The Australia Institute Essential Reading List
The Australia Institute Essential Reading List 2024
As the year draws to a close, the Australia Institute team has compiled a list of our favourite essential reads of 2024.
Non-fiction
What’s the Big Idea? 32 Big Ideas for a Better Australia
edited by Anna Chang and Alice Grundy
To mark The Australia Institute’s 30 years of big ideas, we have asked some of our good friends and leading thinkers from Australia and around the world to share a big idea for a better Australia.
The Australia Institute has spent the last 30 years producing research that matters, and this anthology offers fresh thinking about climate action, how to safeguard our democracy, the importance of bravery in policymaking, and how to address some of the biggest issues of our day: from gender-based discrimination to the housing crisis; from our relationship with the United States to keeping cities cooler.
In our first 30 years, The Australia Institute has shown how to make the impossible feel inevitable, and the radical seem reasonable. The works in this inspiring volume serve as a reminder that the solutions are there, Australia just needs the courage to implement them.
With a foreword by The Hon Michael Kirby AC. Contributors: Yanis Varoufakis, Aunty Pat Anderson, His Excellency Anote Tong, Professor Peter Doherty, Professor Brian Schmidt, Jennifer Robinson, Professor Fiona Stanley & Rebecca Glauert, Professor Patrick McGorry, Thomas Mayo, Christine Milne, Professor John Langmore, Hon Melissa Parke, Lucy Hughes Turnbull, Alana Johnson, Bob Brown, Sally McManus, Karrina Nolan, Polly Hemming, Greg Jericho, Sunita Narain, Maiy Azize, Amy Remeikis, Kieran Pender, Anna Spargo-Ryan, Dr Emma Shortis, Alex Sloan, Allan Behm, Dr Joelle Gergis, Bill Browne, Louise Adler and Dr Richard Denniss.
The Odd Couple: Re-configuring the America-Australia relationship
by Allan Behm
A set of provocative ideas about recalibrating the relationship between Australia and the USA to deliver peace and prosperity rather than conflict and disharmony.
America matters. Australia matters. They matter to each other. They matter to the world.
America is floundering and appears to have lost its way. It needs friends that advise and encourage. As rich and powerful first-world nations, America and Australia share a problem- how to recalibrate their relationship to deliver peace and prosperity rather than conflict and disharmony. In The Odd Couple, Allan Behm suggests ways that America and Australia can transcend military glitz to strengthen well-being and human security worldwide. America needs a friend, not a flunkey, and Australia may become its best ally.
Longlisted, 2024 Australian Political Book of the Year Award
The Great Housing Hijack
by Cameron K Murray
The Great Housing Hijack reveals how vested interests pull the strings on the property market in Australia, and offers a solution for genuinely affordable housing for those who need it.
Everyone claims to want affordable housing, but no one wants cheap housing.
While Australians on regular incomes dream of lower rents and prices, the housing policy debate has been hijacked, sailing further away from workable solutions.
Leading economics commentator Cameron Murray reveals how property insiders shape the housing market and its policy settings. He explains what property developers really mean when they call for more supply in order to provide affordable housing. He shows why landlords and the real estate industry resist rent controls and why the tax and first home buyer policies of the main political parties achieve little for first home buyers. The hoaxes created by the Housing Cheer Squad hide the brutal truth: for every winner in the property market, there is a loser.
For anyone who wants to truly understand the housing market in Australia, The Great Housing Hijack is essential reading. Drawing on the best housing policies around the world, Murray shows how Australia could create a genuinely affordable housing program without compromising the interests of existing property owners.
Longlisted, 2024 Australian Political Book of the Year Award
Let’s Tax Carbon: And Other Ideas for a Better Australia
by Ross Garnaut
A new path for Australia, by eminent economist and author of the bestselling Superpower.
Could Australia become a full-employment, renewable-energy superpower? Ross Garnaut says yes, and it starts with taxing carbon. A levy on the big polluters will help fund Australia to become a carbon-free energy giant, lower the cost of living and assist the world to cut emissions.
In this path-breaking book Ross Garnaut makes two linked arguments. He focuses on the underpinnings of successful social democracy and traces when economic policy has worked for Australia and when it hasn’t. He leads off with a critique of the Albanese government – is this a case of policy half-done, or a government sailing at half-mast?
His second argument is about the low-carbon opportunity that Australia has before it. Garnaut brings to bear his unrivalled expertise on industrial development, here and internationally. He calls for a new Carbon Solutions Levy. Getting this right is a way to secure the economic base of Australia’s social democracy.
A thought-provoking book by a visionary thinker.
Bad Cop: Peter Dutton’s Strongman Politics
by Lech Blaine
Where will Dutton lead the Coalition?
Who is Peter Dutton, and what happened to the Liberal Party? In Bad Cop, Lech Blaine traces the making of a hardman – from Queensland detective to leader of the Opposition, from property investor to minister for Home Affairs. This is a story of ambition, race and power, and a politician with a plan.
Dutton became Liberal leader with a strategy to win outer-suburban and regional seats from Labor. Since then we have seen his demolition of the Voice and a rolling campaign of culture wars. What does Peter Dutton know about the Australian electorate? Has he updated Menzies’ Forgotten People pitch for the age of anxiety, or will he collapse the Liberals’ broad church? This revelatory portrait is sardonic, perceptive and altogether compelling.
Shortlisted, 2024 Australian Political Book of the Year Award
Highway to Hell: Climate Change and Australia’s Future
by Joëlle Gergis
Australia is in peril. Do we truly grasp the impact of a warming planet – in particular, what it will mean for our sunburnt country? As temperatures rise, the climates of our capital cities will change. The sea will rise, and we will see increased fire and drought.
In this powerful essay, Joëlle Gergis, a leading climate scientist, depicts the likely future in vivid and credible detail. Working from the science, she discusses the world’s and Australia’s efforts to combat climate change. She outlines how far Australia is from keeping its promises to cut emissions. She takes aim at false solutions and the folly of “adaptation” rather than curbing fossil fuel use. This is an essay about government paralysis and what is at stake for all of us. It’s about getting real, in the face of an unprecedented threat.
“How many disasters does it take to wake people up to the fact that Australia’s climate is becoming more extreme, with today’s destruction set to be dwarfed by things to come? Do people realise that adapting to climate change won’t be possible in some parts of the country?” — Joëlle Gergis, Highway to Hell
My Efficient Electric Home Handbook
by Tim Forcey
Everything you need to know to transform your home – old, new or rented – for an efficient, comfortable, cheaper electric future.
Do you want to … Make your home healthier and more comfortable in all seasons? Shrink your home’s total energy costs? Make your gas bill disappear completely? Reduce your climate and environmental impacts? Make the change to renewable energy by going ‘all electric’? My Efficient Electric Home Handbook is an essential first-of-its kind resource for homeowners and renters. It provides tips and strategies on how to convert your home into an efficient, healthy and comfortable space suitable for our all-electric future. Sharing insights from working with thousands of Australians in their homes, as well as from hands-on experience modifying his own home, Tim Forcey explains best-practice heating and cooling, hot water heat pumps, induction cooktops, draught-proofing, insulation, solar energy and much more.
The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society
by Joseph E Stiglitz
A major reappraisal, by the Nobel-prizewinning economist, of the relationship between capitalism and freedom
Despite its manifest failures, the narrative of neoliberalism retains its grip on the public mind and the policies of governments all over the world. By this narrative, less regulation and more ‘animal spirits’ capitalism produces not only greater prosperity, but more freedom for individuals in society – and is therefore morally better.
But, in The Road to Freedom Stiglitz asks, whose freedom are we – should we be – thinking about? What happens when one person’s freedom comes at the expense of another’s? Should the freedoms of corporations be allowed to impinge upon those of individuals in the ways they now do?
Taking on giants of neoliberalism such as Hayek and Friedman and examining how public opinion is formed, Stiglitz reclaims the language of freedom from the right to show that far from ‘free’ – unregulated – markets promoting growth and enterprise, they in fact reduce it, lessening economic opportunities for majorities and siphoning wealth from the many to the few – both individuals and countries. He shows how neoliberal economics and its implied moral system have impacted our legal and social freedoms in surprising ways, from property and intellectual rights, to education and social media.
Stiglitz’s eye, as always, is on how we might create the true human flourishing which should be the great aim of our economic and social system, and offers an alternative to that prevailing today. The Road to Freedom offers a powerful re-evaluation of democracy, economics and what constitutes a good society—and provides a roadmap of how we might achieve it.
