1967- Ye Wenjie witnesses Red Guards beat her father to death during China’s Cultural Revolution. This singular event will shape not only the rest of her life but also the future of mankind.

Four decades later, Beijing police ask nanotech engineer Wang Miao to infiltrate a secretive cabal of scientists after a spate of inexplicable suicides. Wang’s investigation will lead him to a mysterious online game and immerse him in a virtual world ruled by the intractable and unpredictable interaction of its three suns.

This is the Three-Body Problem and it is the key to everything- the key to the scientists’ deaths, the key to a conspiracy that spans light-years and the key to the extinction-level threat humanity now faces.

In Annihilation, the first volume of Jeff VanderMeer’s now-classic Southern Reach series, Area X has been cut off from the rest of the continent for decades and nature has reclaimed the last vestiges of human civilisation. Expedition after expedition into Area X has failed to uncover its mysteries and the true nature of its danger to the world.

Now a twelfth expedition makes the attempt, a group of four women: an anthropologist, a surveyor, a psychologist and the narrator, a biologist. Their mission is to map the terrain, record all observations of their surroundings and of one another, and, above all, avoid being contaminated by Area X.

A harrowing cosmic mystery at the vanguard of eco-fiction, Annihilation has only become more pertinent to our reality ten years after its first publication.

Spanning two decades-from the publication of her lightning-rod debut novel in the late 70s, to the throes of a consuming affair in the late 80s, and the messiness and pain of a disintegrating marriage in the late 90s-the diaries reveal the life of one of the world’s greatest writers.

Devastatingly honest and disarmingly funny, How to End a Story is a portrait of loss, betrayal, and the sheer force of a woman’s anger-but also of hard work and resilience, moments of hope and joy, the immutable ties of motherhood, and the regenerative power of a room of one’s own.

A child who will be named Johannes is born. An old man named Johannes dies. Between these two points, Jon Fosse gives us the details of an entire life, starkly compressed. Beginning with Johannes’s father’s thoughts as his wife goes into labour, and ending with Johannes’s own thoughts as he embarks upon a day in his life when everything is exactly the same, yet totally different, Morning and Evening is a novel concerning the beautiful dream that our lives have meaning.

When Lea Ypi discovers a photo of her grandmother, Leman, honeymooning in the Alps in 1941 posted by a stranger on social media, she is faced with unsettling questions. Growing up, she was told records of her grandmother’s youth were destroyed in the early days of communism in Albania. But there Leman was with her husband, Asllan Ypi- glamorous newlyweds while World War II raged.

What follows is a thrilling reimagining of the past, as we are transported to the vanished world of Ottoman aristocracy, the making of modern Greece and Albania, a global financial crisis, the horrors of war and the dawn of communism in the Balkans. While investigating the truth about her family, Ypi grapples with uncertainty. Who is the real Leman Ypi? What made her move to Tirana as a young woman and marry a socialist who sympathized with the Popular Front while his father led a collaborationist government? And why was she smiling in the winter of 1941?

By turns epic and intimate, profound and gripping, Indignity explores what it means to survive in an age of extremes. It reveals the fragility of truth, both personal and political, and the cost of decisions made against the tide of history. Through secret police reports of communist spies, court depositions, and Ypi’s memories of her grandmother, we move between present and past, archive and imagination, fact and fiction. Ultimately, she asks, what do we really know about the people closest to us? And with what moral authority do we judge the acts of previous generations?

Nineteen-year-old Lea is from a village that is out of time, out of jobs and out of hope. She and her friends, however, are vivid and electric with life. They yearn, they dance, they fuck, they fight. And around them, a world that isn’t quite our own vibrates with strangeness and threat.

Now Lea is here, sitting on a bench, telling a silent stranger her life story. Because yesterday, change was finally unavoidable.

A novel of rural entrapment and coming of age, Elisa Levi’s That’s All I Know bears the traces of Beckett and Lorca, rings with the echo of folktales and has a fierce, unapologetic vitality at its heart. Startlingly odd and deeply moving, it is the work of a profound and singular talent.

The witty new novel from this internationally acclaimed Polish author blends horror, folklore and feminist parable.

In September 1913, Mieczyslaw, a student suffering from tuberculosis, arrives at a health resort in what is now western Poland. Every day, its residents gather in the dining room to imbibe the hallucinogenic local liqueur, to obsess over money and status, and to discuss the great issues of the day – will there be war? Do devils exist? Are women inherently inferior?

But disturbing events are happening in the guesthouse and its surroundings. Someone-or something-seems to be infiltrating their world. As our student attempts to decipher the sinister forces at work, little does he realise they have already chosen their next target.

As in her acclaimed novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, Tokarczuk blends horror story, comedy, folklore, and feminist parable with brilliant storytelling.

From the Australian Book Industry-Award winning author of Australian Abstract.

‘Containing a sublime collection of works, Amber Creswell Bell’s book is a deeply fascinating insight into Antipodean portraiture.’ – DAVID WENHAM

Since the advent of the camera nearly two centuries ago, a portrait is no longer expected to be an exact likeness. From surrealist renderings to abstract interpretations, contemporary artists have shed the convention of traditional portraiture, experimenting with an array of styles to convey the personality and character of their subjects.

In About Face, Amber Creswell Bell examines the practices of a diverse canvas of portrait painters in Australia and New Zealand. The dynamic nature of both the artists and their work reflects an evolution of culture, society and creative practice. These painters use portraiture to convey a narrative, engage with social, political or environmental issues or evoke the complexity of the human experience; some are simply fascinated by human faces.

Whatever the artist’s motivation, every work makes clear that portraiture has always been a powerful means of telling stories and exploring our individual and collective identities.

A brilliant exploration of freedom – what it is, how it’s been misunderstood, and why it’s our only chance for survival – by the acclaimed, bestselling author of On Tyranny.

Freedom is the great Western commitment, but we have lost sight of what it means – and this is leading us into crisis. Too many of us look at freedom as the absence of state power- we think we’re free if we can do and say as we please, and protect ourselves from government interference. But true freedom isn’t so much freedom from, as freedom to – the freedom to thrive, to take risks for futures we choose by working together. Freedom is the value that makes all other values possible.

Drawing on the work of philosophers and political dissidents, conversations with contemporary thinkers and his own experiences, Snyder identifies the practices and attitudes – the habits of mind – that will allow us to design a government in which we and future generations can flourish. We come to appreciate the importance of traditions but also the role of institutions. Intimate yet ambitious, this book helps forge a new consensus rooted in a politics of abundance, generosity and grace.

Snyder’s book On Tyranny has inspired millions around the world to fight for freedom; On Freedom helps us see exactly what we’re fighting for. It is a thrilling intellectual journey and a tour de force of political philosophy.

One of the staff’s most anticipated books of 2024! We have been LOVING this one…

Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common.

Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties – successful, competent and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women – his enduring first love Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke.

Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined.

For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude – a period of desire, despair and possibility – a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.