New Books / Reviews
Listings and Reviews of New Books Autumn 2025
On the day of Alec Salter’s fiftieth birthday party, just before Christmas 1990, his wife Charlotte vanishes. Most of the small English village of Glensted is at the party for hours before anyone realizes Charlotte is missing. While Alec brushes off her disappearance, their four children, especially fifteen-year-old Etty, grow increasingly anxious as the cold winter hours become days and she doesn’t return. When Charlotte’s coat is found by the river, they fear the worst. Then the body of the Salters’ neighbour, Duncan Ackerley, is found floating in the river by his son Morgan and Etty. The police investigate and conclude that Duncan and Charlotte were having an affair before he killed her and committed suicide.
Superstar footballer Luca Bruni is being blackmailed for a night of lust he swears he didn’t participate in…except the ransom photo denies that. A media darling on and off the field, he has powerful charisma, a perfect home life he’ll do anything to protect, and more money than he knows what to do with. He’s determined to defy the extortion racket. When Detective Superintendent Jack Hawksworth learns that the cunning mastermind behind this crime has already swindled a dozen of the world’s most highly prized male athletes, he is instructed to keep the situation from escalating and prevent a media frenzy.
It’s 1914 and Molly Dunnage’s burgeoning corsetry business is starting to take off, thanks to some high-profile supporters. She’s marching with Melbourne’s suffragists for better conditions for women everywhere. And her family, her eccentric, confounding, adored father and aunt, are turning their minds to country retirement.
But as the clouds of war gather and an ominous figure starts skulking in the shadows of her life, Molly’s dreams begin to falter. Then, when true love drops out of the sky and into her arms, her hopes for her life and the world are entirely upended.
A car crash victim clings to life and is rushed to hospital but can’t be saved. Hours later, her corpse is stolen from the morgue. No one knows who the dead woman was or why her body was taken. Detective Sergeant Gemma Woodstock is back in her hometown of Smithson on maternity leave when the bizarre incident occurs. She is intrigued by the case but reluctant to get involved, despite the urging of her journalist friend Candy Fyfe. But in the days after the body goes missing, the town is rocked by another shocking crime and Gemma can’t resist joining the investigation. Candy and Gemma follow the clues the dead woman left behind.
After an uneventful Friday at the Dublin office, Cathal faces into the long weekend and takes the bus home. There, his mind agitates over a woman named Sabine with whom he could have spent his life, had he acted differently. All evening, with only the television and a bottle of champagne for company, thoughts of this woman and others intrude and the true significance of this particular date is revealed.
The winner of the Booker Prize 2024, Orbital deftly snapshots one day in the lives of six women and men traveling through space. Selected for one of the last space station missions of its kind before the program is dismantled, these astronauts and cosmonauts from America, Russia, Italy, Britain, and Japan have left their lives behind to travel at a speed of over seventeen thousand miles an hour as the earth reels below.
We glimpse moments of their earthly lives through brief communications with family, their photos and talismans; we watch them whip up dehydrated meals, float in gravity-free sleep, and exercise in regimented routines to prevent atrophying muscles; we witness them form bonds that will stand between them and utter solitude. Most of all, we are with them as they behold and record their silent blue planet. Their experiences of sixteen sunrises and sunsets and the bright, blinking constellations of the galaxy are at once breathtakingly awesome and surprisingly intimate.
In the wake of his parents’ tragic deaths in a house fire, fourteen-year-old Richard Elauved has been sent to live with his aunt and uncle in the remote, insular town of Ballantyne. Richard quickly earns a reputation as an outcast, and when a classmate named Tom goes missing, everyone suspects the new, angry boy is responsible for his disappearance. No one believes him when he says the telephone booth out by the edge of the woods sucked Tom into the receiver like something out of a horror movie. No one, that is, except Karen, a beguiling fellow outsider who encourages Richard to pursue clues the police refuse to investigate.
He traces the number that Tom called from the phone booth to an abandoned house in the Black Mirror Wood. There he catches a glimpse of a terrifying face in the window. And then the voices begin to whisper in his ear . . .
The Moon will soon return. Whether this heralds the destruction of humankind or something worse will depend on two women. Essun has inherited the power of Alabaster Tenring. With it, she hopes to find her daughter Nassun and forge a world in which every orogene child can grow up safe.
For Nassun, her mother’s mastery of the Obelisk Gate comes too late. She has seen the evil of the world, and accepted what her mother will not admit: that sometimes what is corrupt cannot be cleansed, only destroyed.
