‘This is literature at its finest – tender, attentive and daring.’ – Omar Sakr, author of Son of Sin

Nothing to Hide is Australia’s first mainstream anthology of trans and gender-diverse writing.

While there has been unprecedented trans visibility in Australia in the last decade, this visibility has not always been positive, shadowed at every step by transphobic misinformation and extremist rhetoric. As a counter to the harmful chorus of anti-trans voices, this collection features the work of thirty trans and gender-diverse people across the spectrum of age, race, geography and circumstance. The writers give voice to their communities and tell their own stories, on their own terms.

Showcasing the wealth of creativity within the trans and gender-diverse community and providing illuminating insights into the challenges and joys of trans experience, Nothing to Hide is a powerful contribution to Australian literature.

A brilliant debut that examines a ‘haunted’ queer and HIV-positive identity, across spaces and citizenships both physical and imagined.

Paradise (point of transmission) is a poetry collection placed within a sequence of physical and psychic transitional spaces – from seronegative to seropositive; from ‘adopted’ Singaporean to the poet finding his place again as an adult in the Perth of his childhood; and from being secretive about his HIV-status (in which the art he produced was rooted in the trauma of HIV transmission without naming it), towards living a more public life, in which living openly with HIV is characterised by the queer longing toward both resilience and transformation.

Andrew Sutherland is a Queer poz (PLHIV) writer and performance-maker creating work between Boorloo, Western Australia and Singapore. His work draws upon intercultural and Queer critical theories, and the vital instabilities of identity, pop culture and the autobiographical self. He was awarded Overland’s Fair Australia Poetry Prize 2017 and placed third in FAWWA’s Tom Collins Prize 2021. He is grateful to reside on Whadjuk Noongar boodja.

The artworks of Aboriginal Australian peoples are a profoundly important repository of knowledge and reflect a deep connection to Country. This visually rich survey explores the evolution of the contemporary Aboriginal art movement in remote areas of Australia across twenty-nine art centres in five states from the Kimberley through to Arnhem Land and beyond.

Featuring profiles of 100 artists, this unparalleled work provides valuable insight into Knowledges and Traditions, while highlighting the achievements of each unique artist – all recognised as among the most distinguished painters from remote Australia.

Author Marie Geissler’s opening essay traces the progression from rock art through to the launch of the Western desert movement, which began at Papunya in the early 1970s and led to the widespread uptake of contemporary painting by Aboriginal artists. Esteemed writers Margot Neale and Djon Mundine offer erudite contributions distilling the complexity of the art movement and its impact.

Dreaming the Land is an authoritative reference that offers readers around the world a valuable introduction to Aboriginal culture and the stories that underpin the paintings.

Marie Geissler is a cultural historian who has worked in the field of Indigenous art for over thirty years. She has a particular interest in Arnhem Land bark painting and the ways Indigenous Australian art has been critical in promoting the self-determination histories of Indigenous Australians. Marie is currently at the National Museum of Australia in Canberra, where she is researching its bark painting collection. She is also a Visiting Research Associate at the University of Wollongong, and an Investigation Team Member to the Garuwanga Project Research Roundtable of the Indigenous Knowledge Forum, Law Faculty of the University of Technology, Sydney.

This debut pacy crime novel is for fans who love the crime genre, and novels about novels.

US exchange student Hieronymous Beck is Professor Jack Griffen’s biggest fan. Why else would he inveigle himself into the English Literature course that Jack is running, and why else would he devote so much time to chatting with Jack after hours about the anatomy of crime fiction, the roles of heroes and villains, and his favourite true crime book of all time, In Cold Blood?

But everything changes when Jack Griffen picks up a list of five templates to murder that has been written by Beck.

The mild-mannered professor who has never incurred anything more than a parking fine suddenly finds himself in a deadly race to protect those he loves, as he is plunged into Hiero’s crime writer’s fantasy and the darkness of his student’s heart.

Local author – ask us if signed copies are available!

‘One brilliant woman writing about another: an irresistible combination.’ – Antonia Fraser

‘One of the most delightful biographies I have ever read.’ – A.N. Wilson

‘Reading Worsley is as enjoyable as reading Christie herself.’ – Ruth Scurr

Why did Agatha Christie spend her career pretending that she was ‘just’ an ordinary housewife, when clearly she wasn’t? As Lucy Worsley says, ‘She was thrillingly, scintillatingly modern’.

She went surfing in Hawaii, she loved fast cars, and she was intrigued by the new science of psychology, which helped her through devastating mental illness. So why – despite all the evidence to the contrary – did Agatha present herself as a retiring Edwardian lady of leisure?

She was born in 1890 into a world which had its own rules about what women could and couldn’t do. Lucy Worsley’s biography is not just of an internationally renowned bestselling writer. It’s also the story of a person who, despite the obstacles of class and gender, became an astonishingly successful working woman. With access to personal letters and papers that have rarely been seen, Lucy Worsley’s biography is both authoritative and entertaining, and makes us realise what an extraordinary pioneer Agatha Christie was – truly a woman who wrote the twentieth century.

