What happens when we become used to each other, when we become bored, when we anticipate each other’s moods like the seasons cycled in a day? What happens when you are tired of me and I tire of you? Every couple has a story. How they met, how they fell in love – their ups, their downs. What made them want to be in each other's arms day and night. The struggle of family expectations. The need to please each other, the desire to go their separate ways. It is about the private universe between two people as they try to hold to each other despite the barriers of geography, culture and class. Every couple has a beginning, a middle, and maybe an end. The Lovers is an enchanting fable that explores the light and dark of a relationship – a love distilled down to its barest form. You might think you know this story. Maybe you do.

Who is Iris Webber? A thief, a fighter, a wife, a lover. A scammer, a schemer, a friend. A musician, a worker, a big-hearted fool. A woman who has prevailed against the toughest gangsters of the day, defying police time and again, yet is now trapped in a prison cell. Guilty or innocent? Rollicking through the underbelly of 1930s sly-grog Sydney, Iris is a dazzling literary achievement from one of Australia's finest writers. Based on actual events and set in an era of cataclysmic change, here is a fierce, fascinating tale of a woman who couldn't be held back.

Akita’s family have always kept moving to survive. Sudan to Cairo. Cairo to Sydney. Sydney to Geelong. At each new place, challenges test and break Akita, her four siblings and her parents. Just when eight-year-old Akita is feeling settled at her new school and community in Sydney for the first time in her life, her parents decide to relocate to Geelong to be closer to their Sudanese relatives. The move is the beginning of a downward spiral that threatens to unravel the fabric of their family and any hope for finding peace and belonging.Told through the interchanging perspectives of Akita and her mother, Taresai, this coming of age story shines a light on the generational curses of trauma, and gives voice to the silent heartache of searching for acceptance in an adopted society which isn’t able to look past the surface of skin colour. Individually, the female narrators experience racism, rejection and despair, but together their narratives reveal a resilience of spirit and determination to transcend expectations of what a daughter, a sister, and a mother can be.Hopeless Kingdom is the winner of the 2020 Dorothy Hewett Award. Inspired by the author’s own experience of migration from Africa to Australia, this story signals a powerful new voice in Australian writing.From the Dorothy Hewett Award judges:'Akec’s story is a powerful and timely exploration of belonging, race, gender and migration … and contrasts the lives of the mothers, daughters, sisters, grandmothers and cousins in this family through form and language, conjuring a powerful refraction of the experiences of African Australian women. Her storytelling is deeply personal, as well as relatable and insightful.'

The much-anticipated third novel by award-winning Australian author Robbie Arnott, Limberlost is a story of family and land, loss and hope, fate and the unknown, and love and kindness. In the heat of a long summer Ned hunts rabbits in a river valley, hoping the pelts will earn him enough money to buy a small boat. His two brothers are away at war, their whereabouts unknown. His father and older sister struggle to hold things together on the family orchard, Limberlost. Desperate to ignore it all-to avoid the future rushing towards him-Ned dreams of open water. As his story unfolds over the following decades, we see how Ned's choices that summer come to shape the course of his life, the fate of his family and the future of the valley, with its seasons of death and rebirth. The third novel by the award-winning author of Flames and The Rain Heron, Limberlost is an extraordinary chronicle of life and land- of carnage and kindness, blood ties and love.

A mother and daughter travel from abroad to meet in Tokyo: they walk along the canals through the autumn evenings, escape the typhoon rains, share meals in small cafes and restaurants, and visit galleries to see some of the city's most radical modern art. All the while, they talk: about the weather, horoscopes, clothes, and objects, about family, distance, and memory. But uncertainties abound. Who is really speaking here--is it only the daughter? And what is the real reason behind this elliptical, perhaps even spectral journey? At once a careful reckoning and an elegy, Cold Enough for Snow questions whether any of us speak a common language, which dimensions can contain love, and what claim we have to truly know another's inner world. Selected from more than 1,500 entries, Cold Enough for Snow won the Novel Prize, a new, biennial award offered by New Directions, Fitzcarraldo Editions (UK), and Giramondo (Australia), for any novel written in English that explores and expands the possibilities of the form.

