While searching for inspiration for what will be his final work, an unnamed poet and defender of Tasmania's wild places finds himself trapped down an abandoned mine in the island's mountain rainforests. In the darkness he is visited by memories and voices both from his own past as well as the tortured history of the pillaged landscape to which he has devoted his life and work. Lost in a fever dream, in a single sentence that carries the reader effortlessly along, the poet journeys through a kaleidoscope of Tasmanian history, mining lore, hauntology, poetry, rain and rainbow trout, drilling deep into the contemporaneous horrors of the North Mount Lyell disaster and Mawson's expedition becoming trapped in Antarctic pack ice.

An unparalleled reading experience, Mine is at once wondrous, terrifying and haunting; a story of environmental vandalism and exploitation as well as a luminous paean to the beauty which persists in a world spinning out of control.

'A wild, ecstatic howl of a book, dense with ideas and emotion and written with a ferocious energy as mesmerising as it is exhilarating.' James Bradley

'Comprised of a single sentence, telling a tale that is both historical and hallucinatory, Adam Ouston's extraordinary novel is best described as an experience a singular take on Tasmania's past of environmental violence, as well as a call to heed the earth's magic.' Maria Takolander

'Ouston takes antipodean Oulipianism into new terrain, unfurling digression and conjuring connections while maintaining the restraint of a single sentence. The formal restriction is integral, simultaneously evoking the narrator's claustrophobic physical setting while creating room for the spiralling thought-patterns of a mind out of time, travelling everywhere in the terrifying present.' Michael Winkler

Traversing anarchist collectives and experiments in autonomous living, political protest and DIY activism, Max Easton's third novel continues his thirty-year portrait of working-class life in subcultures and music scenes, exploring intergenerational political solidarity, and the ever-present risk of disillusionment under the heavy hand of the state. Now, Autonomy is a novel about the echoes of the past in the present; about the way in which history repeats, even if the lyrics don't always rhyme.

The Magpie Wing is set on football fields, in punk gigs, and in dilapidated and gentrifying pubs, moving from the nineties to the present, and between the suburbs and the inner city. Max Easton's debut novel explores how, even in a city divided against itself, disparate communities - underground music scenes, rugby league clubs, communist splinter groups - share unexpected roots.

'Max Easton's The Magpie Wing is a moving portrait of a city and region undergoing enormous change, told through the perspectives of three unique, sympathetic and vulnerable characters...an exciting debut that tells a compelling story...I recommend it to anyone who reads contemporary Australian literary fiction.' - Brad Jefferies, Books+Publishing

Max Easton is a writer from south-west Sydney. He is the creator of the underground music podcast Barely Human, and the arts journal Tempered. His writing has appeared in Sydney Review of Books, Meanjin, The Lifted Brow and Mess+Noise. He has played in six Sydney punk bands, runs a DIY record label, and appeared in an under-seventeens development squad for the Western Suburbs Magpies in 2003. The Magpie Wing is his first novel.

It's 2022 and Helen is starting again. Newly single, adrift in a hostile rental market, she finds a four-bedroom house flanked by apartment blocks that stare into the yard. Despite the lack of privacy, she fills its rooms with an unlikely group of residents looking for communal belonging: a zine maker working on a punk music archive; an activist writing about Australian anti-communism; a research scientist striving to put down roots; and a part-time rugby league player who has one chance to play for his country before retirement. Each is looking to build a future, each is haunted by their recent past.

But if a rented house in Sydney could ever promise salvation, it would come with a coating of black mould. Against the backdrop of pandemic and war, of climate and housing crises, Paradise Estate finds its residents struggling against generational confusion, political indifference and social malaise. When isolation and atomisation are all we've been given, what can be made from building common ground? Written with ironic wit and an eye for contemporary events, Max Easton's second novel sets the pessimism of its times against the optimism of the will.

