Book chat, Book review

Month by month: the Australian books due to be published in 2024 (updated)

kimbofo

Yesterday The Guardian (Australian edition) published an article about Australian books to be published in 2024. But it was written as a feature that arranged the books by theme, which made it hard work to figure out what was being published when.

So, I’ve taken the time to arrange the books in a way that makes sense to me: by month of publication.

Update 30/12/23: The Age/SMH has produced a similar list, so I have now included titles not previously in the below list, as well as those titles mentioned in the comments.

Please note that all books are fiction unless stated otherwise.

JANUARY

  • We All Lived in Bondi Then by Georgia Blaine (Scribe; short stories)
  • My Brilliant Sister by Amy Brown (Scribner)
  • The Pulling by Adele Dumont (Scribe; non-fiction)
  • Politica by Yumna Kassab (Ultimo)

FEBRUARY

  • The Great Undoing by Sharlene Allsopp (Ultimo)
  • Barbara Tucker: The Art of Being by Hermina Burns (MUP; biography)
  • In Bad Faith by Dassi Erlich (Hachette; non-fiction)
  • One Another by Gail Jones (Text)
  • The Star on the Grave by Linda Margolin Royal (Affirm)
  • Chloe by Katrina Kell (Echo)
  • Gawimarra by Jeanine Leane (UQP; poetry)
  • The Beacon by P. A. Thomas (Echo)
  • Gone by Glenna Thomson (PRH)

MARCH

  • Some People Want to Shoot Me by Wayne Bergmann and Madeleine Dickie (Fremantle; non-fiction)
  • Tell by Jonathan Buckley – joint winner of the Novel Prize (Giramondo)
  • Nameless  by Amanda Creely (UWA)
  • It Lasts Forever and Then it’s Over by Anne de Marcken – joint winner of the Novel Prize (Giramondo)
  • Dirt Poor Islanders by Winnie Dunn  (Hachette)
  • The Mystery Writer by Sulari Gentill (Ultimo)
  • The Cancer Finishing School by Peter Goldsworthy (PRH; non-fiction)
  • What I Would Do For You by Georgia Harper (Vintage)
  • Compassion by Julie Janson (Magabala)
  • Like Fire Hearted Suns by Melanie Joosten (Ultimo)
  • Lead Us Not by Abbey Lay (PRH)
  • 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem by Nam Le (Scribner; poetry)
  • The Work by Bri Lee (Allen & Unwin)
  • What Happened to Nina? by Dervla McTiernan (HarperCollins)
  • Breath by Carly-Jay Metcalfe (UQP; non-fiction)
  • Pheasants Nest by Louise Milligan (Allen & Unwin)
  • Shining Like the Sun by Stephen Orr (Wakefield Press)
  • Appreciation by Liam Pieper (PRH)
  • Always Will Be by Mykaela Saunders (UQP; short stories)
  • Maya’s Dance by Helen Signy (Simon & Schuster)

APRIL

  • On Kim Scott by Tony Birch (Black Inc Writers on Writers series)
  • Deep Water by James Bradley (PRH; non-fiction)
  • The Glass House by Anne Buist and Graeme Simsion (Hachette)
  • Death of a Foreign Gentleman by Steven Carroll (HarperCollins)
  • Thunderhead by Miranda Darling (Scribe)
  • Saltblood by Francesca De Tores (Bloomsbury)
  • Sanctuary by Garry Disher (Text)
  • Bullet, Paper, Rock: A Memoir of Words and Wars by Abbas El-Zein (Upswell; memoir)
  • No Church in the Wild by Murray Middleton (Macmillan)
  • Black Duck: A Year at Yumburra by Bruce Pascoe with Lyn Harwood (Thames & Hudson, memoir)
  • The Gorgon Flower by John Richards (UQP; short stories)
  • Rebel Rising by Rebel Wilson (HarperCollins; memoir).

MAY

  • Houdini Unbound by Alan Atwood (Melbourne Books)
  • Because I’m Not Myself, You See by Ariane Beeston (Black Inc; non-fiction)
  • The Deed by Susanna Begbie (Hachette)
  • Safe Haven by Shankari Chandran (Ultimo)
  • The End of the Morning by Charmian Clift (New South)
  • The Changing Room by Belinda Cranston (Transit Lounge)
  • Because I Love Him by Ashlee Donohue (Magabala; memoir)
  • The Story Thief by Kyra Geddes (Affirm)
  • Ordinary Human Love by Melissa Goode (Ultimo)
  • Depth of Field by Kirsty Iltners (UWA)
  • How to Knit a Human by Anna Jacobson (New South; non-fiction)
  • Ghost Cities by Siang Lu (UQP)
  • To Sing of War by Catherine McKinnon (Fourth Estate)
  • A Very Secret Trade by Cassandra Pybus (A&U; non-fiction)
  • Peripathetic: Notes on (un)belonging by Cher Tan (New South; non-fiction)
  • Bright Objects by Ruby Todd (A&U)
  • Shirley Hazzard and Elizabeth Harrower: The Letters by Brigitta Olubas and Susan Wyndham (New South; non-fiction)

