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Once the plans begin coming together, Archer’s skill becomes much more apparent. He moves between the people involved, supplies enough information to invite speculation and keeps the practical questions interesting. I wanted to know how the scheme would work, where it would go wrong and which person had underestimated someone else. That curiosity carried me through the later sections very happily.

A woman living in a giant cowboy boot is a fairly good invitation to pick up a novel. Add a housing crisis and a mysterious keymaker and I’m more than curious. Emily Hunt Kivel’s Dwelling takes that unlikely combination surprisingly far, although I did wish it would get moving a little sooner.

Meg Mason takes that familiar feeling considerably further in Sophie, Standing There, and there's plenty here for book lovers to recognise, perhaps with a little embarrassment.

Molly Walker has already had to rebuild her life once. Asking her to do it again gives The Witness an emotional weight that kept me interested even when the investigation took its time getting anywhere.

Maisie is comfortable taking her clothes off in a room full of people holding pencils. Feeling secure in a relationship is considerably harder. I liked that contradiction in Emily Lighezzolo’s Life Drawing, because it gives us a woman whose apparent confidence tells us very little about how she feels about herself.

More than a century later, journalist Abigail Foster joins an expedition to the deserted Colorado mining town with her father, historian Lawrence Kendall. He left her when she was a child, so a remote wilderness trip is hardly the easiest setting for their reunion. Two guides and a couple interested in paranormal investigation accompany them. With a storm approaching and civilisation a long way off, their search for answers becomes increasingly dangerous.

I have a lot of time for Richard Sharpe. Give him a handful of riflemen, an impossible assignment and a French fort to take, and I’m usually happy to follow him into trouble. Sharpe’s Command gives him all three. Set in Spain in 1812, it sends Sharpe to inspect the defences around a vital bridge over the River Tagus. Two French armies could join forces if the crossing remains open, and Sharpe soon decides that merely reporting what he finds won’t be enough.

Michelle Wright gradually takes us back through Cookie’s life as he tries to find Good Boy somewhere safe. His mother left when he was small, his father was cruel and neglectful, and school offered him little relief. Mrs Mitten, who saw something worthwhile in him, is one of the people I kept thinking about. She paid attention when it would have been easier to write him off.

Mick Woods and Drew Lovelock have enough trouble making a living as musicians before a gig in Rockhampton ends with their arrest. Soon they’re in prison, their manager has disappeared, and they’ve discovered that the car they’ve been touring in is stolen. Their decision to escape might be understandable. Whether either of them has thought through what comes next is another matter.

Ruby was the reason this book worked so well for me. She’s observant and outspoken, but she isn’t oblivious to the effect her words have on other people. She wants to be herself and still be loved by her father. That vulnerability gives weight to a story full of pranks, disguises and increasingly improbable events.

As someone who has worked in the beauty industry for most of my adult life, I know that there's something soothing about a skincare routine. The familiar order of cleanser, serum, moisturiser and oil can feel less like vanity than a small act of control. The promises printed on the bottles are wonderfully specific: brighter skin, softened lines, renewed firmness, visible transformation. Use this product for long enough and a better version of your face, and perhaps your life,

She's charismatic and spontaneous with an ability to make an ordinary afternoon feel like an event. She's also unreliable and frequently selfish. Her presence fills every room while the people closest to her are left dealing with whatever she's neglected on the way through.

After five books, the repetition is finally bothering me. Every visitor is given the same rules, every cup of coffee creates the same countdown and every story is shaped towards a final emotional revelation. Even the characters’ hesitations and the explanations surrounding the journey have begun to feel overly familiar. I understand that repetition is part of the café’s ritual, but I'm now too aware of the construction underneath each story.

Returning to Café Funiculi Funicula for the fourth time felt much like visiting a familiar local cafe (without the time travel). I knew the dim underground ambience, the mysterious woman reading in the special chair and the rules governing every journey to the past.

