AUSTRALIAN FICTION
AUSTRALIAN FICTION
THE UNDER- WORLD
Sofie Laguna
PB $ 34.99
The Underworld is the muchawaited new novel from the Miles Franklin Award-winning author, Sofie Laguna. Martha Mullins is fascinated by the underworld, a place she learns about in Roman mythology classes at school. To her, the underworld and its divine inhabitants provide a place of refuge, escape, imagination and desire. Martha’ s friends show her the value in spontaneity, fun, laughter... until things go wrong. The Underworld is a wondrous novel from an author who wields her considerable powers with assuredness and grace. Funny, brave, insightful and clever, Martha will break your heart – then mend it – many times over.
A CATALOGUE OF LOVE
Erin Hortle
PB $ 34.99
‘ Did I still love him? No, probably not. Just the memory of him. Except it wasn’ t even that. It was probably that I was in love with the memory of the me who’ d loved him before.’ Neika has made her way in the world without her mother, who died when Neika was only two. Her path to adulthood was shaped by the love of two adoring fathers, but there’ s a mother-shaped hole in her life. Neika seeks to understand what it means to be a woman in a culture that does not always treat women kindly. In navigating her catalogue of experiences, she comes to see how each has made her who she is.
GRAVITY LET ME GO
Trent Dalton
PB $ 34.99
Trent Dalton, Australia’ s # 1 bestselling author, returns with the astonishing Gravity Let Me Go, a story you won’ t ever forget. Noah Cork has just published a true-crime book about a killer who slipped an unfolding murder mystery into his mailbox. But if this is his moment of triumph, then why is the tin roof being ripped from the walls of his reality? Noah is now hurtling headfirst into a storm of secrets, but he must cling to the only story that ever really mattered. Dark, gritty, hilarious and unexpected, Gravity Let Me Go is about the stories we want to tell the world and those we shouldn’ t, and how the stories we keep locked away are so often the stories that come to define us.
HOLLOW AIR
Verity Borthwick
PB $ 34.99
In the tin fields of Far North Queensland, Sarah, a fly-infly-out geologist, is working alone at a remote mine site. She spends her time in a sort of limbo. Strange things keep happening at the mine site, and Sarah can try to explain them away as the ramblings of a lonely mind, but there are dead bodies from a mining accident a century ago at the old Dulcie Ada mine, still buried beneath more than 100 metres of rock. Hollow Air is a deeply moving novel that explores the friction that comes with the desire to understand the secrets of the Earth, coupled with the knowledge that this can exact a toll.
FIRE- WEATHER
Miranda Darling
HB $ 29.99
It all began when they started running away... Life for Winona Dalloway is not as it should be. Her husband is no longer her husband, her children are not at home with her, the city is besieged by fires, and the doctors are calling her mad... In this looking-glass world, Winona is forced to prove she is a sane, rational human being. But as the pronouncements of the professionals grow more insistent, so too do the voices crowding inside Winona’ s head. She seeks solace in the company of plants and animals and begins to imagine an entirely other way of being – one that might make whole her broken heart.
THE SLIP Miriam Webster
PB $ 29.99
These dark, feral and unforgettable stories are about the things we can’ t hold onto: a marriage drifting out with the tide, a family collapsing like a wave, a young woman’ s affair that dissolves as quickly as it ignites. From Melbourne to regional Victoria and beyond, lovers flounder in the push and pull of desire, and families are caught between duty and disarray. A restless couple are visited by an old flame, a washed-up playwright faces his demons, and a woman returns to her childhood home to confront her twin brother’ s ghost. Brimming with dark humour, empathy and a sharp eye for the uncanny, The Slip is an electrifying debut from an original new voice.
shop online at hillofcontentbookshop. com or hillofcontentbalmain. com. au 10 | Summer Reading Guide 2025