New Books / Reviews
Reviews of New Books Autumn 2026
Set in London in 1968, The Curtain Twitcher’s Book of Murder follows the lives of the inhabitants of a suburban London street.
But this is no ordinary road. “Ask anyone on Atbara Avenue how well they know their neighbours, and they’ll answer ‘well’. After all, they see each other across the vast distance afforded by close proximity, and that is probably for the best…”. For the best, because Atbara Avenue is a street where, all too often, murder feels like the solution.
January 1942. The Avallon Hotel & Spa has always offered elegant luxury in the wilds of West Virginia, its mountain sweet water washing away all of high society’s troubles.
Local girl-turned-general manager June Porter Hudson has guided the Avallon skilfully through the first pangs of war. The Gilfoyles, the hotel’s aristocratic owners, have trained her well. But when the family heir makes a secret deal with the State Department to fill the hotel with captured Axis diplomats, June must persuade her staff, many of whom have sons and husbands heading to the front lines, to offer luxury to Nazis. With a smile. Meanwhile FBI Agent Tucker Minnick, whose coal tattoo hints at an Appalachian past, presses his ears to the hotel’s walls, listening for the diplomats’ secrets. He has one of his own, which is how he knows that June’s balancing act can have dangerous consequences: the sweet water beneath the hotel can threaten as well as heal.
Alexandra Bouvier is born in Paris in 1900, at the dawn of a new century. From an early age, she is encouraged to think for herself by her enlightened father, a French doctor; her mother, an American nurse; and her maternal grandfather a highly regarded newspaperman back in the Midwest. At age fourteen, Alex’s comfortable life is upended as war erupts across Europe. Her parents follow their sense of duty to the front, performing triage at a field hospital and confronting the horrors of poison gas and trench warfare. The merciless fighting, coupled with the fast-spreading Spanish flu, wreaks havoc on the continent, as well as on Alex’s loved ones. By the time she is eighteen, she has suffered unimaginable losses.
With her grandfather’s support, she attends the University of Chicago and decides to follow his footsteps into journalism. As a newspaper intern she meets reporter Oliver Foster, who is covering the gang wars sparked by Prohibition. He too has known devastating loss, and the two are drawn to each other, though both fear any attachment. As it turns out, Alex has good reason to be cautious.
When African jihadis attack a Nigerian regiment using American weapons, Cabrillo and the Oregon crew are on the case, investigating from Afghanistan to Kuala Lumpur to track a mysterious arms dealer, a genius, or perhaps a devil, known only as the Vendor.
Cabrillo goes undercover to find the Vendor’s base, but his adversary isn’t just an arms smuggler. He’s an arms maker, and Cabrillo just walked into a lethal military game alongside the most dangerous mercenaries in the world, designed to test the Vendor’s cutting-edge AI arsenal. And yet, surviving an arena full of flame-throwing robots isn’t even his biggest problem. The Vendor has an army of high-speed drones headed for a pivotal military site, and if the Oregon crew can’t stop them from releasing a deadly neurotoxin, the entire globe will erupt in conflict.
Autopsies can reveal the secrets of the dead and this victim is sending Scarpetta a message…
Summoned to an unnerving, abandoned theme park to retrieve a body, Dr Kay Scarpetta is devastated to learn that the victim is a man she once loved. While teaching in Rome during the early days of her career, Scarpetta had an intense love affair with Sal Giordano that led to a lifelong friendship.
The murder scene is bizarre, with a crop circle of petals around the body, and Giordano’s skin is strangely red. Scarpetta’s niece Lucy believes he was dropped from an unidentified flying craft. Scarpetta knows an autopsy can reveal the dead’s secrets, but she is shocked to find her friend seems to have deliberately left her a clue.
As the investigators are torn between suspicions of otherworldly forces, and of Giordano himself, Scarpetta detects an explanation closer to home that, in her mind, is far more evil
Western Australia, 1958. A truck rumbles along a lonely outback road. A moment’s inattention, and in a few muddled seconds the lives of the MacBride family are shattered. Instead of leaving them to heal, fate comes back for them in a twist of consequences that will cause one of them to lose their life, and another to sacrifice theirs for the sake of an innocent child.
Set in the expanse of a vast and flat landscape, where the weather is a capricious god and a million-acre sheep station is barely a dot on the map, A Far-flung Life explores the hearts of a handful of isolated souls and the secrets they shield in order to survive.
Western Australia, 1958. A truck rumbles along a lonely outback road. A moment’s inattention, and in a few muddled seconds the lives of the MacBride family are shattered. Instead of leaving them to heal, fate comes back for them in a twist of consequences that will cause one of them to lose their life, and another to sacrifice theirs for the sake of an innocent child.
Set in the expanse of a vast and flat landscape, where the weather is a capricious god and a million-acre sheep station is barely a dot on the map, A Far-flung Life explores the hearts of a handful of isolated souls and the secrets they shield in order to survive.
