It’s that time again! September is always a pivotal month for exciting and highly-anticipated titles… so don’t be like Billie Joe Armstrong and sleep through these new fiction releases! From trickster gods, to murderous ramages, to time-travelling psychedelic road trips, to newly translated Osmau Dazai work, September has it all! Here’s what you can look forward to from our fiction titles this month.

Set in a stark landscape of cliffs and precipices high above the Argentine pampas, Mariana Travacio’s All That Dies in April follows the members of one small family as each makes a solitary journey out of their treacherous mountain home in search of a better life.

Lina has dreamt for years of leaving her tiny village in the drought-stricken region. Her son left long ago to find work and a better fortune. Relicario, her husband, is content to stay put in the land of his ancestors, tending to their graves. Ignoring Relicario’s pleas, a desperate Lina decides to abandon their home in search of her son, work, and water. She starts her journey on foot, and Relicario eventually follows behind, bringing a donkey and a sack with his ancestors’ bones. Both witness unspeakable violence, cruelty, and folly, but the hope of reuniting their family keeps them alive. Poetically charged, restrained, and delicately condensed, this is a suspenseful ancestral tale rooted in a long Latin American history of rural displacement and perpetual inequality.

The higher the dose, the further you see. But dare you venture to the end of time?

In the not-too-distant future, Australia’s eastern states have become the world’s newest autocracy — a place where pop music is propaganda, science is the enemy and moral indecency is punished with indefinite detention. Julian Ferryman, bass player for the Acceptables, returns to Melbourne after a year overseas and reconnects with his bandmates as they prepare to record their hotly anticipated second album. On a whirlwind tour of the east coast, he gets hooked on a new designer drug, F, a powerful synthetic hallucinogen that gives users a glimpse of their own future. Rumour says, the more you take, the further you see… maybe even to the end of time. Meanwhile, the outside world is gripped by an escalating pandemic of ‘extreme coincidences’ and temporal anomalies: identical football matches played sixty years apart, cancer patients reporting visions of the afterlife, and other world-altering events that all point back to the Acceptables’ mysterious second — and final — album. Big Time is an addictive debut about different forms of time travel: the people in our lives, the art we make together, the moments and movements that will live on long after we’re gone. It’s a psychedelic road trip across a dystopian Australia, through a world on the brink of temporal collapse, and out to the furthest reaches of time and space.

To survive the challenge of a trickster god, a quick-witted woman rallies her ancestors with cunning subterfuge and outright rebellion.

Nesi is desperate to earn the patronage of one of the Ninety-Nine Pillars of Heaven. Without the protection of a divine animal, she will never be allowed to leave her temple home. But after she fails ninety-six auditions, Nesi makes a risky prayer to T’sidaan, the Fox of Tricks. In folk tales, the Fox is a loveable prankster. But despite their humour and charm, T’sidaan, and their audition, is no joke. They throw Nesi back in time three hundred years, when her homeland is occupied by the brutal Wolfhounds of Zemin. Now, Nesi must ally with her besieged people and learn a trickster’s guile to snatch a fortress from the disgraced and exiled 100th Pillar: The Wolf of the Hunt.

A troubled paranormal investigator uncovers terrifying secrets that blur the line between the living and the dead in this gory, campy, supernatural horror.

World-famous paranormal investigator Eric Thompson’s career took a nose-dive after a particularly gruesome case which left most of his camera crew dead. His partner and best friend also abandoned Eric, leaving him floundering. He is soon approached by a mysterious woman who has purchased the supposedly haunted, but previously off-limits to paranormal sleuths, Morsley Manor. To drum up publicity about the house, she hires Eric to perform and host a paranormal investigation on the premises. As he ventures over to England to uncover the darkness bleeding through the veins of Morsley, horrors begin to spring from every corner and Eric soon begins to realise that not all is as it seems…

In a world of magical artifacts and fantastical beings, a woman with a deadly magic secret needs the help of the minotaur she’s trying to forget in the sizzling sequel to Ruby Dixon’s New York Times bestseller Bull Moon Rising.

Gwenna has always considered herself a normal person. A former servant, she wants nothing more than to land a steady job with the Royal Artifactual Guild so she can make some steady coin to send home to her mother. She’s not special. She’s certainly not a necromancer. That would be impossible, given how necromancing (or any ‘mancing) is forbidden upon penalty of death. So if the dead keep talking to her? Well, she’s going to keep on ignoring them. They’re not going to stand in the way of her dreams. Also standing in her way? One big, arrogant, far-too-flirty Taurian named Raptor. They slept together once, and now he wants more  but she doesn’t have time for that. Her focus is on being a fledgling, a trainee for the Royal Artifactual Guild. But Raptor won’t go away. He’s on a secret mission for the guild to find an artifact thief. Problem is, he thinks the thief is Gwenna. How can she convince Raptor that he’s got the wrong girl when all the signs point to her? And how do you tell a Taurian you can’t date him because you hear dead people and it might cost you your life?

A newly translated collection of short stories from legendary Japanese author Osamu Dazai.

