Form/Genre: Literary fiction

Abby Solomon may write happy-ever-afters for a living, but doesn’t believe she’ll have her own. But then a surprise visit from her grandmother’s ghost sets her off on a journey she’ll never forget.Grandma Charlotte wants to find her first love, Dave, who she mistakenly thought had died in World W...

'A beautiful, necessary book' ROXANE GAY. 'Echoes of Margaret Atwood's The Edible Woman' IRISH TIMES. Growing up in the suburban hell of Misery Saga, Lizzie has never liked the way she looks. Though she dates guys online, she's afraid to send pictures: no-one wants a fat girl. So Lizzie starts to...

Alternately surreal, funny, ominous, and lyrical, Lou Beach’s 420 Characters offers an experience as dazzling as any in contemporary fiction. Revealing worlds of meaning in single paragraphs, these crystalline miniature stories that began as Facebook status updates mark a new turn in an acclaimed...

In her sweeping debut, Diane C. McPhail offers a powerful, profoundly emotional novel that explores a little-known aspect of Civil War history—Southern Abolitionists—and the timeless struggle to do right even amidst bitter conflict. Judge Matthews is an abolitionist who runs an illegal school for...

'He who turns his ear away from hearing the Torah – even his prayer is an abomination.’ Proverbs 28:9Melbourne 1999: Ezra and Yonatan are best friends whose lives are forever changed when their school, the ultra-Orthodox Jewish Yahel Academy, is rocked by a scandal and they are thrown onto diverg...

Everyone’s favorite Dirty Old Man returns with a new volume of uncollected work. Charles Bukowski (1920–1994), one of the most outrageous figures of twentieth-century American literature, was so prolific that many significant pieces never found their way into his books. Absence of the Hero contai...

Enne Salta was raised as a proper young lady, and no lady would willingly visit New Reynes, the so-called City of Sin. But when her mother goes missing, Enne must leave her finishing school — and her reputation — behind to follow her mother’s trail to the city where no one survives uncorrupted.Fr...

Lynne Sharon Schwartz is a master of tone, deft at creating realistic settings and characters. In Acquainted with the Night, she unleashes sixteen wickedly smart, wholly believable short stories. In the title story, for instance, a man’s nocturnal battle against a floating globule in his eye forc...

Australian soldier Toohey returns from Baghdad in 2003 with shrapnel in his neck, crippled by PTSD and white-knuckling life. In the Iraq of a decade earlier, aspiring pianist Nasim falls from favour with Saddam Hussein and his psychopathic son Uday, triggering a perilous search for safety. In Mel...

We are such volatile creatures that we finally feel the sentiments we feign. First published in 1816, Adolphe is the story of a young man with all the privileges and advantages of a noble birth, bt who's still haunted by the meaninglessness of life. He seeks distraction in the pursuit of the beau...

Holly wears a ring that says True Love Waits and worries because her boyfriend isn’t trying to persuade her otherwise. Then a boy in her English tute invites her to join his book club.Shocked to find herself at ‘sex club’, plunged into in the classics of erotic literature, Holly soon becomes fasc...

Piper draws us deeper and deeper into the compelling story of Tomakazu Ibaraki, a man whose strengths — discretion, honour and loyalty — also lie at the heart of his personal tragedy. -Danielle Wood, winner of the 2002 Australian/Vogel's Literary award for Alphabet of Light and Dark. After Darkne...

A tragedy shatters Coen’s carefully constructed life.“Utterly engrossing. Coen is a hero for our era, darkly struggling amid the aftershocks of loss, but doing so with dignity, humanity, and passion.” — Timothy Taylor, author of The Rule of StephensWhen the airplane piloted by Elias Santos crashe...

Sanna and her ravishing friend Gerti would rather speak of love than politics, but in 1930s Frankfurt, politics cannot be escaped--even in the lady's bathroom. Crossing town one evening to meet up with Gerti's Jewish lover, a blockade cuts off the girls' path--it is the Fürher in a motorcade proc...

When Indigenous lawyer Jasmine decides to take her mother, Della, on a tour of England's most revered literary sites, Jasmine hopes it will bring them closer together and help them reconcile the past. Twenty-five years earlier the disappearance of Jasmine's older sister devastated their tight-kni...

A single mother resorts to extreme measures to protect her young son. A Namibian student undertakes a United Nations internship in the hope of a better future. A recently divorced man starts a running group with members of an online forum for recovering addicts. Ranging from New York to Istanbul,...

The stunning historical fantasy taking the world by storm'Deliciously irresistible' Natasha Lester'Historical fantasy at its best' Belinda Alexandra'Utterly enchanting' Kate Forsyth'Bewitching ... Woods is a powerful new voice in speculative fiction' Publishers Weekly starred review Ginger. Honey...

Seamlessly transitioning between the absurd and the tender-hearted, balancing acerbic humour with sharp emotional depth, Afterparties offers an expansive portrait of the lives of Cambodian-Americans. As the children of refugees carve out radical new paths for themselves in California, they should...

Nahr has been confined to the Cube: nine square metres of glossy grey cinderblock, devoid of time, its patterns of light and dark nothing to do with day and night. Journalists visit her, but get nowhere; because Nahr is not going to share her story with them. The world outside calls Nahr a terror...

Winston closed his eyes with relief. He heard muffled pulses of party noise, but still felt damp and uncomfortable. His brain had turned haywire. At the mirror over the sink he was relieved to find his everyday face and no tell-tale outward sign - febrile flush, scarlet ears, Mr. Hyde eyes. He be...