Slick: Australia’s toxic relationship with Big Oil
by Royce Kurmelovs
Slick: Australia’s toxic relationship with Big Oil takes a comprehensive look at the origins of the Australian petroleum industry, investigating what these companies knew about climate change and how they learned to wield influence and insert themselves into all facets of public life. Royce Kurmelovs reveals how the US petroleum industry was warned about its environmental impacts back in the 1950s and yet went on to build the Australian oil industry, which in turn tried to drill the Great Barrier Reef, sought to strongarm governments, and joined a global effort to bury the science of climate change and delay action despite knowing the harms it would cause.
Slick also tells the stories of fire and flood survivors, as well as of the activists engaged in a high-stakes fight for the future of Australia and of the efforts being made to save ourselves from catastrophe.
This superb, in-depth work of journalism provides an on-the-ground examination of how the fossil fuel industry captured Australia, and outlines what’s at stake for the survival of the planet and our democracy.
Shortlisted, 2024 Walkley Book Award
Black Witness
by Amy McQuire
From one of this country’s leading Indigenous journalists comes a collection of fierce and powerful essays proving why the media needs to believe Black Witnesses.
Amy McQuire has been writing on Indigenous affairs since she was 17 years old. Over the past two decades, she has reported on most of the key events involving Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, including numerous deaths in custody, the Palm Island uprising, the Bowraville murders and the Northern Territory Intervention. She has also exposed the misrepresentations and violence of the mainstream media’s reports, as well as their omissions and silences altogether in regards to Indigenous matters.
Black Witness showcases how journalism can be used to hold the powerful to account and make the world a more equitable place. This is the essential collection that we need right now – and always have.
The Last of Its Kind: The Search for the Great Auk and the Discovery of Extinction
by Gisli Palsson
How an iconic bird’s final days exposed the reality of human-caused extinction.
The great auk is one of the most tragic and documented examples of extinction. A flightless bird that bred primarily on the remote islands of the North Atlantic, the last of its kind were killed in Iceland in 1844. Gísli Pálsson draws on firsthand accounts from the Icelanders who hunted the last great auks to bring to life a bygone age of Victorian scientific exploration while offering vital insights into the extinction of species.
Pálsson vividly recounts how British ornithologists John Wolley and Alfred Newton set out for Iceland to collect specimens only to discover that the great auks were already gone. At the time, the Victorian world viewed extinction as an impossibility or trivialized it as a natural phenomenon. Pálsson chronicles how Wolley and Newton documented the fate of the last birds through interviews with the men who killed them, and how the naturalists’ Icelandic journey opened their eyes to the disappearance of species as a subject of scientific concern—and as something that could be caused by humans.
Blending a richly evocative narrative with rare, unpublished material as well as insights from ornithology, anthropology, and Pálsson’s own North Atlantic travels, The Last of Its Kind reveals how the saga of the great auk opens a window onto the human causes of mass extinction.
A Periodic Tale: My Sciencey Memoir
by Dr Karl Kruszelnicki
How did a shy Polish immigrant kid – Karl Sven Woytek Sas Konkovitch Matthew Kruszelnicki – evolve into the fabulously eccentric Dr Karl?
The only child of Holocaust survivors who fled to Australia in 1950, Karl has always forged his own destiny in an idiosyncratic way. Before he became one of the world’s favourite scientific storytellers, he ambled through a convoluted cacophony of a career.
In the 1960s, he got his start as a physicist at the Port Kembla Steelworks and promptly joined the Steel Industries Auto Club, racing modified rally cars on Wollongong’s deserted back roads. In the 1970s, he entered his self-described ‘drug-crazed hippie years’, making a living as a long-haired, dope-smoking taxi driver. After he applied to be a NASA astronaut in the 1980s and ‘failed’, he ended up live broadcasting the first space shuttle launch on Triple J instead. Unexpectedly, that blasted off his media career, and from there it was a stratospheric rise from radio to TV, books, newspapers, speaking, podcasts and the internet.
Karl’s story teaches us that you don’t have to know all the answers, as long as you ask the right questions. He has wandered down more than a dozen career paths, from being a TV weatherman (really) to a professional four-wheel drive tester in the outback (really) to being a roadie for Bo Diddley (really). All of these seemingly random experiences have helped create the Karl we know today.
In this long-awaited memoir, you will learn that it’s okay to not take a linear path through life, and that by following our curiosities and our passions, we can bend the universe to our liking.
Working for the Brand: how corporations are destroying free speech
by Josh Bornstein
Josh Bornstein asks how our major corporations have come to exercise repressive control over the lives of their employees, and explores what can be done to repair the greatest threat to democracy – the out-of-control corporation.
When you go to work, you agree to exchange your labour in exchange for your pay packet, right? Actually, you may not realise it, but you are also selling your rights to free speech and to participate in democracy. Welcome to corporate cancel culture, a burgeoning phenomenon that is routinely ignored in debates about free speech. If you work for a large company, it will not allow you to say or do anything that harms its brand – at or outside work. If you transgress and attract controversy – whether for cracking a joke, a Facebook like, or a political post on Tik Tok, you can be shamed, sacked, and blacklisted.
In the twenty-first century, major corporations have become the most powerful institution in the world – more powerful than many nations. That unchecked, anti-democratic power is reflected in the gaming of the political system, the weakening of governments, and the repressive control of the lives of employees. While their behaviour has deteriorated, corporations have invested heavily in ethically washed brands, claiming to be saving the planet and doing good. As Josh Bornstein argues, we would not tolerate a government that censored, controlled, and punished us in this way, so why do we meekly accept the growing authoritarianism of the companies that we work for?
Minority Report: The New Shape of Australian Politics; Quarterly Essay 96
by George Megalogenis
What does the new political landscape look like in Australia?
Australian politics is shifting. The two-party system was broken at the last federal election, and a minority government is a real possibility in the future. Politics-as-usual is not enough for many Australians.
In this richly insightful essay, George Megalogenis traces the how and why of a political re-alignment. He sheds new light on the topics of housing, the changing suburbs, the fate of the Voice to Parliament, and trust in politicians. This is an essay about the Greens, the teals and the Coalition. In a contest between new and old, progressive and conservative, which vision of Australia will win out? But it’s also about Labor in power – is careful centrism the right strategy for the times, or is something more required?
In Minority Report, Megalogenis explores the strategies and secret understandings of a political culture under pressure.
Naku Dharuk The Bark Petitions: How the people of Yirrkala changed the course of Australian democracy
by Clare Wright
In this engaging narrative, Wright follows the story of petitions on bark created by the Yirrkala community in Arnhem Land in 1963, protesting bauxite mining on traditional lands.
In 1963-a year of race riots in the United States and explosive agitation for civil rights worldwide-the Indigenous people of the Northern Territory were yet to be recognised as full adults. Almost to a person, they were classed as wards of the state, unacknowledged as having any ownership over the land on which they had lived for tens of thousands of years.
In 1975 Gough Whitlam poured a handful of sand into the palm of Gurindji Elder Vincent Lingiari to symbolise the granting of deeds to his ancestral country-and the land rights movement was unstoppable. That journey towards legal recognition of native title started in 1963 with the Yirrkala Bark Petitions- Naku Dharuk.
The background was a four-cornered contest for mastery of the land and its resources between the Menzies government, the mining industry, the Methodist Church and the Yolngu peopleof northeast Arnhem Land, under whose country was discovered a blanket of bauxite.
Throughout the tumultuous year of 1963, leaders of the Yolngu clans worked with white allies on the unprecedented political strategy that culminated in the presentation of four Bark Petitions to Federal Parliament. It was a key moment in the formation of a uniquely Indigenous engagement with Australian politics.
This is the story of a founding document in Australian democracy and the people who made it. It paints a vibrant picture of the profound and ancient culture of Australia’s first peoples, in all its continuing vigour.
Clare Wright’s groundbreaking Democracy Trilogy began with The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka (workers’ rights) and continued with You Daughters of Freedom (women’s rights). After a decade of research and community consultation, it concludes, fittingly, with a fascinating and compulsively readable account of a momentous but little-known episode in our shared political history.
The Forest Wars
by David Lindenmayer
Since colonisation, Australians have been frantically logging our native forests as if our lives depended on it. Our lives do depend on the forests—but on keeping them, not destroying them.
