The Mushroom Tapes by Helen Garner, Sarah Krasnostein and Chloe Hooper
Nonfiction, Text Publishing, $36.99
One of the many tantalising details to emerge from the trial of Erin Patterson were reports that Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein had been spotted in Courtroom Four at Morwell. Were there three works of Australian literary nonfiction about Erin Patterson in the offing? A week after the guilty verdict was handed down, Text Publishing announced that these three celebrated nonfiction authors would in fact collaborate on The Mushroom Tapes.
Readers may not have had to endure a long wait to read the book, but a suite of already sold-out events with the authors signals the ravenous anticipation for this release. – Catriona Menzies-Pike
Chosen Family by Madeleine Gray
Fiction, Simon & Schuster, $34.99
Some books make you feel seen, and others make you feel scrutinised. Madeleine Gray’s new novel is a sometimes savage, sometimes heartwarming story about Nell and Eve, two friends who find each other at that crucial point in adolescence where being seen by another person feels like finding your soulmate.
Chosen Family is about queerness, desire and the hurt when the ones you’ve chosen don’t choose you. In contrast to Gray’s biting but bleak debut, this thrums with the vitality and connection of girlhood and female friendships. – Bec Kavanagh
The Rot by Evelyn Araluen
Poetry, UQP, $24.99
Evelyn Araluen’s debut, Drop Bear, hit the literary world in 2021 like an incendiary device. Among other gongs, it was the first book of poetry to win the Stella prize. Her second collection, The Rot, amply bears out this promise. Araluen’s poetry drills down to the nerve with a lyric intelligence that is as tough as steel, with lines that are sometimes unbearable in their complex tensions.
Her headlong language – the ferocity of its anger and sorrow – impels you from one poem to the next. You return again (and again) to reckon with this book’s difficult, seductive beauty, its deadly analyses, its poised wit, its wicked complexities, and its desolations and joys. – Alison Croggon
How to End a Story: Collected Diaries 1978-1998 by Helen Garner
Memoir, Text Publishing, $34.99
November is the month to be a Garner fan, though many of them will probably already own at least one of her diaries already, having been published by Text as three separate volumes: Yellow Notebook (spanning 1978-1987), One Day I’ll Remember This (1987-1995) and How to End a Story (1995-1998).
There is nothing new added to this (weighty) collected edition, but if you’ve yet to convince anyone in your life of Garner’s unique genius, here’s their Christmas present sorted. – Sian Cain
The Hiding Place by Kate Mildenhall
Fiction, Scribner, $34.99
Kate Mildenhall is a genre chameleon, so it’s no surprise her latest novel – a rural crime with layers of domestic tension – is delivered with a confidence that suggests she’s been writing crime for years.
When a group of old friends pool their money to buy an abandoned mining town, they imagine they’ve bought the solution to their busy lives – a place to escape, to connect, to teach their kids about the simple things. But an unexpected death pushes these friends to the limit, exposing the ugly realities of who they really are. The Hiding Place keeps punching until the last page. – BK
The Transformations by Andrew Pippos
Fiction, Picador, $34.99
Andrew Pippos’s warm-hearted debut, Lucky’s, spanned more than 50 years of one Greek Australian family and the cafe franchise they ran – a world Pippos knew well, having grown up in his family’s cafe. For his follow-up, he sticks close to home, setting The Transformations at a national broadsheet not unlike the one he used to work at, following colleagues George and Cassandra as they watch the print industry slowly die around them.
Australian journalism novels are having a moment – Gravity Let Me Go, Green Dot and The Worst Thing I’ve Ever Done among them – but The Transformations is the most true to life. But there is also a lot for people less obsessed with journalism than me. Workplace romance! An open marriage! Class, culture and politics! Also: it’s very funny. – Steph Harmon
Eros: Queer Myths for Lovers by Zoe Terakes
Fiction, Hachette Australia, $29.99
This collection of erotic takes on Greek myths by actor Zoe Terakes (Talk To Me) is horny, hallucinatory, horrific – and pulsing with life. There’s a contemporary twist on Eurydice (with very little Orpheus) that takes readers into a ghoulish underworld; the homoerotic tale of teen Icarus and the sun god Apollo; a retelling of Iphis and Ianthe that reclaims it as a story of trans love; Hermaphroditus, a homage to Aids-era Kings Cross; and Artemis and Kallisto, a time-hopping fantasy that travels from ancient Crete to the beaches of modern-day northern rivers NSW, and is infused with the Terakes family’s migrant history.
