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Gone Guru by Nadine Browne
Fiction, Fremantle Press, $34.99
Noni, the narrator of Nadine Browne’s debut novel, has just arrived in New York to complete an MFA program. Things aren’t going well. Her memoir-in-progress has been pilloried by the NYU crowd and her flatmate Vincent has disappeared, along with all her rent. Noni needs to find Vincent and figure out a new writing project.
Can she pull it off? Can she solve the mystery and stay a few steps ahead of all her readers? This is a funny, smart metafictional caper that revels in the mistakes and misreadings of its narrator (and its readers). – Catriona Menzies-Pike
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The Second Child by Malcolm Knox
Fiction, Allen & Unwin, $34.99
As a journalist Malcolm Knox has covered sports, politics, corporate Australia and the publishing industry – so it’s little wonder he’s found fertile ground tackling the toxic power structures, sycophantic apparatchiks and shared delusions of Stalin’s Soviet Union.
While his 2024 novel The First Friend used historical figures like Stalin and Lavrentiy Beria as playthings for a darkly comic, disarmingly Australian-flavoured parable pitched at the post-Trump reconstruction era, its follow-up, The Second Child, arrives in the midst of the sequel. We’ve all heard the saying that history often rhymes, but in Knox’s telling it feels less like an epic poem – or a dirty limerick. – Walter Marsh
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Osozai by Meg Tanaka
Cookbook, HarperCollins, $39.99
The Japanese wored osozai in translates to something like “little dishes”, or small, everyday plates to eat with rice and soup. The second cookbook from Meg Tanaka, of the beloved Melbourne cafe Cibi, threads this needle of Japanese home cooking – perhaps some tonkatsu with green beans goma-ae (marinated in a ground-sesame seed dressing) and a yuzu-bright coleslaw; or a roster of hamburger steak, potato salad and spring greens.
Some of my favourite parts of the book are when Tanaka references her family food memories, including the grandmother who made her own tofu until she was 92. If you’re the type who browses, rather than cooks from, a cookbook, you’ll also enjoy the beautiful food styling with very pretty ceramics. – Yvonne C Lam
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Three Shocks by George Megalogenis
Politics, Penguin, $36.99
No one takes the long view better than George Megalogenis, and his latest weighty offering since Australia’s Second Chance (not counting the Richmond tragic’s The Football Solution) is worth the wait. Megalogenis argues that the last two federal election results were way overdue “wake-up calls” underpinned by three shocks that have “reshaped our national identity.”
At the centre of these shocks is a massive and fascinating shift in the makeup of our population – firstly, migrants and their kids now make up the majority for the first time since federation, and secondly, professional women are now officially the largest segment of the workforce (booting blue-collar men). The third shock takes in the world stage and the fact that Australia’s key allies have become, in somewhat of an understatement, “unreliable”. Megalogenis is the master of making sense of things, so this is essential reading for anyone unmoored by the uncertainty of our current political climate. – Sophie Black
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Big Little Truths by Liane Moriarty
Fiction, Pan Macmillan, $34.99
Madeline, Celeste, Jane, Renata and Bonnie – the beloved characters at the heart of Liane Moriarty’s runaway success, Big Little Lies – are back. In her first ever sequel, Moriarty returns to the novel’s original Sydney setting, and once more shatters the idyllic setting immediately, as the principal receives a severed human finger in the mail.
The kids, children in the first book, are in high school now, and much harder to protect. Moriarty raises the stakes in her new novel, where everyone’s secrets are coming back to haunt them. A single-sitting novel to be devoured like (or with) lollies. – Bec Kavanagh
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The Doubles by Jacob K Gallagher
Fantasy, Hachette, $34.99
Jacob K Gallagher has created a wonderfully lively world that reminded me a little of Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London series but in Australia (how many fantasy novels open with a magical battle in Adelaide’s suburbs?) The novel follows Kring, a sort of detective with magical abilities (known as an “Envoy”), who hunts predatory supernatural entities who travel into our world from an interdimensional void called the Outside.
Kring’s line of work takes her to Tamworth, where she is tasked with solving a mystery: two local Indigenous children have died and replaced by uncanny, perfect physical replicas. It’s hugely entertaining and imaginative; I’d be amazed if it isn’t the start of a series. – Sian Cain
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Cul-de-Sac by Eleanor Limprecht
Fiction, Hardie Grant, $34.99
Given Cul-de-Sac’s bleak subject matter (psychological control and domestic abuse), this new novel by Eleanor Limprecht is surprisingly easy to read. Jacquie, the mother of two at the heart of the novel, is lively and independent, but finds herself trapped in a relationship with an increasingly controlling husband.
