One reading of this Booker Prize winning novel by Damon Galgut (Chatto & Windus, $32.99) is that it’s an absorbing saga about loss that upends a dysfunctional Afrikaner family. When Rachel Swart dies of cancer, her husband, Marnie, and three children are afflicted... 
Love. Sex. Friendship. What is life without the chaos that these ingredients create? That’s the question Sally Rooney poses to us in her new novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You (Allen & Unwin, $29.99). And in her own distinct style, Rooney leaves it to us to... 
Crouched beneath a table in a garden shed in Oxford, five-year-old Esme watches a word flutter to the ground, overlooked by the men working above her. It is 1887 and Esme’s father is one of a team of lexicographers gathering words for the first Oxford English... 
“Promise me you’ll make your life graceful, Molly. Promise me you’ll make your life grand and beautiful and poetic.” These are the words Molly Hook is left with before her mother disappears into the daytime sky. Words that guide Molly through bush and swamp and... 
Arthur Less is staring down the barrel of his 50th birthday. His writing career still hasn’t taken off, his finances are a mess, and if that wasn’t enough to throw him into crisis, he’s just received a wedding invitation from his ex-boyfriend of nine years – further... 
Would you go back in time even if you knew it wouldn’t change the present? Toshikazu Kawaguchi poses this very question to his characters and readers in the play-turned-novel, Before the Coffee Gets Cold. Poignant and thought provoking, this debut work is a refreshing... 
