accounts from Elders – witnessed or passed down – have captivated audiences worldwide and challenged revisionist historians questioning frontier violence and the Stolen Generations. $50, Aboriginal Studies Press. Out August

WE’RE ON THE WEB Find more new releases at:

www.gleebooks.com.au

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Gleebooks Gleaner

AUSTRALIAN STUDIES

The Big Steal Paul Barry In 2017, Sanjeev Gupta swept into Whyalla, South Australia, to buy its bankrupt steelworks amid promises of billions in green steel investment. His global empire is now collapsing under investigation from corporate regulators worldwide for suspected fraud and money laundering, centred on his ties to Lex Greensill’s shadow bank, which lent Gupta’s group a staggering US$5bn and counted ex-PM David Cameron as an adviser. This is the incredible story of Gupta’s meteoric rise and fall, and the question it leaves behind: how do people like him get away with it? $37, Allen & Unwin. Out September

Fighting for Country James Saunders Gunditjmara man Captain Reg Saunders had an exceptional military career, serving with distinction in North Africa, Greece and New Guinea in World War II, then in Korea – surviving 11 months on the run from the Nazis in Crete and leading troops against a massive Chinese force at the pivotal Battle of Kapyong, exploits now part of Australian Army folklore. Fighting for Country is not just the story of his celebrated service, but of his family and the Fighting Gunditjmara people, and his postwar life of struggle, all vividly brought to life by his nephew James Saunders. $35, Allen & Unwin. Out September

Three Shocks George Megalogenis For decades, Australian politics lagged behind a changing nation. The 2022 and 2025 elections delivered an overdue wake-up call, driven by three shocks: a population now majority migrants and their children for the first time since federation, professional women overtaking blue-collar men as the largest workforce segment, and unreliable allies and trade partners abroad. With original interviews and research, Three Shocks tells how Labor adapted by embracing diversity while the Liberals suffered landslide defeats threatening their survival – and how these shifts will define Australian politics and national identity in the 21st century. $37, Penguin. Out August

Seize the Moment Bernard Keane At the quarter-mark of the 21st century, Australia faces a historic turning point: technological disruption, an ageing population, escalating climate crisis, a rising China, and a retreating US empire abandoning its global role and democratic norms. Bernard Keane draws on his experience in government and as a political commentator to ask whether Australia can remain the lucky country amid these forces – and argues that with smart decisions now, the nation holds crucial advantages it can leverage to prosper over the next 25 years. $35, Allen & Unwin. Out August

Screw Nice Amy Remeikis As the gap between the powerful and those opposing injustice grows, demands for civility become a weapon: be polite, keep your voice down, don’t get angry, don’t march, don’t dare frown – or face financial, legal and reputational consequences that threaten your livelihood and safety. But civility’s rules shift depending on income, religion, gender and status. Amid wars killing civilians, women murdered weekly by intimate partners, politics rewriting history, and a climate crisis demanding action, the politics of civility silences the voices we most need to hear. When lies are treated as truth, all we can do is speak up – and screw nice. $35, Hachette. Out now

Nonfiction AUSTRALIAN STUDIES

From Secret Ballot to Democracy Sausage

More Fool Me: How the gas industry tricked Australia

Judith Brett

Richard Denniss

Australia is one of the few countries – and the only Englishspeaking one – where voting is compulsory, a rule we’ve come to embrace with polling day barbecues, cake stalls and election parties running into Sunday morning. But how did compulsory voting come about, and how has it shaped Australian politics? Historian Judith Brett delivers a lively account of Australian democracy, from its origins to its quirks and traditions. An updated edition that includes the rise of the Teal independents.

Richard Denniss argues the global gas industry has pulled off Australia’s greatest con: one of the world’s richest nations made to feel too poor for the public schools and hospitals it once had, while governments give away billions in gas tax-free to multinational companies. When gas prices surge, Saudis and Qataris feel richer; Australians are told to tighten their belts. This essay exposes how gas companies ran this long con, and sets out the simple steps needed to fix it. $20, Australia Institute Press. Out August

$37, Text Publishing. Out September

Picturing the Climate Emergency explores how multidisciplinary art can strengthen our imaginative, experiential and practical readiness for climate change. It examines two works: Equinox, an immersive installation that places audiences inside larger-thanlife wildfire scenarios to reveal their unpredictable dynamics, and iFire, a training system used by Australia’s largest urban firefighting service to rehearse responses to future fires. Leading art scholars alongside experts in AI, fire science and emergency response analyse both projects, exploring what they mean for artists, audiences, scientists, frontline responders and at-risk communities alike.

