New Books / Reviews
Reviews of New Books Autumn 2026
One late summer evening in the post-industrial town of East Gladness, Connecticut, nineteen-year-old Hai stands on the edge of a bridge in pelting rain, ready to jump, when he hears someone shout across the river.
The voice belongs to Grazina, an elderly widow succumbing to dementia, who convinces him to take another path. Bereft and out of options, he quickly becomes her caretaker. Over the course of the year, the unlikely pair develops a life-altering bond, one built on empathy, spiritual reckoning, and heartbreak, with the power to alter Hai’s relationship to himself, his family, and a community at the brink.
The world knows Virginia Roberts Giuffre as Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell’s most outspoken victim: the woman whose decision to speak out helped send both serial abusers to prison, whose photograph with Prince Andrew catalysed his fall from grace. But her story has never been told in full, in her own words, until now.
In April 2025, Giuffre took her own life. She left behind a memoir written in the years preceding her death and stated unequivocally that she wanted it published. Nobody’s Girl is the riveting and powerful story of an ordinary girl who would grow up to confront extraordinary adversity.
It is estimated up to 100,000 people died in the frontier wars that raged across Australia for more than 150 years. This is equivalent to the combined total of all Australians killed in foreign battles to date. But there are few memorials marking these first, domestic wars.
This is the first book to tell the story of the continental sweep of massacres, guerilla warfare, resistance and the contests of firearms and traditional Aboriginal weaponry as Indigenous nations resisted colonial occupation of their lands, territory by territory. At stake was the sovereignty of an entire country.
Retired academic Martin Pottinger’s romantic aspirations for the delectable head of his former university’s archaeology department, Professor Mary Blake, seem about to be realised. If only he could devise a plan to manage the demands of his eccentric elderly mother, Edwina.
Recently bereaved Grace Cavendish spends her days helping out at All Souls Church, making it her mission to drown out the Reverend Rod’s tone-deaf hymn-singing and give each funeral recipient a hearty send-off. Yet the peace she craves remains elusive despite the comforts offered by psychic medium Rhondda and her eight-year-old son, Hudson. When Martin and Grace meet and bond at an All Souls service, they unwittingly set off a chain of events with far-reaching consequences. They become funeral crashers. But who could have predicted that crashing funerals might have such life-changing and life-affirming outcomes?
In the middle of Missing Persons Week, teenager Max Galbraith disappears after a party at the two-up ring on the outskirts of Kalgoorlie. With hundred-year-old mine shafts hidden in the area, no one can sure whether he become lost while he was under the influence of drugs or if something more sinister has happened. Lily Carter, a talk show radio host, receives information about Brendan Cook, another Kalgoorlie teenager who disappeared in similar circumstances the year before. But the police didn’t launch a full-scale search for Brendan. Why not?
Enter Detective Angie Sullivan, new to Kalgoorlie and yet to understand how the town works. With no clear links between the two cases, and Lily accusing the police of incompetence, the town is tipped into uproar.
Things are going well for Matt Buchanan. After some hard times, life is peaceful as sole-charge constable for the small, isolated settlement of Haast on New Zealand’s wild West Coast. He’s made friends among the locals, won their trust. He keeps their little world safe. And he’s working in spectacular surroundings: the fierce Tasman Sea; the dense beech forest; the dark, cold swamps and the snowy Southern Alps.
But then his much-loved predecessor, Gus, is discovered beside a river with a bullet through his head. He’d been looking into a disturbing murder-suicide from 1978: the parents’ bodies were found, but not their daughter’s. Suspecting a darker truth, Matt is certain the answers can’t be too far away in this close-knit community. How does former forest service ranger Liam, with his gang links, fit into the story? What about Joe, the alcoholic hermit whose knowledge and intelligence seem so at odds with his appearance and lifestyle?
When international lawyer Matilda ‘Tilly’ Marr is summoned back from London to a small town in South Australia’s wine country, she expects to close a billion-dollar deal in a matter of days. Instead, she’s handed an ultimatum: stay for a month and serve as the town’s only solicitor, or watch the opportunity slip away.
Setting up shop in the Beechwood Cafe, Tilly braces for a brief detour, but life in Watervale Downs soon proves to be anything but simple. Drawn into the orbit of three very different women, fierce matriarch Bev Jackson, fallen TV star Fenna de Vries, and warm-hearted librarian Jane Robertson, Tilly unexpectedly finds herself joining a local writing group and training with the country fire service. Slowly, friendships form, long-held secrets surface, and the rhythms of country life begin to change her in ways she didn’t anticipate.
