Summer is the perfect time to dip into some fiction! Whether you’re reading at the beach, in the air conditioning or on a summer getaway, these are our top fiction picks to get stuck into.
The Heir Apparent by Rebecca Armitage
Lexi Villiers is a 29-year-old Englishwoman doing her medical residency in Hobart, working too hard, worried about her bank balance, and living with friends. It’s a good life, and getting even better, because as the dawn is breaking on New Year’s Day, Lexi is about to kiss the man she loves for the very first time.
But by midnight, everything will change. Because Lexi is in fact not an ordinary young woman. She is Princess Alexandrina, third in line to the British throne – albeit estranged from the rest of her family and living in voluntary exile on the other side of the world. But following a terrible accident, Lexi – the black sheep of her family and, until this moment, always destined to be the spare – is now the heir apparent, first in line to the throne once her grandmother, the elderly Queen, dies. Called back to do her duty, she arrives in London to a Palace riven with power plays and media leaks, all the while guarding painful secrets of her own. Palace waters are treacherous, rumours are rife, and selling each other’s secrets is a family tradition. And with the Crown
The Woman in the Spotlight by J.R. Lonie
When everyone is watching, survival will be her greatest performance … A gripping, utterly absorbing novel about survival and art as defiance on the 1930s Berlin stage, from the bestselling author of The Woman from Saint Germain
Berlin 1932: With Germany in chaos, Monika Varády, a young Bavarian actress, arrives in the capital with high hopes – to one day, just maybe, be a great star of the stage and screen.
But with the rise to power of Hitler and his brutal Nazi regime, the theatre scene falls under the control of Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, becoming a minefield of political machinations that Monika, in love with a Bolshevik Jewish actor, must now navigate. As her star rises from the smoky bars of the demi-monde to the city’s prestigious stages, most dangerous of all is Goebbels himself who takes a more-than-artistic interest in her.
While staying true to her beliefs and to those she loves, Monika must employ all the skills of her craft to outwit Goebbels and with her close friends, to resist the regime’s attempts to rewrite German theatre and culture, by hiding in plain sight – even in the glare of the spotlight.
Dreamwives by Claire Novak
A funny, moving and wise mumcom about reinvention with a vengeance and the power of friendship, for fans of Maggie Alderson, Marian Keyes and Jilly Cooper.
When two enterprising women hit the financial skids, they cook up a business to make money from the wife-work they’ve been doing for decades. But will their labour of love be too hot to handle?
Middle-aged housewife Katrina Webb, dumped by her husband and suddenly broke, meets her old friend Michelle Redlin-Wu, who looks after her elderly father and has just been laid off. Over a stolen bottle of champagne, they decide that people should pay for the domestic and emotional work women have largely shouldered for centuries, and their business is born.
Dreamwives aren’t cleaners or nannies or housekeepers – they create warm and inviting homes by cooking dinner, leaving the bathroom clean (and just a little bit used), and listening to their clients unload. This is extreme customer service – no sex included.
It seems to be a winning formula, until Michelle starts falling for a client, and Katrina finds herself at the centre of a very public scandal. Can they really get paid for the work that so many women do for free, or are they flushing their lives away? This fast-paced romp will make you laugh, shout and cry … And make you forget about your To-Do list for a while.
The Watchmaker’s War by Danny Ben-Moshe
A new beginning. An old enemy. A perilous choice.
When Yakov Holtzman arrives in Melbourne – about as far away as he can possibly get from the graveyard that is Europe – he puts behind him the years he spent in the forests of Lithuania as a leader of the resistance, fighting the Nazis. He has come to join his brother – his only surviving family member – and start a new life as the watchmaker he once was.
Yakov looks for solace – and love – in the fragile, traumatised community of Jewish refugees taking root in a new land. But when swastikas, threats and, most frightening of all, the faces of old enemies appear on the streets of suburban St Kilda, his new-found peace is shattered.
Fierce instincts are reawakened in Yakov, and he knows he must act. But how can justice – or revenge – best be served? And will Yakov’s drive to destroy his enemies overtake him too, and leave his new life in ruins?
Based on a true story, The Watchmaker’s War is a gripping, high-stakes tale of Nazi hunters in Australia and the war criminals they pursued – killers with links to the highest levels of Australia’s spy agency. It offers profound insights into the lingering trauma of genocide, posing difficult questions about competing desires for peace and vengeance, and how far a victim should go in the pursuit of justice when the authorities fail to act.
