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Amid a series of personal disasters, Aliyah and her daughter, Sakina, retreat to rural New South Wales to make a new life. Aliyah manages to secure a run-down property and hires a farmhand, Shep, an extremely private Palestinian man and the region’s imām.

During a storm, she drives past the town’s river and happens upon a childhood friend, Hana, who has been living a life of desperation. Aliyah takes her in and tries to navigate the indefinable relationships between both Hana and her farmhand. Tensions rise as Aliyah’s growing bond with Shep strains her devotion to Hana.

Finally, all are thrown together for a reckoning alongside Hana’s brother, Hashim, and Aliyah’s confidante, Billie – a local Kamilaroi midwife she met working at the hospital – while bushfires rage around them.

Published: 27 August 2024

Publisher: Penguin Random House

How long can you run from a lie, if that lie is what your life is founded on?

In a near future all identity information is encoded in digital language. Nations know where everyone is, all the time. Not everyone agrees with this constant surveillance, and when the system is hijacked and shut down, all global borders are closed. The world is no longer connected, and there is no back-up plan to establish belonging, ownership or trade.

Scarlet Friday, whose job is to correct historical record, is stranded on the wrong side of the globe. Befriended by a stranger, she grabs an old, faded history book and writes her own version over the top—a record of the Great Undoing on the run.

But in deciding what truth to tell Scarlet must face her own history. How do we navigate identity when it is all a lie? She must reckon with her past before she can imagine her future.

Published: 31 January 2024

Publisher: Ultimo Press

An innovative collection of poetry and prose from a vibrant new Indigenous voice on the Australian literary scene.

This fierce debut from award-winning writer Evelyn Araluen confronts the tropes and iconography of an unreconciled nation with biting satire and lyrical fury. Dropbear interrogates the complexities of colonial and personal history with an alternately playful, tender and mournful intertextual voice, deftly navigating the responsibilities that gather from sovereign country, the spectres of memory and the debris of settler-coloniality.

This innovative mix of poetry and essay offers an eloquent witness to the entangled present, an uncompromising provocation of history, and an embattled but redemptive hope for a decolonial future.

Published: 2 March 2021

Publisher: University of Queensland Press

An electrifying collection of stories from the febrile imagination of a young writer who traverses culture, genre and form.

In the mind-bendingly upside-down world of Sadvertising, iPhones have feelings, brands come to life, creative directors disappear into parallel universes and lowly freelancers become immortal. It’s a world where gods, ghosts and muses stalk the corridors of bland and placeless offices, and the wondrous exists alongside the mundane.

Short, punchy and direct, Ennis Cehic’s satirical fables are box-fresh and shot through with pitch-black humour, existential dread and late capitalist yearning for meaning. They grapple with love and loneliness, art and commerce, dream and reality, and reflect the absurdity of the modern condition.

Sadvertising is a surreal, subversive and utterly contemporary literary debut from an unforgettable new voice.

Published: 1 March 2022

Publisher: Penguin Random House

In Detachable Penis: A Queer Legal Saga, Elkin relates his bumpy journey from lesbian to transgender lawyer in the aftermath of the 2017 Australian marriage equality postal survey, which resulted in an amendment to the Marriage Act to enable same-sex marriage.

As the inaugural lawyer of Victoria’s queer law service, Elkin is quickly immersed in thorny debates around trans inclusion in sport, children’s access to puberty blockers, birth certificate law reform, and the Christian right’s demand for enhanced religious freedoms. Set against the backdrop of a growing moral panic about the ‘trans agenda’, Elkin reflects on the double-edged sword of visibility post the "transgender tipping point."

Elkin offers an honest, unflinching account of chest surgery, phalloplasty, the emotional impact of cross-sex hormones and the perils of airport body scanners. Refreshingly open-minded, Elkin explores his ambivalence about aspects of his own transition, masculinity, and fears of lesbian erasure as he encounters a new world of gender-affirming psychologists, surgeons, and speech pathologists.