Three terrible things happen in a single day. Essun, a woman living an ordinary life in a small town, comes home to find that her husband has brutally murdered their son and kidnapped their daughter. Meanwhile, mighty Sanze, the world-spanning empire whose innovations have been civilization’s bedrock for a thousand years, collapses as most of its citizens are murdered to serve a madman’s vengeance. And worst of all, across the heart of the vast continent known as the Stillness, a great red rift has been torn into the heart of the earth, spewing ash enough to darken the sky for years. Or centuries.
For thousands of generations the wellbeing of Australia’s First Peoples was grounded in the sacred lands of Mother Earth. Good health occurred naturally because lifestyle and diet were connected to Country and culture. Colonisation damaged this connection, but much is being done to rebuild it.
Health explores concepts that are not tied to Western practices, as it delves into birthing, end-of-life care and other Indigenous cultural rituals. The authors highlight the role of Aboriginal leadership and Eldership in decision making about health care and explore the strength of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander resistance and resilience.
Through their storytelling and their decades of research and health practice, Shawana Andrews, Sandra Eades and Fiona Stanley show how Aboriginal knowledges foster a path for self-determined healthy futures.
A razor-sharp polemic which offers an entirely new understanding of our bodies, ourselves, and our place in the universe, Natural Causes describes how we over-prepare and worry way too much about what is inevitable. One by one, Ehrenreich topples the shibboleths that guide our attempts to live a long, healthy life from the importance of preventive medical screenings to the concepts of wellness and mindfulness, from dietary fads to fitness culture.
But Natural Causes goes deeper into the fundamental unreliability of our bodies and even our “mind-bodies,” to use the fashionable term. Starting with the mysterious and seldom-acknowledged tendency of our own immune cells to promote deadly cancers, Ehrenreich looks into the cellular basis of aging, and shows how little control we actually have over it. We tend to believe we have agency over our bodies, our minds, and even over the manner of our deaths. But the latest science shows that the microscopic subunits of our bodies make their own “decisions,” and not always in our favour.
Dave Winter is a vainglorious, ageing rock and roll musician who is well past his “use-by-date” but after a successful stint as a support act, he thinks he might on the road to a comeback. He meets a young woman who make him think that anything is possible; but then Dave likes to keep his relationships simple and is most comfortable when living in the past, playing his old hits and sharing company with his rogue cockatoo, Kato.
Set against the backdrop of inner suburban Melbourne and the streets of Seminyak, we witness Dave’s domestic world turn upside down after an event that changes the world and the people he cares about forever.
Grace is a thief – a good one. She was taught by experts and she’s been practising since she was a kid. She specialises in small, high-value items; stamps, watches and she knows her Jaeger-LeCoultres from her Patek Philippes. But it’s a solitary life, always watchful, always moving. It’s not the life she wants.
Lying low after a run-in with an old associate, Grace walks into Erin Mandel’s rural antiques shop and sees a chance for something different. A normal job. A place to call home. But someone is looking for Erin. And someone’s looking for Grace, too. And they are both, in their own ways, very dangerous men.
Max didn’t believe in an afterlife. Until he died. Now, as a reluctant ghost trying to work out why he remains, he watches his girlfriend Hannah lost in grief in the flat they shared and begins to realise how much of her life was invisible to him.
In the weeks and months before Max’s death, Hannah is haunted by the secrets she left Australia to escape. A relationship with Max seems to offer the potential of a different story, but the past refuses to stay hidden. It finds expression in the untold stories of the people she grew up with, the details of their lives she never knew and the events that broke her family apart and led her to Max.
For Broome detective Dan Clement, it seems that crime is as plentiful as wet season rain.
When his sergeant is beaten up, and a woman is brutally assaulted, it seems like the same two suspects are behind both incidents. But when a woman’ s hand is discovered in crocodile-infested waters, things take a macabre turn.
The stakes rise sky-high as Dan races against time to solve this complex and puzzling case.
Trouwerner is an inviting yarn between Elder Aunty Patsy Cameron, the 28th Tasmanian Governor Kate Warner, and journalist Martin Flanagan. It weaves through the coming-into-being time, Trouwerner’s colonisation and the lies of history, to the power of truth-telling and hope for the future. It is a story of kinship and respect, of realism and optimism, welcoming the reader into the conversation.
“Down the gravel road where Patsy lived as a child is a stretch of tall bush. Like a stage curtain, it hides the vista of Franklin Sound. Walking through that bush with Patsy is like entering a crowded room where you are a stranger and your companion seems to know everyone.”
