Avenue Bookstores, Albert Park, Elsternwick and Richmond in Melbourne
The Bee Sting by Paul Murray
The Irish are taking over our bookshelves, and with good reason. Comedy, tragedy, end of days – this epic family story has it all. Murray weaves a beautiful and complex tale, with each member of the Barnes family and their tortured backstory coming to life in vivid detail. Crack out the banana lounge, pour yourself a pint of Guinness and settle in for a wild ride.
Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld
Curtis Sittenfeld strikes us as the kind of writer you want to sit next to at dinner. Having previously penned Prep, Rodham and American Wife, Sittenfeld ups the ante on the funny in Romantic Comedy. Set amidst a Saturday Night Live-style TV program, her hero Sally Milz has more than a touch of 30 Rock’s Liz Lemon about her. It’s a whip-smart romance that zings around backstage and delves deep into the fine art of comedy writing.
The Secret History by Donna Tartt
“The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.” Bam! The opening line is as fresh and intriguing as the day it was written. Twenty years on this magnificent novel is one we love to dip back into, and placing it confidently and happily into the hands of a new reader is one of the many joys of bookselling.
Potts Point Bookshop, Elizabeth Bay in Sydney
Valentino and Sagittarius by Natalia Ginzburg
Over the past few years, we’ve loved Daunt Books’s republished editions of classics by twentieth-century Italian author Natalia Ginzburg. The two newest picks, Valentino and Sagittarius, are no different. Think tight-knit villages in 1950s Northern Italy, coffee granitas and fur coats, neighbourly scandals and family spats, and a wry, matter-of-fact voice that will break your heart. Start with Sagittarius for a dramatic story of betrayal, and end with Valentino for a reminder of unconditional family love. Short novels, but powerful.
Day by Michael Cunningham
It’s early spring in Brooklyn. A married couple, the wife’s younger brother, and two kids. A brother-in-law with a fleeting girlfriend and a young son. Eight lives which will bend and break under the pressures of everyday life over the course of three tumultuous years. Primarily, Michael Cunningham’s Day is a story of families and childhoods, of parenting and friendships. A beautiful, quietly moving novel that reveals glimpses into the mechanics of day-to-day life. This is one of Cunningham’s best, a kind of bridge between The Hours and Flesh and Blood. Stylistically impressive but vivified by a glowing sense of humanity. Luminescent.
Riverbend Books, Bulimba in Brisbane
Good Material by Dolly Alderton
Dolly Alderton’s latest novel is a warm, funny and unexpected look at heartbreak and the madness that often follows it. Andy is not a particularly likeable character, yet Alderton writes him with a warmth and empathy that endears him to the reader, without hiding his (many) flaws. With notes of High Fidelity, this feels like another classic break-up novel in the making.
Held by Anne Michaels
Held follows four generations of a single family from 1905 to 2025, told through snapshots that each feel like distinct prose poems. Wonderfully meditative, it reflects on the liminal nature of history, memory and loss. Michaels’s scope is both epic and microscopic, and she manages to say the greatest things in the most quiet and gentle ways. For fans of Claire Keegan and Deborah Levy, or anyone in need of a soothing end-of-year balm.
The Bee Sting by Paul Murray
Paul Murray’s fourth novel is a family saga set in small-town Ireland that will leave you in awe of his literary sleight of hand. Four members of a family alternately narrate their social and financial freefall, continually shifting your perspective on what it is to really know someone. Tragicomic and full of painfully barbed insights, The Bee Sting is a perfect book for long summer days.
Matilda Bookshop, Stirling in the Adelaide Hills
Take What You Need by Idra Novey
I devoured this almost perfect book in one sitting. Told from the vividly realised perspectives of Jean and Leah, stepmother and stepdaughter respectively, Take What You Need transmutes uncomfortable subjects such as Trump’s America, economic precariousness and toxic masculinity into something compulsively readable. What makes the novel sing is the depiction of how art, in this case intricately layered metal sculptures, can transport us from the mundane to the sublime. Novey’s touch as an author is delicate, and it is seemingly only in retrospect that you come to understand the vaulting ambition of this wonderful novel.
