For some years now, I’ve made my first Monday Musings of the year, a “new releases” post. As in previous years, my list is mostly drawn from the Sydney Morning Herald, whose writers do a wonderful job of checking out publishers large and small, but I have found a couple of extras on my own! Also, remember, as this is Monday musings on Australian literature post, it will be limited to Australian authors (listed alphabetically.) Do click on the SMH link to see the full list, which includes non-Aussies, Aussies I haven’t selected, and additional info about some of the books.

Links on the authors’ names are to my posts on them.

Fiction

Last year, I listed 24 fiction works plus a few new voices and short story collections, and read only TWO (par for last year’s course, really) – but I will be reading some more of them in the next few months.

• Pip Adams, Nothing to see (March, Giramondo)
• Michael Mohammed Ahmad, The other half of you (June, Hachette)
• Larissa Behrendt, After story (July, QUP)
• Emily Bitto, Menagerie (second half, A&U)
• Steven Carroll, O (February, Fourth Estate)
• Claire G. Coleman, Enclave (October, Hachette)
• Paul Daley, Jesustown (August, Allen & Unwin) 
• Michelle de Kretser, Scary monsters (“a flip book”, second half of 2021, Allen & Unwin)
• Briohny Doyle, Echolalia (June, Vintage)
• Nikki Gemmell, The ripping tree (April, Fourth Estate)
• Irma Gold, The breaking (March, MidnightSun)
• Chris Hammer, no title yet (second half, Allen & Unwin) (my token crime inclusion!)
• John Kinsella, Pushing back (February, Transit Lounge)
• Jamie Marina Lau, Gunk baby (May, Hachette) (and I have to include the description: it’s “about a budding entrepreneur who opens an ear-cleaning business in the local mall”)
• Charlotte McConaghy, Once there were wolves (August, Hamish Hamilton)
• Emily Maguire, Love objects (April, Allen & Unwin)
• Sophie Masson, The ghost squad (yes, I know, YA, but – February, MidnightSun)
• Jennifer Mills, Airwaves (August, Picador)
• Kate Morton, no title yet (second half, Allen & Unwin)
• Stephen Orr, Sincerely, Ethel Malley (April, Wakefield Press)
• Debra Oswald, The family doctor (March, A&U)
• Alice Pung, One hundred days (June, Black Inc.)
• Trevor Shearston, The beach caves (February, Scribe)
• Graeme Simsion and Anne Buist, Two steps onward (collaborative novel, March, Text)
• Claire Thomas, The performance (March, Hachette)
• Christos Tsiolkas, 7½ (“auto-fiction”, second half, Allen & Unwin)

I’m surprised to find that many more authors from this year’s list are already on my blog than ever before, which sort of makes me feel I’m getting somewhere!

SMH also lists “new voices” (including new forms for established voices):

• Ella Baxter, New animal (February, Allen & Unwin)
• Hannah Bent, When things are alive they hum (second half, Ultimo Press)
• Barry Divola, Driving Stevie Fracasso (March, HarperCollins) (music journalist/short story writer)
• Max Easton, Leaving the plain (TBA, Giramondo)
• Martin McKenzie-Murray, The speech writer (Scribe, February) (journalist)
• L.P McMahon, As swallows fly (March, Ventura)
• Jacqueline Maley, The truth about her (April, Fourth Estate) (journalist)
• Campbell Mattinson, We were not men (June, Fourth Estate) (wine writer)
• Angela O’Keeffe, Night blue (May, Transit) (here’s one for next year’s “interesting narrative voices” – the narrator is Pollock’s Blue Poles painting!)
• Sophie Overett, The rabbits (July, Michael Joseph)
• Madeleine Ryan, A room called Earth (March, Scribe)
• Emma Spurr, A million things (March, Text)

Short stories

• Tony Birch, Dark as last night (August, UQP)
• Te-Ping Chen, Land of big numbers (March, Scribner)
• Paige Clark, She is haunted and other stories (August, A&U).  
• Melissa Manning, Smokehouse (April, UQP)
• Adam Thompson, Born into this (February, UQP) 
• Chloe Wilson, Hold your fire (March, Simon & Schuster)

Non-fiction

SMH provides a long long list of new non-fiction books covering a huge range of topics, so my two lists are highly selective.

