Scribe’s local fiction list is made up of compelling Australian and New Zealand voices. Our authors are highly awarded, and ANZ books on our list have won or been shortlisted for many major literary awards, including the NSW, QLD, SA, and VIC Premier’s Literary Awards, the Miles Franklin Award, The Stella Prize, and the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.
Below is a list of celebrated fiction by Australian and New Zealand authors.
From prize-winning short-story writer Cate Kennedy comes a new collection to rival her highly acclaimed Dark Roots. In Like a House on Fire, Kennedy once again takes ordinary lives and dissects their ironies, injustices and pleasures with her humane eye and wry sense of humour. In ‘Laminex and Mirrors’, a young woman working as a cleaner in a hospital helps an elderly patient defy doctor’s orders. In ‘Cross-Country’, a jilted lover manages to misinterpret her ex’s new life. And in ‘Ashes’, a son accompanies his mother on a journey to scatter his father’s remains, while lifelong resentments simmer in the background. Cate Kennedy’s poignant short stories find the beauty and tragedy in illness and mortality, life and love.
WINNER OF THE 2014 VICTORIAN PREMIER'S UNPUBLISHED MANUSCRIPT AWARD WINNER OF THE 2016 VICTORIAN PREMIER'S LITERARY AWARDS PEOPLE'S CHOICE WINNER OF THE 2016 WESTERN AUSTRALIA PREMIER'S LITERARY AWARDS PEOPLE'S CHOICE
For nearly five years I have wanted to write something about the surrealist painter Emil Bafdescu: about his paintings, one of which hangs in a little restaurant in Melbourne, and about his disappearance, which is still a mystery. But this is probably not going to be the book I imagined. Nothing has quite worked out the way I planned.
With the small inheritance he received upon his father’s death, Miles has come to Europe on the trail of the Romanian surrealist, who disappeared into a forest in 1967. But in trying to unravel the mystery of Bafdescu’s secret life, Miles must also reckon with his own.
Faced with a language and a landscape that remain stubbornly out of reach, and condemned to wait for someone who may never arrive, Miles is haunted by thoughts of his ex-girlfriend, Alice, and the trip they took to Venice that ended their relationship.
Uncanny, occasionally absurd, and utterly original, Fever of Animals is a beautifully written meditation on art and grief.
The thrilling new novel, inspired by Jim Jones’s Peoples Temple, from the author of The Love of a Bad Man.
It’s the summer of 1968, and Evelyn Lynden is a woman at war with herself. Minister’s daughter. Atheist. Independent woman. Frustrated wife. Bitch with a bleeding heart.
Following her conscientious-objector husband Lenny to the rural Eden of Evergreen Valley, California, Evelyn wants to be happy with their new life. Yet as the world is rocked by warfare and political assassinations, by racial discrimination and social upheaval, she finds herself disillusioned with Lenny’s passive ways — and anxious for a saviour.
Enter the Reverend Jim Jones, the dynamic leader of a revolutionary church called Peoples Temple. As Evelyn grows closer to Jones, her marriage is just the first casualty of his rise to power.
Meticulously researched, elegantly written, and utterly engrossing, Beautiful Revolutionary explores the allure of the real-life charismatic leader who would destroy so many. In masterful prose, Woollett painstakingly examines what happens when Evelyn is pulled into Jones’s orbit — an orbit it would prove impossible for her to leave.
WINNER OF THE JANN MEDLICOTT ACORN PRIZE FOR FICTION
WINNER OF THE MITOQ BEST FIRST BOOK OF FICTION
WINNER OF THE NGAIO MARSH AWARD FOR BEST CRIME NOVEL
auē
Taukiri was born into sorrow. Auē can be heard in the sound of the sea he loves and hates, and in the music he draws out of the guitar that was his father’s. It spills out of the gang violence that killed his father and sent his mother into hiding, and the shame he feels about abandoning his eight-year-old brother to a violent home.
But Taukiri’s brother, Ārama, is braver than he looks, and he has a friend, and his friend has a dog, and the three of them together might just be strong enough to turn back the tide of sadness.
This bestselling multi-award-winning novel is both raw and sublime, introducing a compelling new voice in New Zealand fiction.
WINNER OF THE 2021 VICTORIAN PRIZE FOR LITERATURE
WINNER OF THE 2021 VICTORIAN PREMIER'S LITERARY AWARDS PRIZE FOR FICTION
A SLATE AND SUNDAY TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR
WINNER OF THE 2021 ARTHUR C. CLARKE AWARD
Out on the road, no one speaks, everything talks.
Hard-drinking, foul-mouthed, and allergic to bullshit, Jean is not your usual grandma. She’s never been good at getting on with other humans, apart from her beloved granddaughter, Kimberly. Instead, she surrounds herself with animals, working as a guide in an outback wildlife park. And although Jean talks to all her charges, she has a particular soft spot for a young dingo called Sue.
As disturbing news arrives of a pandemic sweeping the country, Jean realises this is no ordinary flu: its chief symptom is that its victims begin to understand the language of animals — first mammals, then birds and insects, too. As the flu progresses, the unstoppable voices become overwhelming, and many people begin to lose their minds, including Jean’s infected son, Lee. When he takes off with Kimberly, heading south, Jean feels the pull to follow her kin.
Setting off on their trail, with Sue the dingo riding shotgun, they find themselves in a stark, strange world in which the animal apocalypse has only further isolated people from other species. Bold, exhilarating, and wholly original, The Animals in That Country asks what would happen, for better or worse, if we finally understood what animals were saying.
WINNER OF THE 2017 VICTORIAN PREMIER'S LITERARY AWARD FOR FICTION
WINNER OF THE 2016 UNIVERSITY OF QUEENSLAND FICTION BOOK AWARD
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2017 STELLA PRIZE
ONE OF BOOKPEOPLE’S ‘100 BEST AUSTRALIAN BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURY’
‘Whenever I need reminding of the preciousness of ordinary life I return to this stunning novel of forgiveness and family, which gives clear, beautiful voice to the fierce luck of being alive.’
Charlotte Wood
Ester is a family therapist with an appointment book that catalogues the anxieties of the middle class: loneliness, relationships, death. She spends her days helping others find happiness, but her own family relationships are tense and frayed. Estranged from both her sister, April, and her ex-husband, Lawrence, Ester wants to fall in love again. Meanwhile, April is struggling through her own directionless life; Lawrence’s reckless past decisions are catching up with him; and Ester and April's mother, Hilary, is about to make a choice that will profoundly affect them all.
Taking place largely over one rainy day in Sydney, and rendered with evocative and powerful prose, the multi-award-winning Between a Wolf and a Dog is a celebration of the best in all of us — our capacity to live in the face of ordinary sorrows, and to draw strength from the transformative power of art.
