read beyond the page

My youngest daughter assured me I would love Strange Houses. After all, she knows me! Knows I love a good mystery.

Marillier has described Stasya as a character she views as being on the autism spectrum, although the world of the novel doesn't have any language through which to identify her in those terms. This understanding gives particular weight to Stasya’s isolation and to the assumptions other people make about her. Her difference is never treated as a flaw awaiting correction.

Abby Jimenez seems to understand that falling in love is rarely the most complicated part of a relationship. The best romance writers are interested in everything that makes love difficult to act upon: illness, grief, family obligation, financial pressure, bad timing and the habits people develop while trying to survive. In The Night We Met, Jimenez adds loyalty to that list, then asks how noble loyalty remains when protecting one person begins to harm everyone else.

Set against the cold, deserted landscape of Belport Island, the novel alternates between Kate, whose husband fails to return from a supposed medical conference, and Abby, whose ordinarily dependable husband has begun behaving suspiciously. White creates tension through accumulating inconsistencies rather than constant action: unexplained absences, discarded clothing, carefully maintained lies and the unnerving possibility that neither woman truly knows the man she married.

Rose Talisman was once a celebrated television therapist in Los Angeles. Her programme made her famous for helping other people confront their pain, until an incident destroyed her career and turned her into the subject of the kind of public scrutiny she once directed towards others.

Each tag insists that he existed in a world determined not to notice boys like him. The city can paint over the letters, but for a brief moment he's left something behind. He's occupied space, and he's made himself visible.

Kathy Lette’s The Sisterhood Rules is a loud, bawdy and surprisingly tender novel about twin sisters separated by a betrayal neither has managed to escape.

Declan’s strongest material lies outside the romance. His father has spent years treating football success as both destiny and obligation. Declan’s identity becomes inseparable from athletic achievement, public admiration and the belief that he must reach the NFL to justify everyone’s investment in him.

Onyx Storm is the first Empyrean novel that convinced me Rebecca Yarros had moved beyond the sheer momentum of her premise and begun exploring the more interesting possibilities within the world she created.

Anthea Hodgson’s The Palace of Lost Virtue begins with one woman believing she's been called to save another.

Meghann Dontess can dismantle a marriage before lunch, stare down an abusive husband by mid-afternoon and still have no idea how to speak honestly to her own sister.

At its centre is Franny Stone, a woman driven by an almost physical need to keep moving. She's crossed countries, abandoned homes and repeatedly left the people she loves, but her latest journey is different. Believing that the Arctic terns may be undertaking their final migration, Franny travels to Greenland and attaches tracking devices to three of the birds. She intends to follow them south to Antarctica, where she'll fulfil a promise connected to her husband Niall.

At the core of the narrative are two women in their eighties whose relationship has endured for nearly a century. Agnes Lee is a celebrated author who fiercely guards her privacy, while Polly Wister has oriented her entire life around marriage and family. Every summer since childhood has been spent on Fellowship Point, a secluded peninsula on the Maine coast. When the future of this jointly owned land comes into question, old loyalties, buried griefs, and long-held assumption

At first, everything feels reassuringly familiar. April Masterson appears to have built the sort of life many people quietly aspire to. She has a successful baking channel on YouTube, a beautiful home, a husband with a respected career and a place at the centre of her suburban community. She's the mother who bakes for school events, organises fundraisers and always seems to know the right thing to say. Then the anonymous text messages begin.

Every now and then a book comes along that makes you wonder whether you've been telling yourself the wrong stories about your own life.

Matt Haig has built a career around asking deceptively simple questions. What if you could live another life? What if you could revisit your regrets? What if you had one final opportunity to understand the person you became? In The Midnight Train, he returns to familiar territory, but instead of exploring the lives we never lived, he examines the life we already have—and the quiet choices that slowly shape it.

One of the things I adored was how completely the Australian landscape becomes part of the story. Meredith Downs doesn't simply provide a backdrop; it influences every choice the characters make. The isolation, the relentless distances, the dependence on neighbours, the vulnerability to drought, and later the arrival of the mining industry all create a world that feels authentic rather than romanticised. You can almost feel the dust settling over everything.

One of the easiest mistakes we make is assuming history changed because somebody signed a law or delivered a famous speech. It rarely happens that neatly. More often, it changes because ordinary people begin asking questions they weren't supposed to ask.

