All of this is eerily familiar, as are the references to inadequate amounts of PPE on board, the constant spreading of misinformation, the revulsion shown towards anyone who sniffs or coughs, the blustering of those in authority and the selfless acts of kindness and decency from those tending to the sick. How did Meg Mundell get it so right, and tell it with such grace, last year?

And yet the most disturbing part of The Trespassers is when the passengers are finally allowed off the boat, into an isolated detention centre. Here is a fresh kind of unrelenting hell, a void without a way forward. They are forgotten and purposeless; subject to harsh and ridiculous rules and given no information about their fate. The hopelessness of their situation is made all the more vivid for being entirely credible.

The corrupting effect of corporate money and power; a government enslaved to a braying and hateful public; a media incapable of accessing and publishing the truth; Mundell, bless her, leaves no soul unscathed. Thank goodness she allows an element of hope in the ending, or I might have lay on the floor and cried. 4.5 stars.

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I’m not usually a fan of novels involving time travel but here it’s dealt with in such a matter-of-fact way, it becomes entirely credible. It helps that Stella doesn’t deliberately travel back in time; she just gets off a bus and wonders where the hell the jacaranda blossoms she saw this morning have gone. Then she meets her former self in the street and carries on from there.

Time travelling Stella has endured one major tragedy; the loss of her daughter, Claire, to a drug overdose when Claire was sixteen. Stella has always felt that Abby, one of Claire’s friends, was largely responsible for her daughter’s drug taking and death. When Stella finds herself back in 1997, four years before Claire dies, she sets about trying to eliminate the influence of Abby in Claire’s life. As time goes by she contemplates increasingly ruthless methods. But it seems every move Stella makes has an effect on the future, and her memories of the past sway and alter in response to her actions. It’s a fascinating process and makes for compulsive reading, seeing whether Stella can save her daughter and what else she’s going to mess up along the way.

Another of the lost girls in Stella’s life is her aunt, Linda. Linda disappeared from her small home town when she was a teenager, well before Stella was born. To infiltrate her way into Stella’s family, time travelling Stella pretends to be the missing Linda – a questionable ethical choice, but one that gets her inside her old family life where she needs to be to begin influencing the future.

Stella’s mother Anne, a sister to the missing Linda, isn’t fooled for a second. I particularly love the relationship and conversations Stella has with her mother. Anne eventually comes to know the truth about Stella’s time travel but wisely refrains from asking Stella too many questions about the future. After all, would you want to know when and how you end up dying? And if you did, could you do anything about it? Would you?

The Lost Girls is written with such intelligence and compassion; it reminds me very much of Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life. Both novels utilise time travel as a tool for the exploration of the human condition and both have a distinct understanding of what is, in the end, important in a life. Stella doesn’t spend her time in the past trying to influence world events or giving her younger self stock market tips. Instead she revels in seeing her children and husband again, as they were, and tries to use a light touch when steering them away from their worst choices. But so many of her acts have unintended consequences.

The Lost Girls ultimately leaves you with a sense of sadness at the inevitability of loss in every life, but it is such a beautiful read you can sit with the sadness for a while, and not mind it.

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When Diana is found dead it’s initially unclear whether it was murder or suicide. And when her family discover she lied to them about having breast cancer and has left all her money to charity, there’s a collective sense of WTF?! 

It’s such a relief to read a gripping thriller with complex, intelligently drawn characters. I feel like ripping the vast majority of books off the crime fiction shelves in bookshops and replacing them with multiple copies of this one. This is how you do it.

Diana is a brilliant and quite brittle character. Her tough past as a single mother estranged from her Catholic family in 1970’s Australia means she feels most at ease with the pregnant refugees her charity supports. She respects the fact they have struggled and is more comfortable helping them than her own priviledged children.

Diana’s relationship with her daughter-in-law Lucy is characterised by a mutual sense of incomprehension. Lucy longs for a mother figure and can’t fathom Diana’s apparent indifference to her. Diana thinks Lucy is a good mother, though she’s never told her so, but she cannot understand Lucy’s choice to remain out of the workforce after the birth of her children, because what if something happens to her husband?

