A vivid, brilliant, darkly humorous and horrifying history of some of the strangest dictators that Europe has ever seen.

Balanced precariously on the shifting fault line between East and West, Romania’s schizophrenic, often violent past is one of the great untold stories of modern Europe.

The country that gave us Vlad Dracula, and whose citizens consider themselves descendants of ancient Rome, has traditionally preferred the status of enigmatic outsider. But this beautiful and unexplored land has experienced some of the most disastrous leaderships of the last century.

After a relatively benign period led by a dutiful King and his vivacious British-born Queen, the country oscillated wildly. Its interwar rulers form a gallery of bizarre characters and extreme movements: the corrupt and mentally unbalanced King Carol; the fascist death cult led by Corneliu Codreanu; the vain General Ion Antonescu, who seized power in 1940 and led the country into a catastrophic alliance with Nazi Germany. After 1945 power was handed to Romania’s tiny communist party, under which it experienced severe repression, purges and collectivisation.

Then in 1965, Nicolae Ceausescu came to power. And thus began the strangest dictatorship of all.

Paul Kenyon has travelled in almost every African country in the footsteps of the dictators. He is a distinguished BBC correspondent and BAFTA award-winning journalist and author.

What is lost when knowledge is withheld?

In 1914, when the war draws the young men of Britain away to fight, it is the women who must keep the nation running. Two of those women are Peggy and Maude, twin sisters who work in the bindery at Oxford University Press in Jericho. Peggy is intelligent, ambitious and dreams of studying at Oxford University, but for most of her life she has been told her job is to bind the books, not read them. Maude, meanwhile, wants nothing more than what she has. She is extraordinary but vulnerable. Peggy needs to watch over her.

When refugees arrive from the devastated cities of Belgium, it sends ripples through the community and through the sisters’ lives. Peggy begins to see the possibility of another future where she can use her intellect and not just her hands, but as war and illness reshape her world, it is love, and the responsibility that comes with it, that threaten to hold her back.

The Bookbinder of Jericho is a story about knowledge – who makes it, who can access it, and what is lost when it is withheld. In this beautiful companion to the international bestseller The Dictionary of Lost Words, Pip Williams explores another little-known slice of history seen through women’s eyes. Intelligent, thoughtful and rich with unforgettable characters, this is the novel of 2023.

From an award-winning First Nations author, a ground-breaking examination of sport’s troubled relationship with race, gender and sexuality.

Award-winning writer Ellen van Neerven plays football from a young age, learning early on that sport can be a painful and exclusive world. The more they play, the more they realise about sport’s troubled relationship with race, gender and sexuality – and question what it means to play sport on stolen, sovereign land, especially in the midst of multiple environmental crises.

With emotional honesty and searing insight, van Neerven shines a light on sport on this continent from a queer First Nations perspective, revealing how some athletes have long challenged mainstream views and used their roles to effect change not only in their own realm, but in society more broadly. Personal Score is a ground-breaking book that confirms, once again, van Neerven’s unrivalled talent, courage and originality.

Ellen van Neerven is an award-winning writer of Mununjali Yugambeh and Dutch heritage. Ellen’s first book, Heat and Light, was the recipient of the David Unaipon Award, the Dobbie Literary Award and the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards Indigenous Writers Prize. They have written two poetry collections- Comfort Food, which was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards Kenneth Slessor Prize; and Throat, which won the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry, the Multicultural NSW Award and Book of the Year in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards.

When The Birdmen Flew is an illustrated history book, jam packed full of photos, memorabilia and ephemera from 1974 to 2007 to create the ultimate Radio Birdman rock and roll book.

The band’s archives and scrapbooks have been collected by lifelong Radio Birdman fan George Munoz with additional items supplied by other Birdman fans from around the world.

George has been collecting Radio Birdman files since 1976 and has compiled a large collection which he dreamed of putting together into a book. That time has now come and High Voltage Publishing is proud to make that dream come true.

The books starts from early days and the beginnings of Radio Birdman. Rare early photos, flyers, posters, set lists and everything in between and much of it unseen for years or never seen at all. The best items have been chosen and presented in this huge book.

Beautifully designed and laid out by George Matzkov.

‘Your new obsession’ ERIN KELLY

‘A dark masterpiece. It will work its way under your skin like a splinter and stay there’ CATRIONA WARD

‘Tense, addictive and sticky underfoot’ JULIA ARMFIELD

‘Utterly unforgettable’ CATHERINE RYAN HOWARD

A BOOKSHOP. A TRUE CRIME CASE. A DEADLY FRIENDSHIP. THE UNMISSABLE DEBUT THRILLER.

Roach – bookseller, loner and true crime obsessive – is not interested in making friends. She has all the company she needs in her serial killer books, murder podcasts and her pet snail, Bleep. That is, until Laura joins the bookshop. Smelling of roses, with her cute literary tote bags and beautiful poetry, she’s everyone’s new favourite bookseller. But beneath the shiny veneer, Roach senses a darkness within Laura, the same darkness Roach possesses.

