From the author of the acclaimed Cherry Beach comes a thrilling exploration of love and desire — obsessive, all-consuming, and impossible to look away from.

On an ordinary day, two women meet on a train.

Heloise — the older woman — lives with her boyfriend in Melbourne.

Lacey — the other woman — is from Aotearoa and studies the clouds.

What follows is anything but ordinary, a passionate affair that will consume them both in mismatched and maddening ways.

Propulsive and lyrical, Worry Doll examines desire, memory, and the delusion of love.

‘A ghost story without ghosts that, beyond the beauty of its form, explores solitude, the twists and turns of our lives, and the unfathomable complexities of affection.’ Mariana Enriquez

While preparing an empty house for sale, a woman encounters an unblinking seven-year-old boy, trapped there from another era, like an insect preserved in amber. Unable to articulate what he needs, the child draws her into an unsettling bond that neither can escape … until they understand what has caused it.

With incredible precision, this deeply disquieting novel weaves together doppelgängers and time loops in the tradition of a classic ghost story. Yet its contemporary sensibility — where lyricism meets cruelty — evokes the dark horror of Shirley Jackson.

From one of the most renowned Spanish-language authors working today, Last Day of a Prior Life is a masterful dissection of human longing and the ties that bind us, even across time itself.

A punk revival of Medea as a Mexican anti-angel of birth and death, from the International Booker Prize-nominated author of Reservoir Bitches.

In Northern Mexico, Paulina, Perla, Antonia, Reina, and Jordan are striving to survive the barrio, hustling on the edge of a cartel-run economy, nursing the wounds made normal in a world that eats its own. Hovering over their trials is a spirit with gothic flair, dressed in black and crowned with braids: Medea, a mythic mother of the Chihuahuan desert, ancient as the Aztecs but never too old to be petty.

From aiding a trophy girlfriend’s abortion, to accompanying a mother in her search for her lost child in the desert, to embracing those taken too soon in the narco’s brutal proxy wars, Medea fights for justice for her chosen mortals — her divine wrath the only power that could rival the corrupt, violent web spun by the cartel, the government, and the military. Dahlia de la Cerda’s magnetic prose draws readers right into the heart of that web and links all our fates to the missions of Medea, equal parts midwife and gravedigger, a femme fatale god in a femicidal world.

An epic, transformative novel following a young woman as she navigates a series of three distinct romantic relationships, reckons with the false promise of family intimacy, and seeks connection with the sublime and natural worlds.

Lucy is a senior in college struggling to quell the effects of a sexual assault when she gets a glimpse into a different plane of existence — one that is more wild, physical, animal. Unable to shake the experience, she moves away from home, breaks up with her long-term boyfriend, stops speaking to her mother, and starts dating a dynamic man with a terrifying violent streak.

As she changes cities, friends, and partners, an otherworldly existential force thrums in the back of her mind. It urges her to reject the ordinary, but also reminds her that she is alone in the world. She feels it in the ocean while deep-sea diving, in the cold silences from her mother, in the unknowing gaze of the man she thought would be her soulmate.

We follow Lucy over the course of a decade, witnessing moments of both horrific pain and quotidian happiness. The years pass by seamlessly, bringing her to the edge of her twenties and back to an altered, barren version of her childhood home, where she must finally come to terms with the fear that being human might mean feeling alone, and wild, and unknowable.

Humans have long observed animals for advanced warnings of danger. What can they tell us about the growing threat of viruses and other infectious organisms in the age of climate change?

Coronaviruses jump from bats to chimpanzees to humans. You can give your cat the flu, and pass tuberculosis to an elephant. The scientific term for this — zoonosis — is a word of the future, one that reveals how human and animal lives are inextricably linked. For scientists now warn that human destruction of the environment is responsible for the accelerating spillover of animal diseases, posing a global health threat.

In a journey that will takes readers from southern China to West Africa, from Antarctica to Australia, journalist Michael Dulaney tracks the surprising ways that people and animals are navigating our shared future — along the way meeting camels in Saudi Arabian beauty pageants, coastal seals with bird flu, and genetically engineered disease-proof pigs. In prose that is entertaining, moving, and deeply informed, Sentinels is not just about fears of contagion, but about the wonder of nature, and understanding our species’ capacity to regenerate and revitalise as much as to destroy.