Praise for The Magpie Wing:

'An original, exceptional novel.' - The Guardian

'An anxious novel about anxious characters in anxious times. It seeks to register this anxiety in all of its contradictions and complexities, but thankfully does not want to resolve it.' - Sydney Review of Books

'A moving portrait of a city and region undergoing enormous change, told through the perspectives of three unique, sympathetic and vulnerable characters.' - Books+Publishing

On land where enslaved people were once tortured and murdered, the state built a penal colony in the wilderness, where inmates could be rehabilitated, but never escape. Now, decades later, and having only succeeded in trapping men, not changing them for the better, its operations are winding down. But in the prison's waning days, a new horror is unleashed: every full-moon night, the inmates are released, the warden is armed with rifles, and the hunt begins. Every man plans his escape, not knowing if his end will come at the hands of a familiar face, or from the unknown dangers beyond the prison walls.

Ana Paula Maia has once again delivered a bracing vision of our potential for violence, and our collective failure to account for the consequences of our social and political action, or inaction. No crime is committed out of view for this novelist, and her raw, brutal power enlists us all as witness.

Padma Viswanathan is a Canadian-American writer and translator. Her novels have been shortlisted for the PEN USA and Scotiabank Giller Prizes. Her work has appeared in Granta, The Boston Review and BRICK. Her translations include SoBernardo by Graciliano Ramos. She teaches at the University of Arkansas.

Four housemates welcome the reader into their home for a birthday party. An elderly widow visits her first queer bar, beneath the flat she shared with her husband. A couple invite a shipwrecked sailor into their isolated lighthouse on the stormy night of their thirtieth anniversary. A single woman embarks on a romantic relationship with a sex robot. A married couple secretly prepare for their baby's arrival in a world where procreation is controlled by the Establishment.

Through prose, poetry, essays, illustrations and more, thirty-one writers bring their visions of euphoria to life. These pages celebrate, subvert, expand and reimagine what joy can look like, even in uncertain times.

A harrowing family story about forced adoption, a sinister chapter in East German history, and father-son relationships expressed through a shared love of nature and fishing.

1978, near Leipzig, East Germany. For Katrin and Hans, every parent's worst nightmare comes true when they are told that their newborn baby Daniel has died. Amidst the shock and horror of the news, Katrin doubts what the doctors have told her, feeling that they are lying and that Daniel is still alive: doubts which Hans refuses to acknowledge, and which lead to the end of their marriage.

After the collapse of the GDR, happy in a new relationship, Hans receives an unexpected phone call which prompts him to investigate the past. His research, which takes him deep into recent history, is met with resistance and silence at every turn, until at last a fishing expedition enables the family to start healing from their trauma.

Mayfly Season is an extraordinary portrait of totalitarian state cruelty, the promise of a new beginning and the infinite healing capacity shared by humanity and nature.

Omar arrives in the US with a fake identity and no friends or family. Having run away from the Iraqi army, he has been branded a deserter and his ear brutally cut off. Omar carries this mark of shame with him and refuses to talk about the past. He dreams of getting his ear, and his dignity, back.

When their paths cross at least one of them knows that they have met before if only he could remember where. Exploring the aftermath of war and how the past haunts new beginnings, Notes from a Lost Country creates a moving portrait of life in exile.

Acclaimed artist C. B. Fraser uses India ink and antique Japanese prints to create her inspiring cat collages. This one-of-a-kind tribute will be treasured by cat lovers and poetry fans alike!

Every year, there's a new crop of sad, dirty poet boys coming up to the city without a penny to their names. In six months' time, who on earth will remember these nobodies, with their so-called blank verse and their extravagant plots this Marlowe, Kyd, and Will 'Shakespere'? (A pseudonym, surely!) Better that they write thrillers, or advertising copy, or speeches for the media baron John Falstaff, who looks to be running for office. Now there's a man with a strong hand, who'll keep us out of any nasty foreign wars!

Published in 1936 and soon forgotten in the chaos of World War II, Picture of Nobody is one of the strangest, most accomplished, and most remarkable one-offs in English fiction. A comic yet credible reimagining of the milieu of Elizabethan London in modernist dress, it transcends its premise to provide a poignant portrait, of a Shakespearean mind coming to grips with the twentieth century. Populated by an assortment of characters familiar from Will's life and writing both, it is as much a loving parody as a grim prophecy regarding the fate of genius in 'interesting times.'

