Fresh off its 2022 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards win for fiction, this short story collection is a meditation on the way loss impacts our choices, and how it specifically affects family dynamics. What starts as a slow build gently sweeps into a bona fide page-turner.

Viewers of the SBS TV series The Family Law will be familiar with the garish humour that suffuses Benjamin Law’s recollections of his life. That same humour graces the pages of his 2010 debut family memoir of the same name that provided the source material for the series.

Arresting prose threads the pages of this exquisite debut together, imbuing scenes with a sense of presence. Balanced with Taylor’s knack for lively pacing, the outcome is an assured novel that finds the moments of tension within even the quietest of scenes.

Two rival colleagues who are opposites in all ways compete for the same promotion. All the classic ingredients for an enemies-to-lovers romance are set up in this premise, and Australian author Sally Thorne certainly delivers in her 2016 debut contemporary romance novel.

‘Are you a good person, or do you just look like one?’ is the tagline that gets us thinking, yet also barely scratches the surface of all that is contained within the pages of Diana Reid’s coming-of-age debut novel.