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Capture by Amanda Lohrey

Fiction, Text, $34.99

Amanda Lohrey is one of Australia’s most exhilarating novelists, not least because her works take such tremendous risks: her characters are not always likable and their trajectories don’t yield easy moral conclusions.

This superb new novel from the Miles Franklin-winner is a psychiatrist’s account of the research he has undertaken with “experiencers”, people who claim to have been abducted by aliens. His colleagues are incredulous. Maybe Lohrey’s readers will be too. Aliens? And yet Lohrey here crafts a gripping fable that animates urgent questions about how we make meaning of our own experiences and those of others. – Catriona Menzies-Pike

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Periodic Bitch by Emma Hardy

Nonfiction, Allen & Unwin, $29.99

For years Emma Hardy struggled with intensely distressing and debilitating periods until a doctor diagnosed her with PMDD (premenstrual dysphoric disorder), a condition that can cause extreme irritability, depression and anxiety during the luteal phase, the days before menstruation begins.

This thought-provoking book weaves Hardy’s personal experience with a broader cultural look at menstruation and medical misogyny. She examines how menstruation has historically been linked to monstrosity and hysteria, drawing on feminist theory, folklore and literature, and poses the question: when is female rage a symptom, and when is it simply a rational response to an often enraging world? – Sian Cain

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Mantle by Romy Ash

Fiction, Ultimo Press, $34.99

Killer mushrooms strike again! That could be the tabloid takeaway from Romy Ash’s impressive second novel. But Mantle unfolds a far more beguiling vision of a near-future when fungi become the great survivors of climate change.

The first-person protagonist, Ursula, is a geologist who visits her dying mother in Tasmania. A new pandemic has broken out, in which fungal spores enter the lungs and sprout as mushrooms. The imagery is both alarming and sensual, and the characters are finely observed, as in Ash’s debut, Floundering. The warning about our failing relationship with nature is threaded through a tense but playfully imaginative story. – Susan Wyndham

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The Ruiners by Ellena Savage

Fiction, Simon & Schuster, $34.99

In Ellena Savage’s acclaimed essay collection Blueberries, she reckoned with the moral impossibility of dismantling capitalism as a writer and academic benefiting from it. Six years later, her acerbic debut novel returns to that question: how far can class consciousness get you when you’re not quite ready to leave the ruling class?

When a failed anarchist and uni dropout, Pip, receives a windfall inheritance, she and her new partner, Sasha – a suave PhD scholar – buy a shack on a Greek island which, they soon discover, is hurtling towards environmental ruin. They’re joined by Pip’s best friend, Vivek, the neurotic editor of a leftist magazine that’s on the brink of cancellation after failing to pay its writers. This book is clever, taut and funny – particularly in its chilling satire of the radical left: drowning in discourse, crippled by theory and “hopelessly attached to a politics that has little reality on earth”. – Steph Harmon

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Songwriters on the Run by Robert Forster

Fiction, Penguin Random House, $34.99

That’s right: the former Go-Betweens vocalist turned solo musician has written his first novel, inspired by a song he once wrote.

Set in 1991, Songwriters on the Run follows two Australian singer-songwriters, Mick Woods and Drew Lovelock, who, while on tour in central Queensland, are charged with several crimes and carted off to a low-security prison. With the help of their fellow prisoners, the two men escape – kicking off a caper as they try to clear their names on the lam, while both the police and an intrigued Hollywood star compete to find them first. – SC

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The Stained Man by Patrick Mullins

Nonfiction, Scribe, $39.99

Patrick Mullins’s new book plucks from historical obscurity the 25-year legal and political saga of the former Sydney lord mayor Richard Meagher. A once-rising solicitor and MP, Meagher is caught out in 1895 after playing dirty to free a client guilty of poisoning his wife.

Tracing Meagher’s decades-long crusade to spin the narrative and un-cancel himself, Mullins gives us a ringside seat to the messy birth of Australian federation – and the nagging, uneasy feeling that Meagher would really smash it in 21st-century politics. – Walter Marsh

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Phantom Days by Angela O’Keefe

Fiction, UQP, $29.99

You can tell a great deal about a person by looking at their bookshelves. But what if those books were looking right back at you? That’s the ingenious premise of Angela O’Keeffe’s Phantom Days, which is narrated by a sentient novel and the woman who takes it home from the bookstore.

