The best new books released in June, from Charmian Clift, Gail Jones and more

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June was another stellar month in the publishing world, as our regular round-up of the best new releases attests.
We have a new offering from Gail Jones, a literary powerhouse who has made the Miles Franklin shortlist four times, and another Franklin-shortlisted author, Jennifer Mills, whose propulsive "bunker novel" is set against a backdrop of environmental catastrophe.
But the best books column is also a showcase of fresh talent, with no fewer than five debut releases. Among them are a glimmering short-story collection and a queer literary thriller set in Melbourne.
There's plenty to sink into this month — enjoy!
Picador Australia
Forget the flashy underground bunker — what if, in the case of environmental catastrophe, the uber-rich retreated to a space station?
In Jennifer Mills's post-apocalyptic novel Salvage, Celeste, the sister of protagonist Jude, has done just that.
Salvage is an impressive addition to an emerging collection of what I like to call 'bunker novels' — eco-fiction that reckons with the morality of self-preservation by the world's richest people (gold-standard 'bunker novels' include Eleanor Catton's Birnam Wood, Tim Winton's Juice and Naomi Alderman's The Future).
As a child, Jude is adopted into the ultra-wealthy family of an Australian resources magnate. She grows up in luxury and seclusion and forms a lifelong bond with her adopted older sister, Celeste. But when the opportunity to flee the Earth appears, only the older sister is interested in a future asleep on a space station, waiting out disaster.
Salvage is a propulsive novel told in multiple timelines. We see Jude and Celeste grow up, and apart. Years later, Jude is living in what appears to be a post-apocalyptic, post-war version of Europe. As part of a community of 'Freelanders', Jude drives a truck, fixes things and does what she can to help, all while keeping her true identity a secret. One day, an escape pod falls to the water, with a person aboard — could this be Celeste, returned to Earth?
The Australian writer Mills is known for her bold experimentation with novels The Airways and the Miles Franklin-shortlisted Dyschronia. With its page-turning story, Salvage is an easier read but Mills's passion for the environment — and glorious descriptions of the natural world — are still front and centre.
– Claire Nichols
Summit Books
I read Lucy Nelson's debut in the course of a single mesmerised sitting. A short-story collection tied together by theme, each narrative reflects on women who are not mothers. Some have chosen not to be; for others, it is a result of circumstance.
In Ghost Baby, a woman undergoes an abortion and finds solace in a podcast about mothering. In the title story, a shy housewife learns to visualise giving voice to the things she most wants to say while seeing a therapist; yet it is in those moments of waiting to see him that she becomes aware of how waiting has shaped her life, for both good and ill. In Swooping Season, the protections people use to fend off swooping birds become a potent metaphor for living with grief. Centred on a ballet dancer, The Feeling Bones tenderly depicts the shape of a family in all its felt and physical contours, from the womb to the end of life.
Across the stories, characters are often brought out of a state of semi-seclusion or taught to see their relative isolation in a new light. Those around them seek or offer companionship, becoming surrogates for absent figures in the characters' lives. We are encouraged to think about how people might nurture and mother one another, as well as the aspirations they carry in life.
Nelson skilfully evokes broader landscapes and personal histories for her characters. Contoured and lean, each story gracefully arcs and coils. Within the space of a passage or single line, resonant details glimmer.
Probing and gorgeously realised, Wait Here marks the arrival of a luminous new talent.
– Declan Fry
Dialogue Books
Jamaica Road is a coming-of-age story, set within the Jamaican diaspora of Britain during the 1980s.
The story begins with Daphne, the sole Black girl in her class in South London, who is coming to terms with her Black British identity. Every day Daphne scours the papers for mentions of people like her and is disheartened when she sees them presented as criminals and degenerates.
When Connie, a young boy recently arrived from Jamaica, joins her class, they become fast friends. As Connie's relationship with his mother's fearsome partner, Tobias, worsens, he seeks shelter with Daphne, literally and figuratively. We follow the pair coming together and apart across the decade as they tackle all the country has in store for them.
Both Connie and Daphne are children made to grow up too fast. While the characters are fictional, the dark history of police riots and racial profiling from South London in the 80s is straight from Smith's own research.
