WAKEFIELD NEW RELEASES: Latest books 2020

Through tough times, the most positive thing you can do is buy books and read them. And then tell your friends and family to do the same! Support Wakefield Press and our collection of beautiful new books! Discover our latest releases for yourself.

The Lactic Acid in the Calves of Your Despair
Ali Whitelock

love is not to tiptoe around the crust of your soul, rather
it is to descend into the fire of your molten core without a harness,
asbestos suit, or dry ice; it is to suffer third-degree burns;
it is to gasp for breath; it is to watch canaries die.
Political, profound, profane. These poems of defiant disobedience crash through the barriers erected to keep us contained. Writing with humour and tenderness, Ali Whitelock takes us through the parched landscape of life, death, love, fear, regret and the unbearable sadness of losing a dog.
And particularly topical in the aftermath of the destructive Australia-wide fires, the powerful ‘this is coal don’t be afraid’ is a found poem made up of statements by Prime Minister Scott Morrison, the Rural Fire Service, as well as relevant tweets and quotes, collated to create an extraordinary piece to make us shiver.
 

A New Name for the Colour Blue
Annette Marner

I still see her sometimes in my sleep. She is walking through the blue and orange lights of the city or in the desert country of red ground, spinifex and oaks. Last night I dreamed she
was climbing a green and blue mountain, the kind you see in the tropics, rich and heavy with steam and rain. She is still only a girl in my dreams, but that’s how I remember her.
In every dream she is walking. In every dream I call out her name. Tania.
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 Set between Adelaide and the southern Flinders Ranges, it won the Adelaide Festival’s Unpublished Manuscript Award in 2018.
Ten years after the disappearance of her best friend, and the death of her mother, Cassandra Noble escapes her country childhood to pursue life as an artist in the city. A New Name for the Colour Blue is a story of the healing power of remembering, of love, and the breathtaking beauty of the natural world.
 

Searching for the Spirit: Theosophy in Australia, 1879–1939
Jill Roe

Abounding with larger-than-life characters, Searching for the Spirit traces the history of theosophy from its rise in the 1870s through its heyday in the 1920s to its relative decline in the 1930s. Although always tangential as a quasi-religious spiritual movement, it had an effect disproportionate to its numbers and paved the way for more recent spiritual movements that bloomed in the 1960s.
Jill Roe, academic and author, published the first edition of this book in 1986 as Beyond Belief. It has long been out of print, and this new, revised edition, as Searching for the Spirit, makes available this fascinating and little known side of Australia’s spiritual history.
 

Marra: The making of men
By Nicholas Newland

In an iconic Adelaide mansion, Simpson Newland raised five sons to fulfil a ‘manly’ ideal, his expectations a partial reflection of Victorian-era Australia and also an insight into the Newland family itself.
Marra chronicles their important contributions as medical professionals, sportsmen, authors, businessmen, politicians and soldiers, to South Australia’s history and community.
 
 

Snow
Gina Inverarity

When the girl brought my bowl she was in and out
through the door like she couldn’t move fast enough.
And when the lock clicked after her I found something
she’d left. A knife. And not one for spreading butter, but
a sharp one for slitting throats.
Locked in a cell by her stepmother, Snow grows small but she still grows. Even so, she’s hardly a match for a world gone wild, where the sun has disappeared behind clouds for good. The night the hunter takes her into the forest with orders to cut out her heart, Snow makes him a promise she isn’t sure she can keep. And then she runs.
Snow’s life is no fairytale. As she grows up her path will take her into the mountains, over misty passes, desolate gorges and alpine rivers, as well as to the city, where she will make her case for the return of what is hers.
And her childish promise will not be forgotten.
A dark and lyrical Snow White retelling set in a post climate-change world, Snow is a fairytale of the future.
 

Taking Down Evelyn Tait
Poppy Nwosu

The door creaks open and standing in the entrance is my
absolute worst nightmare.
Perfect hair, perfect teeth, perfect brain.
Perfect sneer.
Evelyn Tait.
Impulsive Lottie – heavy-metal fan, expert tomato grower and frequent visitor to the principal’s office – is in even more trouble than usual.
Her best friend Grace has dropped an unlikely bombshell: she’s dating Lottie’s mortal enemy, good-girl Evelyn Tait.
Studious Jude, the boy next door, has the perfect war plan. Lottie will beat Evelyn at her own good-girl game, unveiling Miss Perfect’s sinister side in the process.
Taking life more seriously starts as fun, but soon offers its own rewards ... so long as Lottie can manage gorgeous Sebastian’s sudden interest, Jude acting weird, and the discovery that she might actually be good at something.
Taking Down Evelyn Tait is a story about family, friends and embracing who you are. Even if that person is kind of weird.
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