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.

Joanna Di Mattia is reading Unquiet by Linn Ullmann

I’m very close to finishing an utterly engrossing novel, my first by the Norwegian writer, Linn Ullmann. Unquiet is categorised as fiction - and that’s certainly where we shelve it in store - but it’s so much more than a conventional novel.

Ullmann writes about a girl who spends summers with her father at his sprawling Swedish island home, on Fårö at the edge of the Baltic Sea, and then recalls, as an adult, the time she spent with him when he was older and ailing. It’s impossible, when you love film as much as I do, not to approach Unquiet primarily as an experimental memoir - Pappa, being the Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman; Mamma, his longtime muse, the Norwegian actress, Liv Ullmann.

The fragmentary narrative is built around six taped conversations the author had with her father towards the end of his life and is shaped by her hunger to piece together the past - to effectively put her, her father, and mother, into the same room (a rare occurrence); to capture their shared history from scraps and half-remembered truths; to keep them all alive through language and images. Unquiet is compulsively readable and I’m dying to see where it will end.

Jessica Strong is reading Pizza Girl by Jean Kyoung Frazier

‘Her name was Jenny Hauser and every Wednesday I put pickles on her pizza.’

As a child, pizza felt personal. I always perceived there to be a certain mystique surrounding the experience of a pizza delivery person. Driving around in the dark to visit people’s homes and seeing what they’re wearing; who they’re with; what they’re doing. When I’d grab the landline and call to order, I was addicted to the rush of recognition when they recounted your address – saved on file, of course – and asked if you wanted the regular. So of course, when I saw Jean Kyoung Frazier’s Pizza Girl on the shelf – a story about an eighteen-year-old pregnant pizza delivery girl, I knew I had to read it.

Pizza Girl is a bold, coming-of-age debut that delivers the funny and unsettling story of (simply put) an imperfect teen on the cusp of adulthood and her blurred-line relationship with equally flawed stay-at-home mother, Jenny. It takes childhood fascination and fantasy to a darker, realer place; It’s messy, raw, and ripe with unchecked emotion. At under 200 pages, this punchy novel places you at the very edge of someone’s self-destruction – and holds you there.

Some parts are intensely relatable, others intensely alienating. It’s definitely a story which will prove divisive for readers – no lukewarm impressions here. It’s an explosive existential crisis with a side of pizza and I, for one, loved it. Sometimes a large pepperoni-and-pickles pizza really is all that’s holding a person together – and honestly that’s okay.

Lucie Dess is reading The Sad Ghost Club by Lize Meddings

‘For anyone who has ever felt like a sad ghost’ – Lize Meddings

This week I devoured The Sad Ghost Club, a graphic novel about anxiety, depression and finding your kindred spirits. Lize Meddings uses ghosts as a metaphor for feeling invisible and shows the relatable feelings of anxiety in everyday life. The Sad Ghost Club is such a heart-warming story with beautiful illustrations and an uplifting ending and is perfect for anyone who sometimes feels like a sad ghost.