O’Keeffe has form with watchful objects. Her debut novella, Night Blue, gave a soul to Blue Poles – a painting that’s freighted with decades of national argument. What might she do with something as light and ordinary as a paperback? The possibilities are unsettling. Just think of your own to-read pile and its view from the bedside table. “A book is made without eyes,” the novel tells us. “A book has other ways to see.” – Beejay Silcox

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Childhood by Brendan James Murray

Nonfiction, Pan Macmillan, $36.99

In the opening chapters of his book, James Murray recounts telling a friend he is writing a memoir of sorts. His friend replies: “You’re not interesting enough to write a memoir.” Which is not altogether untrue; the regional teacher turned high school principal has a fairly unremarkable life story.

But what makes Childhood a compelling read is the close observation of the dark and light of James Murray’s formative years, and his reflection on the shape of childhood and adolescence today. Contemplative and intimate, it asks readers to re-evaluate the place of imagination, not only in the lives of children but in the adults they grow up to be. – Celina Ribeiro

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Goodbye, My Love by Yumna Kassab

Fiction, Ultimo Press, $34.99

When Amina leaves her husband, she believes that she has finally found freedom. But she soon discovers that privilege cannot protect her from loneliness, and freedom from her own mind is not so easy to win.

Goodbye, My Love – the sixth book from Yumna Kassab, Miles Franklin-shortlisted for The Lovers – is set within a wealthy Arab community, following Amina’s inner world as she tries to escape the long shadow of her divorce. Told through page-long vignettes and fragments of poetry, this is a layered and lovely story about the cost of looking back. – Seren Heyman-Griffiths

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You’re Welcome: A baking celebration with a Southeast Asian twist, by Raymond Tan and Audrey Payne

Cookbook, Murdoch Books, $49.99

This might not be the first Australian cookbook with fortune cookies and mooncakes but it’s definitely the best-looking. I am no baker but the styling and photography in Raymond Tan’s book makes me want to power up my mixer: taro cake in technicolour, kaleidoscopic kueh, prismatic pandan buns. Before moving from Malaysia to Melbourne, Tan had never turned on an oven; in the years since he’s gone viral with his cake popsicles and opened two bakeries, including Dua (no, it’s not named after Dua Lipa; it means “two” in Malay).

From homemade matcha pocky sticks to ube pie, his recipes speak to the type of hybrid south-east Asian-Australian sweets and pastries that have become so popular lately – and are a sweet blessing for third-culture kids like me. – Yvonne C Lam

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Sirens: Inside the Shadow World of First Responders by Martin McKenzie-Murray

Nonfiction, Black Inc, $34.99

Sirens is a book about the extraordinary in the ordinary. The extraordinary and ordinary service and courage of first responders. The extraordinary and ordinary experience of trauma. Martin McKenzie-Murray, a journalist, tells the story of three first responders: a paramedic, a firefighter and a police officer. In what ultimately is an examination of post-traumatic stress disorder, McKenzie-Murray draws portraits of his three subjects but also excavates his own harrowing story.

A personal work, and a window into the shadow world of those we call on in our hours of need. – CR

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Rebirth by Antoun Issa

Creative nonfiction, Hachette, $34.99

In his first novel, my former Guardian colleague Antoun Issa recreates the early life of his mother, Laila, as she navigated poverty and the patriarchy in eastern Beirut in the 1970s – and fell in love with her hairdresser in a country soon to be torn apart by civil war.

The world Issa weaves is so warm, pacy and vivid, with such a vibrant protagonist, that Rebirth feels like a novel. But as civil unrest turns idyllic day trips into violent horrors and eventual tragedy, I found myself absorbing Lebanese history without quite realising it – opening tabs on the Phalangists, the PLO; the religious and political factions of Lebanon, and the Palestinian refugee camps settled there. Still: “This book is not a journalistic endeavour, but a human one,” Issa writes. “This book is my attempt to bring Mum’s story to life.” – SH

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When Words Fail Us: Truth Beyond Time by Stan Grant

Nonfiction, Newsouth, $26.99

The former ABC journalist wrote this book after his public resignation from the media in 2023 and years of online abuse. “We in the media must ask if we are truly honouring a world worth living in,” he told the Australian public in his final night as Q+A host. “Too often, we are the poison in the bloodstream of our society. I fear the media does not have the love or the language to speak to the gentle spirits of our land.”

Drawing on philosophy, Radiohead and Indigenous wisdom, Grant calls on the reader to pause and consider how words matter, beyond all the bloviating. “The curse of the modern age is incomprehensibility,” he writes. “We are a babbling mess. It isn’t that language divides us, it is that we speak into a void.” – SC

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