My main reservation, again, is the repetition. By this point in the series, I know the rules of the café extremely well. I knew them by the second explanation in this book, yet they continue to be restated. The same is true of the emotional structure. A visitor arrives carrying grief or regret. A meeting reveals information they didn't previously understand. The facts remain the same, but the visitor comes back able to face life differently.

Most time-travel fiction is concerned with consequences. A character changes one detail in the past and returns to discover an different present, but Kawaguchi removes that possibility entirely.

Grace is a freshman who's spending Friday night alone with an action film. She's intelligent, adorably awkward and has a tendency to fill nervous silences with anything that happens to enter her head. Logan ends up deciding to stay and watch the film with her, and the unexpected evening soon grows into something much more physical.

Garrett’s father, Phil Graham, is a hockey legend whose public reputation hides years of physical and emotional abuse. Garrett grew up watching Phil assault his mother and later became another of his father's targets.

Kelsier is a thief, a prison escapee, and a survivor of the Pits of Hathsin, and he assembles a crew to overthrow the Lord Ruler. Kelsier presents the enterprise as the most important purpose of their lives: destabilise the noble houses, cripple the imperial economy, raise a skaa army and remove a ruler widely believed to be a god.

Dianne Yarwood’s debut novel The Wakes takes several subjects that should make for sombre reading and turns them into something warm, funny and reassuring. Death is never far from the story, but this isn't a novel preoccupied with dying. It's actually interested in the people left behind and the choices they make once loss has forced them to reconsider how they're living.

After six volumes of friendship, first love, family conflict, mental illness and queer self-discovery, Alice Oseman brings Nick and Charlie’s school years to a close in this last book, which is a gentle and reassuring conclusion, filled with the affection and emotional openness that have defined the series from its beginning.

Readers deeply invested in Nick and Charlie will probably enjoy returning to their gentle world because their affection remains convincing, and their future matters because the previous volumes have made them so easy to care about. This instalment offers a comforting visit and an important stage in their development, but it again feels more like a bridge towards the conclusion than one of the series’ defining volumes.

Moving on in the series, volume four takes us beyond Nick and Charlie's nervous exchanges and affection into much more complicated territory.

Alice Oseman sends the boys and their friends to Paris for a school trip filled with sightseeing, birthday celebrations, romantic tension and very little privacy. It's an ideal setting for a young romance, and it's also the place where the problems they've been quietly carrying become harder to hide.

At the same time, Nick and Charlie begin navigating their first relationship through private kisses, nervous text messages, a birthday celebration and a day at the beach. Their happiness is genuine, but so is the pressure created by secrecy. Nick wants to be with Charlie but remains terrified of being seen, especially by the rugby players with whom he's spent much of his school life.

Adjusting to that form took me a little time, but Alice Oseman made the transition remarkably easy. Nick Nelson and Charlie Spring are immediately likeable, their developing friendship is genuinely lovely, and the nervous uncertainty of first love is captured through small gestures that feel completely disproportionate only until we remember what it was like to experience them ourselves.

Early on, I wasn't at all sure that Touch Grass was going to be for me. For a considerable portion of the novel, I struggled to find my way into it. Mary Colussi drops us into a strange near-future world without offering much assistance or explanation.

Danny’s mother, Diane, is a deeply important figure in Caro’s life. She gives Caro the affection and attention she craves from her own mother, Ines, whose work regularly keeps her away from home. When Diane becomes ill and dies, Caro loses the woman she's come to regard as a second mother. She doesn't know how to claim that grief when Danny has lost his actual mother, so she pushes her own pain aside and concentrates on taking care of him.

Odysseus himself doesn't appear until Book Five, when we find him trapped on Calypso’s island. She offers him comfort, beauty and immortality, but he still longs for home. Eventually released, he reaches the Phaeacians and tells them the story of everything that's happened to him.

Gregory David Roberts creates an extraordinary sense of place. The heat, traffic, monsoon rain, food, poverty and constant press of humanity make Bombay feel less like the setting of the novel than its most commanding character. When Lin is walking through its streets with Prabaker, living among the residents of the slum or trying to understand the customs of Prabaker’s village, the book has an energy and warmth that explains why it's remained so important to so many readers.