Morocco, 1928. Eighteen-year-old Frenchwoman Marie-Madeleine is not the kind of woman who goes through life sitting down, something her new husband can attest. Her unconventionalities, rally car driving, flying planes and dabbling in intelligence work for the government, earn her a reputation, but she knows who she is at an adventurer.
Paris, 1938. As Europe teeters on the brink of war, a chance encounter with a mysterious man codenamed Navarre turns Marie-Madeleine’s life upside down. Recruited to help build a resistance network known only as Alliance, she conceals her identity and gender as she navigates a perilous double life away from her children and the man she loves. Capture and death are only a heartbeat away.
Sydney, 1942: a city in wartime. As nightclubs are raided the sly-grog trade thrives and public toilets become the hunting grounds for corrupt police running an entrapment scheme.
As journalists, lawyers and establishment figures close in on this scandal, figures from the city’s demi-monde must reckon with how to survive in dangerous times.
Jane Boleyn watches from the shadows of the Tudor court, where secrets are currency, every choice is dangerous, and even the faintest whisper can seal the fate of queens. For Jane, survival demands playing every role required of her: a loving wife who conceals her doubts, a devoted sister to Anne Boleyn at the height of her power, and an obedient spy who carefully wields her words.
But in a court ruled by ambition and a tyrant’s sword, Jane must rely on her sharp wit and skilful manoeuvring to outthink those around her, knowing that one wrong move could cost her everything.
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Hirsch is checking firearms. The regular police all weapons secured, ammo stored separately, no unauthorised person with keys to the gun safe. He’s checking people, too. The drought is hitting hard in the mid-north, and Hirsch is responsible for the welfare of his scattered flock of battlers, bluebloods, loners and miscreants. He isn’t usually called on for emergency roadside assistance. But with all the other services fully stretched, it’s Hirsch who has to grind his way out beyond the Mischance Creek ruins to where some clueless tourist has run into a ditch.
As it turns out, though, Annika Nordrum isn’t exactly a tourist. She’s searching for the body of her mother, who went missing seven years ago. And the only sense in which she’s clueless is the lack of information unearthed by the cops who phoned in the original investigation. Hirsch owes it to Annika to help, doesn’t he? Not to mention that tackling a cold case beats the hell out of gun audits and admin.
An illustrated history of every kind of industrial enterprise in Bendigo from its earliest settlement.
Includes a chapter on 19th Century working conditions. Includes photographs, bibliography and index.
Teenaged István lives with his mother in a quiet apartment complex in Hungary. Shy and new in town, he is a stranger to the social rituals practiced by his classmates and is soon isolated, drawn instead into a series of events that leave him forever a stranger to peers, his mother, and himself. In the years that follow, István is born along by the goodwill, or self-interest, of strangers, charting a rocky yet upward trajectory that lands him further from his childhood, and the defining events that abruptly ended it, than he could possibly have imagined.
Van Diemen’s Land, 1839. A young woman of means arrives in Hobart, with a young boy in her care.
Leasing an old cottage next to an abandoned vineyard, Caroline Douglas must navigate an insular colony of exiles and opportunists to create a new life on this island of extreme seasons and wild beauty. But Caroline is carrying a secret of such magnitude, it has led her to cross the world, and it will take all she is made of to bring it into the light.
It was a warm October day when his life splintered down the middle. She was gone in a flash. Everything changed forever. For three months, in shock at this horror, he maintained a regime of late-night walks across the city. There came a time when he had walked enough, and so he stopped. Bring Back Yesterday is a love story, and the account of the author finding his footing again after the death of his wife, Helena.
The anecdotes and insights Bob Carr shares will resonate with anyone who has ever been in a long-term relationship or lost a much-loved partner.
This collection of essays and journalism, published together for the first time, spans two turbulent decades.
With her trademark wit and wisdom, Lucashenko reflects on being caught in a siege, on the marginalised lives of prisoners and the urban poor, on Blak identity, Australian literature and on meeting her writing idol. Her non-fiction, like her novels, is deeply engaged with politics, activism, culture and social (in)justice.
Shortly before Christmas in 2018, Tess McCarthy, a hard-working English teacher who never does anything out of the ordinary, flies to Western Australia’s remote Abrolhos Islands.
She is in search of answers both to the infamous Batavia shipwreck and her personal family crises. Amsterdam, 1628. Saskia, an orphaned young Dutchwoman, boards Batavia with relatives, bound for a new and potentially dangerous life in the East Indies only for her world to first collide with Aris Jansz, the ship’s reluctant under surgeon. Tess, Saskia and Aris, their lives linked by secrets that span generations, carry the baggage of past losses and the uncertainty of their futures. And, in the most unlikely circumstances, they find qualities that echo through faith, acceptance, and love.
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.