Picks of the month
Book of the Month: April 2026
Luna Park: The extraordinary story of the showmen, shysters and schemers who built Sydney's famous fun park by Helen Pitt
Award-winning journalist Helen Pitt’s latest book has uncovered Australia's intriguing Luna Park story. It's filled with con men and criminals, crooked cops, failed politicians and movie moguls. Like the circuses, from which amusement parks evolved, this is a tale with elephants, performing snakes and many ringmasters.
From the engineering feats of its construction in the dark days of the Depression to the tragic deaths of six boys and a father in the 1979 Ghost Train fire - one of Sydney's most heartbreaking unsolved mysteries - and despite financial disasters, legal battles and closures, Luna Park survives, and continues to glitter by the water.
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Featured Event: Author Talk: Helen Pitt with Luna Park
Join author Helen Pitt and uncover the fascinating story and untold history behind Sydney’s iconic Luna Park on
Saturday 2 May at 10:30am.
From its construction during the Great Depression to the tragic 1979 Ghost Train fire, Pitt explores the real stories behind Luna Park’s colourful facade. Her research traces the personalities, political battles and financial struggles that have shaped the park across decades.
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Spotlight: Australian Fiction
The Minstrels by Eva Hornung
Gem and Will grow up on a farm above the chasm and pool known as the Minstrels, a site where both are broken, each by the other. One will disappear. One will, eventually, be transformed. Through her encounters with people and through art, land and language, Gem is remade while the world outside changes and time runs out. Wild, mythic and potent, The Minstrels is an apocalyptic redemption fable that weaves the history and probable fate of the world into the life of one woman.
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Bird Deity by John Morrissey
David is a scout. For ten years he has plundered the ruins of an alien civilisation about which he knows nothing. Now his contract is ending, and he's ready to go home, a wealthy, successful man. Except that everything seems to be slipping out of his control. John Morrissey's Bird Deity is a novel like no other. At once disconcerting and eerily familiar, it's a cosmic horror story about power, theft, love, loss, and destiny.
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Smother by Eve Thomson
Bruce College, a private school in a leafy Melbourne suburb, is a place for winners. Affectionately known as Bruisers, its boys' football program has a reputation for pumping out superstars. When its girls' team pushes for glory, sixteen-year-old Grace Dooley is left with a catastrophic brain injury, and her parents want someone held accountable. Smother is a novel about chasing dreams, and how the quest for victory can risk losses far beyond those on the scoreboard. It's a story about the forces of love, ambition and fear, and finding the right balance before it all comes undone.
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The Cross Thieves by Alan Fyfe
Two hungry boys set out from their squat by a slow river on a not quite mythic quest for revenge. At the same time, a local pastor drives from his beachside home to visit a dying parishioner. What each means to the other will be revealed as brothers, Gark and Pell, run for their lives over one desperate night. The Cross Thieves is bold, mature and compassionate. Alan Fyfe's knowing eye for place, poverty and powerlessness and his empathy for the underdog is captured in an unforgettable story of profound emotional power.
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What the Bones Know by Kirstyn McDermott
A ghost gum falls in Kiln Creek, revealing a child's bones. Jude returns to care for her mother, whose dementia is worsening, but the farm holds strange smells, wet footprints, and voices at night. As her daughter sleepwalks and nightmares close in, Jude fears she's losing her grip, or that something far more sinister is haunting them. What The Bones Know is a taut, claustrophobic exploration of what it means to be haunted by our past, our fractured relationships, by a place we thought we knew and by our own unreliable memories.
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Author Talk: Natasha Lester and Cassie Hamer with The Chateau on Sunset
Join bestselling author Natasha Lester to discuss her new novel, The Chateau on Sunset, on Monday 30 March at 6.00pm. Set at Hollywood’s Chateau Marmont, it follows Aria Jones from the 1950s to the 1970s in a sweeping, Jane Eyre-inspired story of love, loss and ambition. Copies will be available to purchase on the night from Gertrude and Alice Bookstore ahead of release.
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