Each week we bring you a sample of the books we’re reading, the films and TV shows we’re watching, and the music we’re listening to.

Jan Lockwood is reading Words in Deep Blue by Cath Crowley

I don’t normally read YA as there is already so much choice on adult shelves. But I was encouraged to try Words in Deep Blue by Cath Crowley by a colleague and I’m so glad I did. For me, this book is every bit as complex as any ‘grown up’ novel; it was simply a brilliant, contemporary Aussie fiction read. The dialogue is fabulous, the characters (young and older) are well defined and believable, and the themes, of love, friendship, and loss are beautifully developed and intertwined with the bonus setting of the most amazing second hand bookshop. I feel certain this story will stay with me a long time.

Chris Dite is reading Luna: Wolf Moon by Ian McDonald

Most reviews of Ian McDonald’s Luna: New Moon described it as: ‘ Game of Thrones meets Dallas on the moon’. They were all bang on the money.

A hundred or so years from now, mining operations on our tidally-locked neighbour are bubbling along menacingly. Business is controlled by the ‘five dragons’ – ruthless mafia-like families with a vampire squid stranglehold on lunar life. The first installment of this Godfather -meets- Dune saga focused on an unemployed citizen’s stroke of luck. She fell in with the Brazilian Corta family as a jill-of-all-space-trades. It was a rapid rise from oxygen deprivation to the high life, and all just in time for a homicidal takeover by the (sickeningly familiar) Australian McKenzie family. The nastiness well and truly ended her dreams of bossa nova nights by the Sea of Tranquility.

McDonald’s follow up Wolf Moon traces the few surviving Cortas’ veangeful antics, the Sun family’s Art of War long game, and the Machiavellian side pursuits of the other dragons. It’s our ill-fated mining boom meets the Wolf of Wall Street on Ridley Scott’s Nostromo. Only the business is dirtier, the sex is crazier and the death count is far higher.

Welcome to paradise. Your oxygen bills are overdue.

Amy Vuleta recommends three new music releases (and two upcoming events)

In store this week, we’re listening to new releases from women making some incredible music.

The Leaving is urgent, delicate, beautiful folk music from Melbourne musician, Kate Skinner, playing as Rough River. Pressed locally on luminescent green vinyl (and also available on CD), this album is nostalgic and raw. The lyrics are honest, and the arrangements are haunting and heartbreaking by turns. This is one of my favourite albums of the year so far.

We played Valerie June’s 2013 release Pushing Against a Stone on super high-rotation in store for close to two years after its release, and so the whole shop have been looking forward to her new release with much anticipation. Order of Time is everything we’d hoped for – fierce, bluesy, rough, richly textured and overflowing. June’s unique vocals wail and murmur with urgency and deep feeling. I suspect this one will also be spinning for many months to come.

Finally, with Semper Femina, Laura Marling has delivered yet another exquisite release. My first impression is that this is a little more stripped back than her previous albums, featuring acoustic guitar, gentle vocals and rich lyrics. A Marling album always calls for dedicated, repeated listening, and I’m looking forward to taking this one home to do just that.

I’d also like to invite everyone to join us in St Kilda for two FREE live in-store performances by exceptional women: Charm of Finches on Wednesday 5 April and Rough River on Thursday 13 April.

Mike Shuttleworth is reading At the Existentialist Cafe by Sarah Bakewell

Who among us hasn’t dreamt of sitting in a Paris cafe at all hours debating the meaning of life? For philosophers like Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the rest, doing just that was almost a life’s work. So what remains of all that elegant chatter, the writing, the cigarette smoke, the exploration of the world through ideas? In At the Existentialist Cafe, British author Sarah Bakewell brings it all gloriously to life, and makes a good case for why the questions raised by existentialists still matter.

Bakewell knowledgeably and nimbly navigates existentialism’s ideas and influences. She ties these ideas to the lives of major philosophers (along with a few neglected names) and to the historic disruptions of the twentieth century. She writes: ‘When I first read Sartre and Heidegger, I didn’t think the details of a philosopher’s personality or biography were important… Thirty years later I have come to the opposite conclusion. Ideas are interesting, but people are vastly more so.’

Bakewell doesn’t say that reading philosophy will turn you into a better person, improve your love life, or make you more stylish, though it might. At the Existentialist Cafe is an informative, challenging and moving book and I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Lian Hingee is reading Remind Me How This Ends by Gabrielle Tozer

I’ve never read Gabrielle Tozer’s bestselling book The Intern (so many books, so little time) but I’ve heard nothing but good things. With this in mind, I recently picked up an early copy of her forthcoming YA novel, Remind Me How This Ends.

This gentle coming-of-age story feature two wonderful, realistic characters who are both broken and floundering in their own ways. Overachiever Milo Dark was expected to go on to Big Things after graduating from high school but – crippled with indecision about his future – he finds himself instead living at home and working in the family’s struggling bookshop. When his childhood friend Layla blows into town after disappearing without a word in the dead of night five years previously, Milo recognises a fellow lost soul and the two of them quickly rekindle a friendship that becomes something deeper over the course of one summer. This thoughtful examination of memory, grief, and love doesn’t offer any easy answers but instead show that it’s okay to make mistakes – and that it’s never too late to try and fix them.

Michael Awosoga-Samuel recommends two music releases

Last Peace is the first record from American indie rock band Grandaddy in about ten years. The release has a filmic narrative that brings to mind the band’s breakthrough second album, The Sophtware Slump.

I’m also enjoying Jens Lekman’s Life Will See You Now. Lekman is always quirky and thoughtful and while he’s gone through sad period over the last few years, he’s put his optimistic glasses back on for this release (thanks to the help of his fans). Life Will See You Now is a really upbeat Calypso tinged dance record.