In 1910 the famed escapologist Harry Houdini made an ill-fated attempt to become the first person to fly an aircraft over Australian soil—yet while Houdini is remembered today for his failure, the true record-holder has been forgotten. This quirk of history becomes the focus for the obsessions of Bernard Cripp, world-weary scion of an ailing family circus, who tries to unearth every detail of Houdini’s flight in order to re-enact it. But why is Bernard so single-minded? As his manic testimony unspools, his story takes on a darker tone: he is, in fact, in mourning for a wife and child he has lost to the skies, and paralysed by the uncertainty surrounding their deaths. If his efforts to re-create history cannot bring back his loved ones, can they at least bring him peace as he struggles to live with his loss? In Waypoints, his outlandish début novel, Adam Ouston embarks on a journey to reclaim a lost sense of awe and wonder from subjects as diverse as Victorian vaudeville and cutting-edge data storage, from the early history of Alzheimer’s disease to the immortality of human consciousness. Blending the solemnity of Sebald with the breathlessness of Bernhard, the result is equal parts rambunctious and ruminative, poignant and hilarious — a wild ride through a storm of grief, ambition, integrity, remembrance, and love. 'Artful, terrific, heaps of fun... Adam Ouston is hugely talented.' – Robbie Arnott

Welcome to Cinnamon Gardens, a home for those who are lost and the stories they treasure. Cinnamon Gardens Nursing Home is nestled in the quiet suburb of Westgrove, Sydney gdash; populated with residents with colourful histories, each with their own secrets, triumphs and failings. This is their safe place, an oasis of familiar delights wdash; a beautiful garden, a busy kitchen and a bountiful recreation schedule. But this ordinary neighbourhood is not without its prejudices. The serenity of Cinnamon Gardens is threatened by malignant forces more interested in what makes this refuge different rather than embracing the calm companionship that makes this place home to so many. As those who challenge the residents squo; existence make their stand against the nursing home with devastating consequences, our characters are forced to reckon with a country divided. Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens is about family and memory, community and race, but is ultimately a love letter to storytelling and how our stories shape who we are.

'These are troubling times. The world is a dangerous place,' the voice of the Chairman said. 'I can continue to assure you of this: within the Wall you are perfectly safe.' Christine could not sleep, she could not wake, she could not think. She stared, half-blind, at the cold screen of her smartphone. She was told the Agency was keeping them safe from the dangers outside, an outside world she would never see. She never imagined questioning what she was told, what she was allowed to know, what she was permitted to think. She never even thought there were questions to ask. The enclave was the only world she knew, the world outside was not safe. Staying or leaving was not a choice she had the power to make. But then Christine dared start thinking . . . and from that moment, danger was everywhere. In our turbulent times, Claire G. Coleman's Enclave is a powerful dystopian allegory that confronts the ugly realities of racism, homophobia, surveillance, greed and privilege and the self-destructive distortions that occur when we ignore our shared humanity.

This story came to me and entered my soul. It did not need a key or an invite, for it already belonged. It walked in, shook my foundation and set my heart on fire. We danced around the flames and with every twirl, I grabbed a few words until I was burnt to ashes. Tishtar runs a small legal practice in Melbourne where he has a new client, Habiba, who seeks to bring her orphan nieces to Australia from war-torn Somalia. He is also a migrant, having left the civil unrest in Iran to find a new life in a new country. As Tishtar becomes consumed with Habiba’s tales of war-torn Somalia, his own childhood memories return and he reflects on the time he spent at his grandmother’s house to escape the atrocities that unravelled post the Islamic Revolution. While at his grandmother’s house he comes to know Gretel, another lost soul who has experienced a community torn apart by division. Tishtar embarks on a journey in search of peace – for Habiba, for Gretel, for himself. Spanning continents and centuries, Forty Nights is a tale of the ongoing effects of dispossession and dislocation – a struggle humankind has faced long into its past. Ultimately it is the story of finding home, wherever that might be.

Aunty June is the proud owner of a TAFE certificate III in Investigative Services.It took her thirty hours to complete online.Now, she has set up her own private investigation service: Yanakirri Investigative Services – Confidentiality Guaranteed.When environmental activist, Thommo, suddenly goes missing and the police ignore the case Aunty June takes it upon herself to uncover the secrets surrounding her nephew, Thommo’s, disappearance. Corruption, commercial cotton farmers, bikies, racism, water theft, and unreliable local police – Aunty June is really up against it.Lies and corruption are hiding the truth from reaching the surface. And the Murray Darling River is running out of water. Aunty June may be out of her depths, but nothing will stop her fighting for her people and her land.Madukka the River Serpent is a striking novel about family and resistance from Australian Darug Burruberongal writer and playwright Julie Janson.