Life-writing (loosely defined)

• Emma Alberici, Rewrite the story (September, Hardie Grant): memoir.
• Alison Croggon, Monsters: A reckoning (March, Scribe): hybrid memoir/essay (award-winning essayist).
• Carly Findlay (ed.) Growing up disabled (February, Black Inc.): from the Growing Up series.
• Clementine Ford, How we love (second half, Allen & Unwin): memoir about love, motherhood and her family.
• Evelyn Juers, The dancer (TBA, Giramondo): biography of Philippa Cullen, that was listed in my 2020 new releases and is listed again but still without a date.
• Nathan Hobby, biography of Katharine Susannah Prichard (first half, MUP)
• Eleanor Hogan, Into the loneliness (March, NewSouth): biography of Daisy Bates and Ernestine Hill
• Yumiko Kadota, Emotional female (March, Viking): memoir about the challenges of being a young female surgeon in an often toxic environment.
• Sarah Krasnostein, The believer (March, Text): faith and conviction in six people.
• Joyce Morgan, The Countless from Kirribilli (July, Allen & Unwin): biography of Elizabeth von Arnim. I can’t believe there is a third book coming out in reasonably short time about this author, with whom I fell in love way back in the 1980s. 
• Rick Morton, My year of living vulnerably (March, HarperCollins): follow-up memoir.
• Fiona Murphy, The shape of sound (March, Text): memoir about being deaf, by an emerging writer admired by Jessica White and Angela Savage.
• Christine Skyes, Gough and me (May, Ventura): memoir about the role Gough Whitlam played in her life.
• Alf Taylor, God, the devil and me (February, Magabala): Memoir
• Robert Wainwright, The diva and the duc (second half, A&U): biography of soprano Nellie Melba.
• David Williamson, untitled autobiography (October, HarperCollins). 
• Charlotte Wood, Inner life (second half, A&U): expanding her essay on “the creative process, inspiration and hard work”. 

SMH lists a number of biographies coming out on politicians, past and present, and memoirs by current political figures, but let’s give ourselves a break from parliamentary politics today. (You can check out the SMH link, of course, if you are interested.)

History and other non-fiction

• Santilla Chingaipe, Black convict (July, Picador): convicts of African descent transported to the Australian penal colonies.
• Helen Garner, presumably the next diary volume (Text)
• Stan Grant, With the falling of the dusk (April, HarperCollins): “the challenges facing our world”. 
• David Hunt, Girt nation (November, Black Inc.): third instalment after Girt and True girt.
• Bri Lee, Brains (second half, Allen & Unwin): the structural inequalities behind elite institutions.
• Mark McKenna, Return to Uluru (March, Black Inc.): starts from the 1934 shooting at Uluru of Aboriginal man Yokunnuna by white policeman Bill McKinnon.
• David Marr, A family business (October, Black Inc.): Queensland’s frontier massacres in the 19th century. 
• Henry Reynolds Truth-telling (February, NewSouth): First Nations sovereignty and the importance of the Uluru Statement from the Heart. 

SMH also identifies some special current-interest topics being written about, including:

• Last year’s bushfires: Bronwyn Adcock, Currowan (August, Black Inc.); Danielle Celermajer, Summertime (February, Hamish Hamilton); Greg Mullins, Firestorm (September, Viking Australia); John Pickrell, Flames of extinction (March, NewSouth); and Michael Rowland (ed), Black summer (January, ABC Books).
• Climate change: Richard Beasley, Dead in the water (February, Allen & Unwin); Jonica Newby, Beyond climate grief (NewSouth); Gabrielle Chan, Why you should give a f— about farming (August, Vintage); and Ian Lowe, Long half life (August, Monash).
• COVID-19 (of course): Ross Garnaut, Reset (February, La Trobe); Hugh McKay, The loving country (May, A&U); Duncan McNab, The Ruby Princess (February, Macmillan); and Norman Swan, So you think you know what’s good for you (July, Hachette).
• Politics and current affairs: David Brophy, China panic (June, La Trobe); Zoe Daniel and Roscoe Whalan, Greetings from Trumpland (February, ABC Books); Zareh Ghazarian and Katrina Lee-Koo (ed), Gender politics: Navigating political leadership in Australia (May, NewSouth); Nicholas Jose and Benjamin Madden (ed), Antipodean China (February, Giramondo); Peter van Onselen and Wayne Errington, How good is Scott Morrison? (March, Hachette); and Trevor Watson and Melissa Roberts (ed), The Beijing Bureau (May, Hardie Grant).

Does anything here interest you?