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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.