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.

Tracy Hwang is reading The White Book by Han Kang (translated by Deborah Smith)

Having loved Han Kang’s writing in the past, I knew going into The White Book that I would likely enjoy it. Turns out, ‘enjoyable’ is really too simple a word to describe the reading experience this book provides.

In staggeringly beautiful prose, Kang meditates on the colour white and its infinite meanings and associations – birth, death, chill, silence. The result of this meditation is an intimate, all-encompassing exploration of grief and the shadow it casts on a life. In a way that is restrained yet powerful, Kang delivers an impossibly affecting experience to her readers, one that feels as if we are looking at the true depth of human feeling.

Baz Ozturk is reading Free Love by Tessa Hadley

I’m currently reading and loving Free Love, the new Tessa Hadley. One of my favourite contemporary fiction writers, Hadley continues to write in the more traditional way: using close third-person narration to glide seamlessly between the perspectives of a cast of richly imagined characters, here made up of the Fischer family in 1960s London, with Phyllis, the mother and wife, at the centre. The novel belongs entirely to them. I don’t sense Hadley’s presence hovering over the story. I’m not encouraged to make autobiographical associations. Instead I can sink in and lose myself in the complex inner and outer worlds of its people.

Hadley is also a great stylist, highly evocative and painterly. The prose is lush and sensuous, yet agile – it doesn’t feel ornate. Her descriptions of the natural world, and of houses, are especially gorgeous. The harmony she achieves between style and content is masterful. She combines the vivid realism and rightness of detail of Anne Tyler with the exquisite sparkling language of Katherine Mansfield. I love character-driven stories, but I equally love to be seduced by beautiful sentences, and in Free Love Hadley seems to be firing on all cylinders.

Clare Millar is reading Handiwork by Sara Baume

I was recently recommended (by another bookseller, no less!) Handiwork by Sara Baume. I’m interested in writing about arts and crafts, and this was the perfect little creative nonfiction work. I read it in just about one sitting! Sara details her creative process as she’s woodworking little birds - each segment of the book has a photo of a completed bird.

But more largely this is about grief, creating, creative process and living as an artist. It delves into family traditions of crafts and bird migration, and love. This was a stunning read and just right for where I was at in my own creative life when I received the recommendation!