Rather than remaining confined to a single storyline, Vince finds himself exploring a range of communities and motivations. The inclusion of the Amish community, the political campaign, and the strange run of gambling success all seem disconnected at first, but Pomare clearly has a knack for bringing disparate elements together in very clever ways.

Private investigator Reid reluctantly returns to the town he once vowed never to see again after being hired to investigate a fatal car accident. What begins as a routine insurance enquiry quickly expands into something far more complicated, with missing teenagers, old scandals and long-held resentments intertwining until it becomes impossible to separate coincidence from conspiracy.

Every genre has its landmark novels. The books that quietly reshape everything that follows. Readers discover them decades later, only to wonder why they feel so familiar, forgetting that they're familiar because generations of writers have been borrowing from them ever since. Raymond E. Feist's Magician is one of those books.

As someone who has never read any of Liz Tomforde’s Windy City novels, I went into this one with absolutely no idea what to expect, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that this is an incredibly emotionally intuitive and thoughtful book.

Although the mystery is compelling, this is really a novel about grief. Not simply the grief of losing a child, but the grief of losing certainty.

Darrow enters this novel in a position of weakness rather than strength. Despite everything he achieved at the Institute, he remains trapped between worlds. He's neither fully Red nor fully Gold. He belongs everywhere and nowhere simultaneously. That tension has always sat at the heart of the series, but Golden Son sharpens it into something far more psychologically compelling. Darrow is no longer simply trying to survive among the Golds.

Dianne Yarwood's latest novel follows Maggie Reid, a woman in her forties who has spent much of her life carrying wounds she rarely speaks about. Adopted as a baby and raised in a home largely devoid of affection, Maggie has worked hard to build a life that feels safe and manageable.

Allen Levi's Theo of Golden is the kind of novel that restores your faith in literature's ability to illuminate what it means to be human.

And the horror works because it never feels entirely fictional. But, that said, not every element landed for me. The novel occasionally sacrifices subtlety in favour of impact, and there were moments when the chaos of the narrative threatened to overwhelm the story itself. Some readers will undoubtedly find the political commentary too heavy-handed, while others may feel the novel doesn't go far enough.

One of the strengths of this series has always been its ability to balance romance with political intrigue, and The Night Prince expands both elements considerably. The mythology surrounding the God of Night, the Heart of the Moon, and Aurora's own heritage becomes far richer here, giving the story a larger scope than the more contained conflict of the first novel.

Make Me ended up being my favourite book in the entire Broke & Beautiful series, not because it's the most original, or the most complex. But because what it does do is give us something that romance novels often chase but don't always manage to achieve: absolute conviction.

And yet here we are! Because somehow Tessa Bailey took a premise that should have had me rolling my eyes and transformed it into one of those books that I kept reading in one sitting.

Roxy Cumberland is barely keeping her head above water while trying to make it as an actress in New York. With bills piling up and opportunities proving elusive, she takes a job performing singing telegrams. Unfortunately for Roxy, her first assignment involves dressing up as a giant pink bunny and delivering a rather explicit song to a wealthy Manhattan lawyer on behalf of one of his former conquests.

At first glance, Aurora appears to be simply another fantasy heroine trapped by circumstance. She's a princess whose future has already been decided for her, promised in marriage to a man she neither loves nor trusts. Her life is governed by duty, expectation, and obedience. Every choice has already been made on her behalf.

One of the greatest strengths of this novel is its cast of characters. Biddy is an easy protagonist to love. She's curious, compassionate, intelligent, and brave without ever feeling unrealistically capable. Despite growing up in isolation, she approaches the world with an openness and sincerity that makes her instantly engaging. Watching her encounter new people, challenge long-held assumptions, and gradually discover her own strength was one of my favourite aspects of the s

And this book is really, really funny! Not “TikTok marketed as funny” where one character says something mildly sarcastic every forty pages and everybody loses their minds. I mean genuinely funny. The kind of humour that sneaks up on you in the middle of tension and makes you bark out an ugly little laugh before the book immediately throws another body at you.

At the same time, Leo could easily have become the forgettable “safe” alternative love interest and he somehow doesn’t. In fact, one of the book’s greatest strengths is that it genuinely commits to the emotional reality of Tem loving both men for entirely different reasons.

Ali Hazelwood has built an entire literary empire out of highly intelligent women, emotionally constipated men, and workplaces vibrating with unresolved tension, and Two Can Play slides neatly into that lineage. This time, though, the setting shifts from laboratories and academia into the world of video game development, painted as a landscape of crunch culture, professional rivalry, creative obsession, and people surviving almost entirely on caffeine and bad sleep schedules.

