November New Releases 2025

This is the astounding story of the six female aviators who battled to become the first woman to cross the Atlantic Ocean by plane.

In the early 20th century, the dream of crossing the Atlantic by air was as potent as putting a man on the moon would be 50 years later. But many people believed women too fragile and lacked the skills to endure the gruelling conditions of flying long distances.

In Atlantic Furies, Midge Gillies uncovers the stories of Elsie Mackay, Lady Anne Savile, Frances Grayson, Ruth Elder, Amelia Earhart, and Mabel Boll. These courageous, rule-breaking women risked everything to prove that women could fly the Atlantic. Some had lied to their families in order not to be stopped, others duped the press about their intentions and, ultimately, three lost their lives, but each pushed the boundaries of the possible.

Atlantic Furies celebrates the bravery, panache, and drive of these trail-blazing aviators, who showed the world that it wasn’t just men who could conquer the skies.

2025: the year in politics as observed by Australia's funniest and most perceptive political cartoonists.

The established wisdom at the beginning of the 2025 election year was that Labor would likely scrape back into minority government with the help of the smaller parties. Even a Trump-lite Dutton government was an outside, but real, chance.

But after seeing the real and unchecked Trump in action, we decided we didn’t want any of that madness here, and the Coalition — more specifically, the Liberal Party — after a decade of negativity and culture warring, got their unambiguous comeuppance. While Teals-style candidates mostly held the line, the Greens took a severe beating as voters retreated into the imagined security of Albo’s one-party state.

If the Trump effect caused tremors in our domestic politics, globally it set off an earthquake. In trade relations, sanctions reduced established relationships with the US — even with long-time allies — to the crudely transactional. In case we had any doubts that the US-led post-1945 rules-based-system was over, 2025 dispelled them. The moral claims of that order, always dubious, were finally — even proudly — cremated in the ruins of Gaza and Ukraine. Forget international law: might has reasserted its traditional place in the ordering of nations.

In this profoundly disordered world, we have never needed the satirical insights of our great political cartoonists more. This year’s collection features Dean Alston, Badiucao, Matt Bissett-Johnson, Peter Broelman, Warren Brown, Harry Bruce, Mark David, First Dog on the Moon, Matt Golding, Megan Herbert, Fiona Katauskas, Mark Knight, Jon Kudelka, Glen Le Lievre, Sean Leahy, Johannes Leak, Brett Lethbridge, Alan Moir, Nordacious, David Pope, Geoff Pryor, David Rowe, Greg Smith, Phil Somerville, John Spooner, Andrew Weldon, and Cathy Wilcox.

FINALIST FOR THE 75TH NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARDS

The awe-inspiring story of Hannah Senesh, a female paratrooper in World War II whose courage and sacrifice left an indelible mark on history

In the years before World War II, thousands of young Jewish men and women escaped Europe, seeking safety in British Mandatory Palestine. By 1942, horrifying reports began to spread about industrialised killing centres in Poland and a chilling campaign to exterminate Europe’s entire Jewish population. When it became clear that the Allies were unwilling to spare any forces from the war effort to save civilians, the Jewish community in Palestine came up with a daring plan.

Working with British Military Intelligence, an elite unit of young Jewish paratroopers volunteered to return to eastern Europe. Once behind enemy lines, they would use their expertise in the local languages and terrain to rescue thousands of downed Allied pilots and escaped POWs. At the same time, these volunteer commandos would help Jewish civilians escape deportation to death camps or take up arms in resistance against the Nazis. Hannah Senesh was one of only three female paratroopers who risked everything to infiltrate occupied Europe.

In 1939, at just eighteen years old, Hannah emigrated from Hungary to British Mandatory Palestine, where she dreamed of being a poet and a schoolteacher. Instead, she became a poet and a paratrooper. Five years after fleeing Europe, Hannah parachuted back into occupied territory as a freedom fighter with the most crucial role in her team: the wireless operator tasked with sending and deciphering top secret British radio codes. Though captured after crossing the border into Hungary, she refused to give up her radio codes or any information about her mission, despite enduring months of torture. Her final act of defiance — choosing to die before a firing squad rather than beg for clemency — cemented her legendary status as the ‘Jewish Joan of Arc’, and her posthumously published poems, translated into more than twenty languages, continue to inspire new generations of readers.

More than just a gripping historical account of Hannah’s life and afterlife, Crash of the Heavens offers a powerful reminder of the human spirit’s ability to shine, even in the darkest of times.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2026 AUSTRALIAN POLITICAL BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD
SHORTLISTED FOR THE ABA BOOKDATA ADULT NON-FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR

The best of Niki Savva’s scene-setting newspaper columns from The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, along with a riveting and deeply informed analysis of Australia’s epoch-making 2025 election.

Labor’s landslide victory on 3 May 2025 wreaked havoc across the political landscape. It triggered ministerial assassinations, trashed reputations, destroyed careers, fractured the Coalition, and threatened to fracture it again. It took the Liberal Party to the brink of extinction and turned Anthony Albanese into a Labor hero.

When the Coalition government was overthrown in 2022 after nine years in office, it was tempting to portray the loss as merely a personal repudiation of Scott Morrison. Then, when opposition leader Peter Dutton torpedoed the referendum on establishing an Indigenous Voice to parliament, his standing as a political leader improved and the prime minister’s nosedived. That was when, according to Niki Savva, the conservative Coalition thought it had the upcoming election in the bag.

But Niki had noticed the ground shifting: the emergence of the teal independents and the long-term threat they represented to the Liberals; the false dawn of Dutton saying no to the Voice referendum; and the overlooked reality, even back in August 2023, that, ‘The 2022 federal election result was no ordinary defeat … It delivered last rites to the broad-church party that Robert Menzies created.’

In her highly popular columns, Niki Savva captured all this and more in her typically uncompromising, penetrating, and prescient way. Now, following on from So Greek, The Road to Ruin, Plots and Prayers, and Bulldozed, she also provides a detailed, considered analysis of what went on behind the scenes, accompanied by her trademark access to important players and eyewitnesses, of an election that transformed Australian politics.