In her unforgettable new novel, Victorian Premier's Literary Award-winner Melanie Cheng has created this year's literary masterpiece. Amy, Jin and Lucie are leading isolated lives in their partially renovated, inner city home. They are not happy, but they are also terrified of change. When they buy a pet rabbit for Lucie, and then Amy's mother, Pauline, comes to stay, the family is forced to confront long-buried secrets. Will opening their hearts to the rabbit help them to heal or only invite further tragedy? The Burrow tells an unforgettable story about grief and hope. With her characteristic compassion and eye for detail, Melanie Cheng reveals the lives of others-even of a small rabbit.

we only need to tease out the first stray thread, such as the lingering wake left by a white ship forging through grey light to where a thousand seabirds disappear from the collapsing sky . . . and we've begun It is 1954, but not the same way the history books would have it. Events and characters swirl in a vortex of fragments and chance connections. Brisbane celebrates the young Queen Elizabeth II's arrival on her first royal tour of the commonwealth. Meanwhile the future is being shaped behind closed doors, laying the foundations for the 21st century... A magisterial historical novel resonant with contemporary concerns, by one of Australia's foremost authors writing at the height of his ambition.

A gripping, provocative work by one of our finest writers, the internationally acclaimed author Fiona McFarlane. In overlapping stories, Highway 13 explores the reverberations of a serial killer's crimes in the lives of everyday people. A brilliant and illuminating account of loss and its extended echoes across an entire society. A gripping, haunting work about the reverberations of a serial killer's crimes in the lives of everyday people. In 1998, an apparently ordinary Australian man is arrested and charged with a series of brutal murders. The news shocks the nation, bringing both horror and resolution to the victims' families, but its impact travels even further - into the past, as the murders rewrite personal histories, and into the future, as true crime podcasts and biopics tell the story of the crimes. Highway 13 takes murder as its starting point, but it unfolds to encompass much more: through the investigation of the aftermath of this violence across time and place, from the killer's home town in country Australia to the tropical Far North, and to Texas and Rome, McFarlane presents an unforgettable, entrancing exploration of the way stories are told and spread, and at what cost. What damages, big and small, do these crimes incur? How do communities make sense of such atrocities? How does the mourning of families sit alongside the public fascination with terrible crimes? And can we tell true crime stories without putting the killers at the centre of the story? From the acclaimed author of The Sun Walks Down and The Night Guest comes a captivating account of loss and fear, and its extended echoes in individual lives. 'These sublime stories have the poise and clarity of classics. As Fiona McFarlane's characters edge towards revelation or disaster, her artistry shines on every page.' Michelle de Kretser Praise for The Sun Walks Down: 'McFarlane's language and unblinking historical realism are more evidence that the author is one of the legitimate talents of her generation.' The Australian 'The Sun Walks Down is the book I'm always longing to find: brilliant, fresh and compulsively readable. It is marvellous. I loved it from start to finish.' Ann Patchett, author of These Precious Days 'Accomplished, assured, elegant and insightful - this beautifully told novel took me on the most unexpected and compelling of journeys. I adored it.' Sofie Laguna, Miles Franklin-winning author of Infinite Splendours 'Masterful ... an excellent, layered work of literary historical fiction in which McFarlane tackles many complex issues with elegance, assurance and searing intellectual insight.' Canberra Times 'The Sun Walks Down is an extraordinary work of fiction that I have no doubt will become a classic of Australian literature. McFarlane's writing is assured, masterful, nothing short of brilliant.' Emily Bitto, Stella Prize-winning author of The Strays and Wild Abandon

Like the moon landing itself, a feat of enormous ingenuity imagining the lives of the Apollo mission heroes, and those on planet earth in the tumultuous 1960s. You'll never look at the Moon in quite the same way ever again. - Ceridwen Dovey The whole world has just watched Neil and Buzz walk on the Moon. Now they are struck by terror- the lunar module's engine has failed. There is no back-up, no other way off the surface. If the astronauts can't fix the problem, they'll slowly run out of oxygen and die. This Kingdom of Dust explores this harrowing scenario through the intertwined narratives of three distinct voices- Buzz on the Moon, his wife Joan back on Earth, and Aquarius, the journalist compelled to craft a story he doesn't want to write. Marooned, Buzz confronts his fate with a mix of dread and awe. On Earth, Joan wrestles with grief and sacrifice against the backdrop of 1960s America - a nation riven by war and seismic social change. Caught between professional duty and personal turmoil, Aquarius soon discovers that he will need all his skill to capture this unfolding drama, and all his courage to follow it through to its breathtaking conclusion. With page-turning suspense and emotional heft, this reimagining of an epic moment in history combines public spectacle with private despair, reframing what the Moon landing has meant not only for the astronauts and those who loved them, but for all humankind.