While this dark environment pulses in the background, Jamaica Road's main focus is the family and community that keeps its main characters nourished.
Jamaica Road reads almost like a play, with dialogue that comes to life on the page. It is a character-based, highly readable and unapologetically Black story about 80s Britain — and a love letter to the resilience and spirit of the Jamaican community.
– Rosie Ofori Ward
UQP
In the acknowledgements of his debut literary thriller, Thomas Vowles thanks his mother and then apologises for not writing a novel that "delights" her. It may not be "delightful", but Our New Gods is a clever page-turner set in Melbourne's queer scene, which morphs from a gay coming-of-age story to a narrative that trades in paranoia, jealousy and obsession.
Young Ash has recently moved to Melbourne, escaping the misery and emptiness of his father's home. Desperate to connect, Ash launches himself on the dating apps and meets the charismatic James. While they don't initially connect romantically, James invites Ash into his world, taking him to parties, meeting his friends and daring him to be bold. Ash is often out of his depth as he discovers even the local pool is a lavish queer space where "brightly coloured speedos were the uniform".
As a guide, James is a life source for Ash whose desperation to escape extreme loneliness motivates his choices, which become increasingly self-defeating.
Unease intensifies after Ash attends a bush rave with James and his boyfriend Raf; there, Ash recovers the body of Raf's former boyfriend, Booth, in a lake and becomes fixated on the idea that Raf murdered Booth and now Ash wants to protect James from a similar fate.
As Ash reflects: "The difficult task of our lives was to act in the face of uncertainty. But how? To act, one had to make a choice within the treachery of ambiguity. How could this not inevitably lead to tragedy?"
Within this "treachery of ambiguity", Vowles skilfully plays with our sympathies and plants seeds of discontent and disconnect which pushes the reader to the tragic end. A compelling Australian debut.
– Sarah L'Estrange
NewSouth
It's a crime that Charmian Clift's marvellous writing is not better known. The past few years have helped ameliorate this neglect with a series of new publications and republications, including Clift's unfinished novel, The End of the Morning, her daughter Suzanne Chick's 1994 memoir, Searching for Charmian (republished in 2025), and We Are the Stars, her granddaughter Gina Chick's 2025 memoir.
This month sees the arrival of her glorious second solo novel, Honour's Mimic, first published in 1964. It tells the story of Kathy, a woman learning to find herself outside the confines of marriage and children. Kathy is convalescing on a small Greek island following an automobile accident. She and her sister-in-law Milly are outsiders and objects of curiosity on the island, something Clift nimbly and gracefully captures (while out walking, Kathy notes the "quick shy ripple of teeth" she encounters from the men).
Kathy is so vividly drawn, she burns a hole through the page. She is a person who feels deeply and wants to savour the marrow of life. She begins an affair with a wiry, wolfish sponge diver, Fotis. Delicately sketched, intimating things just so, Clift evokes their burgeoning attraction in slow, aching, pointillist detail.
The book offers a fascinating portrait, too, of Greece in the 1950s: the small, close-knit community; scant electricity; the ships, barbers and taverns, and the houses hung precariously from cliff-faces, alongside public buildings dating from the Italian occupation during World War II.
Raw, real and remarkable, Clift charts one woman's journey into the "expansive reckless" wonder of the world. Her evocation of Kathy and Fotis's interior lives is furious, grand and eclectic. Honour's Mimic is a superbly realised portrait of the links between true love and mortality. It is about how being in another country can unmoor and perhaps free you to find "a passionate affirmation of that old lost desire to face challenge and danger, to be brave, to dare for the truth".
– Declan Fry
Text Publishing
Acclaimed Australian novelist Gail Jones explores the subterranean as well as the surface in her 11 novels (Black Mirror, Five Bells, The Death of Noah Glass, Salonika Burning, just to name a few).
Her latest, The Name of the Sister, is a story of the missing. Those people who slipped away or were taken, who fell into mystery or were snatched away. Even more, it's about those left behind, the grieving and the searching, those who fill that missing space with hope, speculation and story.