“How should we tell the story of Indigenous incarceration in Australia? Only part of it is in the numbers … To really grapple with the problem of Indigenous incarceration requires us to accept the possibility that there might be another way. That the current state of affairs – where entire families sometimes spend time behind bars – is not inevitable.”

How and why Australia’s legal system fails Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

Indigenous Australians are the most incarcerated people on the planet. Indigenous men are fifteen times more likely to be locked up than their non-Indigenous counterparts; Indigenous women are twenty-one times more likely.

Featuring vivid case studies and drawing on a deep sense of history, Black Lives, White Law explores Australia’s deplorable record of locking up First Nations people. It examines Australia’s system of criminal justice – the web of laws and courts and police and prisons – and how that system interacts with First Nations peoples and communities. How is it that so many are locked up? Why have imprisonment rates increased in recent years? Is this situation fair? Almost everyone agrees that it’s not. And yet it keeps getting worse.

In this groundbreaking book, Russell Marks investigates Australia’s incarceration epidemic. What do we see if the institutions of Australian justice receive the same scrutiny they routinely apply to Indigenous Australians?

Oxford, 1836. It is the centre of all progress & knowledge in the world. And at its centre is Babel, the Royal Institute of Translation—the great tower from which all the power of the Empire flows. Orphaned in Canton and brought to England by a mysterious guardian, Babel seemed like paradise to Robin Swift. Until it became a prison…

This has swept in as the best novel I have read this year. A standalone offering, Babel has been largely marketed as a ‘dark-fantasy-academia’ novel, but this pigeonhole falls tragically short! It is deeply complex, overflowing with historical allusions and linguistic passion – grounded in a fascinating magic system based on translation. I would personally call it speculative historical fiction before anything else; Kuang’s background in Chinese military history is evident. Babel is a novel about exploitation & empire, language, and the competing of histories. Although these ideas are big, it still has a tender, character-driven heart.

After writing her previously bestselling trilogy, The Poppy War, before she had turned 20(!), Babel has asserted Kuang once and for all as a force of contemporary fantasy; her voice is unique and masterful. Highly recommend for those seeking a bold & subversive fantasy read. – Luka

Brock & Sharon are loving this Bulgarian novel which has amassed international prestige, and has been translated to English by Angela Rodel.

An enigmatic therapist, Gaustine, opens a clinic with a unique appeal: the clinic’s floors have become thresholds to the past—‘time shelters’—that allow Alzheimer’s patients to access forgotten memories.

Time Shelter goes on to explore themes of memory, history, and forgetting; the personal and societal. Satirical and warm, this novel holds a mirror up to contemporary ideas of nostalgia and the dangers that can come with it. I loved it from the first page. -Brock

Possibly the best science fiction novel I’ve ever read, this book is just incredible.

The Chinese Cultural Revolution provides a historical backdrop and introduces one of the protagonists, a kickass astrophysicist. Her characterisation was believable and fascinating. Although it explores the experience of being a woman in a scientific field in China during this time, it does not pigeonhole Ye Wenjie as a victim. She is self-sufficient, strong, at times downright intimidating. She is a strong force, pushing the story forward with her outrageous but believable decisions and aspirations.

Our other protagonist, Yang Weining, is also interesting but honestly kind of pathetic compared to Wenjie. He is thrust into this complicated plot because of his specialization in physics, further manipulated by the hilarious Police detective Shi Qiang (Da Shi).

There is hard science fiction exploring theoretical aspects of nanotechnology and astrophysics, in a way that was accessible and interesting. What an excellent genre to portray the importance of such research, that may seem too specific, too small scale to affect our lives in a macro sense. A lot of it went over my head, but that didn’t matter in the long run. It’s possible that anyone who already knows about these fields may find the explanations tiresome, but I don’t know how big that audience would be!

Some of the dialogue comes across as quite blunt, but I think that is due to Cixin Liu being Chinese and the text being translated. Any translation will bump into some cultural barriers, and I think it made the experience more enjoyable. Much of the prose is to the point, but not to the extent of a lot of other science fiction I’ve been reading. It has many poignant, reflective moments about the lonely aspect of studying space and the search for extra-terrestrials.

Part of the beauty of my experience with this book was the fact I knew nothing about it going into it, and I really enjoyed all the surprises I was met with. I would suggest skim reading the Wiki pages for the Cultural Revolution if you want an enriched experience.

Would recommend anyone on the prow for a gripping scifi. – Shannon

Winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2022

If you let it – if you listen – a book could change your life.

After his father dies, Benny Oh finds he can hear objects talking; teapots, marbles and sharpened pencils, babbling in anger or distress. His mother, struggling to support their household alone, starts collecting things to give her comfort. Overwhelmed by the clamour of all the stuff, Benny seeks refuge in the beautiful silence of the public library.

There, the objects speak only in whispers.

There, he meets a homeless poet and a mesmerising young performance artist.

There, a book reaches out to him. Not just any book – his own book. And a very important conversation begins.

The Book of Form and Emptiness is about grief, resilience, creativity and psychological difference. It is about the importance of reading, and an observation of the mess consumer culture has got us into. It is an affirmation of the power of community. It is funny, kind, wise, urgent and completely irresistible. If you let it – if you listen – it could change your life.