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The Dancer: A biography for Philippa Cullen (Evelyn Juers, Giramondo)
Released October 2021
Dead in 1975 at 25 years old, the Australian avant-garde dancer, teacher and artist Philippa Cullen lived a tragically short life. And yet, at the time, her artistic activity cast... Read more
Social Queue (Kay Kerr, Text)
Released October 2021
Neurodiverse teenager Zoe is undertaking an internship at an online media company when her first assignment, about the struggles of navigating the online dating scene as an autistic person, goes... Read more
A Duck Called Brian (Al Murphy, Scholastic)
Released October 2021
Brian the duck is unique—unlike all his yellow duck friends, he is bright blue. When Brian wakes up one morning to find he has run out of his favourite cereal,... Read more
My Brother Ben (Peter Carnavas, UQP)
Released October 2021
Acclaimed Australian children’s writer Peter Carnavas has followed up his wonderful first novel The Elephant with another book equally full of heart. An ode to sibling relationships, growing up and the natural world, My... Read more
Leaping into Waterfalls: The enigmatic Gillian Mears (Bernadette Brennan, A&U)
Released October 2021
Gillian Mears’s comparatively short life is truly a gift for the brave biographer. A fiction writer of immense talent, Mears received a bounty of accolades, grants and awards, but was... Read more
Permafrost (S J Norman, UQP)
Released October 2021
Permafrost is a decadent, artistic delight, full of sensory pleasure for the reader. S J Norman, a visual and performance artist who won the inaugural Kill Your Darlings Manuscript Award with this collection, makes a... Read more
Bodies of Light (Jennifer Down, Text)
Released October 2021
Bodies of Light is Jennifer Down’s third book and her best yet. It begins with fierce, ageing Maggie (now living in the US under a new identity) being prompted to revisit... Read more
How to Make Friends: A Bear’s Guide (Cat Rabbit, Berbay)
Released October 2021
Bear loves writing, drawing and collecting stickers. But with only the company of her toys, Bear is a bit lonely and would like to make some friends. She sets off... Read more
Dark Rise (C S Pacat, A&U)
Released October 2021
Will is on the run from the men who killed his mother. When a terrifying artefact is unleashed on the Thames docks, Will finds himself thrust into a hidden world... Read more
Scary Monsters (Michelle de Kretser, A&U)
Released October 2021
Montpellier, France, 1981. Twenty-two-year-old Lili is teaching English at a local high school and navigating a new experience of displacement in her adopted European home—after emigrating to Australia with her... Read more
The Stoning (Peter Papathanasiou, Transit Lounge)
Released October 2021
At dawn one Sunday, homicide detective George Manolis is woken with a call: a schoolteacher has been murdered in the outback town of Cobb, and the local police need his... Read more
Out Here: An anthology of Takatāpui & LGBTQIA+ writers from Aotearoa (ed by Chris Tse & Emma Barnes, Auckland University Press)
Released October 2021
The whakataukī (Māori proverb) ‘ka mua, ka muri’ means ‘to walk backwards into the future’; we look to the past to inform our future. Out Here: An anthology of Takatāpui & LGBTQIA+ writers from... Read more
The Accidental Penguin Hotel (Andrew Kelly, illus by Dean A Jones, Wild Dog)
Released October 2021
The fairy penguins, or little penguins, that nest on the breakwater in St Kilda, Victoria haven’t always been there—precisely because the breakwater itself was only built in the 1950s. The... Read more
Into the Rip (Damien Cave, Scribner)
Released October 2021
Damien Cave’s Into the Rip considers how we calculate and cope with risk in Australia. As the first bureau chief of the New York Times Australian outpost, Cave leverages his journalistic point... Read more
The Curlew’s Eye (Karen Manton, A&U)
Released September 2021
A poisoned dam, a crumbling abandoned homestead, encounters with a mysterious girl and the pull of a haunting landscape are all woven together in this literary Australian Gothic debut from Karen Manton.... Read more
self/less (AViVA, Macmillan)
Released October 2021
self/less is the debut novel by self-described multidisciplinary artist AViVA, whose music has a strong online following. Seventeen-year-old Teddy has lived a privileged childhood in the totalitarian city of Metropolis,... Read more
Dragon Skin (Karen Foxlee, A&U)
Released October 2021
Dragon Skin is the much-anticipated new novel by Karen Foxlee, author of cherished modern classics including the internationally successful Lenny’s Book of Everything. Foxlee is skilled at writing brave yet vulnerable young... Read more
Love & Virtue (Diana Reid, Ultimo)
Released October 2021
Two young women. An elite residential college. Michaela and Eve are fundamentally different: Michaela is a reserved scholarship student, while Eve, an outgoing envelope-pusher, is brash, bold and beautiful. Despite... Read more
In Moonland (Miles Allinson, Scribe)
Released September 2021
Miles Allinson’s accomplished second novel—the follow-up to his moving and deeply personal 2015 debut Fever of Animals—is an ambitious and gripping story of parenthood, utopias and environmental collapse, told across several interconnected narratives. The narrator of... Read more
New Australian Fiction 2021 (ed by Rebecca Starford, Kill Your Darlings)
Released September 2021
Kill Your Darlings’ third annual short fiction anthology, New Australian Fiction 2021, brims with stories—by diverse authors both emerging and established—that traverse a wide array of topics. These stories probe... Read more
