STAFF’ S FAVOURITE READS
STAFF’ S FAVOURITE READS
RAPTURE Carol Ann Duffy
PB $ 19.99
The effortless virtuosity, directness, drama and humanity of Carol Ann Duffy’ s verse have made her our most admired and best-loved contemporary poet. Rapture, her seventh collection, is a book-length love-poem, and a moving act of personal testimony. Duffy has accessed a new level of directness that sacrifices nothing in the way of subtlety of expression. Nowhere has Duffy more eloquently articulated her belief that poetry should speak for us all. Rapture is a must-read.
PICKED BY GABRIELLE FROM MELBOURNE
CHANGE Édouard Louis, John Lambert( trans.)
PB $ 24.99
Édouard Louis longs for a life beyond the poverty, discrimination, and violence in his working-class hometown. So he sets out to study at a university in Paris. He sheds the provincial‘ Eddy’ for an elegant new name. He reads incessantly; he dines with aristocrats; he spends nights with millionaires and drug dealers alike. Everything he does is motivated by a single obsession – to become someone else. Change is a personal odyssey, and a profound portrait of a society divided by class, inequality, and power.
PICKED BY OLIVER FROM MELBOURNE
I WANT EVERY- THING
Dominic Amerena
PB $ 34.99
The legendary career of reclusive cult author Brenda Shales remains one of Australia’ s last unsolved literary mysteries. Her books took the world by storm before she disappeared from the public eye after a mysterious plagiarism case. But when an ambitious young writer stumbles across Brenda at a Melbourne pool, he realises the scoop of a lifetime is floating in front of him. The only problem? He must pretend to be someone he’ s not to trick the story out of her.
PICKED BY ALEXANDRA FROM MELBOURNE
REJECTION Tony Tulathimutte
PB $ 22.99
Sharply observant and outrageously funny, Rejection is a provocative plunge into the thorniest problems of modern life: sex, relationships, identity and the internet. Written with the accomplished authority of a modern classic and the manic intensity of a losers’ manifesto, Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte radically redefines what it means to be rejected by lovers, friends, society and oneself. As the characters in Rejection pop up in each other’ s lives they reveal the ways that our delusions can warp our desire for connection.
PICKED BY LAURA FROM MELBOURNE
NOT WAVING BUT DROWNING AND OTHER POEMS
Stevie Smith
HB $ 24.99
Stevie Smith was not only a famous poet in her lifetime but a poet before her time. The poems are distinctly unsentimental as she casts the‘ eye of an anarchist’ over propriety and convention, finding comedy in the tragic and tragedy in the comic. She asks the questions we don’ t have the nous or courage to ask, speaking for the lonely, the troubled and the trapped, and for any of us who at one time or another have found ourselves not waving but drowning.
PICKED BY CHLOE FROM BALMAIN
SUNSTRUCK William Rayfet Hunter
PB $ 34.99
It’ s summer and a young man walks through the gates of a luxurious mansion in the South of France. At the dinner table, the Blake siblings await him – Lily, his carefree friend from university; Dot, the rebellious younger sister; and Felix – handsome, captivating, and guarded. The chance to become part of the family and their world of money and power starts to feel within reach. But as they return to London, the cracks in the Blakes’ careful façade begin to show, and their bond is increasingly tested and pulled apart at the seams.
PICKED BY LEWIS FROM BALMAIN
shop online at hillofcontentbookshop. com or hillofcontentbalmain. com. au 4 | Summer Reading Guide 2025