JUNE

  • First Nations Classics — 8-volume set (UQP)
  • Hurdy Gurdy by Jenny Ackland (Allen & Unwin)
  • The Skeleton House by Katherine Allum (Fremantle)
  • Mrs Hopkins by Shirley Barrett (A&U)
  • Everything Is Water by Simon Cleary (UQP; non-fiction)
  • Black Witness: The Power of Indigenous Media by Amy McQuire (UQP; essays)
  • Every Last Suspect by Nicola Moriarty (HarperCollins)
  • Big Time by Jordan Prosser (UQP)
  • Black Witness by Amy McQuire (UQP; non-fiction)
  • Fool Me Twice by Benjamin Stevenson (PRH)

JULY

  • Smoke by Michael Brissenden (Affirm)
  • Slutdom by Hilary Caldwell (UQP; non-fiction)
  • Only the Astronauts by Ceridwen Dovey (PRH; short stories)
  • The Community by Christine Gregory (Ultimo)
  • The End and Everything Before It by Finegan Kruckemeyer (Text)
  • The Truth About Nice by Amy Remeikis (Hachette; non-fiction)
  • The Degenerates by Raeden Richardson (Text)
  • If You Go by Alice Robinson (Affirm)
  • Storm Child by Michael Robotham (Simon & Schuster)
  • Refugia by Elfie Shiosaki  (Magabala; poetry)
  • Honeyeater by Jessica Tu (Allen & Unwin)

AUGUST

  • Black Convicts: How Slavery Shaped Colonised Australia by Santilla Chingaipe (Scribner; non-fiction)
  • Growing Up Torres Strait Islander in Australia, edited by Samantha Faulkner (Black Inc; essays)
  • All The Missing Children by Zahid Gamieldien (Ultimo)
  • Running with Pirates by Kári Gíslason (UQP; non-fiction)
  • Dirrayawadha by Anita Heiss (Simon & Schuster)
  • All You Took From Me by Lisa Kenway (Transit Lounge)
  • The Fire Inside by Jazz Money (UQP; poetry)
  • Seventeen Years Later by J. P. Pomare (August)

SEPTEMBER

  • The Burrow by Melanie Cheng (Text)
  • When Cops are Criminals, edited by Veronica Gorrie (Scribe; essays)
  • Cherrywood by Jock Serong (HarperCollins)

OCTOBER

  • This Kingdom of Dust by David Dyer (Hamish Hamilton)
  • Vortex by Rodney Hall (Macmillan)
  • The First Friend by Malcolm Knox (A&U)
  • Joan Lindsay: The Hidden Life of the Woman Who Wrote Picnic at Hanging Rock by Brenda Niall (Text; non-fiction)
  • As yet untitled by Magda Szubanski (Text; memoir)
  • Shapeshifting edited by Ellen van Neerven and Jeanine Leane (UQP; essays)
  • On Alexis Wright by Tara June Winch (Black Inc Writers on Writers series)
  • The Yirrkala Bark Petition by Clare Wright (Text, non-fiction)

NOVEMBER

Note. there is a new non-fiction book by Helen Garner in the works, but no date or title was mentioned in the article.

Published by kimbofo

I am a book obsessive who has been charting my reading life online since the early 2000s.

37 thoughts on “Month by month: the Australian books due to be published in 2024 (updated)”

  1. Please add to March 2024: Shining Like the Sun by Stephen Orr, from Wakefield Press.
    I don’t know if you noticed but the BJS’s gender bias in that Guardian piece is way out of whack: I counted them up and (if I remember rightly) it was 39 female, 13 male, and no mention of Stephen’s book. And he’s a major Australian author…
    It’s a bit obvious that there’s nothing from award-winning Transit Lounge either, and their list is bound to be as good as it usually is…

    Liked by 1 person

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    1. These pieces aren’t comprehensive and I suspect the journo would have put a call out for publishers to submit their catalogues and cobbled it together from that. You’ll notice a heavy bias toward UQP.

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    2. I’ve been putting together my usual list Lisa, and I always check publisher websites myself, where I haven’t seen them in the article (usually SMH but this year The Guardian), and I think the uneven gender proportion is not just Beejay. Some sites don’t have their full year’s schedule up on their pages, though.