Brandon is so subtle in the way he erodes Jacquie’s sense of self that she doesn’t recognise the abuse until it’s too late. Limprecht has written a sensitive, clever and timely novel that challenges victim stereotypes. – BK
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The Brain Cliff by Dr Norman Swan
Health, Hachette, $34.99
Cognitive decline is a phenomena viewed with simultaneous fear and resignation; a sense that it’s just perhaps the worst in a long list of downsides to getting older. In The Brain Cliff, ABC stalwart Dr Norman Swan draws together a growing body of research which suggests there are things individuals can do to keep their brain functioning more effectively for longer.
While the neuroscience is complex, Swan tries to keep the research accessible with snappy chapters (35 of them!) on everything from creatine to retirement, as well short portraits of “cognitive superagers”. Pass me the leafy greens. – Celina Ribeiro
***
Trip Reports: Stories from an Australian Psychedelic Renaissance by Rich Haridy
Nonfiction, NewSouth, $34.99
Science journalist Rich Haridy had covered the rise of psychedelic medicine for more than a decade before he had a personal brush with the mental health system, which left him wondering whether the medical establishment is at all equipped to fulfil the much-hyped promises of psychedelic medicine.
Haridy’s debut takes a clear-eyed look at the experimental programs rolling out across the world and laments the missed opportunity for fundamental social connection if pharmaceutical companies succeed in turning the essentially communal act of tripping out into an isolating experience. Featuring the fascinating history of early trials in Melbourne in the 1960s, Haridy punctures the myths around the “psychedelic renaissance” and asks: surely there’s a better way? – SB
***
Grand Ambition by James Curran
Politics, Simon & Schuster, $49.99
Thirty years after Paul Keating lost the prime ministership to John Howard, history professor James Curran offers a reassessment of the Labor statesman and his downfall as something of a sliding doors moment for Australian history; a leader who prioritised national independence, embraced Asia and a reckoning with our past, and was replaced by men who valued western allies, isolation and warned of black armband views of history.
This is a portrait of a politician whose view of Australia was, in Keating’s own words, “bigger than the country’s view of itself”. Curran’s broadly sympathetic portrait of Keating and his vision for a bold Australia in Asia makes for timely reading. – CR
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Time of Monsters: What Future For Liberalism? by Waleed Aly
Politics, Quarterly Essay, $29.99
Never shy about tackling weighty subject matter, the scope of Waleed Aly’s latest Quarterly Essay is eye-watering. In Time of Monsters: What Future for Liberalism?, the academic, columnist and co-host of Radio National’s The Minefield interrogates what he characterises as “a near-constant sense of crisis in almost every sphere of life”.
Aly attempts to plot out our new political map (think One Nation, Maga, Nigel Farage’s Reform and Democratic Socialism, for starters) and points to an instability at the centre of contemporary life that, he argues, threatens liberal democracy as we know it. Social media, AI, environmental disasters, insecure housing and income, and energy inequality are all symptoms of an ailing system, argues Aly. In fact, we may well be witnessing its collapse. So, what’s next? – SB
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You Must Take Part in Revolution by Badiucao and Melissa Chan
Graphic novel, Affirm Press, $46.99
Chinese-born Australian cartoonist Badiucao has teamed up with Chinese American journalist Melissa Chan to paint a terrifying portrait of the near future: 2035, when an authoritarian China and a proto-fascist US are at war. A trio of young idealists – Andy, Maggie and Olivia, who crossed paths during the 2019 Hong Kong protests – must decide how they should live and act under oppression.
Though this graphic novel is grounded in some of the biggest geopolitical events of the past century, its heart lies in its fictional characters as they bear the consequences of their actions. – Kat Wong
***
Ordinary Funny Tragic by Bridie Jabour
Fiction, HarperCollins, $34.99
Disclaimer: Bridie Jabour is, of course, of this parish – but we shan’t hold it against her when she can write like this. This lovely novel follows two adult siblings, Crimson and Marty, who have been summoned to the deathbed of their estranged mother Villy – “the most charismatic, most fun, most selfish person I have ever met”, as Crimson remembers her.
Crimson and Marty are tasked with fulfilling her last wish: escorting her body back to England, where they encounter Villy’s extended family for the first time. Jabour is great on grief and motherhood, but also growing up and showing grace to family who let us down. I found it unexpectedly moving. – SC
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