Galentine’s Day by Rebecca Anderson
Thirteen years. Three women. One annual sleepover.
13 February 2013. Alicia, Marnie and Hannah have their first Galentine’s Day sleepover. They’re eighteen, single, and the world is at their feet. Soon they’ll go their separate ways after college, but they promise that every year, they’ll have their sleepover.
13 February 2026. There are only two friends at the annual sleepover. Their friendships have been tested by life, by partying, breakdowns, and even by pregnancies. Are their best Galentine’s Days now behind them?
Galentine’s Day is a love letter to female friendship, that celebrates messiness, real relationships, and growing up together.
Gravity Let Me Go by Trent Dalton
Trent Dalton, Australia’s #1 bestselling author, returns with the astonishing Gravity Let Me Go – a story you won’t ever forget.
Longlisted for Best Fiction in the Indie Book Awards 2026
How will you ever know how the story ends, if you let the story go?
Noah Cork has just published the scoop of a lifetime: a white-hot true-crime book about the cold-blooded killer who slipped an unfolding murder mystery into his mailbox. But if this is his moment of triumph, then why is the tin roof being ripped from the walls of his reality? Why are skeletons standing upright in his closet? Why do people want to run him over in the street? And why does his wife keep writing a cryptic message across the bathroom mirror? As a severe storm heads towards Brisbane, Noah is hurtling headfirst into a swirling storm of secrets. He must now cling for dear life to the only story that ever really mattered. He must hold on to the truth. He must hold on to the story. He must hold on to love.
Dark, gritty, hilarious and unexpected, Gravity Let Me Go is Trent Dalton’s deeply personal exploration of marriage and ambition, truth-telling and truth-omitting, self-deception and self-preservation. It’s a novel about the stories we want to tell the world and those we shouldn’t, and how the stories we keep locked away are so often the stories that come to define us.
It’s the story of a murder.
It’s the story of a marriage.
It’s the story of a lifetime.
Pilbara by Judy Nunn
A stunning tale of loyalty and survival from a master storyteller …
In this ancient, harsh place, faint hearts will not last.
The Pilbara, late 1800s: Frontier country, the wild west of Australia – a lawless, violent place where treachery is a way of life.
Widower Charles Burton arrives in this forbidding corner of the world with his three young children. They’ve travelled half the globe, from the lush, rolling hills and dales of Yorkshire, on a mission to save their family’s sheep and cattle property. Rebuilding the fortunes of Burton Station will ask everything of Charles and his children, particularly his daughter, Victoria, who will at times threaten to bring about their downfall.
Here in the oldest landscape on earth, survival has always proved a battle. And when greed takes over, the battle only intensifies. Aboriginal people are robbed of their lands and their very way of life as every new arrival fights for the riches on offer – the grazing territory, the pearls and the gold. Amid all this brutality, the Burtons and their allies must fight to conquer the savagery that surrounds them.
From Yorkshire to Cossack in Western Australia, and London to Tahiti in French Polynesia, Pilbara is the tale of a family on a mission to restore the honour of its name.
Boleyn Traitor by Philippa Gregory
Sister. Pawn. Liar. Traitor.
Her words sent two queens to the scaffold.
Her secrets shaped a kingdom.
But her true story was hidden.
Until now.
Philippa Gregory brings the Boleyn traitor out of the shadows in a groundbreaking tale of love, betrayal – and survival.
Until the Read Leaves Fall by Alli Parker
Author of the bestselling and much-loved At the Foot of the Cherry Tree, Alli Parker, returns with another engrossing and moving novel of courage and conviction, Until the Red Leaves Fall.
Emmy Darling has a secret. She has a few. Her lemon meringue pie is a recipe from a women’s magazine, she’s always wanted to be a playwright, and the best parts of her husband Sebastian’s plays are the scenes she’s written during edits. But when charismatic theatre impresario and leading lady, Virginia van Belle, insists Emmy write about her wartime experiences as the lead play in her 1957 season, Emmy is faced with every writer’s dilemma.
Because Emmy’s biggest secret is that her name is actually Emiko Tanaka. She and her Japanese-Australian family were arrested, brutally split up and held in internment camps by the Australian government after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. And it’s this secret that Virginia wants to bring to the masses.
