- The Unforgiving City – Maggie Joel
Colonial Sydney in the final weeks of the 19th century: a city striving for union and nationhood but dogged by divisions so deep they threaten to derail, not just the Federation, but the colony itself. There are chasms opening too when a clandestine note reaches the wrong hands in the well-to-do household of aspiring politician Alasdair Dunleavy and his wife, Eleanor. Below stairs, their maid Alice faces a desperate situation with her wayward sister.
Colourful, immediate and involving, this is the sweeping story of three people, their passions and ambitions, and the far-flung ripples their choices will cause. Despite sharing a house, Eleanor, Alice and Alasdair are each alone in their torment and must each find some solution, but at what cost to themselves and those they love?
- A Single Thread – Tracy Chevalier
Violet Speedwell, mourning for both her fiancé and her brother and regarded by society as a ‘surplus woman’ unlikely to marry, resolves to escape her suffocating mother and strike out alone. As the almost unthinkable threat of a second Great War appears on the horizon, Violet collects a few secrets of her own that could just change everything.
- Home Truths – Susan Lewis
Angie Watts used to have everything. A new home. A beloved husband. Three adored children. Now her son is missing. Her daughter is looking for help in dangerous places. And Angie is fighting just to keep a roof over their heads.
- The Arrangement – Robyn Harding
Natalie, an art student in New York City, is struggling to pay her bills when a friend makes a suggestion: Why not find a sugar daddy – a wealthy, older man who will pay her for dates, and a monthly allowance.
- Doxology – Nell Zink
As the ’90s wane, three New Yorker friends share in one another’s successes. Then, on September 11, 2001, the city’s unfathomable devastation coincides with a shattering personal loss for the trio. In the aftermath, baby Flora comes of age, navigating a charged political landscape and discovering a love of the natural world. When the country faces an astonishing new threat, Flora’s family will have no choice but to look to the past to rediscover strengths they have long forgotten.
- Devotion – Madeline Stevens
Lonnie is 26, rich, talented and beautiful—with a husband and son to match. Ella is also 26, but lonely, hungry and far from home. Their fates intertwine the day Ella is hired as the family’s nanny and finds herself mesmerised by Lonnie’s girlish affection and disregard for the normal boundaries of friendship and marriage, but soon resentment grows too.
Crackling with sensuality and heart-quickening suspense, Madeline Stevens’ searing debut novel wrangles with themes of class, aspiration, female friendship, manipulation, sexuality and obsession.
- The Dutch House – Ann Patchett
Danny Conroy grows up in the Dutch House, a lavish folly in small-town Pennsylvania taken on by his property developer father. Though his father is distant and his mother is absent, Danny has his beloved sister Maeve. Then one day, their father brings Andrea home. Her arrival will exact a banishment whose reverberations will echo for the rest of their lives. For all that life is full, Danny and his sister are drawn back time and again to the place then can never enter, knocking in vain on the locked door of the past. For behind the mystery of their own enforced exile is that of their mother’s self-imposed one: an absence more powerful than any presence they have known. A story of the powerful bonds of place and time that magnetise and repel us for our whole lives, and the lives of those who survive us.
- Wilde Women – Louise Pentland
Robin Wilde is crazy busy with her exciting hob, parenting and her new man. With so little time to herself and best friend Lacey’s increasing struggle with post-natal depression, the cracks are beginning to show. Cue a team trip to New York. It might just with the tonic Robin, Lacey, Aunti Kath, Edward and even Piper need. But when a huge family secret is exposed, Robin’s life looks even closer to falling apart. The hilarious, heart-breaking and completely unforgettable new novel by the number one bestselling author.
- The Falconer – Dana Czapnik
Seventeen-year-old Lucy Adler, a street-smart, trash-talking baller, is often the only girl on the public courts. Lucy’s inner life is a contradiction; by turns quixotic and cynical, insecure and self-possessed. As Lucy questions notions of success, bristling against her hunger for male approval, she is drawn into the world of a pair of provocative female artists living in New York’s bohemia. This hit US debut is a new coming-of-age classic capturing a young woman’s search for an authentic way to live and love.
- The Collection – Nina Leger
In the anonymous hotel bedrooms of Paris, Jeanne undresses man after man, forgetting faces, names, pleasures, thoughts and all physical attributes but one. In her head, a palace of memories is being built, image by image, lover by new lover. There is no way to impose a story on Jeanne; she escapes it. There is no pitying Jeanne, no lusting after Jeanne, no uncovering the secret to Jeanne; she won’t allow it. The Collection is a candid exploration of sexuality, desire and compulsion.
- Say Say Say – Lila Savage
A beautiful, bracingly honest novel about the triangle formed between a young woman and the couple whose life she enters as a care worker: a story about love and compassion, the fluidity of desire and the myriad paths of devotion. Tightly woven, humane and insightful, tracing the most intimate reaches of a young woman’s heart and mind, Say Say Say is a riveting story about what it means to love, in a world where time is always running out.
