November New Releases

A modern-day Wuthering Heights from the author of international bestseller The Eighth Life.

Two families, one devastating secret, and an epic story of forbidden love.

Eight years have passed since Stella last saw Ivo, but when he returns, the reunion of their unconventional family will change the course of her ordinary life. As children, Stella and Ivo grew close as their parents embarked on an affair that would shatter both families. Later, as teenagers, their own relationship would be the cause of further scandal. Now, as adults, they set out on an odyssey to uncover the truth about another family’s past, and to understand their own.

My Soul Twin is an intense love story about forbidden desire, the ties that bind us, and whether we can ever truly forget what we leave behind.

WINNER OF THE 2023 AGE BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD FOR NONFICTION

To essay means to try, to endeavour, to attempt — and to risk failure. For Kim Mahood, it is both a form of writing and an approach to life.

In these finely observed and probing essays, award-winning artist and writer Kim Mahood invites us to accompany her on the road and into the remote places of Australia where she is engaged in long-established collaborations of mapping, storytelling, and placemaking. Celebrated as one of the few Australian writers who both lives within and can articulate the complexities and tensions that arise in the spaces between Aboriginal and settler Australia, Mahood writes passionately and eloquently about the things that capture her senses and demand her attention — art, country, people, and writing. Her compelling evocation of desert landscapes and tender, wry observations of cross-cultural relationships describe people, places, and ways of living that are familiar to her but still strange to most non-Indigenous Australians.

At once a testament to personal freedom and a powerful argument for Indigenous self-determination, Wandering with Intent demonstrates, with candour, humour, and hope, how necessary and precious it is for each of us to choose how to live.

Tommi Parrish’s sophomore graphic novel establishes them as one of the most exciting voices in contemporary literature.

Eliza is a thirtysomething struggling single mother and poet. Sasha, a twentysomething yearning for direction in life, just moved back in with her parents and dabbles as a sex worker. The two strike up an unlikely friendship that, as it veers towards something more, becomes a deeply resonant exploration of how far people are willing to go to find intimacy in a society that is increasingly closed off.

Parrish’s fully realised characters and gorgeously painted pages make Men I Trust one of the most moving and insightful works of fiction in any medium this year.

The twentieth-anniversary edition of this much-loved annual collection brings you the last year in politics, as observed by Australia’s funniest and most perceptive political cartoonists.

2022: the year we slapped ourselves on the back for a job well done, and put the last few awful years behind us.

Well, maybe not. High vaccination rates liberated us from the grind of COVID lockdowns, but not from the virus’s uncontrolled spread and continuing high — if largely ignored — death rates. Spared fires, at least, it was the turn of flooding rains to stress-test our resilience, destroying lives and livelihoods in the process.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine reminded us that history — and geopolitics — was well and truly alive, And in our backyard, the regular amping-up of the China threat threw the Anglo band back together in AUKUS.

If all that wasn’t bad enough, we had the grinding tedium of a six-week ideas-free election campaign between a clamorous but intellectually torpid incumbent and a timid, risk-averse opposition. Clive’s liberation yellow was everywhere, but it was the colour teal and a bunch of smart, thoughtful women who emerged from the Liberal heartlands, demanding integrity in government and action on climate, that most freaked out the Coalition.

It was all enough to make you want to head for a well-deserved holiday in Hawaii.

Featuring Australia’s finest cartoonists, including Alston, Broelman, Dyson, First Dog, Golding, Katauskas, Knight, Kudelka, Leak, Moir, Pope, Rowe, Wilcox, and more …

A call to action for the creative class and labour movement to rally against the power of Big Tech and Big Media

Corporate concentration has breached the stratosphere, as have corporate profits. An ever-expanding constellation of industries are now monopolies (where sellers have excessive power over buyers) or monopsonies (where buyers hold the whip hand over sellers) — or both.

In Chokepoint Capitalism, scholar Rebecca Giblin and writer and activist Cory Doctorow argue we’re in a new era of ‘chokepoint capitalism’, with exploitative businesses creating insurmountable barriers to competition that enable them to capture value that should rightfully go to others. All workers are weakened by this, but the problem is especially well illustrated by the plight of creative workers.

By analysing book publishing and news, live music and music streaming, screenwriting, radio, and more, Giblin and Doctorow deftly show how powerful corporations construct ‘anti-competitive flywheels’ designed to lock in users and suppliers, make their markets hostile to new entrants, and then force workers and suppliers to accept unfairly low prices.

In the book’s second half, Giblin and Doctorow explain how to batter through those chokepoints, with tools ranging from transparency rights to collective action and ownership, radical interoperability, contract terminations, job guarantees, and minimum wages for creative work.

Chokepoint Capitalism is a call to workers of all sectors to unite to help smash these chokepoints and take back the power and profit that’s being heisted away — before it’s too late.