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Vincent and the Grandest Hotel on Earth (Lisa Nicol, Puffin)
Released July 2019
Not 10 pages after inheriting his grandfather’s ostensibly magical shoeshine kit, Vincent is scouted to shine shoes at the Grandest Hotel on Earth—a job that entails far more than it... Read more
100 Ways to Fly (Michelle Taylor, UQP)
Released August 2019
100 Ways to Fly is Michelle Taylor’s third poetry collection for children. She is also a published poet for adults. This book contains a generous number of poems, usually one... Read more
The Brilliant Ideas of Lily Green (Lisa Siberry, Hardie Grant Egmont)
Released August 2019
This debut middle-grade novel, which won Hardie Grant Egmont’s Ampersand Prize, ticks many familiar boxes. The main character: a 12-year-old on the cusp of maturity. The challenges: friendships, enemies, family,... Read more
Australia’s Original Languages: An introduction (R M W Dixon, A&U)
Released July 2019
Bob Dixon has an impressive academic and publishing career, which includes 50 years of researching Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages. Dixon’s latest book combines linguistics, colonisation history, anthropology and... Read more
Lapse (Sarah Thornton, Text)
Released August 2019
Former corporate lawyer Clementine Jones is holed up in a country town where no-one knows her past, and she’s hoping to keep it that way. During her self-imposed exile she... Read more
Storytime: Growing up with books (Jane Sullivan, Ventura)
Released August 2019
Storytime is a delightful collection of essays by literary journalist Jane Sullivan on her favourite childhood books, revisited as an adult. Best known as the scribe behind the Saturday Age’s... Read more
On Drugs (Chris Fleming, Giramondo)
Released August 2019
Philosopher Chris Fleming’s memoir is a searching, considered account of drug and alcohol use and the mechanisms of addiction. Fleming traces his history of marijuana, codeine-based painkillers and alcohol consumption,... Read more
Taking Tom Murray Home (Tim Slee, HarperCollins)
Released July 2019
This debut novel and winner of HarperCollins’ Banjo Prize is based on the ingenious premise of a funeral-protest that raises awareness of the pressures facing dairy farmers from banks, supermarkets... Read more
Love and Other Battles (Tess Woods, HarperCollins)
Released July 2019
Tess Woods’ latest novel follows the lives of three generations of women: Jess is a flower child who falls for a soldier under the shadow of the Vietnam war; Jamie... Read more
Guinea Pig in White Wine Sauce (Alan Rochford, Affirm)
Released July 2019
Guinea Pig in White Wine Sauce is the memoir of restaurateur Alan Rochford, whose cottage bistro is tucked away in the Adelaide Hills. Told as a series of anecdotes, the... Read more
Fortune (Lenny Bartulin, A&U)
Released July 2019
Lenny Bartulin—who cut his teeth with the Jack Susko crime series—made a dramatic shift with his rollicking 2013 historical novel Infamy. But the visceral energy and dirty, real descriptions that... Read more
The Yield (Tara June Winch, Hamish Hamilton)
Released July 2019
The Yield unpicks intergenerational trauma and redacted histories in prose that glimmers. The word ‘yield’ has a dual meaning: in English it refers to the harvest reaped from the land... Read more
A Constant Hum (Alice Bishop, Text)
Released July 2019
Alice Bishop’s debut is a collection of short stories linked by the central theme of bushfire, specifically Victoria’s 2009 Black Saturday fires, which killed and injured hundreds of people, decimating... Read more
The Warming (Craig Ensor, Ventura)
Released July 2019
There’s a lot of climate change-inspired fiction around at the moment—sci-fi, apocalyptic, hopeful and despairing. The Warming has elements of all these but it’s really just about people. People who... Read more
Something to Believe In (Andrew Stafford, UQP)
Released July 2019
This memoir is rock journalist Andrew Stafford’s first book since his 2004 milestone Pig City, which mapped Brisbane music ‘from the Saints to Savage Garden’. Named after a Ramones song,... Read more
Fake: A startling true story of love in a world of liars, cheats, narcissists, fantasists and phonies (Stephanie Wood, Vintage)
Released July 2019
In 2017 journalist Stephanie Wood penned a piece for Good Weekend magazine in which she detailed a relationship she’d had with a man she met online. The relationship went awry,... Read more
Kindred: 12 Queer #LoveOzYA Stories (ed by Michael Earp, Walker)
Released June 2019
Among the boon of recent #LoveOzYA anthologies (Begin, End, Begin; Meet Me at the Intersection; Underdog), Kindred takes the unique position of being entirely devoted to stories by and about... Read more
Fox & Bird (Edwina Wyatt, illus by Alice Lindstrom, Little Hare)
Released June 2019
Edwina Wyatt’s picture book is about testing the bonds of new friendship. Fox’s loneliness lends him to do strange things. He tries to befriend a bird but she has a... Read more
One Careless Night (Christina Booth, Black Dog)
Released June 2019
Christina Booth is an award-winning author and illustrator who has previously collaborated with well-known Australian authors such as Colin Thiele and Jackie French. In One Careless Night, Booth recreates the... Read more
Lights Out, Leonard (Josh Pyke, illus by Chris Nixon, Puffin)
Released June 2019
This book has a perennial theme—a child who’s scared of the dark—but with a really original twist: parents who write a manual on how to scare monsters. Chris Nixon’s illustrations... Read more
