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Bring Back Yesterday by Bob Carr

Memoir, Allen & Unwin, $32.99

In this memoir of loss, written after the sudden death of his wife of five decades, Helena, former New South Wales premier Bob Carr reveals himself as most have rarely seen him: vulnerable, emotionally raw and despairing. We find a man rudderless, wondering if he can – or wants to – live on, as he wanders Sydney’s streets at night visiting places they’d been together during their long partnership.

Replete with literary allusion (as you’d expect of self-declared “bookish’’ Carr), elegantly written and unusually emotionally self-reflective for a book by a former politician, it also brims with hope for the recently bereaved and grief-stricken. – Paul Daley

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Department of the Vanishing by Johanna Bell

Fiction, Transit Lounge, $34.99

Johanna Bell’s eco-lit debut, Department of the Vanishing, is not built for tidy elevator pitches; it’s the kind of wild little miracle that only exists because of the risk-taking of independent presses. I’ve been describing it to friends as the literary equivalent of a murder board: a collage of clues, fragments and factoids strung together with a red thread of verse.

In 2029, Ava Wilde sits in a police interrogation room, accused of stealing files from a buried government archive – a repository of extinct species. What has she tried to set loose? We are left to assemble the story ourselves: detectives as much as readers. Will we dare to admit we’re part of the crime scene? – Beejay Silcox

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On Not Climbing Mountains by Claire Thomas

Fiction, Hachette, $32.99

I loved Claire Thomas’ last novel, The Performance, for its intimacy, wit and insight, but above all for the sheer pleasure of its sentences. Thomas’ latest work, On Not Climbing Mountains, is narrated by a woman journeying by train through Switzerland, her father’s birthplace. She longs to be “beside the point, outside time, somehow untethered to the measurable”.

This is an ambitious and intricate work, melding the geographic, the historical and the literary with a more personal story of grief and loss. – Adele Dumont

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Fourteen Ways of Looking by Erin Vincent

Memoir, Upswell, $32.99

When Erin Vincent was 14 her parents were hit by a speeding tow truck as they crossed the road. Her mother died instantly, her father a month later. This tragedy and its aftermath is one of the subjects of Vincent’s audacious new book, Fourteen Ways of Looking, a poetic memoir in fragments. The number 14 appears in almost every one of these fragments, which include quotations, aphorisms, stranded texts and painful slivers of memoir.

The assembled work does not offer a narrative of smooth redemption, but a wrenching and true reckoning with the lifelong work of grief. – Catriona Menzies-Pike

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The Minstrels by Eva Hornung

Fiction, Text, $34.99

Australian literary fiction is in a parlous state. Enter the award-winning Eva Hornung and her new novel, The Minstrels. Set in a mythological landscape, the expansive narrative follows Gem, a feisty young girl who, along with her brother Will, enjoys the freedom of farm life. But it’s a harsh world, and increasingly so as the story slowly but surely enters the realm of speculative fiction and the environmental collapse that must come.

The Minstrels is, probably, a masterpiece. It will frustrate and anger and disturb, perhaps even disrupt, which is exactly what good literary fiction should do. – Nigel Featherstone

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A Far Flung Life by ML Stedman

Fiction, Penguin, $34.99

ML’s vastly popular debut, The Light Between Oceans, was an intimate interrogation of moral ambiguity. A Far-Flung Life is in many ways its thematic successor, albeit an inverted one, leaving her debut’s isolated lighthouse port for the vast, secluded plains of 1960s Western Australia.

A “forgetment”, a word not for a memory but for a “thing you forget”, is the undercurrent of this beautiful, richly human, attentive novel. As we follow the MacBride family across five decades, the otherworldly passing of time – where “one minute didn’t have the same length as another” – bears witness to great tragedies and new beginnings. It’s a masterful work articulating no less than the daily herculean labours, vast and small, of a life lived. – Jack Callil

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The Red Winter by Cameron Sullivan

Fiction, Tor, $34.99

Beauty and the Beast retellings are a common fantasy romance trope. Cameron Sullivan’s sprawling take runs apart from the pack in its historical settings (the story takes place across three timelines in late medieval and early modern France) and its queerness. Far from a trembling Belle, the main character is a morally ambiguous immortal professor, possessed by an unambiguously immoral demon.

While it takes about a hundred pages to find its stride, those who persist will be rewarded with a propulsive plot, heavy on sex and even heavier on violence, with a touch of politics and humour to lighten things up. – Alyx Gorman

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The Mother is Restless and She Doesn’t Know Why by Gemma Parker

Nonfiction, Scribner, $34.99

Rachel Cusk, Maggie Nelson and Olivia Laing are all name-checked on the back of this memoir; a big swing, yes, but not entirely unfounded. Parker, an Adelaide academic, has woven her own story and the story of nihilism into vignettes that fizz with real brio. Broadly, she writes about how nihilism has helped her – as a young Australian who went to Paris for philosophy and discovered Nietzsche, and came back to be a poet, mother and wife, dealing with restlessness and domestic chaos.

I loved her telling of how her philosophy professor scorned her plan to “have babies and write poetry”. As she writes: “He was the one who had missed the provocation at the heart of it all … how could the end point of apocalyptic enquiry be academic, over birth, passion, and poetics?” – Sian Cain

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Like, Follow, Die by Ashley Kalagian Blunt

Fiction, Hardie Grant, $34.99

I don’t tend towards psychological thrillers when looking for a pleasure read – but as somebody endlessly fascinated with how social media and toxic masculinity is affecting the next generation of men (read: as an Adolescence evangelist), I gobbled this up in two days over my summer break.

Like, Follow, Die (admit it: brilliant title) begins when homocide detective Kyle – eager to prove himself in his new job – shows up at the door of “the most hated woman in Australia”. Corrine is the single mother of a teen boy who was drawn into the worst part of the internet on her watch, before opening fire on an International Women’s Day event, killing 12, including himself. The public blames the mother, but Kyle thinks there’s more to the case – and meanwhile, there’s a serial killer on the loose … – Steph Harmon

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She Who Tastes, Knows by Durkhanai Ayubi

Memoir, Murdoch, $34.99

Durkhanai Ayubi might be the only Australian restaurateur-Atlantic Fellow hyphenate. In Parwana – her 2020 book, named after the Afghan restaurant she runs with her family in Adelaide – she weaved food, memory and recipes between colour-saturated images of bolani and palaw.

In her latest memoir, there’s a fullness and richness to Ayubi’s writing as she unspools Afghan history and her family’s place in their homelands old and new. And it is food – always food, and the fruits of the Earth – that binds her story together. – Yvonne C Lam