As Emmy struggles to determine where the edges of truth and fiction blur, Virginia’s vision of the story morphs into something more sensationalised. Emmy can’t ask for Sebastian’s help – he has his own history with Virginia – but she confides in Isadora Westlake, a dancer at a nearby coffee lounge, who knows a thing or two about keeping secrets.
As opening night looms and rewrites threaten to transform Emmy’s personal history into something unrecognisable, wounds of the past are torn open, jeopardising everything Emmy holds dear. As the cast take their places and the curtain goes up, Emmy must decide which is right: tell the story or tell the truth.
From barbed-wire fences to the lush velvet seats of the Belleview Theatre, Until the Red Leaves Fall is a stunning tale of secrets and betrayal in the aftermath of war that asks: what happens when you let the truth get in the way of a good story?
Workhorse by Caroline Palmer
New York City, 2001.
Editorial Assistant Clodagh “Clo” Harmon wants nothing more than to rise through the ranks at the world’s most prestigious fashion magazine. But there’s just one problem: she doesn’t have the right pedigree. Clo is a ‘workhorse’ in a world of beautiful, wealthy, impossibly well-connected ‘show horses’ and it seems that her fortunes will never change. That is until Clo meets Harry Wood, a reporter with visions of his own media empire and the person who might be Clo’s ally in gaming the system…or is he the only thing standing between Clo and her rightful place at the top?
Clo begins to wade across boundaries, taking ever greater and more dangerous risks to become the Important Person she wants to be. But who is Clo under all the borrowed designer clothes and studied manners? And who are we if we share her desires?
As wickedly funny as it is darkly unsettling, Workhorse is an astonishing story of envy and ambition, set against the glamour and privilege of media and high society in New York at its height.
The Lucky Ride by Yasushi Kitagawa & Takami Nieda
Combining the whimsy and possibility of The Midnight Library with the mystery and revelatory power of The Secret, Come along for the ride of a lifetime in this heartwarming Japanese bestseller, a story about recognizing opportunities, embracing happiness, and discovering what true fulfillment looks like.
What if a single journey could change everything for you What if it could lead you to new possibilities, help you reconnect with loved ones, or bring peace to your past
In this charming story, the unluckiest man in Japan is given a chance to flip his fortunes when a mysterious driver appears, offering him the opportunity to seize a new path. Life’s setbacks can often feel overwhelming, but in The Lucky Ride, you’ll embark on a journey of self-growth that shows us that luck isn’t something you’re born with—it’s a result of the choices you make and the positive energy you bring into the world.
Set off on this heartwarming adventure and discover that luck isn’t a random gift—it’s something you build over time, a treasure that can be passed down through the generations. Yasushi Kitagawa’s uplifting and compassionate parable will inspire you to find joy in every moment, recognize the blessings in your life, and understand that by living each day with a good spirit, you’re crafting your own luck, one ride at a time.
Translated from the Japanese by Takami Nieda
Katabasis by R.F. Kuang
Katabasis, noun, Ancient Greek. The story of a hero’s descent to the underworld.
Grad student Alice Law has only ever had one goal: to become the brightest mind in the field of analytic magick.
But the only person who can make her dream come true is dead and – inconveniently – in Hell. And Alice, along with her biggest rival Peter Murdoch, is going after him.
But Hell is not as the philosophers claim, its rules are upside-down, and if she’s going to get out of there alive, she and Peter will have to work together.
That’s if they can agree on anything.
Will they triumph, or kill each other trying?
2025’s most unexpected love story is going to be hell in the new No.1 Sunday Times bestselling novel by R.F. Kuang.
Paper Heart by Cecelia Ahern
Winner of the Irish Book Awards Popular Fiction Book of the Year 2025!
Pip’s world is small. But it’s about to become a whole lot bigger.
For years she’s tucked away her dreams, shrinking herself into the space left behind – like the delicate origami she creates alone in her room.
Then hope comes from an unlikely place: an astronomer from the local observatory. He teaches her to look up at the stars, and to see a world far bigger and more beautiful than she ever imagined.
And perhaps in that big, beautiful universe there’s someone waiting for her. If she can find the courage to open her heart.
Pip never stopped dreaming, but now it’s time for her to live – and maybe even to fall in love.