Edenglassie by Melissa Lucashenko

Spanning five generations and two concurrent storylines, Melissa Lucashenko dishes up the true history of Edenglassie (what is now known as Brisbane) from the time that Goorie people outnumbered the British, to now. Her writing just punches, and her characters leap off the page – in the present day there’s rascal activist Winona, her unlikely love interest Dr Johnny, and her centenarian Grannie Eddie, holed up in hospital and with plenty of stories to tell. But the true hero of this story is Mulanyin, a young saltwater man in love, looking to make his way back home to Yugambeh country when he meets the brute force of white justice. It’s an epic tale that explodes the colonial myth and invites us to imagine what could have been – and where to go from here – told with immediacy, vitality and scorching humour.

Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood

The decorated author of The Weekend and The Natural Way of Things returns with a novel  of masterful restraint, with prose so bright and clear it chimes like a prayer. Wood’s unnamed protagonist, abandons work, her husband and the city, exiling herself in a small religious community in the NSW town where she grew up. She’s done this seemingly by accident, as she is not religious and is almost bemused by her fellow lodgers. Still, she’s grateful for the escape, for the austerity, simplicity and ritual of her day to day. But we can never truly escape ourselves, can we? And a series of visitations cracks her open – first a harrowing mouse plague, then the arrival of a nun’s remains who has met a terrible end, and finally a kind of celebrity nun with whom she shares some history. The space around the prose mirrors the lunar-esque landscape of the village, and as our protagonist retreats further inward, we, too, are invited to ponder our own pasts, the nature of forgiveness, and our own relationship with hope.

Eventually Everything Connects by Sarah Firth 

Ever wondered why you’re so addicted to your phone? Why you feel super horny? Why you cut your orange the way that you do? So has Sarah Firth. In fact, she’s thought about all of this and more – very deeply, for many years – and can map it all in riotously colourful illustrated essays with interjections from her favourite scientists, philosophers and artists too. Eventually Everything Connects is a kaleidoscopic guided tour through the workings of her luminous, neurodivergent mind, published on Nakkiah Lui’s innovative Joan Press imprint. Come for the big questions and stay for the cool intel on the mating habits of tiger slugs. And lobsters! In a lush hardback edition, with creamy artful pages, it’s one to return to again and again – especially in those moments where you just can’t make the big concepts gel with the everyday act of living. This one is expansive and hopeful.

But The Girl by Jessica Zhan Mei Yu 

What happens when the art that you love doesn’t love you back? This is the question at the heart of this debut novel, which centres overachieving scholar Girl, born in Australia to Malaysian parents, who falls madly in love with Sylvia Plath while reading The Bell Jar as an undergraduate – and is slapped by the casual racism of its pages. Throughout the book, as Girl tousles with Plath and a competitive friendship with older painter Clementine, Mei Yu delights in turning everything we think we know about the coming-of-age novel on its head, playing with the idea of who gets to be canon, and who’s consistently left out. It’s a campus novel set off campus, on an artist’s residency in Scotland where she makes almost no art at all; a bildungsroman where Girl finds her way back to her family. An imaginative, incisive, introverted novel about one young woman summoning her own main character energy.

Songs for the Dead and the Living by Sara M Saleh 

Looking to read more about the Palestinian experience? Look no further than the heartrending debut novel from poet, human rights activist and lawyer Sara M Saleh. Songs for the Dead and the Living spans generations and continents – from Palestine to Lebanon, Cairo to Sydney – to ask how can we know who we are when the place we call home is beyond our reach, and when the people who love us are suffering amid violence, uncertainty and fear. It centres Jamilah, an undocumented Palestinian refugee, who comes of age on the edge of Beirut with her chaotic, loving family. When conflict breaks out, they must flee their home and everything that they know, charting a hazardous course across continents, seeking safety. It’s impossible to read this book without thinking of the very real terrors playing out in Gaza in real time, and the strength of generations of displaced souls yearning for homeland. Saleh’s debut poetry collection The Flirtation of Girls/Ghazal el Banat was also recently released, and makes a wonderful companion piece to this open hearted, deeply humane novel.