Fresh voices came to the fore at WORD Christchurch Spring Festival on Saturday afternoon as Becky Manawatu and RWR McDonald were named the winners of the 2020 Ngaio Marsh Awards.

Both winners were first-time novelists, and while their winning books were different in many ways, each was told in large part from the perspective of young children dealing with loss and violence in small-town New Zealand, each included a rich cast of diverse characters, and each expertly blended lighter moments with dark events in tense tales that could make readers gasp and laugh.

Two men.
One woman.
A blood feud.
The birth of the Italian mafia in Australia.

Join now and start reading the exclusive "Isolation Edition"

Just $9.90 for all 14 chapters – a saving of over 80% on RRP of the printed book

The Calabrian will be published in August but you can be one of the first to read this pulsating novel by signing up for our "isolation edition" You get access to a new chapter of the book each day. Waiting for the next instalment will only heighten your expectation and anticipation as the story develops.

As everyone has heard Michael Robotham's THE SECRETS SHE KEEPS is now a TV show on Channel 10 https://10play.com.au/the-secrets-she-keeps 

On Monday 2 March The Australian Publishers Association announced the 2020 ABIA longlist. The longlist introduces the titles, publishers and authors in the running for the 2020 ABIA. And what a list it is! Check it out below. 

MEDIA RELEASE

The debut literary crime novel by former ABC current affairs broadcaster Annette Marner, A New Name for the Colour Blue, is influenced by her decades of reporting on male violence towards women and girls. Set between Adelaide and the southern Flinders Ranges, it won the Adelaide Festival’s Unpublished Manuscript Award in 2018.

The girl is forbidden from making a sound, so the yellow bird sings

Media Release

The debut novel from Jennifer Rosner, The Yellow Bird Sings is a powerfully moving and utterly gripping tale that will be released on 25 February 2020.

On 11 February 2020, Jenny Quintana will release her second novel Our Dark Secret; an emotional and gripping tale of two girls, two deaths and two decades of silence.

Following the success of her debut novel, The Missing Girl, the anticipated second novel follows Elizabeth, a teenager in the late 1970s who was clever, overweight and the perfect victim for bullies.

A chance encounter with a mysterious girl in the summer of 1978 solidifies the collision of two fates when Rachel moved to town with her family at the start of the school year.

Reading slumps come and go, or at least they normally have done with me. Tiredness, distraction, busy times, lots of things can get in the road of a consistent and lifelong tendency to read anything and everything at any given opportunity, but in the last few months something really strange has happened in AustCrimeFiction central.

Totally lost interest.

Picked up a few books and discarded them. Went and sat in front of the sewing machine instead, or played an online game, or, something I NEVER EVER do, watched movies.

Cover reveal time, with the announcement from newly formed Corella Press (https://www.austlit.edu.au/corellapress) of their upcoming initial releases: BRIDGET'S LOCKET AND OTHER MYSTERIES by Waif Wander (aka Mary Fortune) and THE MILLWOOD MYSTERY by Jeannie Lockett.

These beautiful covers were created by Kathleen Jennings (https://www.kathleenjennings.com/) whose paper cut silhouettes are amazing.

Corella Press state on their website: