June new releases 2025

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST
THE NEW YORK TIMES 100 NOTABLE BOOKS OF 2025
THE NEW YORK TIMES “The Best Historical Fiction Novels to Read Right Now”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY 2025 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR

An extraordinary love story and a captivating novel about the power of memory and imagination.

Flanders 1922. After serving as a soldier in the Great War, Noon Merckem has lost his memory and lives in a psychiatric asylum. Countless women, responding to a newspaper ad, visit him there in the hope of finding their spouse who vanished in battle. One day a woman, Julienne, appears and recognises Noon as her husband, the photographer Amand Coppens, and takes him home against medical advice. But their miraculous reunion doesn’t turn out the way that Julienne wants her envious friends to believe. Only gradually do the two grow close, and Amand’s biography is pieced together on the basis of Julienne’s stories about him. But how can he be certain that she’s telling the truth?

In The Remembered Soldier, Anjet Daanje immerses us in the psyche of a war-traumatised man who has lost his identity. When Amand comes to doubt Julienne’s word, the reader is caught up in a riveting spiral of confusion that only the greatest works of literature can achieve.

Internationally acclaimed human rights lawyer Keio Yoshida uncovers the ongoing battle for LGBTQ+ rights, how far we’ve come, and how much further we have to go.

The right to life and the right to live life free from discrimination are rights that are codified and legally protected, but — unlike those on women’s rights, disability rights, children’s rights, freedom from torture, and racial discrimination — there is no dedicated and binding treaty or convention in international human rights law with respect to LGBTQ+ rights.

In Pride and Prejudices, Yoshida analyses case law from around the world, including Rosanna Flamer Caldera v Sri Lanka, the first global precedent to call for the decriminalisation of same-sex intimacy between women, in which Yoshida acted as counsel, as well as other timely cases such as the bitter debate over self-ID for trans people in the UK and Florida’s recent ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill.

This pivotal book addresses the legal problems that still persist and contribute to the violence and discrimination that the international LGBTQ+ population experiences on a daily basis, and demonstrates what more needs to be done to protect LGBTQ+ communities.

They blamed alcohol. They blamed men. But they blamed women most of all.

The year is 1942, the place Melbourne. A brownout is in effect to dim the night-time lights of the city, and thousands of American GIs are based in Royal Park. As the latter make plans to defend the Pacific, the women of Australia have stepped up to support the war effort at home. Beatrice is doing her part. She’s enlisted as an air raid warden, preparing the city ahead of a possible Japanese attack. Her sister June is an operator at the telephone exchange, while her other sister, Lizzie, works as a shopgirl by day and parties with the Americans by night.

But the times are about to change again, and the three sisters will have to navigate the consequences of a new threat as a series of grisly murders are committed in the eerie half-light of the brownout. Inspired by true events, The Brownout Murders tells a story of fear, fortitude, and social change — and how the independence of all women is too often set against the violence of a single man.