Each week we bring you a sample of the books we’re reading, the films we’re watching, the television shows we’re hooked on or the music we’re loving.

Jason Austin is reading The Three by Sarah Lotz

The supernatural thriller is a genre that I could never live without. Whenever I am feeling disenchanted by whatever I am reading, I often regress to my teenage self and bury my head in a Stephen King novel.

I was travelling to Bendigo last week and needed some escapism, and after a colleague raved to me about The Three when it was released last year I decided to give it a go. It has been exactly what I have needed, although I am glad that it was a train read and not a plane read as the opening of the book depicts a plane crash in wonderfully graphic detail.

This plane is not the only one to have crashed and the media quickly label the day in which four passenger planes drop out of the sky, ‘Black Thursday’; the trio of children who are the only survivors of these disasters are simply called ‘The Three’. Rumours abound about how the children survived. Anxiety seeds itself in the community when an Evangelist names them as three of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Their individual guardians notice that they are in fact acting rather strange: one of the kids seems to be able to heal his grandfather’s Alzheimer’s.

The author has nestled the novel in the guise of a work of non-fiction; a collection of interviews by a journalist and it’s a very clever storytelling device that allows the reader to get first-hand confessions from all of the characters involved. The Three is a classic page-turner and as I discovered, the perfect antidote to literary ennui. I just know that after I have finished this I will be buying a copy of the follow-up novel Day Four the very same day.

Stella Charls is reading Small Acts of Disappearance by Fiona Wright

Last weekend I walked around Hobart while holding my copy of Fiona Wright’s essay collection in my hands. I simply could not put this incredible book down, and read handfuls of pages every chance I got.

Small Acts of Disappearance is about what it means to live with an eating disorder (a complex issue that Wright tackles brilliantly) but it’s also about so much more. Wright is an award-winning poet, and this background surely lends a particularly skilful, spare and affecting use of language to these essays. As Wright chronicles her personal relationship with anorexia, she simultaneously addresses the way this ‘impulse to starve’ is inexorably linked to her ‘impulse to write’. In some essays, Wright masterfully blends her personal narrative with reflections on themes of hunger and smallness in Australian literature (such as with the character of Rose in Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet). Wright’s essays that focus on her time spent living overseas, in Sri Lanka and Germany, are equally fascinating. Our reviewer wrote that this book is, “full of empathy”, and I completely agree.

If you need any more reason to check out this wonderful debut, look here and here.

I’ve also started (and am loving) Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies, and after reading my colleague Jason’s glowing review of Peggy Frew’s Hope Farm I’ve also added that to my growing TBR pile.

Amy Vuleta is reading Fever of Animals by Miles Allinson

Fever of Animals is easily the most intelligent, thoughtful and sublime Australian book I have read recently. It takes itself heart-wrenchingly seriously, but this is balanced by a brilliant sense of irony. The narrator, Miles, is self-deprecating and all-too aware of his shortcomings in life, love, art, writing – yet, his faith in all of these seems as solid as anything else.

In the book, a young man takes a journey through Europe to distract himself from the grief of his father’s death, to remind himself of a past lost love, and to visit a haunted forest in search of something that may not exist: the ghost of a vanished Romanian surrealist painter. The power of this novel is in the way it presents memory as impossibly and inevitably nostalgic—an interminable longing for something outside the realm of our comprehension, but which haunts us, one way or another, from inside our own consciousness. In reading this book, my heart filled with beauty and love, and then by the end, it broke, ecstatically, to pieces.

Jemima Bucknell is reading The Natural Way of Things by Charlotte Wood

Charlotte Wood’s latest book, The Natural Way of Things, has many of us here at Readings in heated discussion. Ten scandalised young women find themselves imprisoned in the ruins of an outback wool farm, skirted by an enormous electric fence. They are dressed in “olden-day” clothing, and are put to work for an aloof company, under the sadistic supervision of two men and a woman posing as a nurse.

Two of these women, Yolanda and Verla, form an unspoken bond. They know they’re not like the other girls, they’re getting out. Wood weaves her prose around and between the lives of these two women, through their fantasies, memories, sickness, dreams. Overall, the experience is somehow transcendent, a kind of surrealist-science-fiction-allegory where Katherine Burdekin’s Swastika Night meets Alice Munro’s frank, fleshy femininity. I have no doubt they’ll soon be studying this book in schools and universities.