The Women's Pages
by Debra Adelaide

'Emily Bronte had written this novel especially for her. For her benefit she had sat alone in her narrow bed in the parsonage, her lap desk on her knees, death all around her with that graveyard right next door, the cold wind from the moors behind rattling the windows... But who had Dove written her story for?'

The Women's Pages is about the choices and compromises women make, about their griefs and losses, and about the cold aching spaces that are left when they disappear from the story... more

Tom Houghton
by Todd Alexander

Tom is a twelve year old boy growing up in the Western Suburbs of Sydney in 1986. But Tom isn't like the other boys and he tries to escape the bullying he receives by immersing himself in the fantasy world of film.

When Tom learns that he shares the same name as the great actress Katharine Hepburn's brother (who hanged himself in 1921), he decides to invent for himself a new identity. When his taunters realise he is destined for greatness himself, surely they will change their opinion of him... more

The Story of the Lost Child
by Elena Ferrante

The Story of the Lost Child is the long-awaited fourth volume in the Neapolitan Novels (My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay). The quartet traces the friendship between Elena and Lila, from their childhood in a poor neighbourhood in Naples, to their thirties, when both women are mothers but each has chosen a different path.

Their lives are still inextricably linked, for better or worse, especially when it comes to the drama of a lost child... more

City on Fire
by Garth Risk Hallberg

The hype is justified: this is the year's must-read book - Shortlist

NEW YORK. 1977. BE THERE WHEN IT EXPLODES.

It's New Year's Eve, 1976, and New York is a city on the edge. As midnight approaches, a blizzard sets in and amidst the fireworks, an unmistakable sound rings out across Central Park. Gunshots. Two of them. The search for the shooter will bring together a rich cast of New Yorkers. From the reluctant heirs to one of the city's greatest fortunes, to a couple of Long Island kids drawn to the punk scene downtown... more

A Little Life
by Hanya Yanagihara

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2015 MAN BOOKER PRIZE

'Astonishing and unsettling ...A masterwork'  - San Francisco Chronicle

Brace yourself for the most astonishing, challenging, upsetting and profoundly moving book in many a season. An epic about love and friendship in the twenty-first century that goes into some of the darkest places fiction has ever traveled and yet somehow improbably breaks through into the light. When four graduates from a small Massachusetts college move to New York to make their way, they're broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition.... more

Slade House
by David Mitchell

Born out of the short story David Mitchell published on Twitter in 2014 and inhabiting the same universe as his latest bestselling novel The Bone Clocks, this is the perfect book to curl up with on a dark and stormy night.

Turn down Slade Alley - narrow, dank and easy to miss, even when you're looking for it. Find the small black iron door set into the right-hand wall. No handle, no keyhole, but at your touch it swings open. Enter the sunlit garden of an old house that doesn't quite make sense; too grand for the shabby neighbourhood, too large for the space it occupies... more

The Heart Goes Last
by Margaret Atwood

'One of the most important writers in English today' – Germaine Greer

Living in their car, surviving on tips, Charmaine and Stan are in a desperate state. So, when they see an advertisement for Consilience, a 'social experiment' offering stable jobs and a home of their own, they sign up immediately. All they have to do in return for suburban paradise is give up their freedom every second month – swapping their home for a prison cell. At first, all is well. But then, unknown to each other, Stan and Charmaine develop passionate obsessions with their 'Alternates,' the couple that occupy their house when they are in prison. Soon the pressures of conformity, mistrust, guilt and sexual desire begin to take over... more

The Secret Chord
by Geraldine Brooks

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of People of the Book, Year of Wonders and March comes a unique and vivid novel that retells the story of King David's extraordinary rise to power and fall from grace.

1000 BC. The Second Iron Age. The time of King David.

Anointed as the chosen one when just a young shepherd boy, David will rise to be king, grasping the throne and establishing his empire. But his journey is a tumultuous one and the consequences of his choices will resound for generations... more

The Life and Death of Sophie Stark
by Anna North

'Who is the real Sophie Stark?

The Life and Death of Sophie Stark is the story of an enigmatic film director, told by the six people who loved her most. Brilliant, infuriating, all-seeing and unknowable, Sophie Stark makes films said to be 'more like life than life itself'.

But her genius comes at a terrible cost: to her husband, to the brother she left behind, and to the actress she can't forget... more

Welcome to Night Vale
by Jeffrey Cranor and Joseph Fink

From the creators of the wildly popular Welcome to Night Vale podcast comes an imaginative mystery of appearances and disappearances that is also a poignant look at the ways in which we all struggle to find ourselves . . . no matter where we live.

Located in a nameless desert somewhere in the great American Southwest, Night Vale is a small town where ghosts, angels, aliens and government conspiracies are all commonplace parts of everyday life. It is here that the lives of two women, with two mysteries, will converge... more