Kin deeply understands that longing isn't always dramatic. Sometimes it simply reshapes a person slowly over years until it becomes the architecture of their identity.

Most love stories are built around longing, but I'm now realising, after a re-read from a teenager to a 56 year-old, that Wuthering Heights is actually built more around corrosion.

As contemporary Australian fiction continues to grapple with questions of housing, class, labour, and generational instability, Kill Your Boomers stands out for the sharpness of its social observation and the sophistication of its psychological insight. It is an unsettling, darkly intelligent novel about inheritance in every sense of the word: financial, emotional, cultural, and moral.

Discipline by Randa Abdel-Fattah is not interested in offering readers the comfort of distance. Set in Western Sydney during Ramadan in May 2021, against the backdrop of escalating violence in Gaza and rising Islamophobic panic within Australia, the novel follows two Palestinian and Arab-Australian professionals attempting to navigate institutions that publicly celebrate diversity while privately disciplining it.

Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell feels less like reading a fantasy novel and more like discovering a forgotten piece of English history that somehow slipped between the cracks of reality. The achievement of it is almost absurd. Clarke doesn’t simply build a world; she builds the illusion of scholarship around that world so convincingly that, by the end, the Raven King feels as historically inevitable as Napoleon.

At first glance, the premise sounds deceptively familiar: a seventeen-year-old girl named Waldo begins an affair with her middle-aged creative writing teacher, Mr. Teddy Korgy. On paper, it risks sounding like another contemporary “taboo relationship” novel built to provoke discourse and little else. However, in reality, Half His Age is far more psychologically precise than that. It's not romantic fantasy masquerading as literary fiction.

At the centre is Charlie, a prime-time radio producer in her early thirties whose life fractures after she leaves her husband. The separation doesn’t just end a marriage, it also dismantles her entire friendship network. The group she once belonged to closes ranks, and she finds herself on the outside, navigating awkward encounters, unread messages, and the peculiar loneliness of still technically knowing people who are no longer yours.

Alicia is, in many ways, the still centre of the novel. Everything moves around her. Doctors, journalists, lawyers, Theo, who is the psychotherapist fixated on her case, all attempt to interpret her, and to translate her silence into something they can understand. But the more the novel unfolds, the clearer it becomes that Alicia isn't as passive as she appears. Her paintings, particularly Alcestis, hold more truth than any spoken explanation could.

Grief doesn’t arrive cleanly in Intermezzo. Nor does it announce itself or demand attention in the way we expect it to. It seeps, it rearranges and it sits quietly inside conversations that seem to be about something else entirely, like sex, money, timing, responsibility, up until you realise every choice being made is orbiting a loss no one quite knows how to hold.

A woman sits at her desk and writes letters, and not occasionally, or sentimentally, but as a discipline, almost as a way of holding her life in place. It sounds gentle, even quaint, until you begin to understand what those letters are doing for her, what they are protecting her from, and what they are quietly refusing to face.

Anthea, in particular, anchors much of the emotional core. Their relationship isn’t dramatic or overtly declared, but it grows in quiet increments, like in shared knowledge, small acts of care, and the simple fact of being understood. It’s only much later that the narrator realises what that connection was. That perhaps it was love, or maybe something adjacent to it. The book resists naming it too neatly, which feels right.

Agnes is the axis on which the novel turns. She is not written as a passive historical wife but as a force in her own right—rooted in the natural world, attuned to bodies, rhythms, and patterns others overlook. Her form of knowledge is intuitive, physical, almost wordless, which sets her in quiet opposition to the structured, literate world her husband eventually inhabits. This tension between ways of knowing—embodied versus intellectual—runs beneath nearly every scene.

On the surface, it’s a dark romance wrapped around obsession, anonymity, and a fantasy that edges close to something far more unsettling. But sit with it a little longer, and what unfolds is less about darkness for its own sake and more about what people reach for when they’ve been living too long without softness, without safety, without being truly seen.

Poppy and Alex don’t fall in love in the way most stories would have them do it. There’s no clean beginning. No single moment where everything changes. Instead, it’s a slow accumulation—shared trips, long conversations, habits that start to look a lot like dependence. By the time the question of “what are we?” comes into focus, the answer has been there for years. They’ve just avoided saying it out loud.