Hard New World Hugh White Under Donald Trump, America’s retreat from global leadership has been swift and erratic.

China, Russia and India are on the move.

White explains the big strategic trends driving the war in Ukraine, and why America has ’lost’ Asia. He discusses Albanese Labor’s record and why complacency about the American alliance - including AUKUS - is no longer an option. This brilliant short book urges us to navigate a hard new world with realism and confidence. This is a thoroughly updated and significantly expanded edition of the bestselling Quarterly Essay.

ENVIRONMENT

Picturing the Climate Emergency Dennis Del Favero

$50, NewSouth. Out August

Sentinels Michael Dulaney Diseases jumping between species – bats to camels to humans, cats to tourists to elephants – reveal how closely our fates are tied to animals.

In Sentinels, Michael Dulaney travels from southern China to the Andes, the Arctic to Australia, tracing how environmental exploitation is accelerating this species-jumping threat, one that rivals climate change. Meeting ecologists tracking flying foxes, frog hunters in Indonesia, lemmings resisting warming and genetically engineered disease-proof pigs, Dulaney moves beyond fear of contagion toward the resilience of life itself. Urgent and deeply informed, Sentinels reckons with our intimate ties to nature and calls for a fairer world. $37, Scribe. Out August

$37, Black Inc. Out August

NATURE AND WILDLIFE

The Book of Birds

The Butterfly Season

Jackie Morris & Robert Macfarlane

Lea Korsgaard

A great thinning of the skies is under way. Around 50% of bird species are in decline worldwide. The Book of Birds is a compendium of 49 bird species which are presently declining or endangered in Britain.

With lyrical precision and playfulness, Robert Macfarlane evokes each bird’s habits and habitats – their patterns of flight and of song, how they hunt and gather, how they nest and raise their young – and the threats which shadow them.

And on every page we encounter Jackie Morris’s exhilarating artwork, painted in watercolour and gold and animated by an extraordinary attention to detail and sense of life.

In the darkness of winter on the first day of the year, a woman in Denmark is making a list. She plans to set out and see all of the country’s butterfly species in a single summer. We follow Lea Korsgaard as her list takes her to landscapes she never knew existed and meets strangers who help along the way.

And she is led into the past; into the lives of her ancestors and the worlds of philosophy and myth.

A bestseller in the author’s native Denmark, The Butterfly Season is a story of home, of endings and beginnings, of rebirth and, of course, butterflies. $55, Particular Books. Out September

$80, Hamish Hamilton. Out August August-September 2026

23

Nonfiction GENDER STUDIES

Presence: the hidden history of the female body Erin Maglaque Sex and abortion, pregnancy and birth, feeding and rocking and washing: these are embodied practices with a deep past. Yet the history of the female body remains largely unknown – even unimagined. Combining memoir with archival research, from fragments in medical texts, trial transcripts, legal treatises, prayerbooks, letters, and diaries, Erin Maglaque assembles a chorus of women’s voices from the pre-modern past. We encounter a vanished past both strikingly recognisable and strange, when ideas of the female body, sexuality, work and pleasure were more varied, more unruly, and sometimes freer. $37, Jonathan Cape. Out now

More Gillian Anderson This collection of intimate, anonymous letters from women across more than 50 nations, aged 18 to 80, curated and introduced by Gillian, explores what women everywhere think, feel and dream in private. Bolder and more explicit than ever, the letters roam from bedrooms to school gates, boardrooms to forest floors – desire, ownership, pleasure and pain in every form, nothing off limits. Joyful, unapologetic and deliciously unfiltered, More proves that women’s freedom to fantasise without restraint remains as exhilarating and vital as ever. $37, Bloomsbury. Out September

MIDDLE EASTERN STUDIES

Your Presence Is a Danger to Your Life

God AI

Samar Yazbek

Toby Walsh

Throughout 2024, Samar Yazbek met hundreds of Gaza survivors, asking each about their experience of October 7, 2023, and life since.

From these conversations, she selects 26 raw, chilling accounts from civilians aged 13 to 65 who witnessed what may be remembered as one of the most savage offensives of our time – homes shattered, loved ones lost, limbs obliterated, many treated in hospitals under attack. Yet these survivors remain determined to be heard. The title, taken from a flyer dropped on Gaza minutes before a bombing, captures the nightmare they’ve endured and their hope that their voices will resonate. $35, Fitzcarraldo. Out August

SCIENCE

Signals: the inside story of our hormones Dr Saira Hameed Hormones drive every moment of our lives, from milestone events to daily emotions and behaviour. In Signals, leading UK endocrinologist Dr Saira Hameed invites us into her clinic to witness lives disrupted by misfiring hormones – spirit-sapping exhaustion, agonising infertility, an emaciated girl near death, a boy who can’t stay awake, a teenager whose racing heart won’t hold out much longer – and how treatment can recalibrate a life. Blending compassionate patient stories with medical breakthroughs and debunked “hormone hacks”, Signals reveals the spectacular endocrine force at work within us. It’s essential reading for understanding our health, happiness, and hormonal humanity. $35, Faber. Out September

The World Beneath Our Feet Frank Ashwood Everything above ground depends on the mysterious world beneath it.

