Sizzling New Australian Books Coming in 2024
What debut books are publishers excited about in 2024? Here's a round up of some of the hottest books coming our way next year!
Well hello!
And welcome to our final issue for 2023. What a year it’s been. We’ve reviewed 23 titles, met 8 authors and given away over 50 copies of these books! We’re so looking forward to doing it all again in 2024.
Summer is typically marketed as the time for what is called Beach Reads. Which is kind of funny because a lot of people (me included) keep aside the weighty tomes for the summer break when I’ve got more time to read and can immerse myself in a novel for days on end. (Interrupted only by the need to forage though the Christmas leftovers and maybe a dip in the pool.) Definitely NOT suitable for holding up lying on a towel!
Conversely, Christmas/ the holiday season is supposed to be one of the most stressful times of year. So perhaps it’s not a surprise that another category that sells really well over summer is crime fiction. Maybe readers are vicariously killing their family, neighbours, friends???
Whatever your reading preference, this issue is dedicated to some super exciting new Australian releases coming our way in 2024. Whether you like a particular genre, such as historical fiction, crime, literary or commercial fiction, we’ve got you covered. Or if you don’t care what it is, as long as it’s good, then fear not. There will be plenty for you to choose from.
Of course, it wouldn’t be a New Voices Down Under newsletter without a giveaway. Welcome to Liz Foster, who I interviewed for our final Meet the Author slot about her debut novel, The Good Woman’s Guide to Making Bad Choices and there are copies for you to win!
PS: This newsletter is way longer than usual. If you’re reading this in your email app, click on the link "View entire message" and you’ll be able to view the entire post.
This list is compiled in publication date order. All the blurbs come from the publishers’ websites and are not a review. (Some have been shortened to fit in as many titles as possible.) They may not be my words but these are the titles I’m looking forward to in the first half of 2024. Enjoy!
30/1 Darkness Runs Deep by Claire McNeel (Pan Macmillan Australia)
In the darkest hour, a blood-soaked teenager flees the rural Gerandaroo football oval. Eight months later, Bess, a young teacher, returns home to Gerandaroo. A childhood game of dare with her former best friend forces Bess to form a women's footy team to play against Denby, a rival town. Bess reluctantly recruits players, but the team has to contend with hostile locals - including Bess's own father.
As tensions in the town boil over, so too do resentments, secrets and violence that have been previously held tight and close. Darkness Runs Deep is fiercely told and breathlessly compelling.
Preorder the book here
30/1 Tidelines by Sarah Sasson (Affirm Press)
It's Sydney in the early 2000s and Grub is spending the summer with her universally adored older brother, Elijah, and his magnetic but troubled best friend, Zed. Their days are filled with surfing, swimming and hanging out; life couldn't be better.
But years later, Elijah disappears and Grub's family unravels. At first, Grub blames Zed: he was the one who derailed Elijah from a bright future in the arts. But as Grub looks back at those dreamy summer days, the sanctuary of her certainty crumbles. Was Zed really responsible for her brother's disappearance? Was anyone?
Tidelines examines the stories we subconsciously write for ourselves, and what remains later, when we have the courage to tear them apart.
31/1 My Brilliant Sister by Amy Brown (Simon and Schuster)
Stella Miles Franklin’s autobiographical novel My Brilliant Career launched one of the most famous names in Australian letters. Funny, bold, often biting about its characters, the novel and its young author had a lot in common. Miles went on to live a large, fiercely independent and bohemian life of travel, art and freedom. Not so her beloved sister Linda. Quiet, contained, conventional, Linda was an inversion of Stella. A family peacemaker who married the man Stella would not, bore a son and died of pneumonia at 25.
In this reflective, witty and revealing novel, Amy Brown rescues Linda, setting her in counterpoint with Stella, and with the lives of two contemporary women: Ida, a writer whose writing life is on hold as she teaches and raises her young daughter; and Stella, a singer-songwriter who has sacrificed everything for a career, now forcibly put on hold. Binding the two is the novella that Linda might have written to her sister Stella – a brilliant alternative vision of My Brilliant Career.
Innovative and involving, My Brilliant Sister is an utterly convincing (and hilarious) portrait of Miles Franklin and a moving, nuanced exploration of the balance women still have to strike between careers and family lives.