As Roach’s curiosity blooms into morbid obsession, it becomes clear that she is prepared to infiltrate Laura’s life at any cost.

Lydia is hungry. Living away from her Malaysian-British mother for the first time, Lydia is forced to navigate her hunger on her own – something of a challenge, as Lydia is half-vampire. Her human side craves the food that would connect her with her late Japanese father… but she can digest only blood. Alone in London, with plans to build a career in performance art, she lurches between human and inhuman, trying desperately to connect with her (very human) peers while her need for blood burns, and burns, and burns…

Luka really enjoyed this short novel about hunger, art, and body-hood. It’s always great to see a unique modern take on the vampire myth, and this was really fascinating! Lydia’s internal world is visceral and complicated; Kohda really captures the sensory experience of hunger, using it as an intriguing allegorical anchor in the narrative.

Shortlisted for the 2023 International Booker Prize

A sweeping, multi-generational tale blending fable, farce, and fantasy-a masterpiece of modern fiction perfect for fans of One Hundred Years of Solitude.

A woman sells her daughter to a passing beekeeper for two jars of honey. A baby weighing fifteen pounds is born in the depths of winter but named “Girl of Spring”. A storm brings down the roof of a ramshackle restaurant to reveal a hidden fortune. These are just some of the events that set Myeong-Kwan Cheong’s beautifully crafted, wild world in motion.

Set in a remote village in South Korea, Whale follows the lives of its linked characters: Geumbok, who has been chasing an indescribable thrill ever since she first saw a whale crest in the ocean; her mute daughter, Chunhui, who communicates with elephants; and a one-eyed woman who controls honeybees with a whistle.

Brimming with surprises and wicked humour, Whale is an adventure-satire of epic proportions, by one of international literature’s the most original voices.

Through the lens of horror — from Halloween to Hereditary — queer and trans writers consider the films that deepened, amplified, and illuminated their own experiences.

Horror movies hold a complicated space in the hearts of the queer community: historically misogynist, and often homo- and transphobic, the genre has also been inadvertently feminist and open to subversive readings. Common tropes—such as the circumspect and resilient “final girl,” body possession, costumed villains, secret identities, and things that lurk in the closet—spark moments of eerie familiarity and affective connection. Still, viewers often remain tasked with reading themselves into beloved films, seeking out characters and set pieces that speak to, mirror, and parallel the unique ways queerness encounters the world.

It Came from the Closet features twenty-five essays by writers speaking to this relationship, through connections both empowering and oppressive. From Carmen Maria Machado on Jennifer’s Body, Jude Ellison S. Doyle on In My Skin, Addie Tsai on Dead Ringers, and many more, these conversations convey the rich reciprocity between queerness and horror.

‘A brilliant display of expert criticism, wry humor, and original thinking. This is full of surprises.’ — Publishers Weekly, starred review

‘A critical text on the intersections of film, queer studies, and pop culture that will appeal to both academic and public-library audiences.’ — Booklist, starred review

Shortlisted for the 2023 International Booker Prize

Buried deep in rural France, little remains of the isolated hamlet of the Three Lone Girls, save a few houses and a curiously assembled quartet: Patrice Bergogne, inheritor of his family’s farm; his wife, Marion; their daughter, Ida; and their neighbour, Christine, an artist. While Patrice plans a surprise for his wife’s fortieth birthday, inexplicable events start to disrupt the hamlet’s quiet existence: anonymous, menacing letters, an unfamiliar car rolling up the driveway. And as night falls, strangers stalk the houses, unleashing a nightmarish chain of events.

Told in rhythmic, propulsive prose that weaves seamlessly from one consciousness to the next over the course of a day, Laurent Mauvignier’s The Birthday Party is a deft unravelling of the stories we hide from others and from ourselves, a gripping tale of the violent irruptions of the past into the present, written by a major contemporary French writer.

 From the bestselling author of Grief is the Thing with Feathers and Lanny – the polyphonic story of a troubled teenager, with all of the humanity and trademark invention we expect from one of our most exciting writers.

Things keep slipping up for Shy. All he wants is sex, spliffs and his own turntables, and for all the red noise in his mind to disappear. But again and again he spirals past his senses and ends up with his head in his hands and carnage around him.

You mustn’t do that to yourself Shy. You mustn’t hurt yourself like that.

He’s been kicked out of two schools, been cautioned, arrested, stabbed his stepdad in the finger and bottled a former Tumble Tots playmate, but it’s the taunts and teasing of his new schoolmates that haunt Shy.

Shy’s got no armpit hair / Shy needs fake ID to buy fags / Got your special meds, nutcase?

At Last Chance – a home for ‘very disturbed young men’ – he is surrounded by people who want to help him, but his night terrors aren’t getting any better.

The night is huge and it hurts.

So tonight he’s stepping into it, with the haunted beginnings of a plan.