A deeply reported journey into the scarred landscapes of global extraction.

Humanity has remade the Earth with astonishing speed. In the last fifty years alone we have taken more out of the planet than in all prior history combined. Across every continent lie the immense wounds left behind by extraction: the mines, quarries, poisoned rivers, and hollowed-out towns that now form the true map of our civilisation and our age.

Everything we touch — rock, metal, sand, water, even thought itself — feeds the reckless dream pursuit of limitless economic growth. Born into a family and landscape steeped in fossil fuels, James Crawford travels through the living ruins of extraction and meets the people living within its extremes: exploring the radioactive fertiliser-ziggurats of Florida’s Bone Valley, the lithium flats of the Atacama, Greenland’s collapsing melt-edge, the desertified shores of Spain’s Sea of Plastic, and the resource-hungry cloud centres birthing new artificial intelligences, to expose the true cost of this hollowed-out dream.

Yet within these same landscapes lie radical alternatives. Hope emerges in the communities waging legal battles to leave oil untouched beneath the rainforests of Ecuador and the wildfire-stricken plains of Montana; technologists attempting to reverse extraction on Iceland’s tundra; and architects raising wooden skyscrapers amid Scandinavia’s felled forests — finding the path to repair for a world pushed to the brink.

Incisive, immersive, and visionary, The Vanishing Earth exposes the ideological forces that have shaped the planet and charts the essential pathways that could yet save it.

A fresh analysis and appreciation of the Beatles’ genius and creativity, from an acclaimed scholar of transpersonal psychology.

It would be an understatement to say that there was something special about the Beatles. How did these four young musicians come together at the perfect time, and how did everything go so perfectly right for them that they became arguably the greatest band — and one of the most significant cultural phenomena — that the world has ever seen? Was it simply a series of lucky coincidences, or could there be a larger reason for their success?

Steve Taylor, a renowned scholar of psychology and spirituality, and former professional musician, retells the story of the Beatles through the lens of their own creativity: from the unparalleled synchronicities and synergy that generated their success, to the ideal flow state they cultivated as a group, the relentless self-actualisation of each of the members, and how they opened their minds to connect to the zeitgeist of the 1960s, to both access their own intrinsic creativity and become transmitters of a creative energy that transcended themselves.

This is the story of the Beatles from an entirely new angle, and is an appreciation of the psychological, spiritual, and cultural forces they harnessed to access their own genius. Wildly enjoyable and packed full of surprising insights into the Beatles’ journey, Across the Universe is an invitation to experience the Beatles’ brilliance anew.

When I think of my hell days, I think of crime scenes. Familiar sites, made uncanny with violence.

In the fluorescent tedium of a call centre in 2018, acclaimed novelist Laura Elizabeth Woollett finds herself meticulously plotting her own death. Until her period arrives, and equilibrium with it. After years of dismissing these monthly turns, she’s diagnosed with premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD). Then, at 33, she falls pregnant and experiences a reprieve — but will it last?

Through case studies, interviews, extensive medical research, forays into history, true crime, and algorithmic rabbit-holes, Woollett looks beyond herself to assemble a chorus of PMDD sufferers, along with dedicated scientists and clinicians. Navigating the impossible terrain between a potentially fatal disorder and treatments that can be almost as dangerous, Hell Days is a testament to the precarity and dignity of life as a periodically suicidal person in an often-brutal world.

This masterful, multi-award-winning novel — acclaimed as the best Dutch novel published this century — is told from the perspective of eleven characters who draw the reader into a narrative that spans three centuries. Its central figure is the mysterious Eliza May Drayden, modelled after Emily Brontë.

In early 19th-century Yorkshire, Eliza and her sisters, Millicent and Helen, lead a reclusive existence marred by poverty and disease. They find fulfilment in their love of reading and writing books. When, after dozens of rejections, the novels by Millicent and Eliza are finally published (using male pseudonyms), Millicent’s novel becomes a huge success, whereas Eliza’s novel is labelled ‘sick’ and ‘immoral’. Over time, however, it is embraced by ever more readers as a masterpiece.