Why, Lucy wonders, are mother-in-law and daughter-in-law relationships often so deeply fraught? Why don’t sons-in-law and fathers-in-law have the same issues? The book suggests it’s because mothers-in-laws and daughters-in-law care too much. And that sounds about right to me.

So many of the relationships in this novel ring true; the way the family cope with the lazy, abrasive son/brother-in-law, the massive role money plays in the childrens’ interactions with their parents, the misunderstandings that stem from acts intended to be kind, the perceived transgressions in the way grandparents take care of their grandkids and the way advice offered up by the older generation in an attempt to be helpful is so often perceived as criticism. As a portrait of a family, The Mother-In-Law is utterly believable. At the same time it’s a compelling mystery as information from the police investigation into Diana’s death is slowly drip-fed to the family and they become increasingly isolated from one another. Lucy’s husband is identified as being present at Diana’s house the afternoon Diana died. Does that mean…..? And what does Lucy know about Diana’s intention to commit suicide?

Buy this book. Read it. Choose it for your book club if you have one. And then get onto all the other Sally Hepworth novels, like I’m about to.

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Marina lives in a large brownstone in Harlem, New York and is acutely aware of the multiple privileges she enjoys compared to Constance, not just in terms of affluence but also a fulfilling career, loving relationships and the comfort of living in a place where she knows she belongs. Her dealings with Constance are frequently awkward; she doesn’t know Constance’s personal story as a refugee but suspects it involves great loss and brutality. She witnesses the utter lack of affection and warmth in the way Constance deals with her son, Gabriel, but doesn’t judge her for it. She cannot imagine how difficult the world is for Constance. Her attempts at conversations with her are mostly greeted with a stony silence;

”Marina often felt inept when she was with Constance and yet there was a sense that with every hour they spent togetherness they were binding themselves to each other in an unspoken but irreversible pact.”

Marina’s husband is baffled by the protective role Marina voluntarily assumes in the life of Constance and Gabriel. His reaction to Marina assuming full time care of Gabriel is not recorded but we assume he comes around eventually, as he is a good man.

We the readers are privileged to learn what becomes of Constance after she leaves her son, although Gabriel and Marina never do. Again, we see Constance through the eyes of another, in this case an elderly nun, but we are never given insight into her inner life. She seems to find some sort of peace with the order of elderly nuns; she cares enough to feed the birds in winter time and we understand this represents a kind of healing, of coming alive, for her. She allows the nuns to believe her son is dead but actually he is just beginning another life orchestrated by her, with more joy in it than the one she could give him.

All the characters in The Children’s House are fully drawn and their interactions with one another believable. There are no bad guys and no easy answers. Instead it shows the role maternal love has played in the lives of so many of the characters. It suggests the consequences of a mother being unable to show or feel that love can be devastating, but are not necessarily catastrophic. Others can step in to fill the void if they are permitted to. It is ultimately a hopeful and warm novel, beautifully paced for a long slow day of rewarding reading. I can’t wait to see what Alice Nelson does next.

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And that, so beautifully conveyed by Holly’s simple recitation of things Simmons did and didn’t do, tell us exactly what is Wrong With Her.

Two strangers arrive in the small town of Cedar Valley on the same day. The first, a distinguished looking man, sits down and dies out the front of the antique shop, evoking much alarm and curiosity on behalf of the locals. He has no identification and no money; just odd, old objects in his pockets, and a bus ticket. The police are left to solve the mystery of who he is and what caused his death.

On the same day, the oddly childlike 21 year old Benny Miller arrives in town to a generous welcome from her dead mother’s friend. Her presence reminds the locals of her mother, a controversial figure who lived there many years before and is more of an enigma to Benny than to many of the people in town. Needless to say, the stories of the two strangers are interlinked but it takes until the end of the book to find out how.

This book is destined to become a book club classic. It is so enjoyable and has much to say, in a quietly profound way, about masculinity and kindness and the concept of home and men and women and how we relate to one another, or fail to. The mystery elements are interesting but it’s a quiet pleasure to simply spend time with the people of Cedar Valley. Each character is so well drawn and believable; they come alive in the way they speak and move and sweat and the constant cups of tea and biscuits and fresh baked banana bread. We sense the humanity and the goodness in each of them.