- The Club – Takis Wurger
Hans Stichler’s aunt invites him to study at Cambridge, where she teaches. In return, he must help her investigate the Pitt Club, an elite university society whose long legacy of tradition and privilege has been largely unquestioned. But there are secrets in the club’s history and in its present, and Hans finds himself in the inner sanctum of an increasingly dangerous institution. A runaway international bestseller, The Club is a smouldering story of class, privilege, and matters of the heart.
- The Bastille Spy – C. S. Quinn
1789. English spy Attica Morgan’s success freeing kidnapped Britons has earned her acclaim with an underground network. But it has also led to the attention of dangerously powerful men. With France on the cusp of a bloody revolution, Attica is given a new assignment in Paris and soon realises her mission is a great deal deadlier than she bargained for. A mythic treasure has vanished, a strange man named Robespierre wants her dead, and on the city streets, all hell is about to break loose.
- Sarong Party Girls – Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan
A brilliant and utterly engaging novel – Emma set in modern Asia – about a young woman’s rise in the glitzy, moneyed city of Singapore, where old traditions clash with heady modern materialism. Razor-sharp, spunky and vulgarly brand-obsessed, Jazzy is a determined woman. As she fervently pursues her quest to find a white husband, this bombastic yet tenderly vulnerable gold-digger reveals the contentious gender politics and class tensions of her city. With remarkable vibrancy and empathy, Sarong Party Girls brings not only Jazzy but Singapore to dazzling, dizzying life.
- Arturo’s Island – Elsa Morante, translated by Ann Goldstein
Young Arturo grows up in isolation on an island in the Bay of Naples. His mother died, and his wayward father returns sporadically. The boy’s childhood idyll is upended when his father arrives with his new wife, who is only a few years older than Arturo. Their presence awakens passionate feelings and draws the family towards painful conflict. Arturo’s Island is an Italian coming-of-age classic.
- Never Have I Ever – Joshilyn Jackson
It starts as a drunken game at a book group one night. Never Have I Ever…done something I shouldn’t. But Amy Whey did do something terrible when she was a teenager. And now the glamorous newcomer to her neighbourhood wants a lot of money to stay quiet about it. Is Amy going to pay up or fight back? In this escalating game of cat and mouse, there can be only one winner.
- The Truants – Kate Weinberg
When Jess Walker, the middle child of a middle-class family, arrives at a concrete university campus under grey East Anglican skies, her world flares with colour. Drawn into a tightly-knit group of rule-breakers headed up by their maverick teacher, Jess begins to experiment with a new version of herself. But the dynamic between the friends begins to darken as they share secrets, lovers and finally, a tragedy. Jess is thrown up against the question she fears most: what is the true cost of an extraordinary life?
- The Passage of Love – Alex Miller
The Passage of Love is an exquisitely personal novel of love and creativity from the critically acclaimed, two-time winner of the Miles Franklin award.
- The Woman in the Photograph – Stephanie Butland
An empowering, feminist and moving novel that will change the way you see the world.
- The Rich Man’s House – Andrew McGahan
Billionaire Walter Richman has built himself his dream home—the Observatory, a mansion like no other mansion—at the foot of the world’s highest mountain in the cold Antarctic waters south of Tasmania. Living a far humbler life is Rita Gausse, the estranged daughter of the architect who designed the Observatory. Rita is surprised, upon her father’s death, to be invited to the Observatory to meet the famous Richman in person.
From the beginning, something doesn’t feel right. Why is Richman so insistent that she come? What does he, and the additional guests he has invited, expect of her? When cataclysmic circumstances intervene to trap Rita and the others in the Observatory, cut off from the outside world, she slowly begins to learn the unsettling—and ultimately horrifying—answers. Andrew McGahan’s eleventh and final novel is a gripping and unique thriller.
- Living with Coco Chanel – Caroline Young
Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel was one of the most influential and ground-breaking fashion designers of the twentieth century. This beautifully illustrated biography tells her remarkable story in a unique and accessible way, examining how the homes and landscapes of her life relate to her work. Featuring designs, drawings, archive imagery and contemporary photography, Living with Coco Chanel provides a fascinating insight into Chanel’s life, work and legacy.
- The Testaments – Margaret Atwood
In this electrifying sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood answers the question that has tantalised readers for decades: What happened to Offred? When the can door slammed on Offred’s future at the end of The Handmaid’s Tale, readers had no way of telling what lay ahead for her—freedom, prison or death. With The Testaments, the wait is over. Margaret Atwood’s sequel picks up the story 15 years after Offred stepped into the unknown, with the explosive testaments of three female narrators from Gilead.
- Lost in the Spanish Quarter – Heddi Goodrich
A poignant, atmospheric coming of age tale of first love.
Told with the intimacy and ferocity of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels and set in the passionate, intense, and crumbling neighbourhood known as the Spanish Quarter of Naples, comes a tale of two students searching for love and belonging in the city they so desperately want to call home.
