Debut Fiction

1650: The Black Forest, Wurttemberg. Fifteen years after the witch in the gingerbread house, Greta and Hans are struggling to get by. Their father and stepmother are long dead, Hans is deeply in debt from gambling, and the countryside lies in ruin, its people recovering in the aftermath of a brut...

Primrose Li is torn - between her past and her present, her first love and her current love, duty and desire, fear and freedom. One day, as she's almost come apart at the seams, she takes an unexpected detour to her local golf course. Slowly, this sport - which she is terrible at - becomes her me...

Anam is a novel about memory and inheritance, colonialism and belonging, home and exile. A grandson tries to learn the family story. But what kind of story is it? Is it a prison memoir, about the grandfather imprisoned without charge or trial by a revolutionary government? Is it an oral history o...

Gordon Parker is just an eager eighteen-year-old Australian boy desperate to fight for his country, and Nobuko 'Cherry' Sakuramoto is a sixteen-year-old girl struggling to survive in Japan in the aftermath of World War II. But when they fall in love, they change the course of history. When Gordon...

Girl is spending the spring at an artist's residency in Scotland. Far from her home in Australia and her tight-knit Malaysian family, she is meant to be writing a postcolonial novel and working on a PhD on the poetry of Sylvia Plath. But she can't stop thinking about her upbringing and the storie...

In her work as a 'death doula', Clover Brooks ushers people peacefully through their last days, collecting their final words into three notebooks: Advice, Confessions And Regrets. But Clover spends so much time with the dying that she's forgotten how to live... Can her clients' hard-won wisdom --...

In this striking collection of stories, the award-winning John Morrissey investigates colonialism and identity without ever losing sight of his characters' humanity. Brilliantly imagined and masterfully observed, Firelight marks the debut of a writer we will be reading for decades to come.

I looked at the streets of Yagoona through eyes stinging with melted Maybelline liquid liner. Yagoona looked back at me, the wannabe hipster who dreamed of moving to a share house in the inner west, and cackled. Funny Ethnics catapults readers into the sprawling city-within-a-city that is Western...

A witty, profound and painfully relatable debut novel exploring solitude, desire, and the allure of chasing something that promises nothing. Hera Stephen is clawing through her mid-twenties, working as an underpaid comment moderator in an overly air-conditioned newsroom by day and kicking around ...

Set in the pristine, precarious world of MoMA, The Modern is a brilliantly wry and insightful debut about art, sexuality, commitment and whether being on the right path can lead to the wrong place. Things seem to be working out for Sophia in New York: having come from Australia to be at the centr...

"At 27, Naomi is just trying to be a normal person. A normal person who works at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, who cares for lost things, found things, sacred things and her family. A person who finds herself going on bad blind dates, having cringe-worthy sex, a tumultuous, toxic affair, and fal...

Council employee Lorrie Hope has a great partner, two adorable kids and absolutely no idea what to do with her life. This Friday, she's hoping for change: it's launch day for her big work project, and she's applied for a promotion she's not entirely sure she wants. Meanwhile, her best friend, Ale...

With DS Manolis on leave in Greece, Senior Constable Sparrow receives a phone call from a man who wants to turn himself in. Bob is sixty-five years old, confined to a Perth nursing home. But thirty years ago, he killed a man in the remote northern Kimberley mining region. He offers to show Sparro...

Tessa is a thoroughbred. A young, brilliant barrister. She has worked her way up from a working-class background to be at the top of her game: defending, cross-examining and lighting up the shadows of doubt in any case. Her masterful line of questioning in the courtroom has netted Tessa win after...

A young woman tries to figure out if she's the best (a creative genius) or if she's maybe just the worst (completely delusional). I'd be in heaven but on the edge of a deeper misery than ever, I'd be on top of the world and then they'd ask me, did you make the right choice Kim? Are you currently,...

After fleeing to Melbourne in the wake of a breakup, all Ana has to show for herself is an unfulfilling job at an overly enthusiastic tech start-up and one particularly questionable dating app experience. Then she meets Evan. Charming, kind and financially responsible, Evan is a complete aberrati...

Eighteen-year-old Aaron is charismatic, resourceful and addicted to heroin. His mum has kicked him out of home in a last-ditch move to help him get straight, and he wanders the streets of South Melbourne, living on his wits and sleeping rough, all the while chasing drugs, dreams and love. Despera...

When the ground beneath your feet is always shifting, how can you ever know where you belong? Jamilah has always believed she knows where her home is: in a house above a paint shop on the outskirts of Beirut, with her large, chaotic, loving family. But she soon learns that as Palestinian refugees...

1788, Gadigal country. On a steamy hot day in January, seven Aboriginal men, Elder statesmen representing the tribes from around Sydney, gather at Warrane. Ships of a type which have never seen before are anchored in the harbour. They meet to discuss their response to these Visitors. All day, the...

"When I was a child, I loved old men, and I could tell that they also loved me." And so we meet our deliciously incisive narrator: a popular English professor whose husband, a charismatic husband at the same small liberal arts college is under investigation for his inappropriate relationships wit...