I very much liked Throsby’s 2016 novel Goodwood, and Cedar Valley is just as well written. It stays in the mind long after you’ve finished it, like a lovely melody.

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After the Darkness is an excellent read. This is my first Honey Brown book but won’t be my last.

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And then things get seriously weird, with Eleanor plagued at every turn by comparisons with the previous teacher, the oh-so-perfect Miss Barker, who mysteriously disappeared. There are also some sincerely strange town residents, which made me never want to go to Talbingo. Eleanor’s love interest stalks kangaroos and tells her she smells like a damp cupboard and deserved to get cancer. If there’s a list of actions calculated to make you scream “RUN” at an unattached girl when she’s contemplating a new love interest, those three things have got to be pretty high up on that list. And then there’s Ryan, the love interest’s  even odder brother….

The last one third of the novel is in turns confusing and disturbing: as readers we are at the mercy of Eleanor, who becomes an increasingly unreliable narrator as her grip on reality slips. It reminded me very much of Darren Aronofsky’s movie Mother! For the first two thirds you’re totally getting it and loving it, then at the end you walk away not entirely sure what happened, and just feeling deeply and quietly disturbed.

But wow, what a ride. This is the most original novel I’ve read in a long time. It’s worth being deeply and quietly disturbed.

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The writing in this book is intense and evocative, quite beautiful. Hannah Kent certainly knows how to turn a phrase. It’s not a particularly pleasant book to read but the writing is good enough to make it worth reading slowly, and savouring.

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The main protagonist, romance writer Frances, bucks this trend by genuinely not giving a shit about her weight. Mother-of-four Carmel is, however, obsessed and shamed by her weight, believing it contributed to her ex-husband’s brutal dismissal of her as someone he didn’t find attractive any more (though it turns out her ex-husband was just a dickhead). Lottery winner Jessica has had her body and face surgically chiselled to Kardashian-esque perfection and doesn’t understand why her husband doesn’t love her more for it. Bereaved mother Heather uses exercise as a tool for outrunning her grief and guilt over her son’s suicide and her daughter Zoe has followed her lead. As Masha, the enigmatic leader of the health retreat they all attend, laments; “They nearly all loathed their bodies. Women and their bodies! The most abusive and toxic of relationships.”

Masha and her ten day health retreat in a grand, secluded house promise to transform the lives of these five women and the four men in the group. (I note at this point the novel is called Nine Perfect Stangers, though there is one couple and one family in the mix so technically they’re not all prefect strangers to one another, but let’s let that slide…) And they do get a kind of transformation, by unexpected and unpleasant means. I expected a murder at some point and was both relieved and mildly disappointed when Moriarty didn’t go down that particularly well-trodden path.

As always with Moriarty’s books, her female characters are better drawn than her male characters but she possesses an undeniable genius for nailing a character in a couple of short sentences, demonstrating the prejudices of those who are judging as well as see those being judged. On first encountering Tony by the roadside Frances notes he is “a very large, unpleasant, unkempt, unshaven man…probably one of those outback serial killers.” The ridiculously handsome Lars, a rich, pleasure-loving lawyer, later notes Heather’s husband is “adorably addled…, a long celery stick of a man, so dorky he was cool. His name was Napoleon, which just added to his marvellousness.” All of her characters get a decent backstory and though Masha’s feels contrived, some of them are genuinely affecting, like the horror and incomprehension of a son/brother’s suicide. The book does get a bit ridiculously dramatic and hysterical in the middle, though. You might, like me, feel almost like writing it off and then find yourself getting unexpectedly teary at the end.

There must be a lot for pressure on Moriarty to produce the next Big Little Lies. Unfortunately this isn’t it. Her best work, like Big Little Lies and What Alice Forgot, are about women who could be us (though with slightly bigger houses), going about their (slightly more dramatic) lives. This novel is far removed from that: it feels unrealistic in the middle and suffers from one too many happy endings.

Still worth a read though. There’s no writer quite like Liane.

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