Staff Picks in May

May 28, 2025

Each month our wonderful staff share what they’ve loved reading, watching
and listening to from our library collection.

Bek is reading A Language of Limbs by Dylin Hardcastle

The first love of a teenage girl is a powerful thing, particularly when the object of that desire is her best friend, also a girl. It’s the kind of power that could implode a family, a friendship, a life. On a quiet summer night in Newcastle, 1972, a choice must be made: to act upon these desires, or suppress them? To live an openly queer life, or to try desperately not to?

Over the following three decades, two lives almost intersect in pivotal moments, the distance between them at times drawing so thin they nearly collide. Against the backdrop of an era including Australia’s first Mardi Gras and the AIDS pandemic, we see these two lives ebb and flow, with joy and grief and loss and desire, until at last they come together in the most beautiful and surprising of ways.

A Language of Limbs is about love and how it’s policed, friendship and how it transcends, and hilarity in the face of heartbreak. An unashamed celebration of queer life in all its vibrancy and colour, this story finds the humanity in all of us, and demands we claim our futures for ourselves.

Annie is reading In the Dead of Night by Greg Haddrick

In March 2020 a couple disappears from the remote Wonnangatta Valley, leaving a burnt-out campsite. Russell Hill and Carol Clay are secret lovers, and at first it seems they might simply have started a new life elsewhere. But the police become increasing convinced that they have been the victims of foul play, even though their bodies have not been found.

So begins a painstaking investigation, tracing the driver of every car that was in the area, checking their stories and alibis. Ultimately, after more than a year’s work, there’s only one driver who cannot be eliminated: Greg Lynn, a Jetstar captain.

Is it possible that this highly successful professional pilot is a killer? Could he be responsible for a number of other mysterious disappearances in the Wonnangatta Valley? And how can the police charge him, given that there are no bodies, no witnesses and no clues as to how Russell and Carol were murdered?

Sienna is reading A Study in Drowning by Ava Reid

A Study in Drowning by Ava Reid follows Effy Sayre, an architecture student who is selected to redesign the home of her favourite writer after his death. Leaving the comfort of a prestigious university, she travels to Saltney, a town on the verge of collapsing into the ocean below, and full of superstitious townsfolk who fear the night and the sea despite their reliance on both.

As Effy and her academic rival, Preston, begin delving deeper into the house and the life of Emrys Myrddin, she realises Hiraeth Manor isn’t what she expected.

A Study in Drowning is haunting, with themes of gothic fiction, mystery, and dark fairy tale elements, it’s the perfect Winter read.

This book is a combination of Donna Tartt’s ‘The Secret History’, Neil Gaiman’s ‘Coraline’ and Maggie Stiefvater’s ‘The Raven Cycle.’

I recommend pairing it with Madame Grey tea and a slice of hummingbird cake.