Appreciation, Liam Pieper, Hamish Hamilton, $34.99. March 5

Who doesn’t love a satire of celebrity, publishing and the media, be it Yellowface or American Fiction? In Liam Pieper’s third novel, a queer artist, Oli Darling, puts his foot slap bang into his mouth on TV and is immediately castigated, if not quite cancelled. How to recover and restore value to his work? Get a ghostwriter, write a memoir and hope for the best. But it’s not that simple and perhaps Oli has more to do to restore his public image and, crucially, his self-image.

The House of Hidden Meanings, RuPaul, HarperCollins, $34.99. March 6

The Emmy award-winning host of RuPaul’s Drag Race reveals his psychological barriers and emotional tests, the hidden meanings of his memoir’s title. As our review will put it: “With anxieties about desirability as an androgynous black man, RuPaul explains that this femme drag enabled a rich new power found in our ‘sexual hierarchy’, one that was intoxicating and liberating all at once ... RuPaul adopts language of psychoanalysis ... to convey the psychological home truths he found on his journey to self-understanding.”

The Cancer Finishing School, Peter Goldsworthy, Viking, $36.99. March 5

Peter Goldsworthy is in my view one of Australia’s most underappreciated writers. His fiction includes Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam, Maestro, Kiss and Three Dog Night. What’s more, he’s written plays and libretti, all while working as a general practitioner. He has previously said medicine is full of high stakes stories: “As a writer you need those.” Now he’s written his own story, with a sprinkling of others, a sort of memoir about his diagnosis and life with a form of incurable cancer.

Until August, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Viking, $35. March 12

I am always ambivalent when a work by a favourite or revered author is to be published posthumously. In Until August a happily married woman travels each August to an island and takes a new lover for one night only. Reportedly, the great Colombian novelist didn’t want it published because while he was writing he was suffering from dementia. But now his sons have decided to have it published. They say there is “nothing that prevents us from delighting in the most outstanding aspects of Gabo’s [as Marquez was known] work”. Fingers crossed.

Who’s Afraid of Gender? Judith Butler, Allen Lane, $55. March 19

The American philosopher and gender studies academic’s latest book is a fierce critique of the right and its systematic attacks on current notions of gender. As Butler says, “The project of restoring the world to a time before ‘gender’ promises a return to a patriarchal dream-order that may never have existed but that occupies the place of ‘history’ or ‘nature’, an order that only a strong state can restore.” And therefore the key question becomes, “What kind of phantasm has gender become, and what anxieties, fears, and hatreds does it collect and mobilise?”

It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over, Anne de Marcken, Giramondo, $29.95; Tell, Jonathan Buckley, Giramondo, $29.95

These two books were joint winners of the Novel Prize, the inaugural iteration of which was the first of many prizes that Jessica Au won for her novella Cold Enough for Snow. They are being published here, in the US and Britain simultaneously. Anne de Marcken’s book is set in some sort of afterlife where a woman yearns for where she was once known and loved. Jonathan Buckley’s is a series of interview transcripts with a woman whose employer, a wealthy art collector, has disappeared. But, of course, both are so much more than those brief descriptions suggest.

American Mother, Colum McCann & Diane Foley, Bloomsbury, $34.99

“Nothing prepares you for properly responding to the unthinkable,” Diane Foley writes in this heart-rending memoir of the capture and aftermath of the eventual brutal murder of her son, journalist Jim Foley, by ISIS. But it’s more than a memoir of grief. In the company of Irish American novelist Colum McCann she castigates the US government for its approach to hostage taking and asks why it couldn’t do more to rescue her son. And, astonishingly, she meets – and shakes hands with – one of the men who killed him.

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