The Work
Bri Lee, Allen & Unwin, $32.99

Like Louise Milligan, journalist and activist Bri Lee has written influentially about sexual abuse, the law, power, and the education system. Now like Milligan she has turned to fiction, though not crime fiction. There are arguments about art and politics; there are power disparities and there’s sex. Lally is a gallerista in New York, whom we meet in an unfortunate encounter with one of her hot young artists; Pat has just started at a Sydney auction house. Can art and commerce and sex really mix? That’s the question.

Love, Death and Other Scenes
Nova Weetman, UQP, $34.99. April 3

Children’s novelist and essayist Nova Weetman had a great, 25-year romance with her playwright partner Aidan Fennessy. But when he was diagnosed with cancer their lives and those of their two children were changed irrevocably. He died at the worst time for anyone – during lockdown. Weetman writes movingly and at times with disarming candour about the before, the during and the after. “That’s where I look for you,” she concludes. “In the gaps.” It’s a beautiful book, but be warned: you’ll cry.

No Church in the Wild
Murray Middleton, Picador, $34.99

Murray Middleton’s pedigree is as a short-story writer. In 2015, his collection, When There’s Nowhere Else to Run, became only the second book of stories to win the Vogel Award. A few years earlier he had won the Age short-story award and in 2016 was named a Sydney Morning Herald best young Australian novelist. So there’s a lot of interest in what will actually be his first novel, which tells the story of tensions in a multicultural community in Melbourne and students, teachers and police training for a community-building exercise on the Kokoda Trail.

City in Ruins
Don Winslow, HarperCollins, $37.99. April 3

The great American crime writer Winslow has said that this third book in his Danny Ryan trilogy will be his last ever. The trilogy emerged from his love of the Greek classics – the Iliad, Aeneid and the Odyssey. The second volume, City of Dreams, left his hero, Danny Ryan, fleeing for his life with a baby and senile father in tow. Now he has fetched up in Las Vegas and 10 years on is very rich. But trouble isn’t far away. Winslow may have given up writing – so he says – but his fierce online campaign against Donald Trump goes on.

Death of a Foreign Gentleman
Steven Carroll, Fourth Estate, $32.99. April 3

How’s this for an intriguing set-up. DS Stephen Minter is an Austrian-born Jewish Cockney investigating the murder of a German philosopher in Cambridge in 1947. Regular readers of Carroll’s fiction will recall Minter trying to track down T.S. Eliot’s missing wife, Vivienne, in the final of his tetralogy of novels about the poet. It seems Carroll − who is a Miles Franklin winner and also reviews for his masthead − was so fascinated by the detective he created that he has now committed to a series of novels about him.

How to Knit a Human
Anna Jacobson, NewSouth, $34.99

Poet Anna Jacobson has written a strikingly personal memoir about her experiences as an involuntary patient. The impetus, as she puts it, was the “splintering of my memory and self after psychosis”. Her evocative title refers to her process of reclamation, and the weaving of extant memories around the gaps left by those that had vanished. “There was no one way to try this, except through knitting and assemblage, which is an ongoing exercise.” It’s a very distinctive way of telling her story.

Caledonian Road
Andrew O’Hagan, Faber, $34.99. April 9

The first thing you encounter in Andrew O’Hagan’s whacking great north London novel in the epigraph from Robert Louis Stevenson: “After a certain distance, every step we take in life we find the ice growing thinner below our feet ...” followed by a list of the many characters like in a Russian novel. O’Hagan, a prolific novelist and journalist, is best known for his last novel, the brilliant Mayflies, and for pulling out of ghosting Julian Assange’s memoir a few years ago. Campbell Flynn, art historian, is O’Hagan’s man on thin ice. If you liked John Lanchester’s Capital, you’ll love this.

The Glass House
Anne Buist & Graeme Simsion, Hachette, $32.99
He wrote the bestselling Rosie Project and other novels; she’s a professor of women’s mental health. Together they wrote Two Steps Forward about walking the Camino. This latest novel is clearly informed by Buist’s experience: Hannah Wright is a registrar starting work in acute psychiatry, “the emergency medicine of mental health”. It’s a full-on position as the team deals with seriously unwell patients – all in a health system struggling to cope. The authors are clear about their intentions: they want “better recognition of the challenges patients and mental health workers face”.

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