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Worry Doll by Laura McPhee-Browne

Fiction, Scribe, $29.99

From the acclaimed author of Cherry Beach and Little Plum comes her best novel yet: a psychosexual thriller about a passionate new love that plays with readers’ perception.

When we meet Heloise, she is in her 30s, eight years into a relationship with Ernesto, but obsessively thinking about Lacey, a woman 12 years her junior who she met on a train. The steamy, all-consuming affair has taken over her life, despite the pair barely seeing each other since – and what starts off as the fresh flush of limerence unravels into a heart-in-mouth tale about the destabilising forces of memory, power and desire that I still haven’t quite shaken off. – Steph Harmon

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A Short History of Longans by Mirandi Riwoe

Fiction, UQP, $34.99

Mirandi Riwoe’s third full-length novel is an expansive, layered book about memory and the cost of silence. It begins with a biography of fictional Chinese Australian bushranger Ah Yang, and the family that begins to branch out from under him in the 1850s. Flash forward to 2049: Ah Yang’s last descendent, Daniel Connolly, is living in a state of profound isolation. But how did he get here?

Told through the eyes of four characters, each 50 years apart, this multigenerational saga elegantly reveals the many-layered patterns of behaviour, shame, connection and trauma that grow in the roots of this family tree. – Seren Heyman-Griffiths

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I Made This Just For You by Chris Ames

Short stories, Hardie Grant, $34.99

Chris Ames’ wildly inventive and very funny debut collection paints a vivid, surreal and sometimes tender depiction of how it feels to rot in late capitalism. In one story, a couple “gently sledding down a snow hill of ketamine” dissociate so hard they decide to become each other through a series of invasive surgeries. In another story, we’re on a deranged press junket tour with the co-stars of a hit film who have to hold puppies and eat hot wings seemingly forever. In another, a man vox popped on the street does something with his face that becomes a meme he has to repeat ad nauseum at conferences around the world.

The premises are tight and clever and never draw on longer than they need to. But its the sharp observations of the everyday horrors of our increasingly unhinged world that sold this one for me. – Steph Harmon

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The Outrageous Good Fortune of Living by Jackie Bailey

Nonfiction, Harper Collins, $36.99

The Outrageous Good Fortune of Living follows regular Guardian contributor and pastor Jackie Bailey as she navigates her own path from a Catholic childhood through the study of the world’s great religions, and lands in a kind of secular spiritual practice. It is a book, Bailey writes, for people like her; people who feel “like something is missing”.

Spanning Confucius to Simone de Beauvoir, Bailey explores prayer, loneliness and the soul as part of a quest to find a meaningful place in the world, and a spirituality outside religious belief. – Celina Ribeiro

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The End of Romance by Maria Takolander

Fiction, Text Publishing, $29.99

In The End of Romance, Maria Takolander’s debut novel, the ground is rock-hard and littered with the wreckage of civilisational collapse. One hollow hope is granted the humans who eke out a desolate existence here: a better life on a planet called the Promised Land. We follow a mother into the wastelands of a ruined planet as she tries to find an alternative to bare, brutal survival for her son.

With record-breaking weather reported seemingly each week, this tense novel is a bracing and urgent rebuke to climate denialism and petrocapitalism. – Catriona Menzies-Pike

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An Ocean and a Day by Hannah Richell

Memoir, Harper Collins, $22.99

On an ordinary Wednesday in 2014, Hannah Richell’s world fell apart. She came home that afternoon to learn her husband Matt – the CEO of Hachette Australia – had died in a surfing accident in Tamarama, Sydney. In her memoir, Richell sews together memories of her life with Matt and the fallout of his death, as she tries to find comfort and meaning after the rupture.

It is intimate, traversing the sense of failing her grieving children to the disorienting heat of sexual desire after her husband’s death. A compelling and unflinching self-study of grief. – CR

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Tight Lines by Allee Richards

Fiction, Simon & Schuster, $34.99

Luke is just five when his working-class family move to a small, coastal holiday town. There, he befriends two local twins: the boisterous, popular Josh and the thoughtful, clever Matty, who push and pull Luke out of his shell. Years later, when the three adolescent boys meet Millie – a confident, magnetic teen there for the school holidays – the four become fast friends with her at their centre. But innocent daytime cliff-jumps turn to illicit nights of booze, drugs and toxic masculinity, and a decision is made that they can’t recover from.

Allee Richard’s third novel is evocative, nostalgic and tenderly drawn; a coming-of-age story set in 90s Australia, with a tragedy at its heart. – SH

Getting Murdoched by Andrew Dodd and Matthew Ricketson

Nonfiction, Hardie Grant, $39.99

There are too many books to count that cover Rupert Murdoch’s expansive media empire, including biographies of the 95-year-old media mogul himself, memoirs of former editors, analyses of the wider family’s succession struggle and studies of News Corp and Fox News. Getting Murdoched, by Australian journalism academics Andrew Dodd and Matthew Ricketson, is the first book to examine the impact of Murdoch’s journalism on people who have found themselves under attack.

The book argues the company has a pattern of unleashing bullying practices on individuals and public figures whose views “do not accord with the media proprietor’s programs or publications”. – Amanda Meade

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Being by Rachel E Menzies and Ross G Menzies

Nonfiction, Allen and Unwin, $36.99

By renowned psychologists and father-daughter duo Rachel and Ross Menzies, Being aims to address the “problems of being” – from an awareness of our own death and the loss of everyone we love, to the way the traumas of grief and attachment can haunt us over a lifetime.

But despite its ambitious vision, there’s something strangely reassuring about the way the pair articulate the connections between crises that feel achingly private, and existential concerns. The book shows us how our personal struggles connect us to a lineage of other people. It makes a compelling case for our cosmic insignificance in the process. – Neha Kale

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Native Ingredients Every Day by Nornie Bero

Cookbook, Hardie Grant, $45

Saltbush is like oregano, but tougher; pepperberry is like black pepper but “sexier”. “Together? They’re seasoning sovereignty,” writes chef Nornie Bero. In her second book, Bero writes as I imagine she talks, with joy, cheek and verve as she continues her mission to bring native ingredients “out of the shadows”. Like other books on First Nations food culture, the Meriam woman and self-described “Island girl” helpfully lists online stockists where readers can source finger lime and wallaby, and gives tips on how to turbocharge these ingredients in everyday cooking.

A whole chapter on yams is pure delight (a recipe for cassava hash describes the tuber as “the Beyoncé of root veg”), while another for crispy purple yams with warrigal greens verde is plain clever. – Yvonne C Lam

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Lovesick by Lillian Telford

Fiction, Harper Collins, $32.99

This first novel from short fiction author Lillian Telford​ alternates between the perspectives of Gabby​ and Gordon, two young people in Brisbane who strugg​le to ​navigate life after their painful breakup​. ​Set adrift, Gabby seeks solace in pills and ​t​he arms of new and old men ​a​s her mental health ​spirals, while Gordon becomes fixated on his long-absent mother. ​

T​elford is a dab hand at interiority; I feared I’d be annoyed with these characters, but found their story quite moving. A perceptive novel about the messy nature of contemporary intimacy​, the shadows cast by our parents and delicious agonies of young love. – Sian Cain