Top spring books for growth & escape | Mindful Puzzles

Top spring books for growth & escape

Spring signals a fresh start – a season of return, reckoning, and rediscovery. This selection of new fiction spans generations and continents, with stories rooted in connection, identity, and resilience. From sunlit vineyards in South Australia to the shaded lanes of Venice, these novels follow characters confronting the past, questioning desire, and seeking a sense of home. Thoughtful, bold, and beautifully told, they’re perfect companions for a season in bloom.

The Venice Hotel

At a Venetian hotel, four women’s lives converge amid family conflict, betrayal, and self-discovery in this evocative novel of love, resilience, and unexpected connection.

Author : Tess Woods

Publisher : Penguin Random House

Lonely Mouth

When their estranged father resurfaces, half-sisters Matilda and Lara must confront old wounds in this tender, witty novel about hunger, desire, family, and self-worth.

Author : Jacqueline Maley

Publisher : HarperCollins Australia

The Belburd

Ginny Dilboong navigates love, family, and identity in Simpson’s lyrical novel about belonging, creation, the strength of women, and the fragility of life.

Author : Nardi Simpson

Publisher : Hachette Book Group

The Limestone Road

In 1944 South Australia, Canning Christie seeks healing through the land and love, while confronting war trauma and a fractured bond with his reckless father.

Author : Nicole Alexander

Publisher : Penguin Random House

Highway 13

McFarlane explores the echoes of violence in this gripping novel, where a 1998 arrest for brutal murders sends shockwaves through lives across time and place.

Author : Fiona McFarlane

Publisher : Allen & Unwin