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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.

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.

Although the mystery is compelling, this is really a novel about grief. Not simply the grief of losing a child, but the grief of losing certainty.

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.