Islamic Art is a product of certain forceful factors that created a cultural milieu which was centred on the religious ethos and intellectual affinities inspired by Islam and its followers.
No art can grow in isolation and nor did Islamic art. From its early manifestations to this date, it has taken from other cultural traditions and has also given to different social structures and visual languages of the world. This book looks at the artistic output of the Islamic civilization through the centuries, from the time of its inception to its interpretations in the contemporary world.
Eva Luna is the daughter of a professor’s assistant and a snake-bitten gardener, she is born poor, orphaned at an early age, and working as a servant.
Eva is a naturally gifted and imaginative storyteller who meets people from all stations and walks of life. Though she has no wealth, she trades her stories like currency with people who are kind to her. In this novel, she shares the story of her own life and introduces readers to a diverse and eccentric cast of characters including the Lebanese émigré who befriends her and takes her in; her unfortunate godmother, whose brain is addled by rum and who believes in all the Catholic saints and a few of her own invention; a street urchin who grows into a petty criminal and, later, a leader in the guerrilla struggle; a celebrated transsexual entertainer who instructs her in the ways of the adult world; and a young refugee whose flight from postwar Europe will prove crucial to Eva’s fate.
Will one week in Greece change their lives for ever?
Chef Maria is running a successful cookery school in her home village of Petalidi, Greece but she is also running from the secrets of her past. Food journalist Kayla thought this was going to be just another work trip. But right before she leaves for Greece, she discovers that her whole life is built on a lie. Jewellery-maker Alessandra has always lived according to her own rules despite what it has cost her to do so. But she has just had some devastating news. As these three very different women come together at the house in the olive grove, unlikely friendships blossom and a season of self-discovery begins.
At 9.01 pm, TV presenter Sam Midford delivers the monologue for his popular current affairs show Mr Midnight.
He seems nervous and the crew are convinced he’s about to propose to his girlfriend live on air. Instead, he pulls out a gun and shoots himself in the head. Sam’s grief-stricken brother Harry is convinced his brother was murdered. But how can that be, when one million viewers witnessed Sam pull the trigger?
In September 1969, a fumbling, cranky old church deacon known in the neighbourhood as Sportcoat shuffles into the courtyard of the Causeway Housing project in south Brooklyn, pulls a .38 from his pocket, and in front of everybody shoots the project’s drug dealer at point-blank range.
McBride brings to vivid life the people affected by the shooting: the victim, the African-American and Latinx residents who witnessed it, the white neighbours, the local NYPD cops assigned to investigate what happened, the members of the Five Ends Baptist Church where Sportcoat was deacon, the neighbourhood’s Italian mobsters, and Sportcoat himself.
A collection of twenty-four stories that express Murakami’s mastery of the form.
From the surreal to the mundane, these stories exhibit his ability to transform the full range of human experience in ways that are instructive, surprising, and relentlessly entertaining. Here are animated crows, a criminal monkey, and an iceman, as well as the dreams that shape us and the things we might wish for.
Under a clear blue September sky, America’s financial centre in lower Manhattan became the site of the largest, deadliest terrorist attack in the nation’s history.
It was September 16, 1920. Four hundred people were killed or injured. The country was appalled by the magnitude and savagery of the incomprehensible attack, which remains unsolved to this day.
Someone is targeting Martin Scarsden. They bomb his book launch and shoot up his hometown. Fleeing for his life, he learns that nowhere is safe, not even the outback.
The killers are closing in, and it’s all he can do to survive. But who wants to kill him and why? Can he discover their deadly motives and turn the tables? In a dramatic finale, Martin finds his fate linked to the disgraced ex-wife of a football icon, a fugitive wanted for a decades-old murder, and two nineteenth-century explorers from a legendary expedition.
Raised by a distant father and an understanding but overprotective mother, Vivek suffers disorienting blackouts, moments of disconnection between self and surroundings.
As adolescence gives way to adulthood, Vivek finds solace in friendships with the warm, boisterous daughters of the Nigerwives, foreign-born women married to Nigerian men. But Vivek’s closest bond is with Osita, the worldly, high-spirited cousin whose teasing confidence masks a guarded private life. As their relationship deepens and Osita struggles to understand Vivek’s escalating crisis, the mystery gives way to a heart-stopping act of violence in a moment of exhilarating freedom.
Escher X Nendo | Between Two Worlds is the first major Australian exhibition to feature the extraordinary work of Dutch artist M.C. Escher in dialogue with the work of acclaimed Japanese design studio Nendo.