Through an examination of Elkin’s legal casework and law reform efforts, Detachable Penis offers a kaleidoscopic view of LGBTIQA+ communities living on the margins and a nuanced account of the lateral violence, poor mental health, and activist burnout that besets the contemporary LGBTIQA+ rights movement. Part love letter and part cautionary tale, Detachable Penis offers a darkly humorous glimpse into Elkin’s unique life in the law.

Published: 30 April 2024

Publisher: Upswell

A moving testament to the displacement and dispossession of the Palestinian people.

rock flight is a book-length poem that, over seven chapters, follows a personal and historical narrative to compose an understated yet powerful allegory of Palestine’s occupation. The poem uses refrains of suffocation, rubble, and migratory bird patterns to address the realities of forced displacement, economic restrictions and surveillance technology that Palestinians face both within and outside Palestine. It depicts a restlessness brought about by dispossession, and a determination to find significance in fleeting objects and fragments. It looks to the literary form as an interactive experience, and the book as an object in flux, inviting the reader to embark on an exploration of space, while limited by the box-like confines of the page. Formally claustrophobic, the poem morphs into irony, declaring everything a box while refusing to exist within one.

Published: 1 September 2024

Publisher: Giramondo Publishing

A Savage Turn is a searing debut from a Gamilaroi author. Using his biting wit and refreshing insight into modern and traditional life, Luke Patterson takes readers to forest billabongs, to prisons, and into nightmares of the not so distant past. Along the way, he sends up the Australian dream and subverts expectations to create a seductive poetry collection sampling from a kaleidoscope of critical theory, modernist poetry, postcolonial irony, eco-romanticism and western folklore.

Published: 12 August 2025

Publisher: Hachette Australia

‘If we were different people, to write down these words might be to leave them behind us. But words are our artifacts, and I am seeding a trail for the journey, home.’

What does the daughter of a Nakba survivor inherit? It is not property or tangible heirlooms, nor the streets and neighbourhoods of a father’s childhood and the deep roots of family who have lived in one place, Jerusalem, for generation upon generation.

Fixing her gaze on moments, places and objects – from the streets of Bethlehem to the Palestinian neighbourhoods of the New Jerusalem – Micaela Sahhar assembles a story of Palestinian diaspora. Find Me at the Jaffa Gate is a book about the gaps and blank spaces that cannot be easily recounted, but which insists on the vibrant reality of chance, fragments and memory to reclaim a place called home.

Published: 1 May 2025

Publisher: UNSW Press

A remarkable and impressive debut collection of poems that speak to the complexity of family, identity and the proud legacy of Māori language and culture.

The poetic visions of Mettle echo through past and present as Anne-Marie Te Whiu draws on stories from a lifetime of listening and learning about her whakapapa (Māori lineage). This exceptional collection resounds with strength – a mettle that ripples through Te Whiu’s own life and that of her ancestral family. Her graceful poems are a lens through which to look ‘now’ straight in the face, without shame or fear, and to acknowledge that while trauma is transmitted generationally, so too are the gifts of resilience and fortitude.

Published: 29 April 2025

Publisher: University of Queensland Press

Engaging, thought-provoking stories from a Tasmanian Aboriginal author who addresses universal themes – identity, racism, heritage destruction – from a wholly original perspective.

The stories in Born Into This throw light on a world of unique cultural practice and perspective, from Indigenous rangers trying to instil some pride in wayward urban teens on the harsh islands off the coast of Tasmania to those scraping by on the margins of white society railroaded into complex and compromised decisions.

To this mix Adam Thompson manages to bring humour, pathos and occasionally a sly twist as his characters confront racism, untimely funerals, classroom politics and, overhanging all like a discomforting, burgeoning awareness for both white and black Australia, the inexorable damage and disappearance of the remnant natural world.

Published: 2 February 2021

Publisher: University of Queensland Press