In Ascension by Martin MacInnes
Philosophical in scope, but personal in delivery, In Ascension makes the connection between the deepest trenches of the ocean to the farthest reach of the galaxies. A young marine biologist is drawn into a project beyond her wildest imaginings to be part of a mission to deep space. But what is central to this page-turner is our ecological, spiritual and physical connection to earth. This book is about the cosmos, gardening, the wounds of childhood, exploration, catastrophe, rapture. I loved it.
Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood
Mirroring the landscape of the Monaro in regional New South Wales, as well as that of monastic life, this novel basks in stillness, and is entirely quiet in its grandeur. A meditation on relationships, what it means to belong, and confronting one’s own humanity, Stone Yard Devotional leaves room to breathe, to interpret and to sit with questions unanswered. This is Charlotte Wood at her most stark, and most austere.
The Paperback Bookshop, Melbourne
Bear by Marian Engel
Lou is a middle-aged Canadian historian living a small, dusty life, “like a mole, buried deep in her office”. Her institute is bequeathed a house of some historical importance on a tiny remote island. She goes there at the start of summer to catalogue its contents and discovers that the house comes with a tame-ish but neglected pet bear. Slowly, they become close, and Lou flourishes. Descriptions of the light-filled octagonal house, cool swims in the river and the island coming to life in the summer are enough to make the book a dream on their own, but Lou’s gruff and clear-eyed approach to the world and the bear’s unknowable wildness and dearness, never diminished by anthropomorphism, make this a rare and special book. First published in the seventies and re-issued in 2021.
Paradise Estate by Max Easton
This is a very contemporary novel set over 2022, written with an adamant specificity about the characters and their worlds. Punk music, socialist organising, playing rugby (league not union), Italian squats, drinking and being working class in Sydney are all pressing concerns. Refreshing and addictive!
Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art by Lauren Elkin
Taking the work of 1970s artists like Carolee Schneemann, Betye Saar and Rebecca Horn as a springboard, Lauren Elkin moves backwards and forwards in time to reconsider how visual artists and writers (among them Virginia Woolf, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Susan Sontag) capture the lived experience of queer, sick, racialised, female and other bodies that are more often marginalised in art historical and literary accounts. Along the way, she reclaims and celebrates the feeling of living inside a monstrous body. This is an insightful intervention into art history and criticism more generally, written in Elkin’s trademark engaging prose. Definitely one for fans of Olivia Laing and Kate Zambreno.
Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami
“What I’d like to know about is the objective reality of things outside myself. How important the world outside is to me, how I maintain a sense of equilibrium by coming to terms with it.” This 1999 novel raises the idea of deciphering one’s own soul free of realism. Murakami’s reality-warping literature stretches the mind loose from taught beliefs. If you thoroughly enjoy being taken out of your own head, this enchanting novel is the ideal transplant.
The Essential Collection by Slim Aarons
Who doesn’t want to spend lazy days dipping in and out of a beautiful coffee table book that transports you to another time and place? “Slim Aarons: The Essential Collection” is a visual feast that showcases iconic works by the legendary American photographer, capturing the glamorous lives of celebrities, socialites and jetsetters in stunning locations. A must-have for photography enthusiasts and fans of mid-century culture.
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
This contemporary classic by Markus Zusak is a captivating and emotionally charged novel, told from the perspective of Death. The story unfolds against the backdrop of World War II, offering a poignant exploration of humanity and courage that touches on the moral complexities of ordinary people during extraordinary times. Despite the potential for a maudlin overshadow, this novel is one of the most beautiful and moving books you’ll ever read.
Looking for more summer reads? Check out our guides from 2022, 2021 and 2020 – they're filled with goodies.
