Tag Archive for: Australia

,

Every Version of You | Grace Chan

 

Set against the backdrop of the planet’s failing ecosystems in late-21st-century Australia, Tao-Yi and her partner Navin spend most of their time inside an immersive, consumerist virtual reality called Gaia. They log on, go to work, socialise and even eat in this digital utopia. Meanwhile, their ageing bodies lie suspended in pods inside cramped apartments.

Across the city, in the abandoned real world, Tao-Yi’s mother remains stubbornly offline, dwindling away between hospital visits and memories of her earlier life in Malaysia.

When a new technology is developed to permanently upload a human brain to Gaia, Tao-Yi must decide what is most important: a digital future or an authentic past.

This spellbinding novel unpicks the ties between life and technology to ask what truly makes us human, and what in our world is worth preserving.

Brilliant, clever and thoughtful.

Longlisted for the Climate Fiction Prize 2026

, ,

Juice | Tim Winton

 

The acclaimed Australian novelist Tim Winton returns to his abiding theme of the outback with a hard-hitting novel set in a far future of grimly plausible climate devastation and precarity. In a world where the descendants of fossil fuel barons hoard their resources and shoot to kill, the novel’s protagonist has spent years in the shadowy “Service”, whose mission is their annihilation. But when he and the child he has pledged to protect encounter a guard with a crossbow, he must tell the story of his life to stay alive. A gripping, heart-stopping story of sacrifice, betrayal and redemption by a master of the cli-fi genre.

How to Bee | Bren MacDibble 

How to Bee - Bren MacDibble

Nine-year-old Peony wants to be a bee – but all the bees in Australia have died, and children like her have to pollinate the fruit trees with feather wands. It’s a great introduction to dystopian fiction for readers aged eight to twelve.

 

Read our Librarian’s top climate choices for children here.

Brimstone: a Book of Villanelles | John Kinsella

Using this poetic form (of five 3-line stanzas and a final quatrain) throughout to great effect, John Kinsella’s latest collection is a work of ecological and political passion. The birds and animals of Western Australia, its landscape of vibrant colours and panoply of sounds are described in vivid detail, so much so that the reader almost feels part of this antipodean environment.

And it is the ecological destruction of the environment and the politics behind it that are the target of the poet’s rage and frustration. This is indeed a powerful and necessary work from a powerful and necessary poet who believes that poetry is one the most effective activist modes of expression and resistance we have.