World-leading forest expert Professor David Lindenmayer exposes the unsettling truth about what is happening in our tall eucalypt forests. Despite what we are told, logging makes bushfires worse for decades after the chainsaws stop, and kills iconic animals and birds each year in droves, driving many species closer to extinction. The trees that are logged mostly end up as paper and cardboard. And it’s not profitable: taxpayers are funding it.
Lindenmayer reveals an unholy alliance between state forestry, the timber industry and unions. Loggers routinely breach regulations, and industry intimidates anyone who questions what they are doing. Worse still, even where native forest logging is supposedly ending, efforts are being made to continue it under a different name.
Forests purify our drinking water. Forests are our best hope to reduce carbon emissions. Forests preserve biodiversity. It’s time we realised the value of leaving our native forests standing.
Live More With Less: Upgrade your life without costing the Earth!
by Kate Luckins
Drop the eco-guilt and create the sustainable lifestyle you want!
Sustainability leader Dr Kate Luckins knows how striving for eco-perfection sets us up for failure. She encourages everyone to act on climate change by living their own shade of green instead.
Live More with Less is a practical and optimistic guide to balancing planet friendly habits with our imperfect reality. It’s filled with entertaining anecdotes from sustainability leaders and everyday eco-heroes, as well as handy tips to reduce consumerism and your mental load. It steps you through elevating your wardrobe, cutting your grocery bills and restoring the joy of Christmas with ease. This book is for anyone wanting to make confident, sustainable choices to upgrade their life – for good.
The Exhausted of the Earth: Politics in a Burning World
by Ajay Singh Chaudhary
Climate change is not only about the exhaustion of the planet, it’s about the exhaustion of so many of us, our lives, our worlds, even our minds. So, what is to be done?
Marrying the scientific and political sides of the climate crisis issue, this is a hopeful call to arms about how we can overcome climate change.
Climate change is not only about the exhaustion of the planet, it’s about the exhaustion of so many of us, our lives, our worlds, even our minds. So, what is to be done?
To answer this question, Ajay Singh Chaudhary brings together both the science and the politics of climate change. He shows how a new politics particular to the climate catastrophe demands a bitter struggle between those attached to the power, wealth, and security of “business-as-usual” and all of us, those exhausted, in every sense of the word, by the status quo.
Replacing Promethean, romantic, and apocalyptic fairytales with a new story for every exhausted inhabitant of this exhausted world, The Exhausted of the Earth outlines the politics and the power needed to alter the course of our burning world far beyond, far better than, mere survival.
Surf Like A Woman: Becoming World Champ when women weren’t welcome on the waves
by Pauline Menczer
In the 80s and 90s, surf culture was toxic, especially towards women. But Pauline Menczer – a dirt-poor, chronically ill, freckle-faced teen from Bondi – defied insults and intimidation to ride the waves. The reason: she simply loved to surf.
But when Pauline’s determination propelled her onto the pro circuit, her battle for acceptance and equality didn’t end there. The endemic sexism of the industry meant prize money for women was a pittance, while sponsors ignored her because she was gay and didn’t have the beach babe look. Despite these challenges, Pauline became the 1993 World Champion and played a key role in bringing greater equality to the sport.
This is the inspirational story of a true underdog battler, whose fearlessness and grit broke down the door of surfing’s boys’ club for the next generation of women.
Black Duck: A Year at Yumburra
by Bruce Pascoe, Lyn Harwood
‘Sometimes you need to repeat something a hundred times before a bell rings in the colony.’
From the bestselling author Bruce Pascoe comes a deeply personal story about the consequences and responsibility of disrupting Australia’s history.
When Dark Emu was adopted by Australia like a new anthem, Bruce found himself at the centre of a national debate that often focussed on the wrong part of the story. But through all the noise came Black Duck Foods, a blueprint for traditional food growing and land management processes based on very old practices.
Bruce Pascoe and Lyn Harwood invite us to imagine a different future for Australia, one where we can honour our relationship with nature and improve agriculture and forestry. Where we can develop a uniquely Australian cuisine that will reduce carbon emissions, preserve scarce water resources and rebuild our soil. Bruce and Lyn show us that you don’t just work Country, you look, listen and care. It’s not Black Duck magic, it’s the result of simply treating Australia like herself.
From the aftermath of devastating bushfires and the impact of an elder’s death to rebuilding a marriage and counting the personal cost of starting a movement, Black Duck is a remarkable glimpse into a year of finding strength in Country at Yumburra.
Crude Capitalism: Oil, Corporate Power, and the Making of the World Market
by Adam Hanieh
How oil greases the wheels of global capitalism
This expansive history traces the hidden connections between oil and capitalism from the late 1800s to the current climate crisis. Beyond simplistic narratives that frame oil as ‘prize’ or ‘curse’, Crude Capitalism uncovers the surprising ways that oil is woven into the fabric of our modern world: the rise of an American-centered global order; the breakdown of Empire and anti-colonial rebellion; contemporary finance and US dollar hegemony; debt and militarism; and the emergence of new forms of synthetic consumption. Much more than an energy source or transport fuel, oil has a foundational place in all aspects of contemporary life – no challenge to the fossil fuel industry can be effective without taking this fact seriously.
Crude Capitalism maps the varied geographies of oil, including the rise of OPEC, the importance of revolutionary and Post-Soviet Russia, the crucial role of African upstream reserves, and the new petrochemical circuits that link the Middle East, China, and East Asia. The book provides an original and fine-grained empirical analysis of corporate ownership and control, including refining and petrochemicals.
By exposing these structures of power and placing oil in capitalism, the book makes an essential contribution to debates around oil-dependency and the struggle for climate justice.
Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilization
by Richard Seymour
Liberal civilisation is in crisis – now is a time of monsters.
The rise of the new far right has left the world grappling with a profound misunderstanding. While the spotlight often shines on the actions of charismatic leaders such as Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, the true peril lies elsewhere. Defeating these people will not stem the tide driving them forward. They are merely the embodiment of profound forces that are rarely understood. Propelled through the vast networks of social media and fueled by far-right influencers, enthralled by images of disaster and fantasies of doom, they have emerged from a reservoir of societal despair, fear, and isolation. Within this seething cauldron, we witness not only the surge of far-right political movements but also the sparks of individual and collective violence against perceived enemies, from ‘lone wolf’ killers to terrifying pogroms. Should a new fascism emerge, it will coalesce from these very elements. This is disaster nationalism.
Richard Seymour delves deep into this alarming development in world politics, dissecting its roots, its influencers, and the threats it poses. With meticulous analysis and compelling storytelling, Seymour offers a stark warning. The battle against disaster nationalism is not just political; it is a struggle for our collective soul and the future of civilization itself. Unless we understand the deeper forces propelling the far-right resurgence, we have little chance of stopping it.
Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown
by Wim Carton, Andreas Malm
It might soon be far too hot on this planet. What do we do then? In the era of “overshoot”, schemes abound for turning down the heat – not now, but a few decades down the road. We’re being told that we can return to liveable temperatures, by means of technologies for removing CO2 from the air or blocking incoming sunlight. If they even exist, such technologies are not safe: they come with immense uncertainties and risks. Worse, like magical promises of future redemption, they might provide reasons for continuing to emit in the present. But do they also hold some potentials?
In Overshoot: Climate Politics When It’s Too Late, two leading climate scholars subject the plans for saving the planet after it’s been wrecked to critical study. Carbon dioxide removal is already having effects, as an excuse for continuing business-as-usual, while geoengineering promises to bail out humanity if the heat reaches critical levels. Both distract from the one urgent task: to slash emissions now. There can be no further delay. The climate revolution is long overdue, and in the end, no technology can absolve us of its tasks.
You Can’t Please All: Memoirs 1980-2024
by Tariq Ali
A new memoir from renowned political activist and author of Street Fighting Years: An Autobiography of the Sixties
The revolutionary upsurge of 1968–1975 jump-hopped continents with ease but finally petered out. What happened after is the subject of You Can’t Please All. Tariq Ali recounts a life committed to writing and cultural interventions. An eyewitness in Moscow to the fall of the Soviet Union, he was caught up in the intellectual excitement that had gripped the country. In Porto Alegre, Hugo Chávez invited him to visit Caracas, and the two men developed a striking friendship.
Post-2001, as a founding member of the Stop the War Coalition, he became a fierce critic of the War on Terror, visiting many US cities with surprising regularity to engage in debate and discussion, inaugurating a new phase of political activism. Evident in his work is the integral part politics plays in his life. He is one of the most sought-after socialist and anti-imperialist public intellectuals on most continents.