In eleven extraordinary chapters, each of which could just as well be a standalone novella, Eliza May’s story is told by people who knew her, by her biographers centuries later, through the pages of a mysterious notebook, and by characters whose lives become serendipitously intertwined with Eliza’s. The novel, in effect, tells the story not of Eliza May’s life, but of her tumultuous life after death.

In The Song of Stork and Dromedary, Anjet Daanje has crafted a unique blend of romanticism and postmodernism — a gripping literary mystery, an intricate tapestry of tales of love, death, and obsession, and an unforgettable exploration of the nature of time and storytelling.

Tadao Ando’s architectural life: a reflection on work, creativity, and learning how to endure.

Tadao Ando is one of the most celebrated architects of our time. Winner of the Pritzker Prize and numerous other international awards, his bold, concrete buildings and their interplay with light, shadow, and nature have become emblematic symbols of the modern world, blending modernist design with Eastern spirituality from his native Japan.

Now, at eighty-five, Ando looks back on a lifetime of making. Born in a working-class family living amongst the ruins of postwar Osaka, he could not afford a university education. After a brief stint as a professional boxer, he taught himself architecture at night from books, founded a practice in a cheap rented room, and, after years of uncertainty, persistence, and belief, eventually saw his ‘concrete poetry’ built around the world.

Towards Light, Ando’s first through-written book to be translated into English, explores the stories behind his greatest buildings and shares wisdom drawn from pivotal moments in Ando’s life. Ando is a guide to both the granular demands of creative work — clients, budgets, and the importance of using your own tools — and the exhilaration of inspiration, the power of art and music to spark new ideas, and how to keep the imagination open.

Towards Light is a grounded guide to a creative life as it is actually lived, for anyone committed to their work and to the long process of creating something meaningful.

The sweeping cultural history of a spice so coveted it launched empires across oceans, reshaped global trade, and bound generations of Sri Lankan peelers to colonial rule.

For millennia, cinnamon has been treasured for its healing powers and warm, unmistakable aroma. But behind its familiar scent lies a tumultuous past steeped in conquest and rebellion. In Cinnamon, acclaimed historian Nira Wickramasinghe traces the remarkable story of this ‘queen of spices’, from ancient Egyptian embalming tables and medieval Mughal kitchens to disastrous expeditions in search of mythical cinnamon lands in the Americas and the fierce imperial rivalries of the Portuguese, Dutch, and British. She reveals how global demand for ‘true’ cinnamon transformed Sri Lanka, where an entire caste of peelers, neither enslaved nor free, were compelled to harvest the bark under systems of semi-servitude, at times rising up in rebellion.

Drawing on meticulously researched global history and mythology, Wickramasinghe brings to life the smugglers, merchants, cooks, botanists, conquerors, and peelers who built the cinnamon trade. A vivid journey across centuries and continents, Cinnamon is the definitive portrait of a spice through which the turmoil and richness of our world come alive.

The extraordinary tale — ‘A two-volume mystery!’ Mark Twain called it — of the solicitor who incited a campaign to free a man he knew was guilty of attempted murder, who lost his reputation and ability to practise, and who embarked on a decades-long political career to regain it all.

Sydney, 1895. Richard Meagher is a brilliant criminal defence solicitor with ambitions in politics. Into his life comes George Dean, a handsome, popular ferryman accused of attempting to poison his own wife. The evidence pointing to Dean’s guilt is damning but, in Dean’s protests of innocence and the clamour of public support, Meagher senses that a great opportunity is at hand.

Nine months later, everything is in ruins. Dean is in gaol, and Meagher has lost everything. Determined to recover his reputation and vindicate his actions, Meagher begins a twenty-five-year quest to rewrite the ‘Dean case’ and reclaim all he has lost. That quest will put him in the glare of public scrutiny, arouse enemies at every turn, propel him to high political office, and entwine his cause with the making of the Australian nation.

In a work of true crime with a twist, moving from sordid Sydney streets to the corridors of parliament, and spanning the critical years of Australia’s history in the late-19th and early-20th centuries, The Stained Man tells the riveting story of Australia’s most sensational scandal — and of how an indelible stain was eventually expunged.