'A thrilling study of time that playfully intertwines birth and death, motherhood and human extinction.'- Kirkus Review

In the round house on Via Saterna, its Palladian square exterior nothing but a trompe-l'oeil, the sun pierces through the central skylight. Its rays pass three floors unobstructed, before reaching the circle below at the heart of the house: four fingers of water filling a little silver basin. It is here that young Lidia dies, setting an end to her clandestine love affair with the ambitious architect. It is this house that real-estate agent Irene is asked to sell, decades later, as the climate catastrophe escalates, cloaking the divided city in a permanent orange haze. Returning to her native Milan for the sale, Irene feels the brunt of her father's judgement. He is a proud Italian and prouder architect how could his own daughter make a living selling cultural patrimony to the highest foreign bidder? As she faces this new Milan and the old family tensions she had avoided while living in Rome, Irene throws herself into the impossible sale, getting to know Via Saterna intimately this space that is as unsettling as it is hostile, with the slowly emerging traces of Lidia's interrupted life. In every room of the house, the burden of a mysterious, unresolved past can be felt, remnants of a selfish and manipulative love.

The Perfect Circle tackles themes like time, death, and repetition with depth and originality, while carrying its philosophy lightly. Through it all, the novel is a subtly disturbing page-turner, every new page adding a new layer and twist.

Giorgia was a talented actress before she abandoned her stage career and fell in love with Filippo. She settles into a life of quiet compromise - until one day she bumps into her old theater director, Mauro, who fans the acting flame back to life. But setting a restless soul on fire can be dangerous if she loses sight of the boundary between reality and fiction - and Giorgia collapses, ending up in a clinic. Filippo and Mauro find themselves both accomplices and adversaries, seduced by a dangerous game to heal and win back Giorgia: by writing the script for her perfect life. In this dazzling debut, Petrucci explores the ambiguous borders between love, possession, and control in clear, magnetic prose.

ANNE MILANO APPEL, based in California, has translated works by a number of leading Italian authors for a variety of publishers in the US and UK. Her most recent translations include works by the award-winning Antonio Scurati and Paolo Maurensig. Her awards include the Italian Prose in Translation Award, the John Florio Prize for Italian Translation, and the Northern California Book Award for Translation. Her website is: amilanoappel.com.

And no one does this better than Alexander McCall Smith. He has brought through his novels many wonderful characters to vivid life and entertained readers all over the globe. And in his third collection of poetry, he guides the reader by the hand and takes them through time and place exploring the majestic themes of nature and the complexities of relationships and what it is that makes us human with his trademark warmth and humour.

Iain McIntosh has illustrated many of Alexander McCall Smith's books, including the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency and the 44 Scotland Street series.

InI Think of You, the reader travels through literary Edinburgh in summer, heartbreak in a rain-drenched glen in the Highlands, a voyage on theArgo in Ancient Greece, and from Dallas to Helsinki and home again. Throughout this collection, the author explores various themes of love, kindness and friendship, as well as the philosophy of food, the idiosyncrasies of language and the importance of canonical hours. Each poem is a journey of the soul that interrogates what it is to love and to be alive.

From the charged lyricism of Tawfiq Zayyad to the expansive imagery of Walid al-Halis; from the romantic cadences of Salma al-Jayyusi to the profound rootedness of Mahmoud Darwish, these poems chart the emotional and political landscape of modern Palestine. Together, they reveal a tradition in which love of land, grief, defiance and hope are inseparable.

Edited and introduced by the eminent scholar A.M. Elmessiri, the collection is arranged around six central themes revolution, war, elegy, belonging, resistance and steadfastness offering readers both an essential literary archive and a vital lens on Palestinian cultural history.

While Senior History Master of Queen's School, Newminster, Carolus Deene has a troubling hobby as a criminologist and sometime sleuth. Even more troublingly, he has jaundice. But with the papers shouting of the crimewave sweeping the seaside resorts of England, sending him to the coast to recover is too risky for the Headmaster he will be much further from trouble in the inland spa resort of Buddington.

But before long Buddington is rocked by a twisted double-murder two elderly women found dead on the same night at the same time, each with a white lily by their side. Perhaps things are looking up for the curious Deene?

First published in 1960, Leo Bruce's classic mystery hums with his trademark wit and comedic flair, centred around an intelligent puzzle and a memorable cast of Buddington's best.