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      1. I was a bit startled to see The Australian’s list of forthcoming titles, by Geordie Williamson no less, with new offerings under genre headings e.g. romance. (Needless to say I didn’t recognise any names!)
        Well, why not, I suppose, except it did make me wonder how many readers of romance would read The Oz Weekend Review… and it also made me wonder how many of those unfamiliar authors had ever been read by GW.
        I guess all these versions of forthcoming titles are all using publisher’s promos.

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        1. What else can you do – unless you have an in with publishers, which you’d think people like Williamson would have. I can see his sorting by gene working very well for the Australian – people can hone in immediately on their interest (or the interest of those they buy for? I have no idea about most genres but that would help me buy for people in those). I guess it also would save me looking up unfamiliar names only to find they were genres I tend not to read?

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          1. I guess that the purpose of it really is marketing, trying to engender a bit of FOMO. LOL I don’t imagine too many people put the publishing dates into their diaries!

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  4. Thanks for putting this together – I also like a chronological list.
    I spotted the post but was too tired to make out who was publishing what when!

    I’m also keen to get into Always Will Be: Stories of Goori sovereignty from the futures of the Tweed by Mykaela Saunders (March), Bullet, Paper, Rock: A Memoir of Words and Wars by Abbas El-Zein (April) who also happens to be a friend 🙂 and We All Lived in Bondi Then by Georgia Blain (Feb)

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    1. Thanks for those additions. I take it the Georgia Blain is a reprint or published posthumously?

      I’m also looking forward to a Fremantle Press title not mentioned in the article: Alexander Thorpe’s second novel “Death Holds The Key” (cosy crime) but not sure what month it is being published

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      1. The Blain is short stories she wrote before she died.
        I also came across the Black Inc’s Writers on Writers series, which will be publishing two new ones in 2024. Tony Birch examines Kim Scott (April) and Tara June Winch considers Alexis Wright (October).

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        1. Don’t think I realised (or I forgot 😜) that he won that. I looked it up online. He won in 2008 and another Aussie, Ceridwen Dovey, was up for the same prize. She’s also got a book coming out this year.

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  8. Before this year ends, Kim, may I thank you, thank you, for your constantly brilliant reviews. I’m always adding the titles to my TBR – I just seem to like the books you choose. And I similarly appreciate your style of review-writing: ‘concisely descriptive’, (if you can understand what I mean!), yet covering all essential details, And you balance any criticisms with such positivity. You have yet again enriched my reading this year, for which I am so grateful.

    Liked by 2 people

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    1. Thank you for such a lovely comment. Always wonderful to hear from people who appreciate my reviews. Sometimes it can feel as if you are publishing them into the ether with next to no impact, so it’s pleasing to find out they have helped guide your reading.

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  9. Good list kimbofo.

    I’ve put together my own list and have gone a bit wider than The Guardian’s list though it has formed my basis. Usually, it’s SMH’s list that I use. My practice has been to publish it the first Monday in January, but that clashes with my usual 1 January Blogging Highlights, so I’ll probably hold it over to the next Monday.

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    1. Thanks, Sue. I updated the list yesterday to include The Age/SMH and then regretted it because it was SO MUCH WORK TO DO and I was trying to have a digital-free period between Christmas and New Year’s 🤷🏻‍♀️ Ha! Nevertheless, it’s interesting to see the popular months for publishing and the sheer lack of big names … I think 2024 looks to be crammed with debuts.

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        1. I have flagged the update at the top and changed the title too by marking it (updated) but if you’re reading on the Jetpack app sometimes the updates don’t come through 🤷🏻‍♀️

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  10. I have the same premise as you do: if I can’t remember much about the book, it doesn’t make the cut as a favorite. Even if what I remember was upsetting to me, that surely qualifies as a worthwhile read (here I’m thinking of several Booker International Prize contenders, such as Cursed Bunny or Boulder).

    I’m so very glad that you will pick up some Japanese literature with us this year, and I am looking forward to Jon Banville with you and Cathy. I read his latest, The Lock-Up, in December, but I didn’t love it…hence, there is no post. But, he is an author I have largely unread, and that must be remedied!

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  11. Pingback: Monday musings on Australian literature: Some New Releases in 2024 | Whispering Gums

  12. Happy New Year… !

    Pleased to hear you’ll join in with our John Banville project… Have you read other in the Strafford/Quirke series? The Lock-Up might not be the place to start, if you haven’t…

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  13. Pingback: Spell the Month in Books | January – This Reading Life

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