Winner of Alone Australia and advocate for the wild power within us all, Gina Chick has pieced together the mosaic of her life as though it were a tree: strong at its base, wilted in parts, branching out at every possible angle in the hopes of skimming the stars. From her coastal childhood to the nightlife of ’90s Sydney, to the touch of death in her hands, this memoir reads like fiction with the thrum of life pushing out of it.

Just as much a breath of fresh air as it is a reminder of ancient wisdom, we recommend this book to anyone who’s had the depth of their resilience shown to them, or those needing a hand in finding their inner-wolf and unlocking its rusty cage.

From multi-award-winning author Jock Serong comes Cherrywood, an imaginative, darkly playful and deeply meaningful delight, a novel about legacy, community, wonder, love and reinvention. A complex and haunting novel, this is delicious, rich storytelling, with a dark unusual charm.

Edinburgh, 1916: A rich Scottish industrialist, Thomas Wrenfether, impulsively embarks on a mad scheme to build a paddle-steamer out of dubiously sourced European cherrywood on the other side of the world, in booming Melbourne, Australia. But nothing goes according to plan.

Melbourne, 1993: Martha is a clever, lonely and frustrated lawyer. One night, on impulse, she stops at a strange hotel in Fitzroy, The Cherrywood, for a bottle of wine. The mysterious building and its inhabitants make an indelible impression, and she slowly begins to deduce odd truths that lie in its history.

Christian White returns with an ever-tight grasp on the art of twists in his new book The Ledge. When human remains are dug up in the dense soil of regional Victoria, a group of evolved friends are forced to confront what they’d rather leave for dead. Flitting between 1999 and the current day, The Ledge convolves between the predicament of past and present, hope and fear, love and hate, with the splice of secrets pushing its readers right up to the suspenseful ledge, gripping the pages as if at any second they might fall right off.

Praised as the new Lemony Snicket, Judith Rossell has given Middle Grade fiction a revamp with The Midwatch. Following Maggie Fishbone and a group of similarly ungovernable girls as they are sent to the Midwatch Institute for Orphans and Runaways, this story uncovers a glittering city and all its alluring secrets. The Midwatch is exploding with mystery, and brimming with the quiet anarchy within all good sisterhoods.

We recommend this book for all young readers who like their stories on the unruly side, with a touch of enchantment and a trough of adventure!

Desolate, barren, hot, Tim Winton’s newest novel Juice follows a man and a child as they seek refuge from a futuristic Australia suffering from centuries of climate breakdown. A survivalist novel with simmering tension, this book works as a reflection of current attitudes towards our earth, and also poses the ambiguous question: how much juice do we have left? Alight with Winton’s usual vibrant characters, Juice is for anyone who’s cared for the land, a child or who wants to tend to the spirit of humanity before it runs completely dry.