FICTION

The Lying Guest When Dr. Anika's patient dies on the operating table and the media pick up on Anika's parasomnia, she has no choice but to escape to Sri Lanka. But returning to her past means facing it too, and Anika needs to be careful of who she can trust...  You don't know her, but she's watching you... Hardworking and overworked, Anika is a talented surgeon at a London hospital. It's been some time since she's had a decent night's sleep, let alone a holiday. Not ideal for someone with parasomnia - a rare, often stress-induced, condition that causes sleepwalking blackouts.  When a patient dies on her operating table, important people start asking questions and the media turns against her with zeal. She quickly becomes a pariah at work. Shafted to endless night shifts and then on suspended leave.  It seems her only respite is to escape on a conveniently all-expenses-paid housesitting gig in Sri Lanka and keep a low profile until the drama passes, and the verdict on her case - and career as a surgeon - is decided.  Despite everything, she's excited to visit the place she used to summer as a child. But what should be a restorative beach break is really a trip back into a murky, haunted past, which has been waiting for her all along.  Will she finally wake up to face her troubles? Or is she cursed to sleepwalk through life?

Miss Burnham And The Loose Thread: A 1920s-set cosy historical mystery. When one of dressmaker Rose's clients is swindled by a deceitful suitor, Rose can't resist being drawn into the investigation... Rose had the sense of a thread being pulled. One tug and everything could unravel. South-east London, 1925. Talented, ambitious designer-dressmaker Rose Burnham knows well both the strains of her profession and the secrets it can yield. Newly established in her own business, she and her sisters are privy to the hushed conversations that unspool behind the fitting room's closed doors. So when a major client finds herself the victim of a deception, it is Rose she tells. Driven by the shortage of men following the Great War, Miss Holmes had engaged the services of a matrimonial agency, only to be cheated out of her inheritance by a fake suitor. Rose is determined to bring the swindler to justice. To begin with, playing the detective is a grand adventure, but as pressures mount and an old friend receives a troubling string of poison-pen letters, Rose discovers there is more to investigating - and these investigations - than she'd bargained for.

Call Me Ishmaelle: A reimagining of Moby Dick from the perspective of a cross-dressing female sailor. Moby-Dick reimagined from the perspective of a cross-dressed female sailor. 'Brilliantly written... ambitious, brave, strange' Philip Hoare. 'One of the most valuable writers in the world' Deborah Levy. 1843. Ishmaelle is born in a small village on the stormy Kent coast where she grows up swimming with dolphins. After her parents and infant sister die, her brother, Joseph, leaves to find work as a sailor. Abandoned and desperate for a life at sea, Ishmaelle disguises herself as a cabin boy and travels to New York. Call Me Ishmaelle reimagines the epic battle between man and nature in Herman Melville's Moby Dick from a female perspective. As the American Civil War breaks out in 1861, Ishmaelle boards the Nimrod, a whaling ship led by the obsessive Captain Seneca, a Black free man of heroic stature who is haunted by a tragic past. Here, she finds protectors in Polynesian harpooner, Kauri, and Taoist monk, Muzi, whose readings of the I-Ching guide their quest. Through the bloody male violence of whaling, and the unveiling of her feminine identity, Ishmaelle realizes there is a mysterious bond between herself and the mythical white whale, Moby Dick. Xiaolu Guo has crafted a dramatically different, feminist narrative that stands alongside the original while offering a powerful exploration of nature, gender, and human purpose.

Burn After Reading A ghostwriter is tasked with capturing the memoirs of a celebrity widely suspected of murder. Now she's locked in an interview room with a killer, and he's ready to confess. The night Jack Smyth ran into flames in a desperate attempt to save his wife from their burning home, he was tragically too late - but hailed a hero. Until it emerged that Kate was dead long before the fire began. Suspicion has stalked him ever since. After all, there's no smoke without fire. A year on, he's signed a book deal. He wants to tell his side of the story, to prove his innocence in print. He just needs someone to help him write it. Emily has never ghostwritten anything before, but she knows what it's like to live with a guilty secret. And she's about to learn that there are some stories that should never be told.