Preorder the book here
27/2 Thanks for Having Me by Emma Darragh (Allen and Unwin)
Mary Anne is painfully aware that she's not a good wife and not a good mother, and is slowly realising that she no longer wants to play either of those roles. One morning, she walks out of the family home in Wollongong, leaving her husband and teenage daughters behind. Wounded by her mother's abandonment, adolescent Vivian searches for meaning everywhere: true crime, boys' bedrooms, Dolly magazine, a six-pack of beer. But when Vivian grows up and finds herself unhappily married and miserable in motherhood, she too sees no choice but to start over. Her daughter Evie is left reeling, and wonders what she could have done to make her mother stay.
Emma Darragh's unflinching, tender and darkly funny debut explores what we give to our families and what we take from them—whether we mean to or not. The stories in Thanks for Having Me are like a shoebox full of old photos: they aren't in chronological order and few are labelled. Looking at a family this way reveals things we don't see when these moments are neatly organised. Except that within these pages are a few moments you wouldn't want to hold up to the light.
27/2 Always Will Be by Mykaela Saunders (University of Queensland Press)
In this stunningly inventive and thought-provoking collection, Mykaela Saunders poses the question: what might country, community and culture look like in the Tweed if Gooris reasserted their sovereignty?
Each of the stories in Always Will Be is set in its own future version of the Tweed. In one, a group of girls plot their escape from a home they have no memory of entering. In another, two men make a final visit to the country they love as they contemplate a new life in a faraway place. Saunders imagines different scenarios for how the local Goori community might reassert sovereignty – reclaiming country, exerting full self-determination, or incorporating non-Indigenous people into the social fabric – while practising creative, ancestrally approved ways of living with changing climates.
Epic in scope, and with a diverse cast of characters, Always Will Be is the ground-breaking winner of the 2022 David Unaipon Award. This is a forward-thinking collection that refuses cynicism and despair, and instead offers entertaining stories that celebrate Goori ways of being, knowing, doing – and becoming.
Preorder the book here
27/2 Breath Carly-Jay Metcalfe (University of Queensland Press)
I am dying. I know that I’m dying, despite not having been told by my doctors that I am dying. I know I am dying because I’m in the dying room.
Carly-Jay Metcalfe was born with cystic fibrosis, survived a double-lung transplant at the age of twenty-one and faced a rare cancer at the age of thirty. What she has endured should have killed her, but her humour, courage and optimism became her best survival skills.
From her hospitalised childhood to her many friendships, loves and losses, Carly-Jay shares the fickle nature of life with candour and warmth. She writes with compelling insight about organ donation, opioid addiction and survivor's guilt, while still managing to find joy amongst the wreckage.
Breath is a stunningly frank and darkly funny memoir about living, dying and trying to breathe.
Preorder the book here
19/3 The Call by Gavin Strawhan (Allen and Unwin)
**Winner of the Allen & Unwin New Zealand Fiction Prize 2023**
After surviving a brutal attack, Auckland cop DS Honey Chalmers has returned to her hometown to care for her mother. The remote coastal settlement of Waitutū holds complicated memories for Honey, not least the tragic suicide of her younger sister, Scarlett. And Honey's relationship with her formidable mother is fraught to say the least.
Honey is hardest on herself regarding the attack that nearly killed her. She let herself get too close to a Reapers gang informant. She got sloppy. And she's pretty sure the informant, mother-of-three Kloe Kovich, paid the price. But when a couple of gang heavies turn up in Waitutū, Honey realises they are hoping she will lead them to Kloe. This means that Kloe is alive and on the run after all.
When Honey catches up with her oldest friend, Marshall, her feelings are complicated. As teenagers they were inseparable, but Marshall was the last person to see Scarlett alive, and there are rumours they were sleeping together, that he broke her heart. Marshall was said to have joined the army, to have gone to Western Australia, to have been married or sent to prison - or all of the above.
Marshall has worked hard to reinvent himself and he and Honey grow close. But Honey can't help digging into the past, and the more she discovers, the more she fears Marshall is not who she wants him to be. Eventually she learns the awful truth about the events that led her sister to take her own life.
Then Kloe arrives in Waitutū and reveals to Honey that she has proof tying the gang to a wealthy businessman with political connections. Honey and Marshall must work together to try and keep the hapless Kloe out of the hands of those who want her silenced. The scene is set for a final confrontation with a shocking outcome.
Tautly plotted, with a killer ending, The Call takes the reader into the seedy underbelly of gang culture.
3/4 The Engraver’s Secret by Lisa Medved (HarperCollins Publishers)
The new, gripping and captivating debut art history novel for fans of Jessie Burton, Tracy Chevalier and Maggie O'Farrell
Spanish Netherlands, 1620s: raised by her father Lucas to know her mind, Antonia Vorsterman sees everything that goes on in her world - all the rivalries and jealousies that course through the artists' studios and workshops of Antwerp.