In The World Beneath Our Feet, soil ecologist Frank Ashwood takes us on a safari through this hidden ecosystem, from New Zealand’s ancient forests to the black soil deposits of the US and China, descending through ever stranger layers of the pedosphere. Home to half of all species on Earth, soil teems with roots, fungal networks and microbial life, making it the planet’s most biodiverse habitat. Ashwood reveals how soil sustains our crops, stores carbon and water, and transforms decay into new life – the very foundation of existence. $35, Hodder Press. Out August

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TECHNOLOGY

Gleebooks Gleaner

Our fears about artificial general intelligence cut deep, touching our identity as thinking beings and our place in the universe. Professor Toby Walsh explores AI’s existential risks alongside its wonders, from life-saving drugs to disrupted livelihoods and relationships.

As AI edges toward the singularity and recursive self-improvement, could we outsource our thinking so fully that we render ourselves obsolete? With characteristic clarity and humour, Walsh weighs the dangers and asks what we can do to prevent AI harms before it’s too late. $37, La Trobe University Press. Out September

The Machine and the Microchip Cagan Koc & Diederik Baazil At the centre of a new Cold War over semiconductors sits ASML, the once-obscure Dutch firm now Europe’s most valuable tech company, holding a monopoly on the machines that make the world’s most advanced chips.

US export controls have cut China off from this technology, raising the question of whether it might one day try to take it by force. Taiwan, home to many of these machines and claimed by Beijing, sits at the centre of rising tensions. The Machine and the Microchip goes behind the scenes of a struggle that could reshape global power. $37, Scribe. Out September

Nonfiction PSYCHOLOGY

TRUE CRIME

Situated

Outlawed

Angela Duckworth

Harry Hobbs & Stephen Young

In Angela Duckworth’s first book, she showed that a common denominator of successful strivers is a blend of passion and perseverance she dubbed “grit”. This new book springs from her deepening realisation that grit, while necessary, is sometimes not sufficient. How you situate yourself to meet a challenge can be crucial.

Duckworth’s in-depth research reveals the enormous influence wielded by the objects within arm’s reach, your peers and mentors, and even where you live. Though you’re often told to make the best of your situation, it is far, far better to make your situation better first.

Across the world, people are embracing pseudolaw – a fastgrowing movement of conspiracy theories and quasilegal rituals promising ordinary people they can outsmart banks, courts and governments.

Its followers call themselves sovereign citizens or freemen; critics call it a scam. Outlawed goes inside this world of courtroom clashes, YouTube gurus and viral traffic stops, tracing pseudolaw from its 19th-century origins to deadly shootings, coup attempts and bizarre cases involving secret trusts and sorcery accusations. Exploring why inequality and distrust make such beliefs so seductive, Outlawed is a disturbing, darkly funny account of conspiracy as law’s outlaw twin. $37, Penguin. Out August

$37, Vermilion. Out September

SOCIOLOGY

The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI Cory Doctorow Cutting through AI hype requires starting with labour: a centaur uses technology to serve their own ends; a reverse centaur is conscripted to serve a machine’s relentless pace – drivers, warehouse workers, programmers pushed beyond human limits.

Doctorow argues AI hype isn’t aimed at those forced to use it, but performed for bosses and investors, justifying trillion-dollar valuations that only make sense if AI replaces human labour. In The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI, Doctorow traces how we got here and how, once the bubble bursts, we might build a life where tools work for us. $35, Verso. Out August

PARENTING

Ten Things I Wish You Knew About Raising Boys Dr Billy Garvey Many parents today are worried about their boys. Developmental paediatrician Dr Billy Garvey has spent more than 25 years supporting families through their hardest moments, seeing boys who are anxious, angry, withdrawn or overwhelmed – and parents unsure how to help. He believes there’s no such thing as a “bad” child, only a child communicating a need. Ten Things I Wish You Knew About Raising Boys combines the latest research, powerful clinical stories and practical strategies to help you understand what’s really driving your son’s behaviour, and how to respond. $37, Penguin. Out September

