***
Sophie, Standing There by Meg Mason
Fiction, HarperCollins, $34.99
Meg Mason’s last novel, 2020’s Sorrow and Bliss, was sharp and moving, a global hit to the point that its cover was instantly recognisable and endlessly recreated for years after. Her follow-up is centred around Sophie, a sound technician at literary festivals who has suddenly found herself single and living alone after her husband leaves. She becomes obsessed with a famous writer, Lilac Dunne, and when the two women eventually meet at a festival, a parasocial relationship transforms into something far deeper.
This witty novel is a smart, metatextual affair, with thoughts on “sad girl fiction” and plenty of fun author cameos. (Although I have met George Saunders and I swear he’s too sweet to get stroppy about his microphone.) – Sian Cain
***
Now, Autonomy by Max Easton
Fiction, Giramondo, $32.95
For the past five years, Max Easton has been chronicling working-class struggle in western Sydney in a sort-of series of novels – beginning with the Miles Franklin-longlisted The Magpie Wing in 2021 and followed by Paradise Estate in 2023. His latest work, Now, Autonomy, throws us back into the turbulent waters of a friendship group of well-meaning but flawed people. As they contend with financial pressures, diminishing capacity for resistance and the oppressive hand of the state, they try to find ways to reclaim agency.
Easton’s novel is an ode to these people, who reach towards change – even in ways conceited or delusional – as they struggle to get by in a world resistant to accommodating them. – Jack Callil
***
Sentinels: When Diseases Spread Between Animals and Humans by Michael Dulaney
Science, Scribe, $36.99
Michael Dulaney’s debut is a timely account of the way zoonotic diseases (think Covid-19, HIV and rabies) are rapidly accelerating, with our insatiable destruction of the natural world to blame. The sweeping scope of Sentinels is breathtaking, mapping a journey from southern China to the Andes, from the Arctic to our shores.
It’s a bracing read, but also a beautiful one – Dulaney explores themes of resilience and regeneration with an urgent call to re-establish our intimate connection to nature. – Sophie Black
***
It’s Not For You: Inside the Artists Rewriting the Rules of the Australian Music Scene by Kelly-Dawn Hellmrich
Music, Penguin, $36.99
Kelly-Dawn Hellmrich was the bassist in Camp Cope, the punk trio who challenged the Australian music industry on its ingrained sexism through songs and campaigns, including It Takes One, an initiative to end sexual harassment at live shows, and standing against male-dominated festival lineups.
In this new essay collection, Hellmrich writes about 18 women and gender-diverse artists who changed the Australian music industry, then sits down to interview them. It is a starry line up: Amyl and the Sniffers’ Amy Taylor, Sarah Blasko, Romy Vager, Sampa the Great, Julia Jacklin, Angie McMahon, Courtney Barnett … festival bookers would never. – SC
***
Mine by Adam Ouston
Fiction, Transit Lounge, $34.99
The ideal way to approach Mine, Adam Ouston’s novel told in a single sentence, might be to read it out loud in one exhausting sitting. This would leave the reader short of breath, uncomfortable, and thus in sync with its central character: a poet, activist and teacher who has tumbled to the bottom of an abandoned mine shaft.
In Mine, Ouston’s formal experimentalism is matched by the feral political energy of the activist-poet at his novel’s heart. The result is an intense, bracing, wildly digressive jeremiad against the exploitation of labour and the environment in Tasmania. – Catriona Menzies-Pike
***
Time Travel for Beginners by Jaclyn Moriarty
Fiction, Hardie Grant, $34.99
Jaclyn Moriarty’s trademark whimsy is delightful in her latest novel. Most people see the Time Travel Agency as a dilapidated novelty not really worth the price of admission. But behind its unassuming doors, the agency offers customers the chance to visit any time in the past. The catch? Nothing they do will have an impact on the present.
