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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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.