When Miles Hammond is invited to a meeting of the Murder Club in London, he is met instead with just two other guests and is treated to a strange tale of an impossible crime in France from years before; the murder of a man on a tower with only one staircase, under watch at the time at which the murder took place. With theories of levitating vampires abounding, the story comes home to Miles when he realises that the librarian he has just hired for his home is none other than Fay Seton, a woman whose name still echoes from the heart of this bizarre and unsolved murder of the past.

First published in 1946, in later years Carr considered this novel one of his finest works. It shows the masterful author at the height of his powers, boasting an ingenious plot delivered with an astounding pace and striking characters including none other than the great detective, Dr Gideon Fell.

'Much more than a ghost story... One might say that Fox is haunted by the spirit of the place and time of which she writes, and she is able to reproduce in a remarkable way that sense of foreboding and mystery that all of us have experienced.' The Argus

Join Weird Walk for a new journey into the ghostly and bizarre, striking out from the shelter of the inn for the places where the path begins to fade, from the sublime wilderness of mountains, coasts and ravines to forbidden, ancient tracts of woodland.

Featuring disorientating classics from John Buchan and Algernon Blackwood alongside modern, thrilling (and sometimes violent) warnings to the intrepid from Lisa Tuttle and Dorothy K. Haynes, The Wayfarer's Weird leads you towards fae dangers, down lost tracks in time and deep into the liminal spaces of Britain and beyond.

'Soft, swelling story-telling'Australian Women's Weekly

'A well-crafted and intensely dramatic novel, with characters you care about facing circumstances so dire a contemporary audience might strain to fully imagine them'Sydney Morning Herald

'The Low Roadis a beautifully written novel ... testament to Quarmby's dedication to her craft and her commitment to delivering an immersive and captivating story'The Tasmanian Times

'A darkly gripping picaresque tale of cruelty, courage and kindness as an orphaned girl survives poverty and injustice to seek love on the other side of the world' Maggie Gee

'An engrossing and beautifully written novel. All sorts of horrors are to be found here, but also love and bravery and hope. A must for lovers of historical fiction' Adele Geras

Norfolk, 1813. In the quiet Waveney Valley, the body of a woman Mary Tyrell is staked through the heart after her death by suicide. She had been under arrest for the suspected murder of her newborn child. Mary leaves behind a young daughter, Hannah, who is sent away to the Refuge for the Destitute in London, where she will be trained for a life of domestic service.

It is at the refuge that Hannah meets Annie Simpkins, a fellow resident, and together they forge a friendship that deepens into passionate love. But the strength of this bond is put to the test when the girls are caught stealing from the refuge's laundry, and they are sentenced to transportation to Botany Bay, setting them on separate paths that may never cross again.

Drawing on real events, The Low Road is a gripping, atmospheric tale that brings to life the forgotten voices of the past convicts, servants, the rural poor as well as a moving evocation of love that blossomed in the face of prejudice and ill-fortune.

SHORTLISTED: East Anglian Book Awards

'A beautiful novel about the beautiful game' Jonathan Pearce

For ten months of the year, two men are drawn to adjacent seats in a stadium, carrying the burdens of life and pouring all their hopes into their beloved but ailing team.

Fatherless and fretful, the Young Man is trying to nurture a precarious new relationship and to find his place in the world. The Old Man, an increasingly isolated carer for his fading wife, knows he has little left to look forward to. Neither fan is a comfortable talker. However, in a slow-motion play of nods, silences and guarded chats, they strike up a tentative friendship across the generational gap.

Told through thirty-eight chapters one for each game of the Premier League campaign Season is a lyrical, hypnotic and gently uplifting study of loneliness and modern masculinity. About much more than football, it celebrates the healing, unifying and maddening role of ritualised sport in the lives of ordinary people.

'Funny and full of heart but also wise' Polly Clark

It's the early 1980s, and a coven of eight women establish a lesbian commune in a Californian redwood forest.

It seems a perfect place to practise the ritual magic that helps them function harmoniously as a group. By getting back to the land, the witches can also live more authentically and give the finger to the Patriarchy.

