Riveting, colourful and often darkly humorous, House of Kwa is an epic family drama spanning four generations, and an unforgettable story about how one woman finds the courage to stand up for her freedom and independence, squaring off against the ghosts of the past and finally putting them to rest. (Booktopia)

For two straight weeks Trent Dalton sat at a desk with a sky-blue 1960s Olivetti typewriter, on the bustling corner of Adelaide and Albert streets, Brisbane, with a sign saying, ‘Sentimental writer collecting love stories. Do you have one to share?’ (Publisher)

Not My Father’s Son is the story of Alan Cumming’s journey of discovery, both a memoir of his childhood in Scotland, and an investigation into his family history which would change him forever. ‘Equal parts memoir, whodunnit and manual for living . . . beautifully written, honest . . . I was completely sucked in’ NEIL GAIMAN

Drawing on the questions he hears time and again, from millennials to baby boomers and all the generations between, So You Think You Know What’s Good For You? is a one-stop handbook that will settle fruitless anxieties and allow people to focus on what matters to them. (Publisher)

Award-winning public-health expert Timothy Caulfield tackles our daily dilemmas – from the moment we wake up to when we go to sleep – and the innumerable cultural, social and psychological forces shaping the decisions we make. Too often these decisions are dictated by concerns or beliefs about our world that simply aren’t true. Caulfield shows that these misperceptions unnecessarily stress us out and cause us to waste time and money. (Goodreads)

 I have decided to write these stories just as I have always done, in my own hand. The joy that I have felt from chronicling these tales is not unlike listening back to a song that I’ve recorded and can’t wait to share with the world, or reading a primitive journal entry from a stained notebook, or even hearing my voice bounce between the Kiss posters on my wall as a child. (Goodreads)

A beautiful, intimate and inspiring investigation into how we can find and nurture within ourselves that essential quality of internal happiness – the ‘light within’ that Julia Baird calls ‘phosphorescence’ – which will sustain us even through the darkest times. (Goodreads)

An inspiring and crucial book from a wise and adored writer that is the perfect companion to Phosphorescence by Julia Baird and Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert. (Goodreads)

Making Australian History catalogues and contextualises changing readings of the past, it examines the increasingly problematic role of historians as national storytellers, and it incorporates the stories of people. (Publisher)

‘A colourful, engaging story of escape and road-trip adventure … also compellingly cinematic and features an endearing narrator-heroine with plenty of meaty real-world troubles.’ – Sydney Morning Herald

From #1 New York Times bestselling author Liane Moriarty comes a novel that looks at marriage, siblings, and how the people we love the most can hurt us the deepest. (Booktopia)

We all have stories we never tell.
Before Owen Michaels disappears, he manages to smuggle a note to his beloved wife of one year: Protect her.

Despite her confusion and fear, Hannah Hall knows exactly to whom the note refers: Owen’s sixteen-year-old daughter, Bailey. Bailey, who lost her mother tragically as a child. Bailey, who wants absolutely nothing to do with her new stepmother.

488 Rules for Life is Kitty Flanagan’s way of making the world a more pleasant place to live. Providing you with the antidote to every annoying little thing, these rules are not made to be broken. 488 Rules for Life is not a self-help book, because it’s not you who needs help, it’s other people.

The runaway Australian bestseller about love and loss in wartime Germany, inspired by a true story. 
 
‘Captures the intensity of a brutal and unforgiving war, successfully weaving love, loss, desperation and, finally, hope into a gripping journey of self-discovery.’ The Courier Mail

Between life and death there is a library, and within that library, the shelves go on forever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. To see how things would be if you had made other choices . . . Would you have done anything different, if you had the chance to undo your regrets? (Goodreads) 

The Magician is an intimate, astonishingly complex portrait of Mann, his magnificent and complex wife Katia, and the times in which they lived—the first world war, the rise of Hitler, World War II, the Cold War, and exile. (Goodreads)

‘There are books you encounter as an adult that you wish you could press into the hands of your younger self. Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray is one of those books – a novel that turns Australia’s long-mythologised settler history into a raw and resilient heartsong.’ – Guardian

A sweeping story of three generations of women, crossing from London to Ireland and back again, and the enduring effort to retrieve the secrets of the past (Goodreads)

Dramatic and urgent in its telling, The Sorrow Stone celebrates one woman’s quest, against the dramatic backdrop of the Icelandic countryside. In this gripping novel, the co-author of the bestselling Saga Land takes a sidelined figure from the Viking tales and finally puts her where she belongs – at the centre of the story. (Booktopia)

A novel about three women at turning points in their lives, and the one night that changes everything. (Publisher)