Digital Freedom Maggie Dent & Kirra Pendergast When it comes to kids and teens on screens, parents and educators face a genuine contradiction. Screen use is both an essential part of modern life and a leading cause of harm and mental illness. How can we protect our young people while giving them the tools to succeed? Digital Freedom cuts through the confusion and delivers practical tools and expert advice to help parents manage their family’s device use and rediscover moments of screen-free connection and creativity. $37, Macmillan. Out August

SELF-HELP

How to Be Hopeful Caitlin Moran One morning, Caitlin Moran lay in bed and realised she had reached Peak Despair: sleepless, doomscrolling, anxious over the news. So she set out on a domestic quest: staying in the same house and neighbourhood, but trying to feel better about the frantic modern world. She quit social media, read local papers instead of the news, picked up litter, donated blood, and relearned how to fall in love with the world. Over the course of a year, Caitlin found that life can be radically transformed when you rebel against the news cycle and algorithms that want to keep us angry, adrenalised, and anxious. She discovered you can’t change the world, but you can change your days – and How to Be Hopeful is the diary of that change. $37, Ebury. Out September

August-September 2026

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Nonfiction COOKING

The Fast 800 GLP-1 Recipe Book

Ottolenghi Simple Too

Dr Clare Mosley & Dr Jack Mosley The Fast 800, based on the late Dr Michael Mosley’s work, has helped countless people lose weight safely and build lasting healthy habits.

This full-colour recipe book from Clare and Jack Mosley offers over 100 nutritious, easy recipes, plus three flexible meal plans: Food First, for fast diet-only weight loss; Low Appetite, for nutrient-dense meals alongside medication; and Maintenance, for keeping weight off long-term. Packed with expert tips, air fryer adaptations, batch-cooking ideas, and fibre and protein boosts to curb cravings, it supports you at every stage of your weight-loss journey. $40, Hachette. Out September

The Vegan Asian Kitchen WoonHeng Chia WoonHeng Chia, known for sharing recipes online under the handle @ Woon.Heng, grew up in Malaysia, an ethnically diverse country where she was constantly surrounded by an amazing array of East Asian cuisines. When she embraced a plant-based diet, she was inspired to master vegan versions of dishes from dim sum and noodle stir fries to endlessly creative tofu and mushroom recipes. The Vegan Asian Kitchen is a comprehensive and loving look at the naturally plant-forward dishes of East Asia, as well as some of WoonHeng’s own creations and favorite culinary memories.

Yotam Ottolenghi Bring Yotam Ottolenghi’s innovation to your everyday life with 135 new recipes for breakfast, lunch, dinner and dessert. Every dish has simplicity at its core and can be made in under 30 minutes, cooked in one pot, or prepped ahead. Whatever your barriers to cooking, this book brings you into the kitchen with a promise that even the simplest of meals can be full of flavour and joy. $70, Ebury. Out September

POETRY

Haiku Cats C. B. Fraser

Sweet Heart

This beautiful hardcover gift book presents 84 irresistible cats in all their moods, accompanied by original art and haiku poems highlighting the vital life lessons that we can learn from our furry friends. Meet the rowdy wanderer cat: a model of fearless curiosity. Then there’s the mewler, whose piercing cries cannot be ignored reminding us to be bold and assertive when we need to be. And you’ll surely recognize the free spirit feline, who teaches us to follow our fancies wherever they may lead us. Plus dozens of other inspirational cat characters and personalities!

Natalie Paull

$25, Tuttle. Out August

$65, Avery. Out September

Nights Out in the Kitchen Jay Rayner Nights Out in the Kitchen features an irresistible combination of recipes sparked by the dishes that Jay has fallen for during more than a quarter of a century as a restaurant critic, alongside 20 of his very own recipes. These are family favourites refined in his kitchen at home, from meatballs with braised spaghetti, to shaved fennel and lemon zest salad; from tartiflette tart to slow-cooked tandoori lamb shoulder. Jay’s love of restaurants and his passion for great home cooking spill off every page of this warmly inspirational cookbook. $55, Fig Tree. Out September

This collection brings together classics and inventive flavour twists, ranging from Natalie’s simplest recipes – many needing nothing more than hand beaters – to ambitious baking projects for those craving a challenge. The recipes are so good they might just move you to tears. With a handy “bake-tionary”, decades of hard-won tips, and her signature Adaptrix advice for mixing and matching to suit any craving, this is a beautifully photographed and illustrated collection. $50, Murdoch Books. Out September

Tramontana Simon Bajada Tramontana is a culinary journey through Italy’s northwestern frontier – from the sunlit coastlines of Liguria to the snow-capped peaks of Aosta.

