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Dianne Yarwood's latest novel follows Maggie Reid, a woman in her forties who has spent much of her life carrying wounds she rarely speaks about. Adopted as a baby and raised in a home largely devoid of affection, Maggie has worked hard to build a life that feels safe and manageable.

Allen Levi's Theo of Golden is the kind of novel that restores your faith in literature's ability to illuminate what it means to be human.

Kin deeply understands that longing isn't always dramatic. Sometimes it simply reshapes a person slowly over years until it becomes the architecture of their identity.

Most love stories are built around longing, but I'm now realising, after a re-read from a teenager to a 56 year-old, that Wuthering Heights is actually built more around corrosion.

As contemporary Australian fiction continues to grapple with questions of housing, class, labour, and generational instability, Kill Your Boomers stands out for the sharpness of its social observation and the sophistication of its psychological insight. It is an unsettling, darkly intelligent novel about inheritance in every sense of the word: financial, emotional, cultural, and moral.

Discipline by Randa Abdel-Fattah is not interested in offering readers the comfort of distance. Set in Western Sydney during Ramadan in May 2021, against the backdrop of escalating violence in Gaza and rising Islamophobic panic within Australia, the novel follows two Palestinian and Arab-Australian professionals attempting to navigate institutions that publicly celebrate diversity while privately disciplining it.

At first glance, the premise sounds deceptively familiar: a seventeen-year-old girl named Waldo begins an affair with her middle-aged creative writing teacher, Mr. Teddy Korgy. On paper, it risks sounding like another contemporary “taboo relationship” novel built to provoke discourse and little else. However, in reality, Half His Age is far more psychologically precise than that. It's not romantic fantasy masquerading as literary fiction.

And yet, that ambition is part of what makes Lost Lambs worth reading. It is not content to remain contained, to limit itself to the familiar satisfactions of the family novel. It wants to connect private disintegration to something systemic, to suggest that the instability within the Flynn household is not entirely separate from the structures surrounding it.