That doesn't stop jealousies arising, as artist Wren nurses an unrequited crush on Robin, the land's ultra-generous owner. Robin claims to have had thousands of lovers in countless past lives, but in this one she is mainly interested in Kelsey, the household's cook. Meanwhile the masculine energy of a diesel-spewing tractor causes conflict, and manipulative Gloria, the spiritual leader of the coven, has an agenda of her own. Will the blessings of the Goddess be enough to ensure the group's survival?

Warm, funny and harking unashamedly back to a more idealistic era,A Circle Outsideis a seductive vision of a utopian dream, where the real magic is self-transformation.

Mild-mannered editor Ben Fairweather is horrified when his genteel religious magazine is taken over by a fanatical movement that believes animals are closer to God than humans and should receive Holy Communion. Amid a national religious revival, this belief becomes mainstream and he is cancelled as a petphobic bigot.

Reinventing himself as a nightclub pianist, Ben meets journalist Anita Scott, who is bent on exposing a newly ennobled Russian oligarch as a cultural vandal. But Lord Ogorodnikov's agenda is far more sinister than they realise, and together they are drawn into a world of spies, art forgery and murder, with their own lives on the line.

Anthony Gardner ingeniously blends intrigue with sharp satire in a story that is both thrilling and darkly funny.

• Philanderers who slip off to hide in the homes of their mistresses
• Hustlers who leave town suddenly on 'very important' business trips
• Connivers who become actors for a day to hide-in-plain-sight on stage

'The New Year's Eve is more precious than a thousand pieces of gold. It is the Great Divide between winter and spring, which none can pass over without copper and silver.' Ihara Saikaku

'Swashbuckling and captivating.'- bestselling author, A.K. Mulford

Lu watched the love of his life walk the plank and sink into the inky-black depths of the sea. Nnenna was dead...or so he thought.

Five years later, Lieutenant 'Lu' Ortega, dutiful fleet officer, embarks on a mission to hunt down a powerful talisman now in the hands of a runaway mermaid. On his quest, he discovers the impossible: Nnenna is still alive. Fierce and cunning, and as breathtaking as ever, Nnenna 's won enough bloody sword fights as a pirate captain to earn the nickname 'Devil of the Deep.' She has come to reject the system of order that Lu clings to, and worse, she's protecting the very quarry he's tracking: Pearl Highwater, who has defied the all-powerful sea god and might hold a valuable key to finding her people's lost island.

When the tides and fates bring them together, Nnenna, Lu, and Pearl must choose their loyalties, find their courage, and race to protect the island from false gods and forces of evil or risk unleashing an ancient curse that could destroy them all.

Keisuke Itagaki's genre-defining fighting manga is finally being released in English with a new Perfect Edition!
Featuring professional translations and lettering approved by the original Japanese publisher, as well as a premium slip cover and all of the full-color insert pages that were featured in the manga's original serialization, the Baki the Grappler Perfect Edition is the definitive way to experience the martial arts saga that has sold over 100-million copies worldwide!
The first print run of this volume will feature an exclusive foil-stamped cover, only available while supplies last!

Seeking the strength needed to defeat his father, Baki takes on a special forces unit comprised of the Japanese military's deadliest soldiers. Baki has proved himself in both the ring and on the streets, but does he have the strength needed to survive on the battlefield?

Available officially for the first time in English, experience Keisuke Itagaki's best-selling and highly influential BAKI saga from the start!

Upon its publication in Italy, The Beginnings was exactly that: the dawning of a new era. Like a photo-negative of Franz Kafka, or Virginia Woolf, Moresco's sweeping novel turns the stream-of-consciousness inside out, and offers nothing interior. Here, much like in real life, you will not be privy to the thoughts and feelings of others. Everything must be experienced as it happens.

From our narrator's undergraduate years in seminary school, to his activities as a member of various Italian political factions, to his attempts to become a writer, The Beginnings is a shapeshifting journey across the 20th century, and across all of literature itself.

The first-ever English language print edition of the online cult sensation.

Prepare to embark on a speculative odyssey in All Tomorrows: an extraordinary exploration of the potentials and pitfalls of human evolution.