Following the ancient salt trading routes that wind inland from the Mediterranean, Simon Bajada uncovers a rich and surprising tapestry of regional food culture, where fresh, delicate coastal dishes give way to the buttery, hearty fare of the mountains. Along the way, readers will discover focaccia and farinata, walnut-sauce pasta and beef agnolotti, buckwheat gnocchi and cheeselaced polenta – each recipe a reflection of the terrain, history and soul of the region. $45, Hardie Grant. Out now

The Palestinian Wedding A.M. Elmessiri Spanning a century of upheaval and endurance, The Palestinian Wedding brings together 21 major poets in a powerful bilingual anthology. From the charged lyricism of Tawfiq Zayyad to the expansive imagery of Walid al-Halis; from the romantic cadences of Salma al-Jayyusi to the profound rootedness of Mahmoud Darwish, these poems chart the emotional and political landscape of modern Palestine. Together, they reveal a tradition in which love of land, grief, defiance and hope are inseparable. $40, Saqi. Out August

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Gleebooks Gleaner

Nonfiction HEALTH

REFERENCE

The Brain Cliff

On the Mark

Dr Norman Swan

Why does this sentence start with a capital letter? Why is this one broken up – and why does it end in a question mark? Florence Hazrat’s groundbreaking history traces punctuation from the fall of Rome to the rise of the emoji, the printing press to the Oxford comma debate. This definitive biography of the marks that shape our written voice reveals their richly storied past and their evolving importance in the digital age. On the Mark: the history of punctuation from ancient Egypt to the emoticon is a fascinating odyssey for language lovers everywhere.

Many of us fear losing our mental sharpness as we age, worrying that decline into dementia is inevitable. Dr Norman Swan argues we’ve been thinking about brain ageing all wrong – it’s not about deficit, but adaptation and resilience, shaped by far more than diet, exercise or genes. Drawing on interviews with cognitive “super-agers” in their 90s and 100s worldwide, Swan finds their wildly different life stories share common threads, offering lessons for all of us navigating our 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s and beyond. $35, Hachette. Out August

Florence Hazrat

$50, Profile. Out September

WINE

GARDENING

The Productive Garden Companion Natasha Morgan The Productive Garden Companion is a practical, reassuring and visually rich modern gardening book that meets gardeners wherever they are – from windowsill pots to generous acreage.

Landscape architect and lifelong gardener Natasha Morgan shows how thoughtful design, seasonal rhythms and purposeful planting can transform any space. Part narrative, part landscape design bible, it traces Natasha’s personal relationship with gardening and invites readers to see their own gardens as sources of productivity and creativity, as well as connection and healing. $65, Murdoch Books. Out September

Hugh Johnson’s Pocket Wine Book 2027 Hugh Johnson’s Pocket Wine Book is the essential reference for anyone buying wine, offering clear, succinct facts on wines, growers and regions worldwide, plus guidance on which vintages to buy, drink or cellar and which growers to seek out. The 2027 edition covers grape varieties, local specialities and food pairings, alongside a special supplement on Flavour and Climate Change, exploring lower acidity, softer tannins and higher alcohol in today’s wines. With illustrations by New Yorker regular Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell. $37, Mitchell Beazley. Out September

TRAVEL

Realms of Gold A.J. Mackinnon Decades after sailing a tiny dinghy through 12 countries for his bestseller The Unlikely Voyage of Jack de Crow, Mackinnon is back on dry land – until a stranger’s message lures him back to the water. This time he sails and rows solo from Romania to Venice, weaving through Istanbul, Ithaca, Mount Olympus and the ruins of Troy, dodging border police and relying on the kindness of strangers along the way. Told with his trademark enthusiasm and self-deprecating humour, it’s a hilarious, unforgettable adventure through the legends of antiquity. $37, Black Inc. Out August

A World of Bookish Places DK Travel If you’ve ever planned a trip around a bookshop or detoured for a literary landmark, A World of Bookish Places is for you. This beautifully designed gift book with its foil cover, ribbon marker and marbled endpapers, celebrates 35 iconic literary cities, from London to Bath, Paris to Chicago, alongside cosy indie bookshops, historic author homes and literary cafes. Each city comes with a curated reading list and literary walking tours, including Tokyo’s Jimbocho Book Town, plus features on book towns like Hay-onWye. $45, Dorling Kindersley. Out September

ESSAYS

Griffith Review 93: Into the Archive Edited by Carody Culver The archive has long been a form of collection, preservation and communication. As the internet and social media reshape what, why and how we record information, whether for personal or institutional means, the nature of the archive itself is also in flux. How does the archive mediate the relationship between public and private space? How do archives shape individual and collective memory?