When Rowland Sinclair is invited to take his yellow Mercedes onto the Marouba Speedway, popularly known as the Killer Track, he agrees without caution or reserve.
But then people start to die. The body of a journalist covering the race is found in a House of Horrors, an English blueblood with Blackshirt affiliations is killed on the race track and it seems that someone has Rowland in their sights. A strange young reporter preoccupied with black magic, a mysterious vagabond, and up-and-coming actor by the name of Flynn and ruthless bookmakers all add mayhem to the mix. With danger presenting at every turn, and the brakes long since disengaged, Rowland Sinclair hurtles towards disaster with an artist, a poet and brazen sculptress along for the ride.
For many centuries, scientists have investigated the “fearful symmetry” that seemed to underlie the Universe. But increasingly, it looks as though life is the result of cosmic asymmetry, and scientists are now preparing to uncover the asymmetries at the heart of the Big Bang. Not only cosmic life but our own everyday variety is full of other examples of asymmetry, from the human body to the molecules of life.
In Lucifer’s Legacy, physicist Frank Close explores the origins of asymmetry from the molecular level to the Universe at large, and asks whether this multitude of examples can be traced back to a single event that took place at the origin of our Universe.
One of the most deeply ingrained beliefs of our age is that perpetual economic growth is the solution to most, if not all, of society’s problem.
In Slow Down or Die, French economist Timothée Parrique brilliantly challenges this myth, demonstrating how producing more won’t solve climate change, poverty, or inequality. In fact, our obsession with growth is accelerating social and ecological collapse. This book proposes a different vision, tracing a path toward a “post-growth” economy where decisions are made collectively and democratically. The goal is not the infinite accumulation of wealth but the creation of a just, equitable, and sustainable society.
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The first love of a teenage girl is a powerful thing, particularly when the object of that desire is her best friend, also a girl. It’s the kind of power that could implode a family, a friendship, a life. On a quiet summer night in Newcastle, 1972, a choice must be to act upon these desires, or suppress them? To live an openly queer life, or to try desperately not to?
Over the following three decades, these two lives almost intersect in pivotal moments, the distance between them at times drawing so thin they nearly collide. Against the backdrop of an era including Australia’s first Mardi Gras and the AIDS pandemic, we see these two lives ebb and flow, with joy and grief and loss and desire, until at last they come together in the most beautiful and surprising of fashions.
Every day, María Dolz stops for breakfast at the same café. And every day she enjoys watching a handsome couple who follow the same routine.
Then one day they aren’t there, and she feels obscurely bereft. It is only later, when she comes across a newspaper photograph of the man, lying stabbed in the street, his shirt half off, that she discovers who the couple are. Some time afterwards, when the woman returns to the café with her children, who are then collected by a different man, and Maria approaches her to offer her condolences, an entanglement begins which sheds new light on this apparently random, pointless death?
One clear ice-cold January morning shortly after dawn, a wolf crosses the border between Poland and Germany. His trail leads all the way to Berlin, connecting the lives of disparate individuals whose paths intersect and diverge.
On an icy motorway eighty kilometres outside the city, a fuel tanker jack-knifes and explodes. The lone wolf is glimpsed on the hard shoulder and photographed by Tomasz, a Polish construction worker who cannot survive in Germany without his girlfriend. Elisabeth and Micha run away through the snow from their home village, crossing the wolf’s tracks on their way to the city. A woman burns her mother’s diaries on a Berlin balcony. And Elisabeth’s father, a famous sculptor, observes the vast skeleton of a whale in his studio and asks: What am I doing here? And why?
In 1987, Miri Ammerman returns to her hometown of Elizabeth, New Jersey, to attend a commemoration of the worst year of her life. Thirty-five years earlier, when Miri was fifteen, and in love for the first time, a succession of airplanes fell from the sky, leaving a community reeling.
Against this backdrop of actual events that Blume experienced in the early 1950s, when airline travel was new and exciting and everyone dreamed of going somewhere, Judy Blume imagines and weaves together a haunting story of three generations of families, friends, and strangers, whose lives are profoundly changed by these disasters. She paints a vivid portrait of a particular time and place, Nat King Cole singing “Unforgettable,” Elizabeth Taylor haircuts, young (and not-so-young) love, explosive friendships, A-bomb hysteria, rumours of Communist threat. And a young journalist who makes his name reporting tragedy. Through it all, one generation reminds another that life goes on.