In this visionary classic, author and artist C.M. Kosemen imagines how life will be shaped by genetic manipulation, alien intervention and the relentless forces of evolutionary change. From the colonisation of Mars to the ultimate destiny of humanity, the future is bound to unfold in unexpected and unsettling ways...

All Tomorrows is a thrilling tale of survival and a breathtaking work of imagination that catalogues the progress of new human species and documents the trials they face on distant worlds. Some will flourish while others fade into oblivion, but the vital essence of humanity persists against all odds.

This print edition of Kosemen's cult classic features his original illustrations and bonus material including a special commentary, sketchbook excerpts and never-before-seen artwork.

Each of the three journeys sees Shaw walk alone into a Dartmoor forest and wait. What arrive are stories fragments of myth that he has carried within him for decades: the deep history of Dartmoor itself; the lives of distant family members; Arthurian legend; and tales from India, Persia, Lapland, the Caucasus and Siberia. But these stories and their tellers don't arrive as the bearers of solace or easy wisdom. As with all quests, Shaw is entering a domain of traps and tests. Bardskull can be read as a fable, as memoir, as auto-fiction or as an attempt to undomesticate myth. It is a magnificent, unclassifiable work of the imagination.

'Martin Shaw's work is so very beautiful. A new animal. His love of images is deep and contagious. In the passion of his search he makes up new words that seem as though we've always known them. His language is tasty and surprising. This elegant combination of very fresh, free verse storytelling, and a deep untangling of myth feels so alive. What will it do next?' - Coleman Barks, author of The Essential Rumi

'Martin Shaw is a teacher of profound cultural knowledge, and is a master artist at transmitting it. Those transmissions are subtle and profound. We desperately need his work.' - Tony Hoagland, author of Application For Release From The Dream

'Shaw encourages and illuminates the mythic in our own lives. He is a modern-day bard.' - Madeline Miller

London, 1904.

Edward VII sits on the throne, the economy is faltering, and one of the youngest Prime Ministers in history has been thrust into office on the crest of a populist wave. Battling self-doubt and fierce opposition within the Commons, Felix Grey is plunged into a world of murky politics and hidden secrets when a lord is mysteriously abducted from a gentlemen's club.

With tensions rising between the government and trade unions amidst a series of fatal factory disasters, Felix must quickly connect the dots between the missing politicians and the growing chaos in the country. A rapidly escalating chain of events is threatening to tear apart Parliament and Nation...

Can Felix crack the case and protect his country, or will he bear witness to a grim repetition of history?

Readers can't get enough of Felix Grey. . .

'Reminiscent of Dickens' London with the air of a Sherlock Holmes novel' Karla_bookishlife

'Brilliant twists and revelations that keep you glued to the pages' The Strawberry Post

'In Felix Grey I have found a new favourite character' LdLoz

Mario's short films Anonymous, Echo, and The Gifted Hypothesis have garnered numerous awards, selections and nominations at Oscar, BAFTA, and BIFA-qualifying film festivals. His accolades include Best Drama at Cannes Shorts, Best Narrative Short and Best Male Actor at FIFF, as well as a nomination for the Short Film Award at the Oscar-qualifying Austin Film Festival and selection for the Oscar-qualifying Flickers Rhode Island Film Festival.

Mario attended Saginaw Valley State University in Michigan and taught soccer for the MLS in Arizona and Los Angeles before returning to London. He is also a BAFTA member and serves on the board of the Kingston International Film Festival.

Told as an eclectic collection of appropriated testimonies, treatises, missives, and police files, The Rise and Fall of Parkinson's Disease follows the progression of the contagion's patient zero, a Soviet citizen (sometimes) named Demyan Lavrentyevich Parkinson, as he ascends from hellish health to the sacred illness.

Hailed as one of Serbia's most influential living writers, Svetislav Basara's scathing, irreverent critiques of authoritarianism have twice won him Serbia's prestigious NIN Award.In The Rise and Fall of Parkinson's Disease, Basara lives up to this reputation with a book as formally ambitious as it is intellectually sophisticated. His blend of grotesque absurdism and wry humour evokes the paranoid, vexing worlds of Franz Kafka's novels and the meta-textual assemblages of Paul Auster. Told from a colourful range of perspectives, the novel is a multifaceted, crystalline account of truth, lies, and history, a sprawling case study of humans in an inhuman society.