Underlying the narrative is a chain of anecdotes, reflections, jottings and storytelling. The book explores his work for the theatre and film, as well as his fiction, including the acclaimed Islam Quintet. There are pen portraits of friends and comrades such as Edward Said, Derek Jarman, Richard Ingrams, Benazir Bhutto, Mary-Kay Wilmers, and the intellectuals who founded and relaunched New Left Review: E. P. Thompson, Perry Anderson and Robin Blackburn.
The book also contains a moving family portrait, describing how his parents met and lived during the early years of Pakistan.
A Clear Flowing Yarra
by Harry Saddler
They say you can’t step in the same river twice, and it’s true that the Yarra has been hugely changed – but this book is a glorious and timely reminder that things can also be changed for the better.
Nature writer Harry Saddler hops, skips and jumps his way along, beside, on and even in the Yarra River from source to mouth, reveling in its hidden beauty, getting close to platypuses, kingfishers, Krefft’s gliders and the occasional seal, and meeting many of the swimmers, bushwalkers, ecologists and traditional owners who are quietly and tenaciously restoring the river, patch by patch.
Optimistic, inspiring and heartfelt, A Clear Flowing Yarra is a passionate love letter to the river that shapes Melbourne, and an evocative vision of what it is now and what it can be.
Growing Up Torres Strait Islander in Australia: A Groundbreaking Collection of Torres Strait Islander Voices, Past and Present
by Samantha Faulkner
A journey through Torres Strait Islander culture and identity, past and present
‘My people are expert navigators, adventurers, innovators, ambassadors, teachers, storytellers, performers, strategists, chefs and advocates for change. The blood runs deep when I reflect on the past and the present and imagine what our future might look like.’ -Leilani Bin-Juda
What makes Zenadth Kes/Torres Strait unique? And what is it like to be a Torres Strait Islander in contemporary Australia? Growing Up Torres Strait Islander in Australia, compiled by poet and author Samantha Faulkner, showcases the distinct identity of Torres Strait Islanders through their diverse voices and journeys.
Hear from emerging and established writers from both today and the recent past, including Eddie Mabo, Thomas Mayo, Lenora Thaker, Ellie Gaffney, Jillian Boyd-Bowie, Aaron Fa’Aoso and Jimi Bani. These and many more storytellers, mentors, traditional owners, doctors and teachers from the Torres Strait share their joy, culture, good eating, lessons learned and love of family, language and Country.
Discover stories of going dugong hunting and eating mango marinated in soy sauce. The smell of sugar cane and frangipani-scented sea breeze. Family, grandmothers and canoe time. Dancing, singing, weaving hats and making furniture from bamboo. Training as a doctor and advocating for healthcare for the Torres Strait. The loneliness of being caught between two cultures. Mission life, disconnection and being evacuated to the mainland during World War II. “Is that really your mum? Why is she black?”. Not being Islander enough. Working hard to reconnect to your roots, and claiming back land and culture.
A book to treasure and share, this groundbreaking collection provides a unique perspective on the Torres Strait Islander experience.
With contributions by Ellen Armstrong, Tetei Bakic-Tapim, Jimi Bani, Leilani Bin-Juda, Jillian Boyd-Bowie, Tahlia Bowie, Aaliyah Jade Bradbury, John Doolah, Donisha Duff, Aaron Fa’Aoso with Michelle Scott Tucker, Ellie Gaffney, Velma Gara, Jaqui Hughes, Adam C. Lees, Rhett Loban, Thomas Lowah, Edward Koiki Mabo with Noel Loos, Thomas Mayo, Lenora Thaker, Sorren Thomas, Ina Titasey as told to Catherine Titasey, Lockeah Wapau and Daniella Williams.
Because I’m Not Myself, You See: A Memoir of Motherhood, Madness and Coming Back From the Brink
by Ariane Beeston
A frank, hopeful and darkly funny memoir of postpartum psychosis and recovery
‘I do not know who I am anymore or where I have gone …’
Ariane Beeston is a child protection worker and newly registered psychologist when she gives birth to her first child – and very quickly begins to experience scary breaks with reality. Out of fear and shame, she keeps her delusions and hallucinations secret, but as the months pass Ariane gets worse. Much worse. Finally admitted to a mother and baby psychiatric unit, the psychologist is forced to learn how to be the patient.
With medication, the support of her husband, psychotherapy and, ultimately, time, Ariane rebuilds herself. And she also begins a new chapter working in perinatal mental health, developing resources to support other new mothers.
Because I’m Not Myself, You See is a candid, often humorous memoir of motherhood and madness, interwoven with research and expert commentary. It’s the story of the impossible pressures placed on new mothers and how quickly things can go wrong during ‘the happiest time of your life’. It’s also about life on the other side of serious illness, trying to make sense of what doesn’t make sense, and finding humour, beauty and joy when things don’t go according to plan.
Everything is Water: A river-walking journey
by Simon Cleary
Four weeks, 344km and one inspiring river journey
‘I want to go with the river’s flow, not against it. I want to follow where the river leads – to listen, to observe, hopefully to learn.’
When novelist and experienced hiker Simon Cleary sets off to follow the course of the river that has so influenced his life, he hopes that by walking its banks – from its source to where it empties into the bay – he will better understand the power and impact of this immense waterway on the environment and communities who rely on it.
Cleary’s ambitious journey, alone and with companions, explores the ways rivers connect landscapes, ecologies, histories, communities and myth. But his journey along the unpredictable and magnificent Brisbane River threatens to be cut short by one of the wettest autumn months on record. Over four eventful weeks and 344 kilometres we are witness to the river in all its beauty and fury.
Everything is Water considers our complex relationship with nature through flood, drought, time and place. It is an inspiring pilgrimage that invites us to connect with nature and also to navigate our own path.
How Many More Women?: Exposing how the law silences women
by Jennifer Robinson
In this powerful and accessible exploration of our legal systems, two human rights lawyers break open the big judgments, developments and trends that have and continue to silence and disadvantage women
HOW MANY MORE WOMEN have to be raped or abused before we act? need to accuse him before we believe her? will be failed by the criminal justice system? need to say something before we do something? will be sued for defamation for speaking out? will be contracted to silence? From two internationally acclaimed lawyers comes a masterful and urgent exploration of the legal response to the MeToo movement in Australia and around the world.
We are in a crucial moment: women are breaking through the cultural reticence to speak out about gender-based violence. But as they have grown empowered to speak, a new form of systematic silencing has become more evident: the spike in survivors speaking out has been followed by a spike in legal actions against them and the media.The law is being wielded to reinforce the status quo of silence that existed before MeToo.We cannot act if we do not know. If women cannot speak about their abuse – and journalists are fearful of telling their stories – then how can we understand the problem of gender-based violence in our society? And how can we even begin to end it?
In How Many More Women? Jennifer Robinson and Keio Yoshida examine the laws around the world that silence women, and explore the changes we need to make to ensure that women’s freedoms are no longer threatened by the legal system that is supposed to protect them.
Long Yarn Short
by Vanessa Turnbull-Roberts
The blockbuster memoir from one of the most powerful voices of a generation. From surviving out-of-home care to becoming a human rights lawyer, Vanessa Turnbull-Roberts shares her incredible story in a bid to drive positive change for First Nations youth.
At just ten years old, Vanessa Turnbull-Roberts was forcibly removed – stolen – from her family, community and kinship systems. After eight years in various out-of-home care placements, Vanessa fled the system, reconnected with kin and returned to country for the very first time. Only then did she begin to heal.
In this book, Vanessa embarks on an extraordinary work of truth-telling, exposing the ongoing violence visited on Black children, their families and their communities by the systems that claim to protect them. As a survivor of out-of-home care, a practising lawyer fighting for the freedom of others and now also a mother herself, she takes an unflinching look at the heartache and trauma caused by racist family policing, the shameful rates of child removals and the steady pipeline of First Nations children into the criminal justice system.
Long Yarn Short is a story of struggle, grief and love; a call to action from one of the most powerful voices of her generation. As a leading expert in children’s and young people’s rights, Vanessa invites readers to imagine solutions for a better world – a world of support and empowerment, not punishment – and demands that they listen when she says, ‘We are still here.’
Murriyang: Song of Time
by Stan Grant
Stan Grant is talking to his country in a new way. In his most poetic and inspiring work yet, he offers a means of moving beyond the binaries and embracing a path to peace and forgiveness, rooted in the Wiradjuri spiritual practice of Yindyamarra – deep silence and respect.
