(Image: Mitchell Squire/Private Media)

Booksellers tend to do well around Christmas time, so here are a few titles one could hypothetically find on the shelves. Titles such as …

Stop F***ing Up Your Life and Get Your S**t Together!

The latest in the series of no-nonsense, hard-hitting self-help books.

F***! You’re Still F***ing Up! F*** this S**t!

An alternative take on the no-nonsense, hard-hitting self-help genre.

How to Deal With Ars*holes

How to Deal With F***ing Ars*holes

F***, These F***ing Ars*holes You Have to F***ing Deal With!

The three best-selling no-nonsense self-help volumes in one collection.

Why You Should Give A F*** About Farming

A serious contribution to national social policy.

Why You Should Give A F*** About Road Pricing-Freight Tradeoffs

A serious contribution to national social policy from a rival publisher.

Why You Should Give a F*** About Your Publisher Demeaning Your Book Title for Cheap Sales

A serious contribution to authors growing a spine.

F**ing S**t, You’ve Really F***ing Got to Get Your F***ing S**t Together. Motherf***er 

The latest latest in the series of no-nonsense, hard-hitting self-help books.

Over in the crime fiction section, however, it’s a different story:

The Drought: Warracknabeal detective Tex T Function goes back to his small home town of Melbourne to expose the guilty secret of why all crime fiction has the same story.

The Big Wet; The Saltpan; The Roaring Forties; The Fremantle Doctor; The Mixed Coastal Dune-Riparian Interface Environment; The Veldt: Tex T Function exposes the big secrets of small towns in a variety of climate and terrain settings, including one accidentally set somewhere interesting.

Drouin Mon Amour: 29th in the series from Drouin-based writer Lionel Servitup, about the secret life of police and crime in a mid-size regional feeder community. Who vandalised the Sleepy-Daze Motel mini-golf windmill? Was it returned shoplifter Brie Text, senior sergeant John Wood’s half-stepdaughter by magistrate Alt Protagonist, who’s now seeing Sudafed buyer Gen “Eric” Bikie, while she was previously married to rezoning kingpin John Wood, who is, yes, his own brother? We’ll find out 400 pages later.

Completed Assessment: private investigator Naim Tocome is blind, deaf, without touch, anosmic and sits in a room and solves crime by tasting evidence. In this seventh outing, he turns to his own mystery — his parenthood — with nothing to go on other than that he was devised in a UTS creative writing seminar exercise. 

Meanwhile, back in self-help and personal growth:

F*** the F***ing C**ts Who F*** Up Your Life. Here’s How to Deal With Them, Sorry, Here’s How To F***ing Deal With Them. C***s! 

One brave publisher ups the ante on the whole no-nonsense self-help thing.

OK, over to literary fiction…

The Sad Lady Who Was Having a Saddie And Was Sad: Stella Prize winner. Also Miles Franklin, Premiers, Colin Roderick, Vogel, Prime Minister’s, and the Stanley Cup for Tennis

And the new one from bestselling author Liane Moriarty, it’s The… no, sorry, I can’t even.

In the social issues section:

Women In a White Redress: Liberal staffer Madison Cassidy-Madison’s sexual assault derailed a promising career cutting off water to Indigenous communities and denying refugees healthcare — until the feminist movement rallied around! A heartwarming story of the woman who will one day, with your solidarity and support, return to deny you a pension.

Born Every Minute: new memoir from a leading writer, a one-64th Kough-Kough man, talking of the pain of genocide and celebrating the solidarity of mob in not exposing his hustling snow-white arse. 

The Lifted Brow Book of Overhyping Mild Sexual Misconduct and Destroying Fifteen Years’ Hard Work

How-to books! Always popular!

Black Inc’s Big Book of the Middle East: zero pages.

Scribe’s How To Unionise a Left-Wing Publisher: zero pages.

The Big Coffee Table Book of Australian Publishers’ Summer Houses: lavishly photographed spreads of delightful second and third homes, with all proceeds going to the campaign to defend exclusive import licensing.

Wait, more self-help?

F***ing F***! I Mean, What the F***ing F*** Is Going On?

A look inside the world of book marketing.

And some books defy genre and are best described as “ideal gifts”:

Penang Sands: Peter FitzSimons’ roistering 600-page account of the battle of Penang Sands — little known but principally because it occurred in 2017, when FitzSimons hired three surplus Mosquito bombers and 20 Blackwater mercenaries to attack a Malaysian resort, having run out of wars. Coming soon: Peter FitzSimons’ prison diaries.

He: Murray Bail’s much-praised memoir, in which a leading Australian writer searchingly tells us all that can be known of him.

Hold. My. Beer: volume three of Helen Garner’s diaries, covering the years of her marriage to Murray Bail. 

Collected Hungarian poems by Gerard Murnane (Giramondo): for that hard-to-buy-for relative. 

And one more trip back to self-help:

F***! We Got so Desperate and Lazy We F***ed With Cheap Obscenity the F***ing Culture That Supports Us. F***!

A publisher’s memoir. The best gift of all. God bless us, every one.