Mucky and sexy, violent and shocking, tender and joyful, and constantly surprising – this is a stunning debut. – Dee Jefferson
Thai: Anywhere and Everywhere by Nat Thaipun
Cookbook, Hardie Grant, $50
There are a great many Thai cookbooks, but how many feature kangaroo larb tartare? Nat Thaipun, the charismatic winner of MasterChef Australia 2024, runs the gamut of well-loved Thai dishes from som tum (papaya salad) to khao pad poo (crab fried rice).
But its when she plays with the flavours of her culture that things get really interesting: a family-size pie filled with massaman curry, a chiffon-cake trifle heaving with pandan syrup and mango jelly, or sausage rolls with the flavours of sai oua, that spicy, tangy pork sausage of northern Thailand and Laos. The photography and styling, too, is a joy. Thaipun isn’t necessarily breaking new ground, but she looks like she’s having the most fun. – Yvonne C Lam
The Underworld by Sofie Laguna
Fiction, Penguin, $34.99
The latest novel from Sofie Laguna, who won the Miles Franklin in 2015, has a lovely beguiling quality from the get-go. It is 1974 and teenager Martha, the only child of wealthy but taciturn parents, has fallen in love with the classics at her elite private school. She is fascinated by ancient cultures’ understanding of the underworld, “a realm invisible to the living and deeper than any ocean … underneath all human life.”
This becomes an important metaphor for Martha, who seeks distance from her adolescent awkwardness, her family’s internal politics, and her burgeoning understanding of her own sexuality. Laguna elegantly charts her intellectual and sexual awakening through high school, university and to a hopeful glimpse of adulthood. – SC
Ankami by Debra Dank
Memoir, Echo Publishing, $32.99
In her review of Gudanji and Wakaja author Debra Dank’s 2022 debut, We Come With This Place, Tara June Winch called it “a jewel of a book”. The deeply generous, time-bending memoir-meets-cultural-history ended up winning a record-breaking $85,000 at the NSW premier’s literary awards, among other prizes.
Her latest, Ankami, is a companion of sorts. Dank describes discoveries she made researching her family history which “shook and broke and disrupted something that I’m still working to identify”: four children were stolen from her paternal grandmother, which no one in her family had spoken about since. The resulting book is both a memoir and a devastating reckoning with Australia’s past; with events that, Dank acknowledges, “are not palatable for any of us”. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t reckon with them too. – SH
The ADHD Brain Buddy by Matilda Boseley
Health, Penguin, $34.99
Our very own Matilda Boseley did a great thing with her 2023 book The Year I Met My Brain, which explored adult ADHD and her diagnosis at the age of 23. This companion book is a practical workbook filled with tips, activities and facts that have been designed with ADHD specialists to help adults with ADHD in their daily lives – tackling challenges such as getting out of bed, clearing your inbox, making a shopping list and even learning how to relax. I don’t even have ADHD and I think I need this book. – SC
Hooked: Inside the Murky World of Australia’s Gambling Industry by Quentin Beresford
Nonfiction, NewSouth, $39.99
Australians love a wager. Or do they? We lose approximately $32bn a year on legal gambling. In Quentin Beresford’s latest dissection of money and power in Australia, he turns his lens on to our massive gambling industry; the characters, companies, politics and volumes of cash involved.
This deeply researched deep dive into a major force in Australian political and social life charts not only how the gambling industry came to be so large and powerful, but also how vociferous the warnings against it have been. – Celina Ribeiro