Many cultural and religious traditions expect those who are grieving to step away from the world. In contemporary life, we are more often met with red tape and to-do lists. This is exactly what happened to Geraldine Brooks when her partner of more than three decades, Tony Horwitz just sixty years old and, to her knowledge, vigorous and healthy collapsed and died on a Washington, D. C. sidewalk.
After spending their early years together in conflict zones as foreign correspondents, Geraldine and Tony settled down to raise two boys on Martha’s Vineyard. The life they built was one of meaningful work, good humour, and tenderness, as they spent their days writing and their evenings cooking family dinners or watching the sun set with friends at Lambert’s Cove. But all of this came to an abrupt end when, on Memorial Day 2019, Geraldine received the phone call we all dread. The demands were immediate and many. Without space to grieve, the sudden loss became a yawning gulf.
Three years later, she booked a flight to a remote island off the coast of Australia with the intention of finally giving herself the time to mourn. In a shack on a pristine, rugged coast she often went days without seeing another person. There, she pondered the varied ways those of other cultures grieve, such as the people of Australia’s First Nations, the Balinese, and the Iranian Shiites, and what rituals of her own might help to rebuild a life around the void of Tony’s death.
Bennelong and Phillip were leaders of their two sides in the first encounters between Britain and Indigenous Australians, Phillip the colony’s first governor, and Bennelong the Eora leader. The pair have come to represent the conflict that flared and has never settled. Fullargar’s account is also the first full biography of Bennelong of any kind and it challenges many misconceptions, among them that he became alienated from his people and that Phillip was a paragon of Enlightenment benevolence. It tells the story of the men’s marriages, including Bennelong’s best-known wife, Barangaroo, and Phillip’s unusual domestic arrangements, and places the period in the context of the Aboriginal world and the demands of empire. To present this history afresh, Bennelong & Phillip relates events in reverse, moving beyond the limitations of typical Western ways of writing about the past, which have long privileged the coloniser over the colonised. Bennelong’s world was hardly linear at all, and in Fullagar’s approach his and Phillip’s histories now share an equally unfamiliar framing.
Malaya, 1949.
After studying law at Cambridge and time spent helping to prosecute Japanese war criminals, Yun Ling Teoh seeks solace among the jungle fringed plantations of Northern Malaya where she grew up as a child.
Beautiful Assassin is a stunning, relentlessly thrilling, and richly evocative historical novel.
A gripping tale of secrets and suspicion as a beautiful Russian woman, one of World War Two’s most decorated snipers, is caught between her government’s deadly intrigues and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.
Join the largest manhunt ever mounted in Victorian police history. On 16 August 1998, Sergeant Gary Silk and Senior Constable Rodney Miller were shot dead while on duty. The Victorian policemen had been staking out a restaurant in Moorabbin as part of an operation aiming to snare two serial bandits who’d been targeting fast-food restaurants around the city’s southeast. A member of that team, Detective Senior Constable Joe D’Alo, has collaborated with writer David Astle to give the reader a rare chance to enter a dramatic chapter of Australian police history, and take you on the full investigative journey that took several years to reach its dramatic conclusion.
Four years ago, in the small town of Birravale, Eliza Daley was murdered. Within hours, her killer was caught. Wasn’t he?
So reads the opening titles of Jack Quick’s new true-crime documentary. A skilled producer, Jack knows that the bigger the conspiracy, the higher the ratings and he claims Curtis Wade was convicted on flimsy evidence and shoddy police work. Millions of viewers agree. Just before the final episode, Jack uncovers a minor detail that may prove Curtis guilty after all. Convinced it will ruin his show, Jack disposes of the evidence and delivers the finale unedited, leading to Curtis’s eventual release. Then a new victim is found bearing horrifying similarities to the original murder. Has Jack just helped a killer walk free?
Determined to set things right, Jack returns to Birravale looking for answers. But with his own secrets lurking just beneath the surface, Jack knows more than anyone what a fine line it is between fact and fiction. Between life and death.
Malcolm Turnbull’s campaign against Scott Morrison and the Liberal Party is one of the greatest acts of revenge in Australian political history. This account explores the egos, deception and thwarted power that has left a trail of personal destruction across the political world. Friends have been turned into enemies, alliances destroyed and reputations shattered.
Time will tell whether Turnbull’s revenge brings down his own political party and sets Australia on a different course but the discourse has changed forever.
Alzheimer’s is the great global epidemic of our time, affecting millions worldwide: there are more than 5 million people diagnosed in the US alone. And as our population ages, scientists are working against the clock to find a cure.
