Wendy: 

Tata by Valérie Perrin

 

French author Perrin wrote one of my favourite books, Fresh Water for Flowers. 

 

This follows Agnès who receives the news that her Tata (Aunt) Collette has died. However, Agnès believed Colette died three years before. From here, Agnès unravels a web of family secrets. Shifting between Agnes and Collette's point of view, this book is filled with French history and culture and tells of what we will do for the ones we love. 

jenna:

Angel Down by daniel kraus

 

This 2026 Pulitzer Fiction winner almost passed us by and I think it may be a masterpiece? 

 

Set in the Great War and written as one (easy to read) sentence. Kraus’ prose is rich and rhythmic, viscerally describing the horrors of the trenches, but it’s also funny, magical and a warning for the future to come. 

 

Angel Down has the eerie atmosphere and dark humour of Percival Everett's The Trees. 

Rhi: 

Worry Doll by laura mcphee-browne

 

A quietly heartrending dual narrative of two queer women. Heloise is living in Naarm with her long-term boyfriend, while secretly pining for Lacey, a woman she met on a train and can't stop thinking about. Meanwhile, in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Lacey is trying to focus on her studies while managing the pain of a years-old breakup. A tender yet gritty story of longing and loneliness. 

 

This story keeps wandering back into my mind even though I finished it a while ago!

katie:

the heart of the nhaga by lee YOUNG-DO

 

The world is divided by the Line of Limit. To the North are the Tokkebifire people, able to manipulate flames, Rekon - giant birdmen, and the humans. To the South are the Nhaga, a reptilian people who relenquish their hearts for immortality. For centuries, these groups haven't crossed the Line, but change is in the air …

 

Lee Young-Do is an exceptionally imaginative wordsmith and absolute master of epic fantasy, perfect for fans of J.R.R. Tolkien and Ursula K. Le Guin. 

Pip:

Main characters by bobby palmer

 

A story of love, friendship, grief, and family told through the eyes of everyone but the main characters. Friends, flatmates, ex-partners, siblings, and strangers all have their own version of the story, but only Clara and Seb have the power to decide how that story ends. It's not often that a romance novel really sticks with me, but I ripped through this in one sitting and have been thinking about it ever since. 

 

Perfect for fans of David Nicholls and Sally Rooney who enjoy reading about real, messy people and their real, messy lives. 

Nate: 

Repetition by vigdis hjorth

 

An investigation into hidden familial trauma by one of Scandinavia's greatest living writers. A women listens in on the conversation of the family next to her at the opera and is catapulted back to her teenage years, allowing her to look back at unsettling events that provide the key to an even darker secret underpinning them all. 

Frances:

the beginning comes after the end 

by rebecca solnit

 

A novella-length essay from one of the most significant writers of our time, Solnit has here entwined her unique contemporary gaze with history and philosophy to draw attention to moments of reparation, progress, and success in many realms of social justice across recent decades. Solnit asserts that we must not lose sight of the gains we have made, but rather use them to propel us as we march through the violent last gasps of the ‘old world' and into something new … 

Amelie: 

Hexes of the deadwood forest by Agnieszka Szpila

 

The wild and salacious tale of an oil company CEO who loses her job when she's filmed having sex with a tree in her sleep! This disaster mysteriously catapults her back in time, leading her to join a medieval eco-feminist group called the Earthen Ones. Witty, surreal and mind-bending!

Rachel:

offenses 

by constance Debré

 

Is a criminal born or made?

 

Constance Debré probes this question with tenacity in this slender volume, scathingly interrogating the chasms of social inequality which people cascade, rather than slip through.

 

There is a geography, Debré writes. We live in a vertical world, you don’t see. A world made of worlds. Not side by side but set concentrically and upon one another [...] a bit like Dante’s circles of hell. Each world only communicating with the worlds directly in contact with it and none of the others.

 

Asher Emanuel's The Valley meets La Haine.