Should the archivist preserve without intervention? What will the archives of the future look like? This edition of Griffith Review goes on the record to reveal the spoils and surprises of the archive. $28, Griffith Review. Out August

WE’RE ON THE WEB Find more new releases at:

www.gleebooks.com.au August-September 2026

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Nonfiction ART

ARCHITECTURE

Margaret Preston National Gallery of Victoria

One of Australia’s most influential early 20-century artists, Margaret Preston reshaped the nation’s visual language through bold, technically innovative work. Her still lifes – especially her iconic native flowers – turn banksias, waratahs and gum blossoms into rhythmic, graphic, unmistakably modern design elements. Working across painting, printmaking and decorative arts, she fused international modernism with a distinctly Australian sensibility. This landmark publication surveys her career through key works and new scholarship, illuminating her artistic networks, her complex engagement with First Nations visual culture, and her lasting influence on Australian art and design. $80, Thames & Hudson. Out September

Philippa Nikulinksy: for the seeker who walks Philippa, Alex and Angela Nikulinksy One of Western Australia’s best known artists, Philippa Nikulinsky demonstrates the power of closely observing nature. Sharing more than 25 years of field diaries with some of her most significant works, this is a rare look behind the scenes of her artistic process. Accompanied by text from her husband, Alex, and her daughter-in-law, Angela, the diary entries, artwork and stories offer insight into Philippa’s creative process and her fascination with the arid landscape of the place she calls home. $65, Fremantle Press. Out September

Jackie Kurltjunyintja Giles Tjapaltjarri Hetti Kemarre Perkins The art of Jackie Giles bridges Aboriginal cosmology and the modern world. For much of his life, Jackie Kurltjunyintja Giles Tjapaltjarri (ca. 1935-2010) lived a nomadic existence across Australia’s Western Desert, later settling in small communities. Renowned as a Maparnjarra – a powerful traditional healer able to see into the bodies and spirits of others – he began painting in acrylic in the 1990s, fusing deep knowledge of his land with visionary dreams.

His labyrinthine, rhythmical compositions celebrate the Tjukurpa (Dreaming), forging a striking link between Ngaanyatjarra cosmology and a rapidly changing world. With 70 colour illustrations. $65, 5 Continents. Out August

Tim Braden: I can see all the colours now This monograph surveys two decades of paintings and works on paper by Perth-born, London-based artist Tim Braden, whose practice balances restlessness with order – much like his studio, which is serene yet crammed with eclectic curiosities. Moving fluidly between ink drawings, oil interiors and acrylic abstractions, Braden explores mountains, interiors, craftspeople and travellers with a vivid, enquiring eye, shaped by his cousin Patrick Heron and the Bauhaus legacy of Josef and Anni Albers. His art embodies a profound, ongoing fascination with colour, making and seeing. With 200 illustrations. $190, Anomie. Out August

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Gleebooks Gleaner

Wild Comfort: Contemporary homes in the wilderness Wild Comfort showcases 30 contemporary homes set in some of the world’s most remote and untamed landscapes – perched on rocky archipelagos, enshrouded in forests, nestled in deserts. Designed by leading architects, these homes range from minimalist cabins to luxury retreats, masterfully built to withstand harsh conditions while offering warmth and shelter. Stunning photography and engaging narrative reveal how each home’s architecture responds to its climate and context, forging a deep connection with nature – a dialogue between the tamed and the untamed, comfort and wilderness. $90, Images Publishing. Out August

The Verandah Simon Griffiths The verandah is one of Australian architecture’s most enduring icons – not just a design feature but an interface between private life and public space, shaped by our climate and way of life. From colonial slab huts to gold rush mansions; from the smallest shack to the grandest mansion, verandahs have evolved across the continent’s diverse climates and eras. In The Verandah, photographer Simon Griffiths journeys across Australia to capture the beauty and charm of this beloved feature. $60, Thames & Hudson. Out August

Riverside Modern Jake Taylor; photography by Jack Lovel In the decade following World War II, a cluster of visionary architects built a series of experimental family homes in the Melbourne suburb of Kew, many working side by side as the neighbourhood took shape. Among them were figures who would come to define Melbourne modernism, including Robin Boyd, Anatol Kagan, McGlashan Everist, and Peter McIntyre and Dione McIntyre.

