As we edge toward Christmas publishers begin to put on a spectacular show and booksellers get excited. Here are a couple of things that we’re getting excited about this August. Its just the beginning folks!

Fight Night, by Miriam Toews. 

The ‘must read’ book of 2022! Fight Night is a laugh a minute celebration of resilience, compassion and the wisdom of age. Things are not great for 9 year old Swiv – She’s been suspended for fighting, Grandma Elvira is going to die any second, her Mom is crazy (and pregnant) and no-one knows where her father is. Under Grandma Elvira’s watchful eye Swiv learns to fight for happiness in the face of adversity. Toew’s has an incredible knack with character and language, creating fully animated personalities that crackle and shimmer on the page. I absolutely adored it. You will too. ~ Sally 

All Our Missing Hearts, by Celeste Ng

A powerful story of race, resistance and love from the author of Little Fires Everywhere. America is in social and economic free-fall, its citizens are hungry, violence is widespread, institutions have crumbled. Wildly searching for a culprit, the powers that be fix on the Chinese. The Preserving American Culture and Traditions Act changes Birds life irrevocably. His Chinese American mother has disappeared, his father is a ghost of his former self, all live in silence and fear. But a secret message beckons the young boy and what is revealed will change him forever. A pacy read with an unforgettable ending. ~ Sally 

The Dawn of Everything, by David Graeber and David Wengrow

For over ten years a dazzling intellectual conversation flourished between anthropologist David Graeber and Archaeologist David Wengrow. It’s focus: Freedom, as evidenced by their respective professions. This stunning book is the product of that conversation. With an inimitable conversational style that tears shreds off Jared Diamond and Yuval Harari, among others, and they unpick the myths perpetuated in the telling to history to radically question what civilisation actually costs. Does inequality arise because of industrialisation? Did humans all run to meet their chains just because we learned to cultivate cereals? Most crucially, why, when the record shows us to be intelligent political actors capable of flexibly structuring societies, did we become so bogged down in one modern model. ~ Sally