The story of a family over the past 100 years, starting in Palestine under British rule and ending in Redland Bay in Queensland. Samah Sabawi shares the story of her parents and many like them who were born as their parents were being forced to leave their homelands. Filled with love for land, history, peoples it is more than anything else a family story and a love story told with enormous humanity and feeling. How the son (one of six), born at the height of the displacements to a disabled father and illiterate mother, a believer in peaceful resistance, became a leading poet and writer in Palestine, before being forced, with his own young family in tow, to flee and start a new life in Australia. One of the gifts of Samah Sabawi's Baba is to remain open-hearted and optimistic.

From one of Australia's most brilliant writers, a dark comedy about the tangled fates of two couples and the children trapped between them Michael and Mary Shelley are Christian fanatics who loathe their fellow Australians - especially their 'foul language, reckless indulgence of alcohol and obsession with idiotic ball sports'. Lenore and Tom Blaine are working-class Queensland publicans raising a large family in a raucous, loving, rugby-league-obsessed home. There's just one problem. The Blaines are foster parents to three of the Shelleys' children, who were removed from Michael and Mary as infants. And the Shelleys are prepared to do anything to get them back. Anything. Australian Gospel is a family saga like no other - heartbreaking, hilarious and altogether astonishing. 'One of the best writers of his generation.' Benjamin Law 'Blaine's native tongue, an ocker irreverence, gives his writing an amiable charm and reflects the styles of artists such as Tim Winton, Stella Franklin and Helen Garner.' Australian Book Review 'Fact is stranger than fiction but it never arrives fully formed. We need writers like Blaine to do that for us. Here he delivers a rollicking, insightful and moving account of the everyday heavens and hells we make for ourselves, and each other.' Sarah Krasnostein, author of The Trauma Cleaner

WINNER, NSW Literary Awards Book of the Year, 2026WINNER, NSW Literary Awards Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-fiction, 2026WINNER, The Australian Political Book of the Year, 2025WINNER, Queensland Literary Awards: University of Queensland Non-Fiction Book Award, 2025WINNER, Northern Territory History Award, 2025SHORTLISTED, Prime Minister’s LIterary Award, Australian History, 2025SHORTLISTED, Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, Non-Fiction, 2025SHORTLISTED, Age Book of the Year, Non-fiction, 2025SHORTLISTED, NSW History Awards, Australian History Prize, 2025SHORTLISTED, The Australian Political Book of the Year, 2025 ‘A masterpiece.’ Thomas Mayo ‘The most painstaking and beautiful reconstruction of mission life…feels like a revolutionarily good piece of history…exhilarating to read…so gripping.’ Annabel Crabb In this engaging narrative, Wright follows the story of petitions on bark created by the Yirrkala community in Arnhem Land in 1963, protesting bauxite mining on traditional lands.

We all grow up with rules. Do this, be this, don't be that. Lisa Qin was all about the rules: do your homework, be good, don't rock the boat. She was the model daughter, model student and model minority. But doing everything right? It made her lost and miserable. So she decided to take a spectacular risk and change everything. At 23, Lisa was an unhappy overachiever working for a prestigious law firm. So she quit. She didn't know what else was out there, but she wanted to find out. She changed paths, changed countries, changed her entire view of what the world could be, and who she could be - with some primal screaming and tree-hugging along the way. In the process, she discovered the person she truly was, not who she thought she should be. Model Minority Gone Rogue is a funny, sad, exhilarating and thought-provoking true story about what happens when you want to live life on your own terms, even when those terms go against everything you've ever known. It's a story of what happens when you choose love over fear and honour your authentic self: life can be bigger and brighter than anything you had ever imagined.

An uplifting memoir on living well in the face of death Mark Raphael Baker was no stranger to death. Over seven years he had become a mourner three times over- for his first wife, for his brother and for his father. When diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, he began to reflect on their deaths, his probable death and on Death as, in the words of Ecclesiastes, a 'season' that produced a large and bitter harvest for the Baker family. Powerful and conflicting emotions assailed him, but their destructive power was always defeated by his love of his family and of life, which never deserted him even when his spirit was most weary. Over the short course of his illness, he came to realise that to love both truly, he must die as the most authentic version of himself he can achieve. It enabled him to die with humbling grace and dignity. In A Season of Death readers of The Fiftieth Gate and Thirty Days will rediscover the many forms of Mark's humour, his candour and his depth of thought and feeling, albeit in a different key, as it must be when those virtues reveal themselves in expressions of vulnerability that fend off self-pity. There is profound sorrow in this memoir but there is matching joy and much love, interwoven by a fine writer and thinker into a story that will deepen one's understanding of life.