Neuroscientist Joseph Jebelli is among them. His beloved grandfather had Alzheimer’s and now he’s written the book he needed then, a very human history of this frightening disease. But In Pursuit of Memory is also a thrilling scientific detective story that takes you behind the headlines. Jebelli’s quest takes us from nineteenth-century Germany and post-war England, to the jungles of Papua New Guinea and the technological proving grounds of Japan; through America, India, China, Iceland, Sweden, and Colombia. Its heroes are scientists from around the world, many of whom he’s worked with and the brave patients and families who have changed the way that researchers think about the disease.
This compelling insider’s account shows vividly why Jebelli feels so hopeful about a cure, but also why our best defence in the meantime is to understand the disease. In Pursuit of Memory is a clever, moving, eye-opening guide to the threat one in three of us faces now.
Hugh Mackay has spent his entire working life asking Australians about their values, motivations, ambitions, hopes and fears. Now, in The Good Life, he addresses the ultimate question: What makes a life worth living?
His conclusion is provocative. The good life is not the sum of our security, wealth, status, postcode, career success and levels of happiness. The good life is one defined by our capacity for selflessness, the quality of our relationships and our willingness to connect with others in a useful way.
Mackay examines what is known as the Golden Rule through the prisms of religion, philosophy, politics, business and family life. And he explores the numerous and often painful ways we distract ourselves from this central principle: our pursuit of pleasure, our attempts to perfect ourselves and our children, and our conviction that we can have our lives under control.
A collection of autobiographical essays by 22 women active in areas such as women’s issues politics, the law, the arts, and the media.
Contributors include Lynne Spender, Kay Setches and Moira Rayner. The editor is a Melbourne writer and lawyer.
Many people wanting to write do not know where to begin.
Carmel Bird has taught writing to a wide audience and understands the difficulties facing the new writer. Dear Writer … Revisited, is a collection of letters to an aspiring author, speaks on the one hand about writer’s block, about plots, about publishers, and on the other hand, about the nature of fiction, offering the inspiration required for writing.
Keen to escape the pressures of city life, Marsali Swift and her husband William are drawn to Listowel, a glorious historic mansion in the seemingly tranquil small town of Muckleton. There is time to read, garden, decorate, play chess and befriend the locals. Yet one night Listowel is robbed, and soon after a neighbour is murdered. The violent history of the couple’s adopted Goldfields town is revealed, and plans for a new goldmine emerge.
Atmospheric and beguiling this is a novel the seduces the reader with mysteries and beauties but also speaks of something much larger. The planet is in trouble, but is the human race up to the challenge? Are Marsali and William walking blindfold into a hostile world?
Bill Garner reminds us that Australia was settled as a campsite: the nation was born in a tent. But while Europeans brought tents, they did not bring camping. Australia had been a camping place for millennia. For more than a hundred years, settlers, women as well as men, colonised the country by living under canvas. It changed them into a new sort of native Australian. It gave them a feel for the place, a wry can-do attitude, and a lasting taste for equality. And it led to a sense of belonging.
Born in a Tent takes the story from the campfire to the gas bottle, from a tarp slung on saplings to polymer tents and aluminium poles. It reveals how deeply our camping holidays connect us to the land, to the past, and to one another.
The Comfort of Water, Maya Ward’s lyrical exploration of her river as it winds through the city and the wild is a revelation, a testament to the fact that the greatest of worlds are often at our doorstep. Its author understands the power of the natural world to transform lives, and writes about the connection between a river and the self with humility, humour, and a clear-headed wisdom. The telling of her own journey and that of her fellow walkers is seamlessly woven together with ecological and cultural history, the revelation of the pilgrim’s path and the unknowable depth of Aboriginal myth. Through trekking this Wurundjeri Songline, this ancient, ever-renewing river, she discovers rich possibilities of belonging, and shares how a river can nourish the passion and resilience required to transform our world.
The Burrow follows members of the Lee family as they navigate grief and hope in their quiet Australian Jin, an emergency physician and father; Amy, a published author and mother; Lucie, their bookish and introverted ten-year-old; and Pauline, Amy’s mother who’s trying to make amends.
Racked with grief for Ruby, Lucie’s baby sister who died in a shocking accident, the family adopts a rabbit in the hopes of bringing much-needed cheer to their home. At first, each family member benefits from the distraction of a new and needy creature, but when a violent home invasion breaks their fragile sense of peace, the family is forced to confront the terrible circumstances surrounding Ruby’s death.