Pothivelu Pandaram is known as a successful, God-fearing man about town: he has a loyal wife, three daughters, and money to pay for their dowries. However, it's an open secret that his success is fueled by a trade that is as profitable as it is cruel: he owns-and breeds-a group of physically deformed beggars and places them outside temples to collect money.

There is Mangandi Samy, with just one arm, no legs, and "a little head on top," who only speaks in divine songs he himself invents; Ahmedkutty, an intellectual whose testicles hang to the floor "like two great pumpkins"; Muthammai, mother to eighteen children. To Pandaram, they are only "items," to be bought and sold like cattle. But when he makes an impulsive trade, his luck turns.

Written with an unflinching eye and suffused with a deep existential longing,The Abyssis an extraordinary novel-for its terrain, its fundamental questions about humanity, and its depiction of human suffering and liberation.

Suchitrawrites fiction in Tamil and translates between Tamil and English. Her work has appeared in literary magazines includingAsymptoteandNarrative Magazine. She won the Asymptote Close Approximations Prize for Fiction Translation in 2017.The Abyssis her first full-length translated work. Suchitra lives in Bengaluru, India.

**Shortlisted, Stella Prize 2026**

**Shortlisted, Victorian Premier's Literary Awards 2026, Fiction**

The much-anticipated follow-up to acclaimed graphic novelist Lee Lai's Stella-shortlisted Stone Fruit, a funny, dark, emotionally turbulent slice of friendship strife.

We arrive to wreckage a restaurant smashed to rubble, with tables and chairs upended riotously. Under the swampy nighttime cover of a Montreal heatwave, we meet our protagonist, Cannon, dripping in beads of regret sweat. She was supposed to be closing the restaurant for the night, but instead, she destroyed it. The horror-scape left in her wake is not unlike the films Cannon and her best friend, Trish, watch together. Cooking dinner and digging into deep cuts of Australian horror movies on their scheduled weekly hangs has become the glue in their relationship. In high school, they were each other's lifeline two queer second-generation Chinese nerds trapped in the suburbs. Now, on the uncool side of their twenties, the essentialness of one another feels harder to pin down. Yet when our stoic and unbendingly well-behaved Cannon finds herself very uncharacteristically surrounded by smashed plates, it is Trish who shows up to pull her out

In Cannon, Lee Lai's follow-up to the critically acclaimed and award-winning Stone Fruit, the full palette of a nervous breakdown is just a part of what is on offer. Lai's sharp sense of humour and sensitive eye produce a story that explores the intimacy of queer friendship and weight of family responsibility, and breaks open the question of what we owe both to each other and to ourselves.

'In Cannon, Lee Lai has performed a rare and powerful act of alchemy the images, narrative, and writing not only capture a life, but combine so that the book itself feels alive.' Torrey Peters

'Beguilingly drawn, Cannon depicts a wide spectrum of adulthood with nuance and complexity. From one story unravels many stories, about friendships, situationships, work, familial obligations. I was struck by its attention and care.' Ling Ma

'A beautifully drawn slice of life, filled with the kind of intimate, specific details that make the best fiction seem autobiographical.' Adrian Tomine

'It's rare, and precious, when a moment in a movie, in a poem, in a comic surges up at you as being True. And in Cannon, Lee Lai does it again and again.' Eleanor Davis

An electrifying debut novel about grief, power and desire and the tangles in between that make up a life.

When a creative writing academic becomes infatuated with his colleague the poet his fascination soon begins to threaten his relationship with his partner, Michael. Michael is beautiful. Michael is safe. But the poet is everything he isn't; she has everything he wants. While he writes about steel and sex, she dreams about the movements of swallows. While he tends to his budding career, she writes from her big, white house in the woods.

Meanwhile, his homophobic and spiteful mother who cast a shadow over his childhood is continuing to make his life difficult. As he is pulled back and forth between these two different worlds, his fixation on the poet, his Kingfisher, grows into something more powerful. She becomes his sole focus. He is hypnotised.

But when simultaneous illnesses threaten to destroy the precarious reality he clings to, he's forced to question what he can and cannot take from someone.