This novel’s three protagonists – Anna, Teddy and Jade – are achingly relatable, grounding the speculative elements in everyday fears, dreams and desires. A powerfully emotional novel from a master storyteller. – Bec Kavanagh
***
Good Witch by Lucianne Tonti
History, Simon & Schuster, $36.99
Playing “light as a feather, stiff as a board” has been a coming of age ritual for a certain kind of tweenage girl since the 1990s, but the contemporary fascination with all things witchy isn’t exactly enthralled with history. Regular Guardian contributor Lucianne Tonti’s Good Witch aims to redress that.
A mix of travelogue and social history, Tonti visits witch trial sites across Europe and the US to tell the stories of women who stood accused. She explores several witchy archetypes – from gardeners to gossips; spinsters to nymphs – to build a case that accusations of witchcraft were often about maligning women’s work. A lesson in eco-feminism for the Etsy spell-casting set. – Alyx Gorman
***
Blue Giant by Jordan Prosser
Fiction, UQP, $34.99
If, like me, you think an excess of earnestness is a pox on Australian fiction, Blue Giant is a welcome blast of profane fizz. Abby Horne is a thirtysomething Melbourne scenester who has been winging it for a decade, sustained by delusions, cheap wine and her loving best friend, Niki. When Abby gets caught up in a tech billionaire’s scheme to settle Mars, she loses her fragile grip on reality.
By turns deranged and hilarious, this is a Bildungsroman about closing your eyes and dreaming big as the earth burns. It features a high-school reunion for the ages. – CMP
***
The Wanted and the Unwanted by AM Stafford
History, Miegunyah Press, $36.99
In the remote Kimberley of Western Australia lies the bones of a hospital not like any that would merit the word today. The Wyndham Native hospital was a place not of healing, but segregation; where Aboriginal Australians were denied treatment, dug the graves of their co-patients and stayed out of sight of the white population.
In The Wanted and Unwanted, former journalist AM Stafford teases apart the hospital’s dark past in vivid detail. It is, she writes, “a story about the unacknowledged bones buried in our foundations, bones that keep washing up”. – Celina Ribeiro
***
Realms of Gold: The Remarkable Return of Jack de Crow by AJ Mackinnon
Travel writing, Black Inc, $36.99
As a former bookseller, I remember selling countless copies of AJ Mackinnon’s bestseller The Unlikely Voyage of Jack de Crow, his compelling, humorous account of sailing in a tiny dinghy across 12 countries from north Wales to the Black Sea.
This sequel sees Mackinnon pick up where his first trip ended, sailing and rowing across 3,000 kilometres and eight countries including Greece, Romania and Turkey. Based on my experience in the bookshop, a sure-fire hit among dads. – SC
***
Riding the Jet Stream by Alan Joyce
Memoir, Hardie Grant, $49.99
The controversial former Qantas chief executive is now free from the legal agreement that sealed his lips when he resigned in 2023, so now we have the inside story of his 15-year tenure – including the string of controversies that defined it: the ghost flights, worker outsourcing and chairman’s lounge largesse.
Also included is his rise from a working-class upbringing to Trinity College Dublin, his time at Ireland’s flag carrier Aer Lingus, how he became one of Australia’s first openly gay top CEOs, the 2011 strikes that grounded Qantas’s fleet worldwide and his handling of Covid-19. Joyce has plenty to say about himself – but far less to say about politicians and former colleagues. – Luca Ittimani
***
Blackbirding by Ryan Butta
History, Affirm Press, $34.99
Australia has long reassured itself that, despite genocidal treatment of First Nations peoples, at least it has no heinous past of slavery, unlike Britain and the US. Ryan Butta shatters this historical self-deception. The term “blackbirding” (its etymology in the African and West Indies slave trades) involved the coercion and kidnapping of up to 62,000 Pacific Islander people, many children, to labour mostly on Australian sugar cane plantations between 1860 and 1906.
Long portrayed as somehow “other” than slavery, Butta uses forensic archival work and compelling prose to disturbingly illustrate why this was Australia’s slave trade – and how a colonial who’s-who profited handsomely from it. – Paul Daley
