Loner
Georgina Young, Text, $24.99

A young woman’s book about a young woman, Loner won the Text Prize for an unpublished manuscript in 2019 and tells of the homophonically named heroine Lona’s floundering around with the question asked by anguished twentysomethings in every generation: ‘‘What shall I do with the rest of my life?’’ Lona is an art school dropout who has genuine creative gifts but can’t cope with the institution or the sudden failure of her own ambitions. She is also an introvert and therefore ill equipped to resort to the more usual consolations of the young. Her friend, Tab, seems to be drifting away, and her relationship with the bewildered George begins to disintegrate after a promising start while she makes her way through various dead-end jobs. This novel has no plot as such but is rather a portrait of a particular state of mind at a particular time of life.

Sorrow and Bliss
Meg Mason, Fourth Estate, $32.99

There is something wrong with Martha, and the more we see of her, the clearer this becomes. The novel is written in the first person so all we can know of Martha is what Martha knows of herself, and although she is intelligent, articulate, cultivated and witty, and is therefore good company as a narrator, self-knowledge is not Martha’s forte. As the title of this mostly sophisticated and often blackly funny novel suggests, its heroine feels everything to excess. She is perennially paralysed by despair or consumed by rage or energised by euphoria. Despite her often appalling behaviour to the people around her, they continue to find her charming. Eventually, Martha finds an answer to the question of what is wrong with her, but if you as the reader do not wish to feel massively cheated, make sure you read the ‘‘Note on the Text’’ at the end before you begin.

The Bluffs
Kyle Perry, Michael Joseph, $32.99

When four schoolgirls go missing in Tasmania’s dramatic and spooky Great Western Tiers, Detective Con Badenhorst is summoned from Hobart to the small-town home of the missing girls. But the more he finds out, the more complex and mysterious the case becomes, and the whiff of the supernatural that haunts the town makes his task even more difficult. Various staples of Australian storytelling in general and crime fiction in particular are used in this thumping debut novel to good effect, especially the figure of the damaged detective and the inevitable internal tensions within the police force. The spirit of place looms large in Australian crime writing, and Kyle Perry makes superb use of remote and wild Tasmanian landscapes in this packed narrative of lost schoolgirls, corrupt police, dope dealers, teenage social media influencers and much more.

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