Set within a steep, leafy riverside landscape, these architects refined ideas about light, site and modern living that would shape Australian architecture for decades. Author Jake Taylor and photographer Jack Lovel explore key residential projects, revealing the creative energy behind this extraordinary pocket of design. $85, Thames & Hudson. Out September

Nonfiction DESIGN

Woman Textile Designers Victoria Bradley and Elizabeth Currie

Women Textile Designers showcases printed, woven and embroidered fabrics for public spaces, furnishings, fashion and theatre by leading designers – from Arts and Crafts pioneer May Morris and Bauhaus figures Gunta Stölzl and Anni Albers, to mid-century talents Lucienne Day and Althea McNish, to contemporary innovators such as Birgitta Hahn and Reiko Sudo. Chapters trace the textile industry’s transformation across the 20th century, including women’s growing access to design education and roles as entrepreneurs, alongside designer profiles. Illustrated with worldclass 20th-century designs from the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and beyond. $80, Thames & Hudson. Out September

MUSIC

PHOTOGRAPHY

Reckless: The Saga of Australian Crawl Jeff Apter When Australian Crawl debuted on Countdown in 1979, no one knew what to make of them. But over seven years, these high school mates produced two of Australia’s biggest albums and hits like Reckless and Errol. Behind the sun-kissed image, though, tensions over money, credit and direction frayed the band, and Guy McDonough’s 1984 death left a wound they never recovered from. Reckless is Jeff Apter’s poignant account of a legendary, tangled legacy. $35, Allen & Unwin. Out August

Making Rumours Ken Caillat & Steve Stiefel One of the bestselling albums of all time, Rumours remains an enduring cornerstone of rock. Co-producer Ken Caillat offers a rare, front-row seat into the studio where it was born, capturing the partying, creative struggles and unravelling relationships behind tracks such as Dreams, Don’t Stop and The Chain. Discover how two couples’ breakups shaped the songs, how the band’s excesses fuelled some of their most legendary sessions, and what sparked Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham’s screaming match. With 80 exclusive photos, Making Rumours reveals how Fleetwood Mac found their voice amid heartbreak and betrayal. $35, Monoray. Out September

The Rolling Stones Bob Spitz You think you know the story? Think again. Shorn of dulling layers of myth, an irresistible, clear-eyed portrait emerges of a band who, after 60 years, continue to break new ground. At the heart of it all, the unique, fractious, alchemical bond between Mick and Keith, the Glimmer Twins. There’s been debauchery, decadence and death along the way. Not everyone survived the journey, but the band was always greater than the sum of its parts, laying down a trail of classic albums and landmark live performances in its wake. This is a groundbreaking reckoning with the world’s greatest rock ’n’ roll band. $70, Michael Joseph. Out now

It’s Not For You Kelly-Dawn Hellmrich Trailblazing female punk band Camp Cope changed the Australian music scene forever, from their It Takes One campaign to end sexual harassment at gigs to their track The Opener, which became an anthem for fearlessly calling out the sexism that permeates the industry. Here, Kelly-Dawn Hellmrich, Camp Cope’s bass player, brings that same passion to conversations with fellow artists who represent the firsts and the future of Australian music. It’s Not For You goes beyond the music, offering a peek behind the curtain, generous personal reflection, catharsis, camaraderie and inspiration for anyone who’s ever been told they were too much or not enough.

Magnum Streetwise Edited Stephen McLaren Magnum Streetwise takes a tour through the photographs and practices that have defined street photography, from Henri Cartier-Bresson’s pioneering vision to present-day masters like Erwitt, Parr, Gilden and Kalvar. Blending photographerand theme-based portfolios with insightful texts and anecdotes, it explores how shared subjects – marketplaces, leisure, travel – and cities like Paris, New York and Tokyo have been captured across Magnum’s history. The ultimate collection of street photography from the worldfamous Magnum Photos Agency, it showcases hidden gems alongside some of street photography’s most iconic images. $65, Thames & Hudson. Out August

Definite Dupain Max Dupain Definitive Dupain draws on more than 250,000 negatives held at the State Library of NSW to present around 150 photographs spanning Max Dupain’s career from the 1920s to the 1990s – including his iconic Sunbaker alongside studio work, architectural studies, commercial commissions and personal images.

Working tirelessly until his death in 1992, Dupain captured Australia’s people, landscapes, architecture and even manufactured products, leaving a body of work that stands as both singular artistic achievement and striking visual memory of Australian culture. $80, Thames & Hudson. Out September

$37, Penguin. Out August August-September 2026

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A Tattoo on My Brain Daniel Gibbs

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Born in Blackness Howard W. French

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Crusader Criminals Steve Tibble

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Madrid: A New Biography Luke Stegeman

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Half His Age Jennette Mccurdy

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Byron: A Life in Ten Letters Andrew Stauffer

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Larry: A New Biography of Lawrence Durrell Michael Haag $52

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Templars: The Knights of Britain Steve Tibble

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The Yellow River Ruth Mostern

Shop Talk

Reid All About It This month, two selections from our Folio Society holdings Paris After the Liberation Anthony Beevor & Artemis Cooper When Allied troops fought their way into Paris on August 25, 1944, they were greeted by the wildest scenes of joy Europe had ever witnessed. The following day, more than a million people thronged the streets in a delirious atmosphere of freedom to watch General de Gaulle’s triumphant march from the Arc de Triomphe to Notre Dame.