Murriyang, in part Grant’s response to the Voice referendum, eschews politics for love. In this gorgeous, grace-filled book, he zooms out to reflect on the biggest questions, ranging across the history, literature, theology, music and art that has shaped him. Setting aside anger for kindness, he reaches past the secular to the sacred and transcendent.
Informed by spiritual thinkers from around the world, Murriyang is a Wiradjuri prayer in one long uninterrupted breath, challenging Western notions of linear time in favour of a time beyond time – the Dreaming.
Murriyang is also very personal, each meditation interleaved with a memory of Grant’s father, a Wiradjuri cultural leader. It asks how any of us can say goodbye to those we love.
This is a book for our current moment, and something for the ages.
Lest: Australian War Myths
by Mark Dapin
From Simpson’s donkey and the Emu War to Vietnam and Ben Roberts-Smith, Australian military history is full of events that didn’t happen the way most people think they did. In his inimitable style, award-winning author Mark Dapin sets the record straight.
Australia has many stories and statues ‘lest we forget’ our military past. But from Simpson’s donkey to Ben Roberts-Smith, our history is full
of events that didn’t happen the way most people think they did.
The first Anzac Day, for example, was far from being a solemn march – it was a celebration where people dressed as cavemen and dinosaurs, among other things. And is it true that British officers callously dispatched Australian soldiers to their deaths in the Dardanelles, as we’ve been told? Did we really hate the soldiers returning from Vietnam? Were the white-feather women of the First World War fact or fiction?
In his inimitable style, award-winning author and historian Mark Dapin sets the record straight, showing that the reality was often completely different from the myth – and that in celebrating the wrong people we often overlook the real heroes.
Deep Water
by James Bradley
Through history, science, nature writing, and environmentalism, Deep Water invites you to explore the deepest recesses of our natural world.
The ocean has shaped and sustained life on Earth from the beginning of time. Its vast waters are alive with meaning, and connect every living thing on Earth.
Deep Water is a hymn to the beauty, mystery and wonder of the ocean. Weaving together science, history and personal experience, it offers vital new ways of understanding not just humanity’s relationship with the planet, but our past – and perhaps most importantly, our future.
Lost Wonders: 10 tales of extinction from the 21st century
by Tom Lathan
Many scientists believe that we are currently living through the Earth’s sixth mass extinction, with species disappearing at a rate not seen for tens of millions of years – a trend that will only accelerate as climate change and other pressures intensify. What does it mean to live in such a time? And what exactly do we lose when a species goes extinct?
In Lost Wonders author and journalist Tom Lathan tells the stories of ten species that have lived, died out and been declared extinct since the turn of the twenty-first century. In a series of fascinating encounters with subjects that are now nowhere to be found on Earth – from giant tortoises to minuscule snails the size of sesame seeds, from ocean-hopping trees to fish that wag their tails like puppies – Lathan brings these lost wonders briefly back to life and gives us a tantalising glimpse of what we have lost within our own lifetime.
Drawing on the personal recollections of the people who studied these species, as well as those who tried but ultimately failed to save them, Lost Wonders is an intimate portrait of the species that have only recently vanished from our world and an urgent warning to hold on all the more tightly to those now slipping from our grasp.
The Forever War
by Nick Bryant
The Forever War tells the story of how America’s political polarisation is 250 years in the making, and argues that the roots of its modern-day malaise are to be found in its troubled past.
As we approach the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the American experiment is failing. Division, mistrust and misinformation are now its defining characteristics. The storming of the Capitol, the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the increasing spotlight on Second Amendment rights raise the spectre of further political violence, and even the possibility of a second civil war.
Nick Bryant argues that the hate, divisiveness and paranoia we see today are in fact a core part of America’s story. Combining brilliant storytelling with historical research, Bryant argues that insurrections, assassinations and massacres – from the American Civil War through to JFK and the inner-city race riots of the late ’60s, up to the more recent school shootings and the murder of George Floyd – should sadly not be seen as abnormalities.
The compromises originally designed to hold the union together – the Amendments made in the Reconstruction era to give rights back to former enslaved people, the apportionment of political power – have never truly been resolved. Today, a country that looked confidently to the future has become captive to its contentious past.
The Men Who Killed the News: The inside story of how media moguls abused their power, manipulated the truth and distorted democracy
by Eric Beecher
Crikey owner and ex-News Corp and Fairfax editor lifts the lid on the abuse of power by media moguls – from William Randolph Hearst to Elon Musk – and on his own unique experience of working for (and being sued by) the Murdochs.
What’s gone wrong with our media? The answer: its owners. From William Randolph Hearst to Elon Musk, from the British press barons to colonial upstarts Conrad Black and Rupert Murdoch, media proprietors have manipulated the news to accumulate wealth and influence as they meddled with democracy.
Eric Beecher knows the news business from bottom to top. He has been a journalist, editor and media proprietor (of Text Media and Crikey), with the rare distinction of having both worked for and been sued (unsuccessfully) by the Murdochs.
This book reveals the distorted role of the media moguls of the past two centuries: their techniques, strategies, behind-closed-doors machinations, and indulgent lifestyles. It explains how they have exploited the shield of the freedom of the press to undermine journalism – and truth.
In an era of fake news, AI and misinformation, this is democracy’s chillingly important story: how a small coterie of flawed and narcissistic moguls created a shadow of power that has contributed to making the media an agent of mistrust.
The Season
by Helen Garner
It’s footy season in Melbourne, and Helen Garner is following her grandson’s under-16s team. She not only goes to every game (give or take), but to every training session too, shivering on the sidelines at dusk, fascinated by the spectacle.
She’s a passionate Western Bulldogs fan (with an imperfect grasp of the rules) who loves the epic theatre of AFL football. But her devotion to the under-16s offers her something else. This is her chance to connect with her youngest grandchild, to be close to him before he rushes headlong into manhood. To witness his triumphs and defeats, to fear for his safety in battle, to gasp and to cheer for his team as it fights for a place in the finals.
With her sharp eye, her generous wit and her warm humour, Garner documents this pivotal moment, both as part of the story and as silent witness. The Season is an unexpected and exuberant book: a celebration of the nobility, grace and grit of team spirit, a reflection on the nature of masculinity, and a tribute to the game’s power to thrill us.
Revolusi: Indonesia and the Birth of the Modern World
by David Van Reybrouck
A true masterpiece of narrative history and the definitive story of the revolution that ignited the end of colonialism worldwide
A story of staggering scope and drama, Revolusi is the masterful and definitive account of the epic revolution that sparked the decolonisation of the modern world.
On a sunny Friday morning in August 1945, a handful of tired people raised a homemade cotton flag and on behalf of 68 million compatriots announced the birth of a new nation. With the fourth largest population in the world, inhabiting islands that span an eighth of the globe, Indonesia became the first colonised country to declare its independence after the Second World War.
Four million civilians had died during the wartime occupation by the Japanese that ousted the Dutch colonial regime. Another 200,000 people would lose their lives in the astonishingly brutal conflict that ensued – as the Dutch used savage violence to reassert their control, and as Britain and America became embroiled in pacifying Indonesia’s guerrilla war of resistance- the ‘revolusi’. It was not until December 1949 that the newly created United Nations forced The Netherlands to cede all sovereignty to Indonesia, finally ending 350 years of colonial rule and setting a precedent that would reshape the world.
Drawing on hundreds of interviews and eye-witness testimonies, David Van Reybrouck turns this vast and complex story into an utterly gripping narrative that is alive with human detail at every turn. A landmark publication, Revolusi shows Indonesia’s struggle for independence to be one of the defining dramas of the twentieth century and establishes its author as one of the most gifted narrative historians at work in any language today.
I Seek a Kind Person: My Father, Seven Children and the Adverts that Helped Them Escape the Holocaust
by Julian Borger
In 1938, before Kindertransport, Jewish parents in Vienna took out adverts in the Manchester Guardian asking for people to take in their children – a desperate, last-ditch attempt to save them from the Nazis.
Eighty-three years later, Julian Borger discovers an advert for an ‘intelligent boy, aged 11, Viennese of good family’. It was his father, Robert. Like almost everything about his childhood, Robert had kept this a secret, until he took his own life.
