Who’s the clever one? The quiet one? The evil one?

She’s somebody I know unsettlingly intimately, and I’m probably so unsettled by her because I’m afraid to admit to myself how easy it would be to become her.

A generational story that follows a line of Māori mothers and their daughters, navigating the world.

Settle down, put on Young Sherlock or Enola Holmes and join Mrs Hudson as she embarks on the first of, what I can only imagine to be, many mysteries.

This is a raw and unflinching memoir of family, motherhood and a son’s struggles with mental ill health (bipolar disorder) and addiction.

Summer is a time that evokes childhood, beauty and freedom, but also becomes a setting to set a family’s tensions against, asking if they can ever break out of their own trappings.

The story gives voice to some difficult themes and while it does offer them space, it never makes them the focus of the plot or the characters, never turning them into a caricature and instead fleshing them out past their troubles.

This book took me by surprise in the best way. I feel in love with each character and the themes were beautifully woven together.

I couldn’t tell where it was going to go; the ending was spectacularly hair raising, my teeth on edge.

With a Rooney-esque penchant for frustrating communication styles, you'll like this book if you enjoy wanting to shake characters through the pages. Be prepared to unravel along with them.

Perhaps, though, it shouldn’t have done. A writer is a reader first, after all, and books, their existence, have been a major part of my life.

That said, a good story is always a delight. I love the storytelling of writers like Anne Patchett, Isabel Allende and Colm Toibin, in which atmosphere and plot combine for a compelling narrative.

I started to write this novel on a dare to myself - to write the thing that most scared me. As a chronically ill writer, I’d always skirted around the topic of late-stage disease with my first two (unpublished) novels. to Brideshead Revisited, they occupy such a space in literature — and then you get older and realise that, if you’re working-class, you wouldn’t be one of the main characters, you’d have been below stairs.

Set in Osaka, we follow the story of Anna as she ventures into a new lift teaching at a Japanese school in Osaka. Old wounds from a vanished mother rise to the surface as she searches for her missing friend, Loll.

Beautifully crafted through a dual narrative as we unravel both the murder at sea and the history of DI Rachel Harlow.

If you’re looking for a book that will make you laugh out loud and fall in love with the main character, this is it.

It’s a portrait of American motherhood and survival and an unflinching exploration of the consequences of overturning Roe Vs Wade

So when a stalker starts threatening the stability of everything she has fought for and drags secrets to light that should have always remained hidden, what can Elle do?

Slow and careful, this story unravels around us, whispering the secrets it holds. With every page we learn more about Shannon and Victoria, the friendship that holds them together and the world they dream about.

Grab a peach iced tea, set up a reading spot and prepare to be transported to the heat of present-day and 1976 Thailand, where Lin returns to care for her dying mother.