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.

Chris Gordon is reading Give Me Your Hand by Megan Abbott

Late to the game, I have finally joined my colleagues in their love for Megan Abbott. I’m reading Give Me Your Hand. It’s a story about female friendship that I know is about to go terribly wrong. Abbott is a crime writer who has the power to get right there, inside your head, and mess with it a little. I’m all in, but only in the daytime hours… I’m an obsessive reader – when I find an author I enjoy I have to read everything they have ever written almost immediately. My next pick after this nasty but compelling read will be You Will Know Me. This novel is about parenthood and I think I’ll be glad my kids have moved on from competitive sport.

Julia Jackson is reading The Eighth Life (For Brilka) by Nino Haratischvili (translated by Ruth Martin & Charlotte Collins)

A couple of Sundays ago, in my post AFL Grand Final haze, I curled up on the couch to read this book. Immediately swept up by the characters and setting, time flew. I blinked and checked the page: 425! I can report I’m now well past halfway and am still enjoying this book immensely. It has certainly lived up to the hype. It might be physically weighty, but it’s not a dense book. Told across the span of the twentieth century this multi-generational family epic tale is both well-structured and paced. One of my favourites for the year!

Jackie Tang is reading The Glad Shout by Alice Robinson

Re-reading Alice Robinson’s The Glad Shout has felt a little bit like pressing on a bruise these past few weeks. Robinson’s book is the story of a family’s struggle to survive after a cataclysmic climate event in the near and all-too-plausible future, so you can see why the themes would resonate. That this is only her second novel is hugely impressive, and I can easily see why it’s been shortlisted by the judges for the Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction.

Told via two narrative strands, one starting in the disaster-fuelled present and the other in the past, Robinson has crafted something that feels organic, but is actually an intricately wrought work, balancing pace, plot and small illuminating moments of character brilliantly, all while building to a moving, heart-in-mouth crescendo. It was some of those small moments that resonated the deepest for me – a resilient, resourceful man and the fleeting moment in which he gives up, a mother wistfully reading classic children’s stories to her child when they’re populated by animals that have become extinct, a small throwaway line describing an increasingly authoritarian government ‘closing the borders’ between different regions in this country. I don’t want to make it sound like it’s all prophetic visions, because this novel is very much other things too: an exploration of women’s relationships across generations; a thrilling disaster story grounded by a woman who reaches deep into herself to find the strength to survive. If you want to give someone a book that helps to gently but vividly bring home the personal stakes of climate crisis – like compassion cloaking steel – then this is the one.