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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.

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.

After five books, the repetition is finally bothering me. Every visitor is given the same rules, every cup of coffee creates the same countdown and every story is shaped towards a final emotional revelation. Even the characters’ hesitations and the explanations surrounding the journey have begun to feel overly familiar. I understand that repetition is part of the café’s ritual, but I'm now too aware of the construction underneath each story.

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.

Most time-travel fiction is concerned with consequences. A character changes one detail in the past and returns to discover an different present, but Kawaguchi removes that possibility entirely.

Garrett’s father, Phil Graham, is a hockey legend whose public reputation hides years of physical and emotional abuse. Garrett grew up watching Phil assault his mother and later became another of his father's targets.

Kelsier is a thief, a prison escapee, and a survivor of the Pits of Hathsin, and he assembles a crew to overthrow the Lord Ruler. Kelsier presents the enterprise as the most important purpose of their lives: destabilise the noble houses, cripple the imperial economy, raise a skaa army and remove a ruler widely believed to be a god.

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.

Moving on in the series, volume four takes us beyond Nick and Charlie's nervous exchanges and affection into much more complicated territory.

Adjusting to that form took me a little time, but Alice Oseman made the transition remarkably easy. Nick Nelson and Charlie Spring are immediately likeable, their developing friendship is genuinely lovely, and the nervous uncertainty of first love is captured through small gestures that feel completely disproportionate only until we remember what it was like to experience them ourselves.

Odysseus himself doesn't appear until Book Five, when we find him trapped on Calypso’s island. She offers him comfort, beauty and immortality, but he still longs for home. Eventually released, he reaches the Phaeacians and tells them the story of everything that's happened to him.

Gregory David Roberts creates an extraordinary sense of place. The heat, traffic, monsoon rain, food, poverty and constant press of humanity make Bombay feel less like the setting of the novel than its most commanding character. When Lin is walking through its streets with Prabaker, living among the residents of the slum or trying to understand the customs of Prabaker’s village, the book has an energy and warmth that explains why it's remained so important to so many readers.

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.

As winter deepens and the fishermen return with empty nets, fear begins to consume the isolated community. Selkies, strangers and women who refuse to behave as they should all become convenient objects of suspicion. Malie has to contend not only with the mystery of her mother’s disappearance but with an increasingly dangerous husband and a society structured to protect his authority rather than her safety.

Grotesque escalation can produce horror, but repeated extremity eventually flattens feeling. Once every doorway leads to another atrocity, atrocity becomes expectation. The reader might continue because the solution remains tantalising, yet the emotional response is narrowed to shock.

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.

Kathy Lette’s The Sisterhood Rules is a loud, bawdy and surprisingly tender novel about twin sisters separated by a betrayal neither has managed to escape.

Declan’s strongest material lies outside the romance. His father has spent years treating football success as both destiny and obligation. Declan’s identity becomes inseparable from athletic achievement, public admiration and the belief that he must reach the NFL to justify everyone’s investment in him.

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