Whether you’re after an inventive short story collection, a cosy Parisian murder mystery or a memoir that will leave you reaching for the tissues, this week’s releases have you covered. The fiction stretches from the strange to the deeply humane while the non-fiction grapples with big life questions through stories of friendship, resilience, Indigenous knowledge, faith and finding meaning in difficult times. Here, our reviewers share their verdicts on 10 new books hitting our shelves.Fiction Photo: I Made This Just for You by Chris Ames (Ultimo, $35)I Made This Just for You is a surreal suite of short fiction, at least partly drawn from digital nightmares. The infiltration of the real by its uncanny opposite gets a dramatic embodiment in the title story, which follows a new dad so desperate for money to pay for his infant’s medical care that he gets a gig moonlighting for a tech start-up. That crazy venture outsources fan communication with adult content influencers: soon he’s left holding the baby, and trying to impersonate famous porn stars at the same time.There’s a variety of formal and thematic experimentation in this volume that never settles into anything so simple as a satire of late capitalism and the inhuman pressures it creates. A man becomes famous for an arbitrary meme-able gesture. A depressed girl creates an ideal version of herself from a clump of her own hair. The people of a sinking volcanic island find a novel means of coping ritually with environmental disaster. (For lovers of crosswords, there’s even a “story” in the form of a crossword puzzle, with clues pointing to lost love.) Chris Ames has created a rabbit-hole of metamodern fiction that often verges on absurdist parable, pulling the reader into personal worlds deformed by tech advance and ethical backsliding. Photo: Tight Lines by Allee Richards (Summit, $35)It’s easy to see why Allee Richards’ Tight Lines has drawn comparisons to Tim Winton. This is a blokey coming-of-age story set amid the wind and the surf of Victoria’s Gippsland coast from the ’90s onwards. It creates a strong sense of place and voice, surfing seductive currents of Australian vernacular. And the narrative concentrates on (male) vulnerability and personal growth, staking a fair claim to sentiment through the depth, drama and emotional complexity of the storytelling.Luke and his best mates, twins Josh and Matty, spend adolescent summers cliff-jumping and surfing at the beach near their small coastal town. One reckless decision will jolt them out of childhood, as naivety and boyish camaraderie yield to adult consequences, and the young men must cope with grief and trauma. Richards handles multiple perspectives with skill, and there’s a tragicomic lustre to this searching novel, haunted as it is by the freedoms of childhood, the liminal state of adolescence, and the sensitively wrought song of experience that emerges from it. Photo: The Northern Tomb by Isabelle Li (Puncher & Wattman, $32.95)Set in north-eastern China during the COVID-19 pandemic, Isabelle Li’s The Northern Tomb nests personal adversity, grief and resilience within the broader contours of Chinese history – the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution – and dwells on the importance of caring for others. Retired official Mr Zhao is old and sick, and in a deep state of mourning when the pandemic comes. A close bond develops in isolation between Zhao and his carer – the middle-aged hospital cleaner Sister Fu – who has escaped her own demons and deprivations to build an independent life for herself.Structured as a quartet, and featuring both perspectives, and that of Zhao’s son, this is a quiet, moving and subtle book. The author’s stylistic parsimony refines a profound sense of melancholy. It’s a novel convincing at the level of individual character, as a tale of unlikely intimacy, but it also incorporates broader aspects of Chinese history and culture in a way that feels unobtrusive and enriching. Photo: Murder Most Delicious by Danielle Postel-Vinay (HarperCollins, $35)Cosy crime goes on a Parisian spree in Danielle Postel-Vinay’s Murder Most Delicious. Elite sommelier Olivia still has a nose for the finest scent, though after she contracts COVID-19, her sense of taste is at least temporarily disabled. That leads to an embarrassing blunder in which Olivia confuses goon with the finest French wine. With her reputation and career in peril, she jumps at the chance for a job interview with a popular celebrity chef, Jacques de Bizet, in Paris. Before long, Jacques has been poisoned, Olivia becomes the prime suspect and, luckily for her, a group of wily locals called Neighbourhood Watch takes up the case. Led by the brilliant agoraphobe and amateur sleuth Augusta Dupin (and her cat Chateaubriand), they’re convinced Olivia is wrongly accused and resolve to help discover the identity of the poisoner.The novel certainly has cosiness factored in – warmth, wit and wisdom intermix with mystery and intrigue – and there are Easter eggs aplenty for readers of classic detective fiction in the puzzle-like plot, Parisian setting, and affectionate nods to formative writers in the genre such as Edgar Allan Poe. Photo: The Sisters of Serendib by Ayeesha Inoon (HQ, $35)The word “serendipity” is derived from the Persian name for Sri Lanka, Serendib, as author Ayeesha Inoon notes in her new novel, though fortune has not always been beneficial or benign to its main character. Three sisters flee the civil war in their homeland by boat with their mother, who dies on the voyage, orphaning them and leaving them to be informally adopted by other refugees aboard.For the eldest, eight-year-old Janu, this leads to a traumatic childhood scarred by sexual abuse. Middle sister Samar is adopted by Huda, remains ignorant of the fact that Huda isn’t her biological mother, and embraces dance in Melbourne as an adult. The youngest, Maryam, is the word nerd of the family; she moves to Sydney but struggles within the confines of a controlling marriage. After Janu sets up a seaside shop called