Angie, a freelance journalist in Sydney, is intrigued by the story of a woman found on the side of the road outside Broken Hill. Found, rather than lost or missing. The woman can't or won't speak and nobody knows who she is and what has happened. As Angie pursues the story, she is drawn in by the numerous people who project their own losses onto this woman, who claim that they recognise her, "dead cert, for sure, one hundred and one per cent".
Meanwhile, Angie's romantic relationship is unstable, and her family history of silence and secrets lingers in the shadows. Her fierce best friend is the lead detective on the case, too, and so this is almost a crime novel, but not quite: "She had no wish to contribute to the criminal hunt or its shady forms of titillation."
Jones takes us into this story with her usual eye for surprising detail and exquisitely realised description: the "windy hollow of the city's loud darkness", punctuated by memories, music, shared song lyrics and the sound of hopeful searches.
– Kate Evans
Allen & Unwin
When you're 10, summer holidays seem like they last forever. It's a feeling Kiwi author Jennifer Trevelyan captures and infuses with unease in her debut novel, A Beautiful Family.
A family of four heads to a popular holiday spot on the North Island coast for their annual five-week break. The story is told from the perspective of the younger sister, who remains unnamed for most of the book. It's the 1980s and her days are sound-tracked by the Split Enz album, True Colours, which she listens to religiously on her walkman.
In the absence of digital distractions, time takes on an expansive quality. The narrator's 13-year-old sister, Vanessa, is now "too cool" to play, so she befriends a boy, Kahu, who tells her a story about a girl who went missing from the town a few years earlier. The pair spend their days exploring the beach and a nearby lagoon, looking for clues in their hunt for the missing girl.
Around halfway through the novel, Trevelyan begins ratcheting up the suspense, and what began as a portrait of family dynamics becomes something more sinister. The missing girl's mother, a sad figure who collects wildflowers to lay at a makeshift memorial for her daughter, is a distressing reminder that however idyllic the beach appears, danger is never far away.
What that danger is exactly is hard to say: is it the wild surf? The creepy next-door neighbour? Or does it come from within? Fractures grow in the parents' marriage as the narrator's mother disappears for mysterious walks on the beach while her father is at home watching cricket on TV. Their youngest daughter, small and easy to miss, has learned how to blend into the background. But she's always watching and leaping to conclusions, unchecked by her parents who are caught up in their own affairs.
As the adults in her life become increasingly unreliable, the narrator sees the fragility of her family for the first time. "Now I understood that a family wasn't a particularly solid thing — it was a bubble purely of our own making and just like a bubble, it could burst."
In the book's final pages, Trevelyan brings together the narrative threads in a gripping denouement. It's an atmospheric and satisfyingly pacy read that serves up a welcome slice of sun-filled escapism.
– Nicola Heath
Doubleday
Liquid features an unnamed and unmoored protagonist. Two years after finishing her PhD, she is spiralling.
She reflects, "My career had gone nowhere. My love life was non-existent. And as for sex, here I was, home alone on a Saturday night with a chick flick playing on my laptop because I didn't own a TV."
Determined to change her life, she resolves to marry rich, planning 100 dates over the summer. Given her published PhD is a take-down of modern marriage, she feels perfectly placed for this endeavour.
The writing is sharp, witty and fun. Our protagonist is a skilled commentator and, with cutting barbs, the dates become academic case studies on America, whiteness, class and sexuality.
As a queer woman and the daughter of an Iranian father and Indian mother, she grapples with what it would mean to marry for the sake of comfort, particularly in the pressing whiteness of LA.
In the final third of the novel, the tone shifts, as the protagonist travels to Tehran to see her father. Despite speaking Farsi and her olive skin, as an American in Iran she is an outsider. Everything that normally comes with ease or familiarity is met with sanctions and dead ends.
She identifies this is not the fault of her destination, but where she's come from: "It wasn't my father's people who had invented the term 'Third World', and they hadn't defined the terms by which its inhabitants were forced to live."
With a critique of American imperialism at its centre, Liquid is both a sexy and highly political piece of literary fiction.
– Rosie Ofori Ward
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