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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.

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.

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.

Even his attempts to speak Kikongo become acts of accidental violence. Nathan believes he's declaring that Jesus is precious, but his incorrect pronunciation transforms the phrase into the assertion that Jesus is poisonwood, which is a plant capable of causing intense pain.

Richard arrives at Hampden College in Vermont after an unhappy childhood in California. His parents are neither wealthy nor particularly interested in him, and he's already learned that the truth about his life won't take him where he wants to go. He begins reinventing himself almost immediately.

As winter deepens and the fishermen return with empty nets, fear begins to consume the isolated community. Selkies, strangers and women who refuse to behave as they should all become convenient objects of suspicion. Malie has to contend not only with the mystery of her mother’s disappearance but with an increasingly dangerous husband and a society structured to protect his authority rather than her safety.

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.

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

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

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.