New Australian Fiction

The conversion was Nick's idea. Nick: so persuasive, ever the optimist, still boyishly handsome. Always on a quest to design the perfect environment, convinced it could heal a wounded soul. The conversion was Nick's idea, but it's Zoe who's here now, in a valley of old coalmines and new vineyards...

For as long as they can remember, Jessica, Norah and Alicia have been told how lucky they are. Rescued from family tragedies and raised by a loving foster mother on an idyllic farming estate, they were given an elusive second chance of a happy family life. But their childhood wasn't the fairy tal...

When someone is taken away, what is left behind? All her life, Till has lived in the shadow of the abduction of a childhood friend and her tormented wondering about whether she could have stopped it. When Till, now twenty-three, senses danger approaching again, she flees her past and the hovering...

Two extraordinary Indigenous stories set five generations apart. When Mulanyin meets the beautiful Nita in Edenglassie, their saltwater people still outnumber the British. As colonial unrest peaks, Mulanyin dreams of taking his bride home to Yugambeh Country, but his plans for independence collid...

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 ...

A family of cat farmers gets the chance to set the felines free. A group of chickens tells it like it is. A female-crewed ship ploughs through the patriarchy. A support group finds solace in a world without men. With her trademark humour, energy, and flair, McKay offers hallucinogenic glimpses of...

'So, was it hard to pretend I was "dead"? Well, my motivation was abundant; it was splendiferous, endless, you might say.' An American actress, renowned for being late, is living with her two cats in a modernist clifftop apartment in Sydney in the late 1980s. The recounting of her story is prompt...

Iris doesn't remember the first time she met Nina. But she remembers the first time she paid attention to her. It was when he did. The first year of high school brought Iris into a type of privilege she'd never felt part of. But then she found her place. The magic of performing in school musicals...

A girl and her mother have been on the run for sixteen years, from police and the monster they left in their kitchen with a knife in his throat. They've found themselves a home inside a van with four flat tyres parked in a scrapyard by the edge of the Brisbane River. The girl has no name because ...

All Hanna Fischer ever wanted to do was to study physics under the great Albert Einstein. But when, as a teenager in 1919, her life is suddenly turned upside-down, she is catapulted into a new and extraordinary life - as a secretary, a scientist, a sister and a spy. From racist gangs in Berlin to...

Another rich and sumptuously told tale based on the life of artist Dorothea Graff, from award-winning and bestselling author of The Birdman's Wife and The Bee and the Orange Tree, Melissa Ashley. Set in 1700s Amsterdam and the wilds of the South American jungle, it charts the creation of one of t...

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...

It could have been any summer evening, but of course it wasn't. It was the end of some things, the beginning of so many others. Nick Wheatley has finished high school, but he isn't ready for the rest of his life. His parents are getting divorced, his sister is downright weird and his best friend ...

It's 2022 and Helen is starting again. Newly single, adrift in an uncaring rental market, she finds a four-bedroom house flanked by apartment blocks that stare into the yard from all sides. Despite the lack of privacy, she fills its rooms with an unlikely group of residents looking for communal h...

There's nothing quite so beautiful as Paris in the Spring; and when you add in the chance to learn the French way of food, in a relaxed and friendly atmosphere, who can resist? Not Gabi Picabea or Kate Evans who have come from Australia to Sylvie Morel's Paris Cooking School. Both are at a crossr...

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...

Salt River Road is a compelling coming-of-age novel about grief and healing set in a small town in the 1970s. In the aftermath of their mother's death, the Tetley siblings' lives are falling apart. Left to fend for themselves as their family farm goes to ruins, Rose sets out to escape the grief a...

"It is February 1942. Amid the turmoil of World War II, a group of Australian Army nurses, among them Nesta James and Vivian Bullwinkel, have just arrived in Singapore. The women have fled there from Malaya, where they had been stationed to care for Allied troops - and they are reluctant to move ...

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...

Adella is facing the dawn of a new year and the end of her twenties - and she's in a psychiatric unit recovering from a mental breakdown. A decade earlier, her life held such promise; she had every option in her hand. How did it come to this? As we go back and walk with Adella through her twentie...