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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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Allen Levi's Theo of Golden is the kind of novel that restores your faith in literature's ability to illuminate what it means to be human.

King Sorrow is less interested in what begins than in what continues. Joe Hill’s novel follows six friends bound by an occult pact that refuses to remain in the past, unfolding into a quiet, sustained study of responsibility, complicity, and the weight of carrying something forward.