Serendib on the NSW coast, she turns to the mystery of what happened to her sisters, hoping to find and reunite with them.While The Sisters of Serendib is at pains to be a vibrant migrant story, the novel’s rose-tinted optimism can flatten the emotional picture, acting as a kind of middlebrow filter that shortchanges the trauma endured.Non-fiction Photo: Conversations with My Rabbi by Rabbi Eli Schlanger & Nikki Goldstein (HarperCollins, $40)You might think a book with a title like this is not relevant to you. But you would be wrong. The dramatic circumstances of the book’s conception, its tragic conclusion and everything it addresses in between concern the biggest and most pressing of all questions. As Nikki Goldstein puts it, the ancient wisdom discussed here is not just for Jews. It is for “anyone seeking to live ethically, compassionately, spiritually – with integrity and truth”. Goldstein, a secular Jew, was in ICU on the verge of death when she was visited by Rabbi Eli Schlanger. Her miraculous recovery led to this series of conversations between them as a shared offering of a “universal moral code”. Just four days after her last conversation with Schlanger, he was killed during the terrorist attack on the Jewish gathering at Bondi on December 14, 2025. Importantly, this is a book that transcends political divides. It doesn’t require religious belief but challenges us to think about our shared values and what underpins them. Please read it. Photo: Is It Too Early To Bitch? by Grace Rouvray (Macmillan, $37)“We talk about romance as life’s greatest love stories, but sometimes the rarest thing we’ll ever find is a soulmate in a friend.” I love this pithy observation for two reasons: I know it to be true from my own experience, and because it so perfectly captures the preciousness and enduring qualities of the friendship between Grace Rouvray and Katie Lees.They met while studying acting at university, fell rapidly into “drunk D & Ms” and became so close they playfully called each other “wife” after being mistaken for a couple. The essence of their relationship was the sheer delight they took in each other’s company. After going to comedy shows together, they began plotting their own show about their shared experiences, which became Hour of Power. There were moments of tension between them but nothing that could derail their bond – until Katie’s sudden death. This achingly bittersweet memoir is both a celebration of, and elegy for, what friendship at its best can be. Photo: Grandma Joy and Me by Brad Ryan (Text, $37)A 30-something man travels with his nonagenarian grandmother to all the 63 United States National Parks over a period of seven years. As a premise for a memoir, it could smack of gimmickry: a bucket-list attempt for the record books. But the story Brad Ryan tells runs much deeper than this, unfolding with the rawness and poignancy of an intergenerational family saga.It was Grandma Joy’s wistful confession that she had never been to the mountains that served as the spark for the first of these journeys. While he wanted to open her to new and thrilling experiences, Ryan was also driven by a powerful yearning for his grandmother to acknowledge the pain that his father had inflicted on him. As they travel from the Great Smoky Mountains National Park to the rain forests of American Samoa, Ryan is both awed by his grandmother’s determination and capacity for wonder, and frustrated by her refusal to conform to his script. Slowly and fitfully, his understanding and acceptance of Grandma Joy deepens, as does his own capacity to free himself from the past. The result is an emotionally rewarding, well-crafted tale. Photo: The Knowledge by Victor Steffensen (Murdoch Books, $35)“The Knowledge” is what we all hold in our bones even if our awareness of it has been repressed or lost. It is our primal connection with nature bequeathed to us by our ancestors. As we become increasingly alienated from the earth, traditional cultural knowledge holders offer an alternative to our destructive ways and can “help humanity find its way home”, argues Aboriginal fire and land management practitioner, Victor Steffensen. He has spent years educating the community about Indigenous cultural burning practices and how they differ from standard hazard reduction burns.Sadly, those in power have been slow to recognise the significance of this layered understanding of how fire interacts with native flora, fauna and soil, and the crucial role played by old growth trees in maintaining a balanced ecosystem. In this eloquent and urgent work, Steffensen tells of the hurdles faced in getting those in authority to recognise and value the depth of experience and knowledge that underpins caring for Country. Photo: We’re All Going To Die by Ben Pronk (Macmillan, $37)If the message of this manual on happiness can be distilled into one quote, it is that of Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl on his time in the concentration camps of Auschwitz and Dachau. “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing ... to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.”As an ex-SAS commanding officer who has served in Afghanistan, Ben Pronk knows a thing or two about the looming spectre of death.Which makes his droll, hard-headed embrace of the philosophy, neuroscience and psychology of happiness all the more persuasive. From the regular practice of intensifying your appreciation of life by reminding yourself that it could end at any moment, to viewing happiness as a skill that can be honed, Pronk’s rapid tour through the ancient wisdom and contemporary science on the subject shows how these insights can be applied in daily life. In particular, this is a book for the cynics who consider themselves too tough for this kind of stuff.What else is happening in the book world?These 10 audiobooks may cause you to miss your stop.Theatre director Andrew Upton has released his debut novel.Here’s the new fiction and non-fiction worth reading this week.And the book about Trump that everyone is talking about.