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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A lot of what happens here takes place in the mind rather than in space. There are still battles, still stakes, but they feel different. It's quieter, in a strange way and more abstract. It took me a while to settle into that, and I’m not sure I ever fully did.

And then, at the novel’s core, comes an unexpected relationship. It’s unconventional, built on sincerity and a refreshing lack of sentimentality. Communication isn’t instant or effortless—it’s painstakingly constructed through trial, error, and the stubborn refusal to give up when understanding seems just out of reach. It’s quietly profound. In a plot that’s ostensibly about saving humanity, it’s connection (not conquest) that matters most.

A Gift Before Dying by Malcolm Kempt has moved into that esteemed category and rating it five stars does it no justice. It's not even a ten-star read! It’s one of those rare novels that taps a finger to your forehead, looks you in the eye and says - ha! I've got you now, my new friend.