Starting with nothing but the adverts, Borger traces the remarkable stories of his father, the other advertised children and their families. From a Viennese radio shop to the Shanghai ghetto, internment camps and family homes across Britain, forests and concentration camps in Germany, smugglers saving Jewish lives in Holland, an improbable French Resistance cell, and a redemptive story of survival in New York, he unearths the astonishing journeys and legacies of children left in the hands of fate – and at the mercy of other people’s kindness.
I Seek a Kind Person is a gripping story of grief, inheritance, courage and hope.
Mean Streak: A moral vacuum, a dodgy debt generator and a multi-billion-dollar government shake down
by Rick Morton
From award-winning journalist and writer Rick Morton comes Mean Streak, a gripping and horrifying account of how, over the course of four and a half years, Australia’s government turned on its most vulnerable citizens.
Robodebt was a new debt-creation system that was used to illegally pursue close to half a million Australian welfare recipients for fake debts generated by the thousands. It was described by the Royal Commission’s report as a ‘massive failure of public administration’ caused by ‘venality, incompetence and cowardice’. Essentially, Australians were gaslit by their own government, which doggedly and knowingly concocted a program that was both mathematically wrong and illegal, just to shake down innocent people for money, then lied about it for four and a half years. Robodebt is a historic and appalling political tragedy, a scheme created deliberately and sustained by institutional cowardice, clearly displaying the systematic contempt that a government had for its own citizens.
Powerfully moving, deeply compelling and utterly enraging, Mean Streak reveals disturbing truths about the country we have become and the government that was. In the mode of a corporate thriller, this is a scouring cautionary tale of morality in public life gone badly awry – a story that is bigger than robodebt, and far from over.
My Animals, and Other Animals: A memoir of sorts
by Bill Bailey
Bill Bailey has always had dogs, including a Patterdale terrier called Rocky who would travel with him in the van to his first shows and occasionally join him on stage. Fast forward a few decades and Bill has shared his home with a variety of birds, dogs, frogs, chameleons and an armadillo called Tommy. ‘We even had a giant chicken, a huge Malay cockerel called Kid Creole. After a few stand-offs he took against me. He had to go in the end, I was being stalked in my own back garden.’
That chicken apart, animals have always been at the heart of an extraordinary life as one of Britain’s favourite comedians, actors, musicians and (thanks to Strictly) dancers: from terriers to the orangutans of Sumatra and the parrots that share his breakfast every morning in west London.
Full of the leftfield humour, wit and wisdom that has made Bill Bailey such a beloved performer around the world, My Animals and Other Animals is the story of Bill’s life; but more than that, it’s the story of how all of our lives are enriched by the animals who accompany us on that journey.
Excitable Boy
by Dominic Gordon
What happens to the adolescent spirit when all vestiges of innocence about the world are foregone, replaced within the grinding sounds of concrete and metal of the CBD of Melbourne? A place where train tunnels become nesting sites, carpark stairwells spots to refuel on methamphetamine and hide from predators; where agility leads you across nightclub rooftops. For a rest, why not ride on the back of a train as it speeds through the night? The dangers of a decades-long exploration of risk in the streets of his city is exhilarating. In these original essays, Dominic Gordon, explores his memories in tight prose bursting with insight, audacious ideas and dark humour. Excitable Boy is an immersive experience of what it was like growing up in and around criminal-class and working-class culture in the inner city of Melbourne at the turn of the twentieth century. With an Introduction by Christos Tsiolkas.
Shakespeare is Hard, but so is Life
by Fintan O’Toole
The works of Shakespeare have become staples of literature. They are everywhere, from our early schooling to the lecture rooms of academia, from classic theatre to modern adaptations on stage and screen. But how well do we really know his plays?
In this witty, iconoclastic book, the bestselling author Fintan O’Toole examines four of Shakespeare’s most enduring tragedies: Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello and King Lear. He shows how their tragic heroes have been over-simplified and moulded to fit restrictive, conservative values, and restores the true heart and spirit of the classics.
Offshore: Stealth Wealth and the New Colonialism (A Norton Short)
by Brooke Harrington
An eye-opening account of offshore finance: a secretive system making the rich richer while corroding democracy, capitalism, and the environment.
How do the rich keep getting richer, while dodging the long arm of the law? From playboy billionaires avoiding taxes on private islands to Russian oligarchs sailing away from sanctions on their superyachts, the ultra-rich seem to live in a different world from the rest of us. That world is called offshore. Hidden from view, the world’s ultra-rich can use offshore finance to escape tax obligations, labor and environmental safety regulations, campaign finance rules, and other laws that get in their way.
In Offshore: Stealth Wealth and the New Colonialism, sociologist Brooke Harrington reveals how this system works, as well as how it degrades democracy, the economy, and the public goods on which we all depend. Harrington spent eight years infiltrating this secretive world by training as a wealth manager, traveling from glossy European and North American capitals to developing countries in South America and Africa, to islands in the Indian Ocean, Caribbean, and South Pacific regions. Through interviews with dozens of wealth managers in nineteen countries, Harrington uncovered how this global network of offshore financial centers arose from the remnants of colonialism and has created a new, hidden imperial class
This engrossing deep dive reveals what offshore finance costs all of us, and how it has colonized the world—not on behalf of any one country, but to benefit a largely invisible empire of a few thousand billionaires, who help themselves to the best society has to offer while sticking us with the bill. As politicians struggle to address the deepening economic and political inequality destabilizing the world, Harrington’s exposé of the offshore system is a vital resource for understanding the most pressing crises of our time.
Peripathetic: Notes on (un)belonging
by Cher Tan
Peripathetic is about shit jobs. About being who you are and who you aren’t online. About knowing a language four times. About living on the interstices. About thievery. About wanting. About the hyperreal. About weirdness.
Cher Tan’s essays are as non-linear as her life, as she travels across borders that are simultaneously tightening and blurring. In luminous and inventive prose, they look beyond the performance of everyday life, seeking answers that continually elude.
Paying homage to the many outsider artists, punks, drop-outs and rogue philosophers who came before, this book is about the resistance of orthodoxies — even when it feels impossible.
Fiction
Juice
by Tim Winton
An epic novel of determination, survival, and the limits of the human spirit. This is Tim Winton as you’ve never read him before. Two fugitives, a man and a child, drive all night across a stony desert. As dawn breaks, they roll into an abandoned mine site. From the vehicle they survey a forsaken place – middens of twisted iron, rusty wire, piles of sun-baked trash. They’re exhausted, traumatised, desperate now. But as a refuge, this is the most promising place they’ve seen. The child peers at the field of desolation. The man thinks to himself, this could work.
Problem is, they’re not alone.
So begins a searing, propulsive journey through a life whose central challenge is not simply a matter of survival, but of how to maintain human decency as everyone around you falls ever further into barbarism.
The Thinning
by Inga Simpson
A powerful literary page-turner about two young people in a race against time to reach a monumental solar eclipse, from famed Australian novelist Inga Simpson
We haven’t always lived like this . . .’
Fin grew up by an observatory, learning about telescopes and planets, inspired by the passions of her parents, then leaders in their fields of astrophotography and astronomy. Those days are long over. Now Fin, her mother, Dianella, and a band of outliers live deep off the grid, always on amber alert and always ready to run.
In the outside world, things are not good: extinctions and a loss of diversity threaten what’s left of the environment. With a new disaster looming, Fin finds herself thrust into an unlikely partnership with a stranger who has appeared in their camp – one of a new breed of evolved humans, the Incompletes, who are widely distrusted. But the pair will need to work together during a dangerous journey if they are to play their part in an audacious plan to help restore the natural world – and humankind.
The Thinning is both an exquisitely written novel of nature and urgent thriller by the bestselling and acclaimed author of Willowman and The Last Woman in the World.
Dirrayawadha
by Anita Heiss
Miinaa was a young girl when the white ghosts first arrived. She remembers the day they raised a piece of cloth and renamed her homeland ‘Bathurst’. Now she lives at Cloverdale and works for a white family who have settled there.
The Nugents are kind, but Miinaa misses her miyagan. His brother, Windradyne, is a Wiradyuri leader, and visits when he can, bringing news of unrest across their ngurambang. Miinaa hopes the violence will not come to Cloverdale.
When Irish convict Daniel O’Dwyer arrives at the settlement, Miinaa’s life is transformed again. The pair are magnetically drawn to each other and begin meeting at the bila in secret. Dan understands how it feels to be displaced, but they still have a lot to learn about each other. Can their love survive their differences and the turmoil that threatens to destroy everything around them?
From the bestselling author of Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray (River of Dreams) comes another groundbreaking historical novel about resistance, resilience and love during the frontier wars.
