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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.

Returning to Café Funiculi Funicula for the fourth time felt much like visiting a familiar local cafe (without the time travel). I knew the dim underground ambience, the mysterious woman reading in the special chair and the rules governing every journey to the past.

My main reservation, again, is the repetition. By this point in the series, I know the rules of the café extremely well. I knew them by the second explanation in this book, yet they continue to be restated. The same is true of the emotional structure. A visitor arrives carrying grief or regret. A meeting reveals information they didn't previously understand. The facts remain the same, but the visitor comes back able to face life differently.

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.

Meghann Dontess can dismantle a marriage before lunch, stare down an abusive husband by mid-afternoon and still have no idea how to speak honestly to her own sister.

At its centre is Franny Stone, a woman driven by an almost physical need to keep moving. She's crossed countries, abandoned homes and repeatedly left the people she loves, but her latest journey is different. Believing that the Arctic terns may be undertaking their final migration, Franny travels to Greenland and attaches tracking devices to three of the birds. She intends to follow them south to Antarctica, where she'll fulfil a promise connected to her husband Niall.

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.

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.

Kin deeply understands that longing isn't always dramatic. Sometimes it simply reshapes a person slowly over years until it becomes the architecture of their identity.

Most love stories are built around longing, but I'm now realising, after a re-read from a teenager to a 56 year-old, that Wuthering Heights is actually built more around corrosion.

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.

At first glance, the premise sounds deceptively familiar: a seventeen-year-old girl named Waldo begins an affair with her middle-aged creative writing teacher, Mr. Teddy Korgy. On paper, it risks sounding like another contemporary “taboo relationship” novel built to provoke discourse and little else. However, in reality, Half His Age is far more psychologically precise than that. It's not romantic fantasy masquerading as literary fiction.

And yet, that ambition is part of what makes Lost Lambs worth reading. It is not content to remain contained, to limit itself to the familiar satisfactions of the family novel. It wants to connect private disintegration to something systemic, to suggest that the instability within the Flynn household is not entirely separate from the structures surrounding it.