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.

Ellen Cregan is reading Louise Erdrich and Alissa Nutting

I’ve just finished reading two excellent books.

The first is Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich. Initially, I’d planned on reading a couple of chapters, but ended up finishing the whole thing in one sitting. If you liked The Handmaid’s Tale, you absolutely must read this book. It focuses on Native American woman Ceder, who’s reality is being rewritten as evolution goes backwards. This reversal is happening to every biological entity on earth – insects, mammals and plants all revert to prehistoric versions of themselves. Most importantly for Cedar who is four months pregnant, it also applies to humans. All over the country, pregnant women are being rounded up so their births and mysterious babies can be observed by experts. Ceder decides that this is not the fate she wants for her baby (and herself) and so essentially – she goes on the run. This is speculative literary fiction at its best.

The second book is Made For Love by Alissa Nutting. You might remember Nutting’s previous novel, the slightly infamous Tampa, which detailed a relationship between a paedophile schoolteacher and her young student. Made For Love is a very different book to that one. Its protagonists are a woman who has just divorced her tech billionaire husband and returned to her father’s house to find he has purchased a highly realistic sex doll, and a con-man who develops an intense, romantic attraction to dolphins. This is a really hard book to explain, but if you want to laugh, or be challenged, or just enjoy some really excellent writing, then trust me – read this.

Roland Bisshop is reading Devil’s Day by Andrew Michael Hurley

Newlywed John Pentecost returns with his wife to the Endlands in Yorkshire, ostensibly to attend the funeral of The Gaffer, his grandfather, a man who it seems had disowned John, having considered his departure to the city for study an apostasy of the peculiar pagan superstitions which have held in the Endlands for generations… These rituals and ceremonies are designed to keep their flock of sheep from the devil’s harm. The ‘owd feller’ it seems lays in wait within the rocks and the earth, the tributaries and the firmament above, incarnating in man and beast alike, jumping from one to another at will.

In Devil’s Day, Hurley imbues a malevolence upon the very landscape of Yorkshire to chilling effect, but there remain darker recesses in the human heart than those charted in the deepest troughs of Yorkshire’s topography. I enjoyed Hurley’s first novel The Loney enormously, and in his sophomore release he achieves a greater degree of subtlety in terrorising the mind of the reader. In doing so has earned the title of master of contemporary British gothic fiction, IMHO.

Bronte Coates is reading Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney

Despite getting some rave reviews, I was worried I wouldn’t enjoy this novel. The premise (a complicated affair) did not appeal, and nor did the comparisons with HBO’s Girls – a show I’d never been able to care about. But after repeated recommendations from my colleagues, I reluctantly gave it a go and, of course, I ended up loving it. once again proving that age-old adage: ‘The bookseller is always right.’ This was exactly the smart summer read I needed in my life. It’s funny, elegant, refreshing, addictive. I especially loved how the narrative works on multiple levels – coming-of-age story, a romance (or romances), an exploration of modern angst, and so on. Conversations with Friends is a wonderfully juicy and thoughtful novel that made me laugh and cry, and I’m still thinking about it now.