The Work
by Bri Lee
A stunning debut novel about art, power, love and money from the acclaimed and bestselling author of Eggshell Skull.
Lally has invested everything into her gallery in Manhattan and the sacrifices are finally paying off. Pat is a scholarship boy desperate to establish himself in Sydney’s antiquities scene. When they meet at New York’s Armory Show their chemistry is instant – fighting about art and politics is just foreplay.
With an ocean between them they try to get back to work, but they’re each struggling to balance money and ambition with the love of art that first drew them to their strange industry. Lally is a kingmaker, bringing exciting new talent to the world, so what’s the problem if it’s also making her rich? Pat can barely pay his rent and he isn’t sure if he’s taking advantage of his clients or if they are taking advantage of him, and which would be worse? Their international affair ebbs and flows like the market, while their aspirations and insecurities are driving them both towards career-ending mistakes.
If love costs and art takes, what price do we pay for wanting it all? The Work is about the biggest intersections of life: of art and commerce, of intimacy and distance, of talent and entitlement, and of labour and privilege. Dazzling, funny and unforgettable, it is an epic and forensic exploration of modern love and passion, politics and power. The Work announces a brilliant new voice in Australian fiction.
Dusk
by Robbie Arnott
In the distant highlands, a puma named Dusk is killing shepherds. Down in the lowlands, twins Iris and Floyd are out of work, money and friends. When they hear that a bounty has been placed on Dusk, they reluctantly decide to join the hunt. As they journey up into this wild, haunted country, they discover there’s far more to the land and people of the highlands than they imagined. And as they close in on their prey, they’re forced to reckon with conflicts both ancient and deeply personal.
Theory & Practice
by Michelle de Krester
It’s 1986, and ‘beautiful, radical ideas’ are in the air. A young woman arrives in Melbourne to research the novels of Virginia Woolf. In bohemian St Kilda she meets artists, activists, students—and Kit. He claims to be in a ‘deconstructed’ relationship, and they become lovers. Meanwhile, her work on the Woolfmother falls into disarray.
Theory & Practice is a mesmerising account of desire and jealousy, truth and shame. It makes and unmakes fiction as we read, expanding our notion of what a novel can contain.
Michelle de Kretser, one of Australia’s most celebrated writers, bends fiction, essay and memoir into exhilarating new shapes to uncover what happens when life smashes through the boundaries of art.
Pheasants Nest
by Louise Milligan
A gripping, propulsive and brilliantly original debut by award-winning investigative journalist and writer Louise Milligan.
She wonders if they have discovered her missing yet. Has it broken in the news? Who has been assigned to cover her story? Have they started spooling through her social media and pulling out photographs? Constructing a narrative about who she is and what possible reason any person has to kidnap or (let’s be frank) kill her? She tries not to let out the whimper that’s building in her sternum, at the thought that he might. Kill her, that is. He might kill her.
Kate Delaney has made the biggest mistake of her life. She picked the wrong guy to humiliate on a girls’ night out and now she is living every woman’s worst nightmare. Kate finds herself brutalised, bound and gagged in the back of a car being driven god knows where by a man whose name she doesn’t know, and she is petrified about what’s in store for her.
As a journalist who is haunted by the crimes she’s had to report over her career, Kate is terrifyingly familiar with the statistics about women who go missing—and the fear and trauma behind the headlines. She knows only too well how those stories usually end.
Kate can only hope the police will find her before it’s too late, but she’s aware a random crime is hardest to solve. As the clock ticks down, she tries to keep herself sane by thinking about her beloved boyfriend and friends, escaping into memories of love and happy times together. She knows she cannot give way to despair.
As the suspense escalates, Kate’s boyfriend Liam is left behind, struggling with his shock, fear and desperation as the police establish a major investigation. The detectives face their own feelings of anguish and futility as they reflect on the cases they didn’t solve in time and the victims they couldn’t save. They know Kate’s chances of survival diminish with every passing hour.
Acclaimed and award-winning writer and journalist Louise Milligan has written a stunning and surprising thriller with a gigantic heart: a gripping, propulsive and brilliantly original debut.
The First Friend
by Malcolm Knox
A tour de force set in 1938 Stalin Soviet Union, this chilling black comedy it is at once a satire and a thriller, a survivor’s tale in which a father has to walk a tightrope every day to save his family from a monster and a monstrous society.
Even the worst person has a best friend.
A chilling black comedy, The First Friend imagines a gangster mob in charge of a global superpower.
The Soviet Union 1938: Lavrentiy Beria, ‘The Boss’ of the Georgian republic, nervously prepares a Black Sea resort for a visit from ‘The Boss of Bosses’, his fellow Georgian Josef Stalin. Under escalating pressure from enemies and allies alike, Beria slowly but surely descends into murderous paranoia.
By his side is Vasil Murtov, Beria’s closest friend since childhood. But to be a witness is dangerous; Murtov must protect his family and play his own game of survival while remaining outwardly loyal to an increasingly unstable Beria. The tension ramps up as Stalin’s visit and the inevitable bloodbath approaches. Is Murtov playing Beria, or is he being played?
The First Friend is a novel in a time of autocrats, where reality is a fiction created by those who rule. Reflecting on Putin’s Russia, Trump’s America, Xi’s China and Murdoch’s planet Earth, it is at once a satire and a thriller, a survivor’s tale in which a father has to walk a tightrope every day to save his family from a monster and a monstrous society. Where safety lies in following official fictions, is a truthful life the ultimate risk?
The Burrow
Melanie Cheng
Amy, Jin and Lucie are leading isolated lives in their partially renovated, inner city home. They are not happy, but they are also terrified of change. When they buy a pet rabbit for Lucie, and then Amy’s mother, Pauline, comes to stay, the family is forced to confront long-buried secrets. Will opening their hearts to the rabbit help them to heal or only invite further tragedy?
The Burrow tells an unforgettable story about grief and hope. With her characteristic compassion and eye for detail, Melanie Cheng reveals the lives of others—even of a small rabbit.
Prize Catch
by Alan Carter
A quest for the truth becomes a race for survival in this pacy new crime novel from award-winning author Alan Carter.
When Roz Chen’s wife, Niamh, is killed in a hit-and-run on a lonely Tasmanian road, the grieving widow begins to wonder if Niamh’s death was an accident after all. Meanwhile, SAS veteran Sam Willard is hoping for a fresh start with a job at a salmon farm. But as allegations of old war crimes surface and Sam is ‘promoted’ as a special operative against anti-salmon farm activists, he and Roz form an unlikely alliance.
Forced to retreat into the unforgiving Tasmanian wilderness, Roz and Sam find themselves scrambling for the truth with murderous thugs on their trail.
Dirt Poor Islanders
by Winnie Dunn
A powerful, insightful and provocative debut novel that explores the challenge of finding a way to be true to yourself and your roots without ignoring where you have come from or denying where you want to go.
‘Islanders must do everything together. We painted ngatu together. We crossed the ocean together. We settled on isles together. We lived with generations upon generations stacked in fibro houses together. We became half-White together. We stayed poor together. Together. Together. Together.’
For Meadow Reed, a half-Tongan, half-White girl, the world is bigger than the togetherness she has grown up in. Finding her way means pushing against the constraints of tradition, family and self until she becomes whole in her own right. Meadow is going to see that being a dirt poor Islander girl is more beautiful than she can even begin to imagine.
Dirt Poor Islanders is a potent, mesmerising novel that opens our eyes to the brutal fractures navigated when growing up between two cultures and the importance of understanding all the many pieces of yourself.
The Honeyeater
by Jessie Tu
‘Translation is longing. You never get it right.’
Young academic and emerging translator Fay takes her mother on a package tour holiday to France to celebrate her birthday. It’s a chance for the two of them to take a break from work and have a little fun, but they both find it hard to relax. Her mother seems reluctant to leave their room in the evening, and Fay is working on a difficult translation. On their last night in France, Fay receives the shattering news that her former lover has suddenly died.
Back in Sydney, Fay seeks solace from her mentor, Professor Samantha Egan-Smith, who offers her a spot at a prestigious translation conference in Taipei. But can she trust her? Does the Professor know more than she is admitting, or is Fay being paranoid? When a shocking allegation is made, Fay chooses to keep it secret. Is she protecting the Professor or exercising power over her?
Fay arrives at the conference in Taipei. Career opportunities abound, but it’s ghost month in Taiwan. Her mother had begged her not to go at that time, warning that she would be susceptible to dangers and threats. And there is almost nothing a mother won’t do to protect her child.
