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Summer Skin (Kirsty Eagar, A&U)
Released February 2016
Jess is in her second year at university and living at Unity College. This year there is one rule: no sleeping with the boys from Knights College. Not after what... Read more
Clancy of the Undertow (Christopher Currie, Text)
Released December 2015
Clancy of Clancy of the Undertow lives in a small and small-minded town outside of Toowoomba in Queensland. She wrestles with the dilemma of just wanting to be accepted by... Read more
Ask Me Anything (Rebecca Sparrow, UQP)
Released December 2015
What differentiates this book from other teen self-help books is that it speaks unequivocally to young girls. Sixty-five questions were submitted anonymously to YA author Rebecca Sparrow, covering everything from... Read more
Iris and the Tiger (Leanne Hall, Text)
Released February 2016
Twelve-year-old Iris Chen-Taylor is on a mission from her parents: she’s been sent to visit her Great Aunt Ursula in Spain to discover who will inherit her grand estate, and... Read more
American Blood (Ben Sanders, A&U)
Released January 2016
From the opening lines of American Blood you know you’re in the hands of a master storyteller. New Zealand author Ben Sanders (‘The Auckland Trilogy’) throws the reader into the... Read more
First Person Shooter (Cameron Raynes, MidnightSun)
Released February 2016
Jayden and his dad moved to Bridgetown after Jayden’s mum died. It’s a small town where the only booming industry seems to be the meth made by the local bikie... Read more
Tears of the Cheetah (T M Clark, Mira)
Released December 2015
Readers feeling the effects of the recent glut of Australian rural fiction will find a pleasing page-turner in Zimbabwe-born author T M Clark’s latest book. Set in South Africa, Tears... Read more
Dancing in My Dreams: Confronting the Spectre of Polio (Kerry Highley, Monash University Publishing)
Released November 2015
In the first half of the 20th century, polio was a scourge that blighted thousands of lives in Australia. As other infectious diseases were being conquered, polio seemed to be... Read more
Invisible Country: Southwest Australia: Understanding a Landscape (Bill Bunbury, UWA Publishing)
Released December 2015
Bill Bunbury is a notable WA broadcaster and author who has specialised in local, particularly Indigenous, histories since the 1980s. In Invisible History, Bunbury examines the ways European settlement has... Read more
The Last Wilkie’s (Jon Steiner, Spineless Wonders)
Released February 2016
The Last Wilkie’s is a quirky collection of short stories that are by turns funny, dark and troubling. Some are only a few sentences long; others span 10-15 pages. All... Read more
The Things We Keep (Sally Hepworth, Macmillan)
Released January 2016
Imagine the trauma of being diagnosed with dementia in your 30s and placed into aged care. Sally Hepworth explores this tragic premise in her third novel, which avoids excessive sadness... Read more
Island Home (Tim Winton, read by David Tredinnick, Bolinda)
Released November 2015
Tim Winton’s Island Home is a personal and passionate exploration of the Australian landscape and the way it’s shaped Winton’s life and the country as a whole. The book intersperses... Read more
Cherry Season (Trish Morey, Macmillan)
Released December 2015
Trish Morey is the bestselling author of over 30 titles for Mills & Boon. I mention this first as her latest book does bear similarities to this particular brand of... Read more
The Magnificent Life of Miss May Holman (Lekkie Hopkins, Fremantle Press)
Released January 2016
This long overdue biography of May Holman by feminist academic Lekkie Hopkins presents an extraordinary woman: a committed member of ‘the Great Labor family’, talented musician, community activist and eloquent... Read more
Interestingly Enough… The Life of Tom Keneally (Stephany Evans Steggall, Nero)
Released January 1970
At school Thomas Keneally had ambitions to become a writer, a composer, an orator and even the pope. When he decided that he would never ‘be able to undertake the... Read more
Tom Houghton (Todd Alexander, S&S)
Released January 1970
Tom Houghton is a classic first-person coming-of-age novel about a boy with huge dreams. 1986: 12-year-old Tom is a lonely and introverted child. He’s obsessed with Hollywood movie stars, and... Read more
Mister Cassowary (Samantha Wheeler, UQP)
Released October 2015
Flynn has never visited his grandfather’s banana farm and is not terribly excited by the prospect of spending his holidays in the remote beachside town of Mission Beach. However, when... Read more
Adelaide’s Secret World (Elise Hurst, A&U)
Released November 2015
Becoming lost in a picture book and wanting to turn back to the first page again is a very special experience. This is such a book. It doesn’t matter that... Read more
Can a Skeleton Have an X-Ray? (Kyle Hughes-Odgers, Fremantle Press)
Released November 2015
‘What powers the lights? How does sound taste? Who builds the wings for birds to fly?’ These complex but simply worded questions and others like them form the text for... Read more
Emo the Emu (Tony Wilson & Lucia Masciullo, Scholastic)
Released November 2015
Sometimes all it takes is a good title to gain immediate interest, and Tony Wilson’s latest picture book Emo the Emu does exactly that. This ‘gloomy bird on a great... Read more