Theory & Practice WINNER, STELLA PRIZE, 2025SHORTLISTED, THE MILES FRANKLIN LITERARY AWARD 2025 SHORTLISTED, VICTORIAN PREMIER'S LITERARY AWARD, FICTION, 2025 'One of the living masters of the art of fiction.' Max Porter 'Michelle de Kretser is to my mind one of the finest writers alive and Theory and Practice a lightning strike of a book.' Ali Smith 'Michelle de Kretser, one of the best writers in the English language, has written her most brilliant book yet. It is, in short, a masterpiece.' Neel Mukherjee One of the most anticipated literary releases of the year, this gripping novel changes the game on what fiction can be and do. It's 1986, and 'beautiful, radical ideas' are in the air. A young woman arrives in Melbourne to research the novels of Virginia Woolf. In bohemian St Kilda she meets artists, activists, students-and Kit. He claims to be in a 'deconstructed' relationship, and they become lovers. Meanwhile, her work on the Woolfmother falls into disarray. Theory & Practice is a mesmerising account of desire and jealousy, truth and shame. It makes and unmakes fiction as we read, expanding our notion of what a novel can contain. Michelle de Kretser, one of Australia's most celebrated writers, bends fiction, essay and memoir into exhilarating new shapes to uncover what happens when life smashes through the boundaries of art. PRAISE- 'Thrillingly original.' Sigrid Nunez 'I loved it...raw, funny, truthful, youthful' Tessa Hadley 'Startlingly intelligent and stylish.' Jasmine Vojdani, New York Magazine 'Brilliant and mesmerising.' Gleaner 'Perfect for a summer read, but also with a timeless appeal.' Good Weekend 'Utterly absorbing.' Felicity Plunkett, Saturday Paper 'Ambitious and dazzling ' Men Yiman, Big Issue 'I've read it twice...The more you look at it, the more it offers you.' Kate Evans, ABC News 'Theory & Practice blazes with intelligence, passion and wit. I devoured it, greedily, in a single glorious sitting.' Sarah Waters 'Michelle de Kretser is a genius-one of the best writers working today. She is startlingly, uncannily good at naming and facing what is most difficult and precious about our lives. Theory & Practice is a wonder, a brilliant book that reinvents itself again and again, stretching the boundaries of the novel to show the ways in which ideas and ideals are folded into our days, as well as the times when our choices fail to meet them. There's no writer I'd rather read.' V.V. Ganeshananthan, author of Women's Prize for Fiction and Carol Shields Prize award-winning Brotherless Night 'A brilliant account of what it means to be a feminist and wrestling with universal emotions that cannot be denied. It's a slim book, something you can finish in one glorious and insightful sitting.' Women's Agenda 'A thought-provoking narrative on desire, shame and moral complexities.' Harper's Bazaar 'De Kretser perceptively evokes how maternal figures, both birthright and adoptive, maintain a hold on us, despite our attempts to distance ourselves...A form-melding book contending with colonialism, the disharmony that can arise between our purported ideals and how we live, the depths of jealousy and shame, and motherhood and the maternal figures who shape us...An inquiry into what fiction can look like and what it can achieve.' Jack Callil, Guardian 'Sharp-witted and mesmerising...The narrator's clever political insights and beautiful depictions of art and literature offer readers a view into a captivating mind. De Kretser is at the top of her game.' Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Your Friend And MineA warm, witty and wise novel about second chances, friendship, and romance for readers of Marian Keyes and Liane Moriarty.

I Cheerfully Refuse Barnes & Noble's April Book Club Pick An Amazon Top 10 Editors' Pick A Most Anticipated Book of 2024 from Literary Hub Set in a not-too-distant America, I Cheerfully Refuse is the tale of a bereaved musician taking to Lake Superior in search of his departed, deeply beloved bookselling wife. Encountering lunatic storms and rising corpses from the warming depths, Rainy finds on land an increasingly desperate and illiterate people, a malignant billionaire ruling class, crumbled infrastructure and a lawless society. Amid the Gulliver-like challenges of life at sea, Rainy is lifted by physical beauty, surprising humour, generous strangers and an unexpected companion in a young girl who comes aboard. As his essentially guileless nature begins to make an inadvertent rebel of him, Rainy's private quest for the love of his life grows into something wider and wilder, sweeping up friends and foes alike in his strengthening wake. A rollicking narrative in the most evocative of settings, I Cheerfully Refuse is a symphony against despair and a rallying cry for the future.