Three stories of the ruined and the lost: Osamu Dazai at his most tormented. This collection unearths the Japanese literary legend’s most controversial and exhilarating early-career writing with first-time and original translations. ‘Retrograde’ traces the life of an anguished youth in reverse; ‘Das Gemeine’ features an aspiring literato with a dark past who hitches his wagon to an eccentric violinist; ‘Blossom-Leaves and the Spirit Whistle’ tells of an old woman recalling the final breaths of her beautiful, sickly sister. Experience the twisted agony of the prose that propelled Dazai to the top of the literary world.

Carl and Princess Donut are ready to battle it out in the epic seventh book in the New York Times bestselling Dungeon Crawler Carl series — now with bonus material exclusive to this print edition.

The ninth floor. Nine armies, each led by rich and powerful aliens from across the galaxy. Each team has one objective: to capture and hold the castle at the very centre of the battlefield. Strategy, alliances, pitched battles, and, of course, betrayal… It all makes for great fun and even greater television. After all, none of these powerful aliens really die when they’re playing war. Except this time. This time, winner takes all. Those who fall, stay in the ground. As the AI continues its rapid decline, Carl and company take advantage of the chaos. For the first time ever, the crawlers are fighting back. They are now one of the nine teams. And this season, there’s a tenth army on the playing field. The NPCs, who are normally used as nothing but cannon fodder, have become fully self-aware and formed a team of their own. For Donut and Katia, the stakes are even higher. Only one of them will be allowed to leave this level. If they all want to survive, they’re going to need a little help from a veteran or two. This is it. This is what they’ve been fighting toward. This is war.

History meets fantasy in A. Rushby’s tale of sisterhood, betrayal and reclamation revolving around three Anatomical Venuses — ultra-realistic wax models of women — that come to life at night to murder men who have wronged them.

Seoul, present day: Antiques dealer Alys is paid a vast sum of money to transport one of three highly coveted Anatomical Venuses to the UK… and then destroy it. It’s a moment she’s waited years for, and an offer she can’t refuse. London, 1769: After a chance meeting at the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, young and inexperienced Eleanor is promised a life of luxury by the beautiful and charismatic Elizabeth and her protege, Emily. All she has to do is allow Elizabeth complete control of her destiny. In a darkly compelling and magical plot, prepare to discover the dangerous secret shared by these four women — a secret that spans centuries, and which will unearth horrors not of this world.

A dark satire on consumerism from one of Britain’s twentieth-century literary masters.

One Hand Clapping is the story of Janet and Howard Shirley, living a dreary life in the dreary fictional northern city of Bradcaster. Howard works at the local garage and Janet works in the local supermarket, and they spend their evenings having dinner in front of the television. Their lives begin to change when Howard’s photographic memory wins them a gameshow fortune. Janet doesn’t want their lives to change that much. She is quite happy with the routine of their ordinary life, improved as it is by consumer goods and modern household conveniences. But once Howard unleashes his unusual brain on the world, the used-car salesman can’t seem to stop; and what he sees as the logical conclusion to their success isn’t something Janet can agree to. Anthony Burgess’s darkly comic satire of 1960s consumerism explores themes of the importance or otherwise of culture and education and the growing influence of America, and taps into contemporary anxieties about the future.

A blistering and playful satire on the literary world, from well-loved reviewer Andrew Gallix.

Writers are being murdered. Heads are rolling; ponytails are chopped off; victims tarred and feathered. The French literary world lives in fear of the next attack. A nihilistic terrorist group takes responsibility, but their objective remains obscure. Loren Ipsum is an English journalist, who moves to Paris to research a monograph on an underground writer called Adam Wandle. The terrorists’ slogans are all culled from his works. Has Adam been co-opted as their guru, or is he actually their eminence grise? And what of Loren Ipsum herself? Will they ever be able to leave the 21st century and make it to the mythical Blue Island? Set on the Riviera and in Paris, Loren Ipsum is a darkly comic satirical novel. A famous author is expropriated from her beautiful garden, which is turned into a commune. The severed head of a British author residing in Paris is discovered in a box. A Scandinavian playwright’s ponytail is cut off on the streets of the Left Bank. A mermaid blows up a yacht on which a sparkling literary party is in full swing…

Blending folkloric horror and an exploration of womanhood, against a background of eco-anxiety, Tender beautifully depicts the quiet violence of overcoming and accepting our darkest sides.

Nell has curated a perfect museum of the self: a successful career in archaeobotany, a pastel Instagram filled with flowers, and an uncompromising manicure routine. She’s convinced that her veneer of perfection will mask the parts of her she’d rather not think about. When two ‘bog bodies’ are discovered in elaborate floral graves in a Somerset fen, Nell seizes the opportunity to excavate their secrets. But the deeper she digs into the fertile, waterlogged earth, the more she uncovers memories of her unsettled childhood and strained relationship with her sister  and the more her body manifests her own wildness in ways she can’t ignore. Under the pressure of a blazing summer, Nell whirlwinds into toxic romance, intense friendships, and the brutal process of reconciling her past and her future before the weight of it all buries her, too. Blending folkloric horror with explorations of womanhood against a backdrop of eco-anxiety, Tender burrows into the quiet violence of overcoming and accepting our darkest sides.