Drawn into the lively household of the artist Peter Paul Rubens, whose work her father engraves for a living, Antonia begins to see a life of colour and possibility for herself - until Lucas entrusts her with a terrible secret that will alter the course of their family's future.
Belgium, present day: haunted by the recent loss of her mother, art historian Charlotte Hubert moves to Antwerp to research her hero, the Baroque master Rubens, and to seek answers about the father she's never met.
But a startling discovery hidden inside an ancient map folio turns Charlotte's quiet academic life into a dangerous hunt for long-lost treasures, missing for 400 years. In the shadowy cloisters of the university, where ambition, obsession and violence run deep, nothing is as it seems.
Charlotte is certain of one thing - no one can be trusted.
Centuries apart, Charlotte's and Antonia's lives intertwine as they unearth long-buried secrets about a master and his engraver where theft, betrayal and the fallout of family loyalty run rampant.
Preorder the book here
3/4 The Husbands by Holly Gramazio (Chatto & Windus)
You wait ages for The One . . . then 203 come along at once
One night Lauren finds a strange man in her flat who claims to be her husband. All the evidence – from photos to electricity bills – suggests he’s right.
Lauren’s attic, she slowly realises, is creating an endless supply of husbands for her.
There’s the one who pretends to play music on her toes.
The one who’s too hot (there must be a catch).
The one who makes a great breakfast sandwich.
The one who turns everything into double entendres (‘I’ll weed your garden’).
And the one who can calm her unruly thoughts with a single touch.
But when you can change husbands as easily as changing a lightbulb, how do you know whether the one you have now is the good-enough one, or the wrong one, or the best one? And how long should you keep trying to find out?
Preorder the book here
4/24 The Players by Deborah Pike (Fremantle Press)
One hot summer, a group of university students gathers in an orchard to rehearse a play. Veronika is born for a life on the stage while Felix seizes his last chance for creative freedom. Sebastian woos Veronika, and Cassie longs for Sebastian. Josh and Gloria each carry a secret they are unable to share.
Passion, rivalry and enduring connections will bind the Players across years and continents, long after the final curtain falls and they leave university behind. From Perth to Paris, Cambridge, London, Berlin and Dili, the friends search for meaning in their careers and friendship, discover love and endure heartbreak.
5/6 There’s No Telling by Mark Mordue (HarperCollins Publishers)
A sunny, bright, cold Christmas morning. Two young girls go ice-skating on a frozen pond and tragically drown. Lives are lost, and lives are irrevocably changed.
Three years later, on Christmas Eve, Darcy Travers, the father of one of the girls, is again struggling with the anniversary. Sometimes, he feels she's still there, ghost-like, watching over him. Zel, his ex-wife, is similarly bereft and, consumed by grief and rage, the pair blame each other. They are bonded in their suffering with their neighbours, Pete and Suda Kelly, the parents of the other girl who drowned.
As snowy winter weather sets in around the town of Thule, and night closes in on Christmas Eve, a series of unexpected events propels the lives of these people together once more. Both a love story and ghost story, There's No Telling is a darkly beautiful novel about grief, loss, shame and redemption - and how we can work our way back from the very worst thing that can happen to us.
Meet the Author
Liz Foster is a British-Australian fiction writer of stuff, viewed through a whimsical lens. She’s written a monthly column called Life’s Rich Pattern for the Village Observer, Lane Cove’s long running local paper, for six years as well as a features and interviews. Fun fact: She was the original Fairy Liquid TV commercial girl but refused to wear the witch’s hat so was dropped. (Poor Liz!!)
A little bit about the book …
Loyal country girl Libby Popovic lives a golden life with her confident financier husband Ludo and their two children, Harrison and Ava. When Ludo is jailed for financial fraud, and her friends and family lose tens of thousands of dollars as a result, Libby feels agonizingly complicit for hosting the final investor pitch in their home. Matters go from atrocious to worse when her possessions and home are repossessed, Libby is sacked and a priceless family heirloom is wrecked. While camping out at the rural goat farm where she was raised, she's forced to re-evaluate her life choices.
A warm, funny and outrageously unfair novel about deception, financial fraud and goat's cheese, and the possibility of starting your life all over again when everything goes south of the border.
Can you tell us a little about the inspiration behind this story?
