OUR PICKS

Here are our latest recommendations. This is where you can learn more about what we’re reading and loving and what you, our customers, are buying.

WHAT WE’RE READING

Gavin: Happiness & Love by Zoe Dubno (out July)

Heather: Money To Burn by Asta Olivia Nordenhof (out now)

Jo: A Great Act of Love by Heather Rose (out September)

Kasey: A Murder is Going Down by Kate Emery (out November)

Marina: Ruins by Amy Taylor (out July)

Molly: Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy (out Sep)

Rose: Rise and Shine by Kimberley Allsop (out now)

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OUR TOP 10 BESTSELLERS FOR JUNE

BOOKS WE LOVE

Antiquity by Hanna Johansson

Antiquity centres an unnamed narrator who becomes obsessed with an older artist. When she is invited to spend a summer with this artist and her teenage daughter, our narrator becomes envious of the attention the daughter receives from her mother. With a hazy and intoxicating prose, reminiscent of long, indefinable summer days, jealousy becomes obsession and desire. It is deeply unsettling and demonstrates the immoral and perverse lengths humans can go to to feel seen and loved. NADIA

You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue

This is historical fiction on magic mushrooms. In 1519, Cortés rides into Tenoxtitlan (what is now Mexico City) with the intention of conquering it, but Emperor Moctezuma and his sister-wife have other ideas. Strange, hallucinatory, brilliant scenes burst off the page in clear but crackling prose; unbelievably, Enrigue has made a tragicomedy out of one of the bloodiest episodes of human history. This will be one of my favourite novels of 2025. ROSE

On the Calculation of Volume: 1 by Solvej Balle

From a seemingly simple premise, the protagonist is forced to live the same day over and over again, Danish author Solvej Balle leaps off into a deeper meditation about what makes a life. The first in a planned septology, Tara Selter wakes one morning to find it is still November 18th, and over the course of this volume she relives that day a further 365 times. What could be narratively repetitive, to say the least, is vivified by how Balle shows that the fixed terrain of an endlessly reoccuring day can be wildly different each time according to your perspective . This elegant whorl of a book left me completely enthralled and utterly impatient to read Volume II. Gavin

A Beautiful Family by Jennifer Trevelyan

This evocative and gripping novel, told from the perspective of a young girl and set over summer in a small New Zealand town,kept me enthralled until the last pages. From the outside everyone seems happy, but secrets, both big and small, are eventually uncovered which change things forever. Trevelyan writes beautifully and sustains a tone of barely-concealed tension throughout.
I really enjoyed this. Jo

The History Of Sound by Ben Shattuck

This is the book you came here for. Atmospheric, propulsive and lyrically beautiful - it’s that rare kind of book that every type of reader will close feeling fulfilled. Set in New England and spanning three centuries, it consists of twelve cleverly interconnected stories that work as compelling couplets. Traversing between historical fiction and the utterly modern, there are mysteries and murders and love and loss, all against a backdrop of stunning natural beauty. The most divine reading journey. For your book club, for lovers of The North Woods and for those keen to get ahead of the impending Paul Mescal film. Heather

Theory & Practice by Michelle de Kretser

This book is bright with the radical days of youth in 1980s Melbourne, following a young woman as she navigates deconstructed relationships, writing a thesis on the Woolfmother (Virginia Woolf), and finding her place as a daughter of migrants in bohemian St Kilda. Michelle de Kretser effortlessly and delightfully disrupts the form of the novel by coalescing memoir, essay and fiction, while tackling serious themes such as colonialism and shame, love and desire. MOLLY

The Book of Guilt by Catherine Chidgey

The Book of Guilt is set in an alternate Britain, one where Hitler was assassinated in 1943 and there were no winners of WWII. Reminiscent of Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, comparison will inevitably be drawn between the two, however, where Ishiguro centres the protagonist’s own mortality, Chidgey is preoccupied with political reality and the ways bystanders are complicit in the dehumanisation of those we perceive to be unlike us. A sinister undercurrent pulls through The Book of Guilt compelling you to queasily grapple with what is laid out on the page, and yet, this is not a book that allows itself to be easily put down. Kasey