A wildly inventive, chilling and intoxicating story of betrayal, ambition and love, The Honeyeater confirms that Jessie Tu is one of our most original and exciting writers.
Diving, falling
by Kylie Mirmohamadi
It’s never too late to rewrite your own story.
For years, Leila Whittaker has been the mediator in her family. She smoothes ruffled feathers between her sons; endures the volatile moods of their father, the acclaimed Australian artist Ken Black; and even swallows the bitter pill of Ken’s endless affairs. All this, for the quiet hum of creative freedom her marriage provides. Or so she tells herself.
When Ken dies, leaving his artist’s estate to their two sons, and the pointed amount of sixty-nine thousand dollars to his muse, Anita, Leila decides she’s had enough. It’s time to seek some peace (and pleasure) of her own …
Diving, Falling is an elegant, exhilarating journey through grief, betrayal, and the intoxicating rediscovery of joy. Ripe with wickedly wry observations, unashamedly bold and sexy, it examines the calculations and sacrifices women make to keep the peace, escape their pasts, and find the agency to pursue their own passions.
Chinese Postman
by Brian Castro
One of Australia’s most important novelists writes about the experience of old age.
Abraham Quin is in his mid-seventies, a migrant, thrice-divorced, a one-time postman and professor, a writer now living alone in the Adelaide Hills. In Chinese Postman he reflects on his life with what he calls ‘the mannered and meditative inaction of age’, offering up memories and anxieties, obsessions and opinions, his thoughts on solitude, writing, friendship and time. He ranges widely, with curiosity and feeling, digressing and changing direction as suits his experience, and his role as a collector of fragments and a surveyor of ruins. He becomes increasingly engaged in an epistolary correspondence with Iryna Zarebina, a woman seeking refuge from the war in Ukraine.
As the correspondence opens him to others, the elaboration of his memories tempers his melancholy with a playful enjoyment in the richness of language, and a renewed appreciation of the small events in nature. This understanding of the experience of old age is something new and important in our literature. As Quin comments, ‘In Australia, the old made way for the young. It guaranteed a juvenile legacy.’
Woo Woo
by Ella Baxter
Sabine is having a moment. Her new exhibition, Fuck You, Help Me, is opening soon and, as her gallerist says, ‘Hell is an artist three days before their exhibition opens.’ But it’s not only this coming milestone that is causing Sabine to melt down.
She is being stalked. As exhibition day draws closer, so too does the man who has been watching her. As his approaches become more overt and threatening, Sabine’s fear amplifies and transforms into something feral and primal. And then things start to get really strange.
Darkly funny, intense and unsettling, Woo Woo is an astonishing and unflinching dissection of creativity and obsession, love and passion, vengeance and rage. Nothing will prepare you for this literary firestorm from the author of the internationally acclaimed debut New Animal.
Cherrywood
by Jock Serong
Edinburgh, 1916: A rich Scottish industrialist, Thomas Wrenfether, impulsively embarks on a mad scheme to build a paddlesteamer out of dubiously sourced European cherrywood on the other side of the world, in booming Melbourne, Australia. But nothing goes according to plan.
Melbourne, 1993: Martha is a clever, lonely and frustrated lawyer. One night, on impulse, she stops at a strange pub in Fitzroy, The Cherrywood, for a bottle of wine. The mysterious building and its inhabitants make an indelible impression, and she slowly begins to deduce odd truths about the pub.
From multi-award-winning author Jock Serong comes a darkly delicious, playful and rich novel about legacy, community, wonder, love and reinvention – Cherrywood is haunting, magical and a true original.
Creation Lake
by Rachel Kushner
Sadie Smith – a thirty-four-year-old American undercover agent of ruthless tactics and bold opinions – is sent by her mysterious but powerful employers to a remote corner of France. Her mission: to infiltrate a commune of radical eco-activists influenced by the beliefs of an enigmatic elder, Bruno Lacombe, who has rejected civilisation, lives in a Neanderthal cave, and believes the path to enlightenment is a return to primitivism.
Sadie casts her cynical eye over this region of ancient farms and sleepy villages, and finds Bruno’s idealism laughable, but just as she is certain she’s the seductress and puppet master of those she surveils, Bruno Lacombe is seducing her with his ingenious counter-histories, his artful laments, his own tragic story.
Beneath this taut, dazzling story about a woman caught in the crossfire between the past and the future lies a profound treatise on human history. Creation Lake is Rachel Kushner’s finest novel yet – a work of high art, high comedy and irresistible pleasure.
Gliff
by Ali Smith
Once upon a time not very far from now, two children come home to find a line of wet red paint encircling the outside of their house.
What does it mean?
It’s a truism of our time that it’ll be the next generation who’ll sort out our increasingly toxic world.
What would that actually be like?
In a state turned hostile, a world of insiders and outsiders, what things of the past can sustain them and what shape can resistance take?
And what’s a horse got to do with any of this?
Gliff is a novel about how we make meaning and how we are made meaningless. With a nod to the traditions of dystopian fiction, a glance at the Kafkaesque, and a new take on the notion of classic, it’s a moving and electrifying read, a vital and prescient tale of the versatility and variety deep-rooted in language, in nature and in human nature.
Orbital
by Samantha Harvey
A team of astronauts in the International Space Station collect meteorological data, conduct scientific experiments and test the limits of the human body. But mostly they observe. Together they watch their silent blue planet, circling it sixteen times, spinning past continents and cycling through seasons, taking in glaciers and deserts, the peaks of mountains and the swells of oceans. Endless shows of spectacular beauty witnessed in a single day.
Yet although separated from the world they cannot escape its constant pull. News reaches them of the death of a mother, and with it comes thoughts of returning home. They look on as a typhoon gathers over an island and people they love, in awe of its magnificence and fearful of its destruction.
The fragility of human life fills their conversations, their fears, their dreams. So far from earth, they have never felt more part – or protective – of it. They begin to ask, what is life without earth? What is earth without humanity?
Choice
by Neel Mukherjee
A publisher, who is at war with his industry and himself, embarks on a radical experiment in his own life and the lives of those connected to him; an academic exchanges one story for another after an accident brings a stranger into her life; and a family in rural India have their lives destroyed by a gift.
These three ingeniously linked but distinct narratives, each of which has devastating unintended consequences, form a breathtaking exploration of freedom, responsibility, and ethics. What happens when market values replace other notions of value and meaning? How do the choices we make affect our work, our relationships, and our place in the world? Neel Mukherjee’s new novel exposes the myths of individual choice, and confronts our fundamental assumptions about economics, race, appropriation, and the tangled ethics of contemporary life.
Choice is a scathing, compassionate quarrel with the world, a masterful inquiry into how we should live our lives, and how we should tell them.
Poetry
36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem
by Nam Le
Fifteen years after his best-selling, award-winning collection of stories The Boat, Nam Le returns to his great themes of identity and representation in a virtuosic debut book of poetry
36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem, says Le, a Vietnamese refugee to Australia, is ‘the book I needed to write. The book I’ve been writing my whole life’. This book-length poem is an urgent, unsettling reckoning with identity and the violence of identity, embedded with racism, oppression and historical trauma. But it also addresses the violence in those assumptions – of being always assumed to be outside one’s home, country, culture or language. And the complex violence, for the diasporic writer who wants to address any of this, of language itself.
Making use of multiple tones, moods, masks and camouflages, Le’s poetic debut moves with unpredictable and destabilising energy between the personal and political, honouring every convention of diasporic literature – in a virtuosic array of forms and registers – before shattering the form itself. Like The Boat, 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem conjures its own terms of engagement, escapes our traps, slips our certainties. As self-indicting as it is scathing, hilarious as it is desperately moving, this is a singular, breakthrough book.
Gawimarra: Gathering
by Jeanine Leane
This superb collection moves from deeply tender meditations on Country, culture and kinship, to experimental archival poems dissecting the violence and destruction of the settler-colony. Jeanine Leane’s poems are richly palpable in texture, imagery and language, layering the personal with the political, along with a sharp-tongued telling of history. Cleverly divided into three parts, ‘Gathering’, ‘Nation’ and ‘Returning’, Gawimarra weaves back and forth in a dedication to strong matriarchs, and the core acts of gathering and returning – memory, language, history – resonate powerfully throughout. This remarkable book is the result of decades of poetic, political, and cultural work and reflection.
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