While other people took to home baking and DIY during Covid, I became slightly obsessed with fraud style true crime. Who the Hell is Hamish, The Dropout, Inventing Anna, and Kate McClymont’s excellent and compelling early reporting on Melissa Caddick’s nefarious activities before her eventual disappearance. I couldn’t stop wondering, not how she did it (forging pdfs of CommSec statements), but how could she do it? The subsequent Liar Liar podcast unpicked excruciating detail of how she defrauded her own parents and closest friends while she and her husband lived their first-class lives. I thought, how would you cope if you woke one day to find your partner was not only a bona fide criminal but that he or she had ripped off your own loved ones along the way.
After I started writing GWG, I reached out to a super clever professor of commercial law and regulation at NSW University who was quoted on the Caddick case. She advised it can take years, if ever, for these cases to be tried: a similar story to Caddick’s had just played out in Newcastle and after protracted years of back and forth, the guilty party was fined and given a suspended sentence. She advised turning the fraud into false fundraising for a startup, more similar to Theranos/Elizabeth Holmes, as they’re quicker and easier to prosecute, making a tidier narrative timeline. But the working title for the novel was The Ponzi Scheme!
I get the Melissa Caddick link, but goats’ cheese?!?
It’s a personal fave food of mine as I can’t have cow’s milk! Libby my protagonist grew up on a goat farm where they make cheese… goat’s cheese features from the heart-of-the-conflict prologue right through to the last chapter. I visited a goat farm near Beechworth, way before starting the novel, and decided it would be the perfect setting for a story. Full of offbeat people and of course goats, who are characters in themselves. The goats in the novel are all named (by the eccentric Dido) after successful strong female role models, including Lada Gaga and Kim Kardashian.
What drives you, do you think, to write comedy rather than straight drama?
I didn’t set out to write comedy per se, I write how I speak and how I present myself as a person. However serious the setting, such as a high stakes board meeting, there’s always room for lightness. It’s about reading the room and picking the time and place. Plus, I wanted to recreate the feeling in my readers that I get when reading a genuinely well written, clever, and funny book. Rachel’s Holiday by Marian Keyes is about addiction and doesn’t shy away from graphic detail but still manages to create laugh out loud moments all the way through.
You write a column for the local paper, is that a good grounding to launching into novel writing? Or more a hindrance than a help?
My lifestyle column, Life’s Rich Pattern, was probably where it all began. I started writing it six years ago, and while it often has a local focus, it’s mostly fanciful musings on things that really matter, such as whether it’s okay to stash extra garbage in the neighbour’s bins, or the whys and wherefores of how to Use Cash (directed at Gen Zedders). My eyes are constantly open to quirky offbeat stories that can be repurposed. And now I’ve got a monthly newsletter, Lizzie’s Lighter Look on Life, full of nonsense news and observations plus tips on what to read or watch, so I can add my latest column at the end.
When you’re not writing, what do you do to fill the creative well?
I work in an aged care facility two days a week as the General Communications Manager and let me tell you this is a rich source of inspo. One of my tasks is to write and produce twelve-page magazine every two months where I interview residents about their lives and loves. Their stories are all wonderful and not what you’d expect. Apart from that I spend hours letting my brain drift across seedlings of ideas that have struck me, usually while dog walking or exercising. It’s amazing which ones start to sprout. My family are also super helpful, and my husband John is practically a co-author – I can present a character dilemma to him, and we chew it over until it’s sorted out. He’s like a dog with a bone.
To WIN a copy of The Good Woman’s Guide to Making Better Choices, scroll down to Freebies
Find Liz Foster
Instagram @lizfosterauthor
Website www.lizfoster.com.au
Australia: Preorder a copy of the book here
Freebies!
Many thanks to the folks at Affirm Press, it’s such a great pleasure to be able to offer two lucky readers the chance to win a copy of Liz Foster’s The Good Woman’s Guide to Making Better Choices. To win, all you have to do is send a reply email with the answer to this question.
Name one of the goats who feature in the novel?
The fine print: Giveaways are currently only open to subscribers and you must reside within Australia to be eligible to win (postage!) The winners will be picked at random and will be emailed on 8 January 2024 (Because this book is not released until 26 December and I’ll be on holidays then — sorry!) Good luck!
The End
And here we are at the end of the final issue of New Voices Down Under for 2023. Have a wonderful summer and we will be in your inbox again on 28 January 2024. We love hearing your feedback, so please leave a comment, follow us on socials and come back next year for more bookish news, reviews, interviews and freebies. See you on the other side!
Don’t forget, you can always catch up with us on Instagram @newvoicesdownunder
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