There was a dark edge to the exuberance, though. Marshal Pétain’s regime was now cursed. Scores were settled in a chaos of rough and uneven justice The period that followed was full of contrast and contradiction: Picasso, a multimillionaire, became the Communist Party’s star recruit; an infatuation with American popular culture thrived amid virulent anti-Americanism; black marketeers grew rich on the misery of the population; literary and social life revived miraculously amid the poverty and dilapidation.

Paris After the Liberation is the first work to do justice to this extraordinary period. It draws on an astonishing array of sources: unpublished diaries, letters, and photographs; interviews with many of the period’s leading figures; and important material from archives in Paris, the US, London, and Moscow. A pivotal moment of world history brought to life, suffused with wit, anecdote and brio.

2003. Hardcover. 1st Edition. Five volume set: The Island of Sheep, The Three Hostages, Mr Stand-Fast, Green Mantle, and The Thirty-Nine Steps. B/w line drawings. Second printing 2004.

Nick Hardcastle [illustrator]. Minor foxing to text blocks otherwise

ABN 87 000 357 317

clean and bright internally. Slightly scuffed slipcase. Condition: Near fine. Price: $150 The Golem Gustav Meyrink (1868-1932) “A superbly atmospheric story set in the old Prague ghetto featuring the Golem, a kind of rabbinical Frankenstein’s monster, which manifests every 33 years in a room without a door. Stranger still, it seems to have the same face as the narrator. Made into a film in 1920, this extraordinary book combines the uncanny psychology of doppelganger stories with expressionism and more than a little melodrama. Meyrink’s old Prague – like Dickens’s London – is one of the great creations of city writing. An eerie, claustrophobic and fantastical underworld where anything can happen.” – Phil Baker, The Sunday Times 2010. Hardcover, xvi, 237pp. 8vo.

Quarter bound in black buckram with paper sides printed with a design

by Vladimir Zimakov. Title stamped in gilt to spine. Ten b/w illustrations.

Translated by Mike Mitchell.

Introduction by Iain Sinclair. Condition: Fine. In a lightly marked black slipcase.

Price: $70 – Stephen Reid

PO Box 486, Glebe NSW 2037 Ph: (02) 9660 2333 Fax (02) 9660 3597 Email: books@gleebooks.com.au

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is a publication of Gleebooks Pty Ltd, 49 Glebe Point Rd (P.O. Box 486), Glebe, NSW, 2037 Ph: (02) 9660 2333 books@gleebooks.com.au

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BESTSELLERS JUNE-JULY 2026 Fiction

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Children

1. Yesteryear Caro Claire Burke

1. Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Swan

1. A Hat for Every Harriet Jess Horn

2. The Things We Never Say Elizabeth Strout

2. London Falling Patrick Radden Keefe

2. Detective Beans #3: The Map of Mystery Li Chen

3. Mother Mary Comes to Me Arundhati Roy

3. Josie Mack & the MEGA Division Bethany Loveridge

4. Screw Nice Amy Remeikis

4. Once I Was a Giant Zeno Sworder

5. If You’re Listening: Declassified Matt Bevan

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6. John of John Douglas Stuart

6. Famesick Lena Dunham

6. Tiny Good Things Gabrielle Tozer

7. The Correspondent Virginia Evans

7. The Land and its People David Sedaris

7. Kid Peter Carnavas

8. The Odyssey Homer (translated by Emily Wilson)

8. Liberal Fascisms Slavoj Zizek

8. Spooky House: The Graphic Novel Sally Rippin

9. Heart the Lover Lily King

9. Said the Dead Doireann Ní Ghríofa

10. Villa Coco Andrew Sean Greer

10. When the World Sleeps: Stories, Words and Wounds of Palestine Francesca Albanese

9. The Epically Awesome Odyssey, as told by Nanny Piggins R.A. Spratt

3. Whistler Ann Pachett 4. Land Maggie O’Farrell 5. Taiwan Travelogue Yáng Shuāng-zî (Translated by Lin King)

10. Mega Rich Guinea Pigs #2: Witless Protection Kate & Jol Temple

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