‘There is no good way to state these facts, which must be acknowledged. My husband and I had two children and lost them both: Vincent in 2017, at sixteen, James in 2024, at nineteen. Both chose suicide, and both died not far from home.’

Things In Nature Merely Grow is essential reading, especially if you’ve ever been depressed, though it’s not a self help book. It’s Yiyun Li’s insights into existing in what she refers to as an ‘abyss’, ie the world as it is without her children. There is no moving past this abyss, nor does the abyss have an end, there is only the ‘now and now and now and now’. How can one reside in this space, and how does one live a life when a life is not necessarily worth living?

This biography is about death, about thinking instead of feeling, but also about life and linguistics, and the human capacity for language. And of course the limitations of our language, and our ability to understand the world. ‘Yes, I loved them, and still love them, but more important than loving is understanding and respecting my children, which includes, more than anything else, understanding and respecting their choices to end their lives’.

If Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking resonated with you, this book will too.

4th Estate, 2025

A lyrical work that explores the fallibility of memory and asks if we can ever really know the ones we love or ourselves …

Estranged sistes—Eva and Elisabeta Novak—have not spoken since Eva’s young daughter, Gracie, was killed in a road accident. More than a decade later, and long after Eva has moved overseas, Elizabeta calls, insisting that Eva return home.

But when Eva arrives at her sister’s house, she discovers that Elizabeta is dead. Eva finds that she has been appointed the executor of Elizabeta’s estate, and as she undertakes the monumental task of clearing out the house, she comes to know her sister again through the objects and documents that she encounters. Through this process, Eva is forced to reckon with their shared history and the possibility that her mind cannot be trusted.

Foreign Country engages with themes of grief and loss, and the instability of memory. The novel explores the difficulty of coming to terms with conflicting accounts of the past and asks how well we ever really know the ones that we love, or our own past selves.

Ultimo Press, 2025

Everybody wants something.

An addict pleads to rid himself of the mystical force ruling his life. A girl takes drastic action to ensure her grandmother lives forever. A man untangles his memories and succeeds only in unravelling himself.

Glutt examines the cost of our desires, traversing the boundary of literary horror and speculative fiction to produce a gut-churning appraisal of wanton desperation.

Darkly humorous and at times eerily grotesque, this debut anthology toys with fantasy and comedy to explore hunger in its most physical and discarnate forms.

Grattan St Press, 2024

My father was a gardener. Now he is a garden.

Through long winter mornings, a man sits by the bedside of his elderly father.

His father, one of a generation of tragic smokers born at the end of the Second World War in Bulgaria, who clung to the snorkels of their cigarettes.

His father, who created and le behind a garden, blooming from a barren village yard: peonies and potatoes, roses and cherry trees – and endless stories.

His father, without whom the man’s past begins to quietly crack, leaving him buried in all the a fternoons of childhood. Because the end of our fathers is the end of a world.

From the winner of the International Booker Prize comes a novel about a father, a son and an orphaned garden. Set in a fading world, it spans from ancient Ithaca to present-day Sofia, interweaving the botany of sorrow, the consolations of storytelling and the arrival of the first tulips of spring.

Translated by Angela Rodel

Orion, 2025

They are the unhappy husbands, the disengaged grandfathers and the angry ‘letters to the editor’ writers. They sneer at generational change, know exactly where that bloody apostrophe should go and gather in sad groups bemoaning the modern world. They are Grumpy Old Buggers.

Geoff Hutchison became determined not to turn into one himself upon retirement from a career in journalism. So he wondered: what is it about ageing that tends to have this effect on Australian men, and what can be done to arrest that development?

Consulting a wide range of experts and mining his own experience and that of the other men in his life, Geoff has discovered how we can all live a happier, healthier and less grumpy life.

Affirm Press, 2025