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Every now and then a book comes along that makes you wonder whether you've been telling yourself the wrong stories about your own life.

One of the things I adored was how completely the Australian landscape becomes part of the story. Meredith Downs doesn't simply provide a backdrop; it influences every choice the characters make. The isolation, the relentless distances, the dependence on neighbours, the vulnerability to drought, and later the arrival of the mining industry all create a world that feels authentic rather than romanticised. You can almost feel the dust settling over everything.

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.

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.