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Michelle Wright gradually takes us back through Cookie’s life as he tries to find Good Boy somewhere safe. His mother left when he was small, his father was cruel and neglectful, and school offered him little relief. Mrs Mitten, who saw something worthwhile in him, is one of the people I kept thinking about. She paid attention when it would have been easier to write him off.

Mick Woods and Drew Lovelock have enough trouble making a living as musicians before a gig in Rockhampton ends with their arrest. Soon they’re in prison, their manager has disappeared, and they’ve discovered that the car they’ve been touring in is stolen. Their decision to escape might be understandable. Whether either of them has thought through what comes next is another matter.

As someone who has worked in the beauty industry for most of my adult life, I know that there's something soothing about a skincare routine. The familiar order of cleanser, serum, moisturiser and oil can feel less like vanity than a small act of control. The promises printed on the bottles are wonderfully specific: brighter skin, softened lines, renewed firmness, visible transformation. Use this product for long enough and a better version of your face, and perhaps your life,

She's charismatic and spontaneous with an ability to make an ordinary afternoon feel like an event. She's also unreliable and frequently selfish. Her presence fills every room while the people closest to her are left dealing with whatever she's neglected on the way through.

After five books, the repetition is finally bothering me. Every visitor is given the same rules, every cup of coffee creates the same countdown and every story is shaped towards a final emotional revelation. Even the characters’ hesitations and the explanations surrounding the journey have begun to feel overly familiar. I understand that repetition is part of the café’s ritual, but I'm now too aware of the construction underneath each story.

Returning to Café Funiculi Funicula for the fourth time felt much like visiting a familiar local cafe (without the time travel). I knew the dim underground ambience, the mysterious woman reading in the special chair and the rules governing every journey to the past.

My main reservation, again, is the repetition. By this point in the series, I know the rules of the café extremely well. I knew them by the second explanation in this book, yet they continue to be restated. The same is true of the emotional structure. A visitor arrives carrying grief or regret. A meeting reveals information they didn't previously understand. The facts remain the same, but the visitor comes back able to face life differently.

Most time-travel fiction is concerned with consequences. A character changes one detail in the past and returns to discover an different present, but Kawaguchi removes that possibility entirely.

Dianne Yarwood’s debut novel The Wakes takes several subjects that should make for sombre reading and turns them into something warm, funny and reassuring. Death is never far from the story, but this isn't a novel preoccupied with dying. It's actually interested in the people left behind and the choices they make once loss has forced them to reconsider how they're living.

After six volumes of friendship, first love, family conflict, mental illness and queer self-discovery, Alice Oseman brings Nick and Charlie’s school years to a close in this last book, which is a gentle and reassuring conclusion, filled with the affection and emotional openness that have defined the series from its beginning.

Readers deeply invested in Nick and Charlie will probably enjoy returning to their gentle world because their affection remains convincing, and their future matters because the previous volumes have made them so easy to care about. This instalment offers a comforting visit and an important stage in their development, but it again feels more like a bridge towards the conclusion than one of the series’ defining volumes.

Moving on in the series, volume four takes us beyond Nick and Charlie's nervous exchanges and affection into much more complicated territory.

Alice Oseman sends the boys and their friends to Paris for a school trip filled with sightseeing, birthday celebrations, romantic tension and very little privacy. It's an ideal setting for a young romance, and it's also the place where the problems they've been quietly carrying become harder to hide.

At the same time, Nick and Charlie begin navigating their first relationship through private kisses, nervous text messages, a birthday celebration and a day at the beach. Their happiness is genuine, but so is the pressure created by secrecy. Nick wants to be with Charlie but remains terrified of being seen, especially by the rugby players with whom he's spent much of his school life.

Adjusting to that form took me a little time, but Alice Oseman made the transition remarkably easy. Nick Nelson and Charlie Spring are immediately likeable, their developing friendship is genuinely lovely, and the nervous uncertainty of first love is captured through small gestures that feel completely disproportionate only until we remember what it was like to experience them ourselves.

Early on, I wasn't at all sure that Touch Grass was going to be for me. For a considerable portion of the novel, I struggled to find my way into it. Mary Colussi drops us into a strange near-future world without offering much assistance or explanation.

Danny’s mother, Diane, is a deeply important figure in Caro’s life. She gives Caro the affection and attention she craves from her own mother, Ines, whose work regularly keeps her away from home. When Diane becomes ill and dies, Caro loses the woman she's come to regard as a second mother. She doesn't know how to claim that grief when Danny has lost his actual mother, so she pushes her own pain aside and concentrates on taking care of him.

Gregory David Roberts creates an extraordinary sense of place. The heat, traffic, monsoon rain, food, poverty and constant press of humanity make Bombay feel less like the setting of the novel than its most commanding character. When Lin is walking through its streets with Prabaker, living among the residents of the slum or trying to understand the customs of Prabaker’s village, the book has an energy and warmth that explains why it's remained so important to so many readers.

Ayesha Inoon’s The Sisters of Serendib begins with a family torn apart before its youngest members are old enough to understand what they've lost. In 1990, three sisters flee war-torn Sri Lanka with their mother aboard a boat bound for Australia. When their mother dies during the journey, Janu, Samar and Maryam are separated and raised by different families across the country.

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.