The debut novel from the inimitable Madeleine Ryan, A Room Called Earth is a humorous and heartwarming adventure inside the mind of a bright and dynamic woman. This hyper-saturated celebration of love and acceptance, from a neurodiverse writer, is a testament to moving through life without fear, and to opening ourselves up to a new way of relating to one another. (Publisher)

A fantasy series about a kingdom divided by corruption, the prince desperately holding it together, and the girl who will risk everything to bring it crashing down. (Publisher)

Surrounded by enemies, the once-great nation of Ravka has been torn in two by the Shadow Fold, a swath of near impenetrable darkness crawling with monsters who feast on human flesh. Now its fate may rest on the shoulders of one lonely refugee. (Publisher)

The Black Witch Chronicles #4. Newly exposed as the Black Witch of Prophecy, Elloren Gardner Grey is on the run, not knowing if she’ll find friends or foes. With her fastmate, Lukas Grey, either dead or in the hands of High Mage Marcus Vogel, Elloren knows the only chance of turning the tide of the coming war is to seek allies who will listen long enough not to kill her on sight.

Jack West Jr #4

Jack, it seems, has been chosen – along with a dozen other elite soldiers – to compete in a series of deadly challenges designed to fulfill an ancient ritual.

With the fate of the Earth at stake, he will have to traverse diabolical mazes, fight cruel assassins and face unimaginable horrors that will test him like he has never been tested before. (Publisher)

After the success of The Thursday Murder Club, Richard Osman’s crime-fighting septuagenarians are back in The Man Who Died Twice. It’s the Thursday after the Thursday Murder Club’s first case. Elizabeth has been approached by a man from her past who has made a mistake — a ‘stolen diamonds, the mob is involved’ kind of mistake — and he needs her help. It quickly becomes clear that this isn’t anything like their first small town case. (Booktopia)

Quala, a North Queensland sugar town, the 1970s.
Barbara McClymont walks the cane fields searching for Janet, her sixteen-year-old daughter, who has been missing for weeks. The police have no leads. The people of Quala are divided by dread and distrust. But the sugar crush is underway and the cane must be burned. (Publisher)

For the first time in 20 years, Ann Cleeves –international bestselling and award-winning author of the Vera and Shetland series, both of which are hit TV shows– embarks on a gripping new series.
In North Devon, where two rivers converge and run into the sea, Detective Matthew Venn stands outside the church as his father’s funeral takes place. Once loved and cherished, the day Matthew left the strict evangelical community he grew up in, he lost his family too. (Goodreads)

Ann Cleeves–New York Times bestselling and award-winning author of the Vera and Shetland series, both of which are hit TV shows–returns with the extraordinary follow-up to The Long Call, in the Two Rivers series, soon to be a major TV series too. (Goodreads)

Fifteen-year-old Christopher has a photographic memory. He understands maths. He understands science. What he can’t understand are other human beings. When he finds his neighbour’s dog lying dead on the lawn, he decides to track down the killer and write a murder mystery about it. But what other mysteries will he end up uncovering? (Goodreads)

 The young engineer Marcus Attilius Primus has just taken charge of the Aqua Augusta, the enormous aqueduct that brings fresh water to a quarter of a million people in nine towns around the Bay of Naples. His predecessor has disappeared. Springs are failing for the first time in generations. And now there is a crisis on the Augusta’s sixty-mile main line—somewhere to the north of Pompeii, on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius. (Booktopia)

This funny, picaresque, clever retelling of Chaucer’s ‘Wife of Bath’ from The Canterbury Tales is a cutting assessment of what happens when male power is left to run unchecked, as well as a recasting of a literary classic that gives a maligned character her own voice, and allows her to tell her own (mostly) true story. (Publisher)

A New York Times Notable Book (2020)
Best Book of 2020: Guardian, Financial Times, Literary Hub, and NPR

Drawing on Maggie O’Farrell’s long-term fascination with the little-known story behind Shakespeare’s most enigmatic play, HAMNET is a luminous portrait of a marriage, at its heart the loss of a beloved child. (Goodreads)

From one of our finest living writers, Wolf Hall is that very rare thing: a truly great English novel, one that explores the intersection of individual psychology and wider politics. With a vast array of characters, and richly overflowing with incident, it peels back history to show us Tudor England as a half-made society, moulding itself with great passion and suffering and courage. (Goodreads)

Though he battled for years to marry her, Henry VIII has become disenchanted with the audacious Anne Boleyn. She has failed to give him a son, and her sharp intelligence and strong will have alienated his old friends and the noble families of England. (Goodreads)

With The Mirror and the Light, Hilary Mantel brings to a triumphant close the trilogy she began with Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. She traces the final years of Thomas Cromwell, the boy from nowhere who climbs to the heights of power, offering a defining portrait of predator and prey, of a ferocious contest between present and past, between royal will and a common man’s vision: of a modern nation making itself through conflict, passion and courage. (Goodreads)