Framed for mass murder. Hunted by every agency on the planet. Ryan Kaine is on the run ...

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Kind Worth Killing and Eight Perfect Murders comes an inventive, utterly propulsive murder-mystery in reverse, tracing a marriage back in time to uncover the dark secret at its heart.  Thom and Wendy Graves have been married for over twenty-five years. They live in a beautiful Victorian on the north shore of Massachusetts. Wendy is a published poet and Thom teaches English literature at a nearby university. Their son, Jason, is all grown up. All is well...except that Wendy wants to murder her husband.   What happens next has everything to do with what happened before. The story of Wendy and Thom's marriage is told in reverse, moving backward through time to witness key moments from the couple's lives-their fiftieth birthday party, buying their home, Jason's birth, the mysterious death of a work colleague-all painting a portrait of a marriage defined by a single terrible act they plotted together many years ago.   Eventually we learn the details of what Thom and Wendy did in their early twenties, a secret that has kept them bound together through the length of their marriage. But its power over them is fraying, and each of them begins to wonder if they would be better off making sure their spouse carries their secrets to the grave.

The Wind Weaver: A heart-racing enemies-to-lovers romantasy steeped in elemental magic . . . In the war-torn world of Anwyvn, where maegic is seen as a scourge, halflings like Rhya are hunted down and hanged on sight. But Rhya's execution is interrupted by an unexpected saviour. Because the strange birthmark on her chest means she is a Remnant - one of four souls scattered across Anwyvn, fated to restore the balance of maegic or die trying. Soon she is thrust into the lives of two very different men of two very different kingdoms. Both immensely powerful. Neither of whom she can fully trust with her life . . . or her heart.

Beloved #1 Sunday Times bestselling author of It Ends with Us returns with an unforgettable love story between a writer and his unexpected muse. Fallon meets Ben, an aspiring novelist, the day before her scheduled cross-country move. Their untimely attraction leads them to spend Fallon’s last day in Los Angeles together, and her eventful life becomes the creative inspiration Ben has always sought for his novel. Over time and amidst the various relationships and tribulations of their own separate lives, they continue to meet on the same date every year. Until one day Fallon becomes unsure if Ben has been telling her the truth or fabricating a perfect reality for the sake of the ultimate plot twist. Can Ben’s relationship with Fallon—and simultaneously his novel—be considered a love story if it ends in heartbreak?

'Despite the inordinate limits placed on women, See allows their strengths to dominate their stories' Washington Post'Poignant . . . quietly affecting' Time'Emotional and illuminating' BookPageIn 15th century China two women are born under the same sign, the Metal Snake. But life will take the friends on very different paths. According to Confucius, ‘an educated woman is a worthless woman’, but Tan Yunxian – born into an elite family, yet haunted by death, separation and loneliness – is being raised by her grandparents to be of use. She begins her training in medicine with her grandmother and, as she navigates the male world of medicine, requiring tact and diplomacy, she struggles against the confining world of her class. From a young age, Yunxian learns about women’s illnesses, many of which relate to childbearing, alongside a young midwife-in-training, Meiling. The two girls find fast friendship and a mutual purpose – despite the prohibition that a doctor should never touch blood while a midwife comes in frequent contact with it – and they vow to be forever friends, sharing in each other’s joys and struggles. No mud, no lotus, they tell themselves: from adversity beauty can bloom. How might a woman like Yunxian break free of tradition, go on to treat women and girls from every level of society, and lead a life of such importance that many of her remedies are still used five centuries later? How might the power of friendship support or complicate these efforts? Lady Tan’s Circle of Women is a captivating story of women helping other women. It is also a triumphant reimagining of the life of a woman who was remarkable in the Ming dynasty and would be considered remarkable today.Praise for Lisa See 'This novel spans wars and generations, but at its heart is a beautifully rendered story of two women whose individual choices become inextricably tangled’ Jodi Picoult 'No one writes about female friendship, the dark and the light of it, with more insight and depth than Lisa See’ Sue Monk Kidd 'See’s thoughtful and empathetic book sheds necessary attention on this largely ignored event' New York Times 'A powerful and essential story of humanity' Los Angeles Review of Books 'A spellbinding portrait of a time burning with opportunity and mystery' O: The Oprah Magazine 'A lush tale infused with clear-eyed compassion' The Washington Post