Ayesha Inoon’s The Sisters of Serendib begins with a family torn apart before its youngest members are old enough to understand what they've lost. In 1990, three sisters flee war-torn Sri Lanka with their mother aboard a boat bound for Australia. When their mother dies during the journey, Janu, Samar and Maryam are separated and raised by different families across the country.

Even his attempts to speak Kikongo become acts of accidental violence. Nathan believes he's declaring that Jesus is precious, but his incorrect pronunciation transforms the phrase into the assertion that Jesus is poisonwood, which is a plant capable of causing intense pain.

Gambling also extends beyond the illegal parties. Tyler approaches people as though they're cards to be counted and risks to be calculated. He believes that with enough information, he can predict every response. Stella, Blake, Meg, Richard, and even Tyler himself ultimately refuse to behave according to his calculations.

Navessa Allen’s Lights Out succeeded because it understood precisely what it wanted to be.

Richard arrives at Hampden College in Vermont after an unhappy childhood in California. His parents are neither wealthy nor particularly interested in him, and he's already learned that the truth about his life won't take him where he wants to go. He begins reinventing himself almost immediately.

Aria’s friendship with Calliope and Flitter gives this story its emotional depth. Their experiences expose the machinery beneath Hollywood’s dream factory, where beauty is treated as currency and a young woman’s career can depend upon how much of herself she's prepared, or pressured to surrender. Bob Ashenhurst, the self-appointed King of Hollywood, is the clearest face of that corruption. His power rests upon more than his own behaviour.

As winter deepens and the fishermen return with empty nets, fear begins to consume the isolated community. Selkies, strangers and women who refuse to behave as they should all become convenient objects of suspicion. Malie has to contend not only with the mystery of her mother’s disappearance but with an increasingly dangerous husband and a society structured to protect his authority rather than her safety.

Grotesque escalation can produce horror, but repeated extremity eventually flattens feeling. Once every doorway leads to another atrocity, atrocity becomes expectation. The reader might continue because the solution remains tantalising, yet the emotional response is narrowed to shock.

A white bird sits inside a black and thorny tree. Five drawings left by a woman who died during childbirth form a hidden image when placed together. A young boy covers part of his picture in heavy black strokes. A murdered art teacher leaves behind a landscape that appears to record his final moments.

My youngest daughter assured me I would love Strange Houses. After all, she knows me! Knows I love a good mystery.

Marillier has described Stasya as a character she views as being on the autism spectrum, although the world of the novel doesn't have any language through which to identify her in those terms. This understanding gives particular weight to Stasya’s isolation and to the assumptions other people make about her. Her difference is never treated as a flaw awaiting correction.

Abby Jimenez seems to understand that falling in love is rarely the most complicated part of a relationship. The best romance writers are interested in everything that makes love difficult to act upon: illness, grief, family obligation, financial pressure, bad timing and the habits people develop while trying to survive. In The Night We Met, Jimenez adds loyalty to that list, then asks how noble loyalty remains when protecting one person begins to harm everyone else.

Set against the cold, deserted landscape of Belport Island, the novel alternates between Kate, whose husband fails to return from a supposed medical conference, and Abby, whose ordinarily dependable husband has begun behaving suspiciously. White creates tension through accumulating inconsistencies rather than constant action: unexplained absences, discarded clothing, carefully maintained lies and the unnerving possibility that neither woman truly knows the man she married.

Rose Talisman was once a celebrated television therapist in Los Angeles. Her programme made her famous for helping other people confront their pain, until an incident destroyed her career and turned her into the subject of the kind of public scrutiny she once directed towards others.

Each tag insists that he existed in a world determined not to notice boys like him. The city can paint over the letters, but for a brief moment he's left something behind. He's occupied space, and he's made himself visible.

Kathy Lette’s The Sisterhood Rules is a loud, bawdy and surprisingly tender novel about twin sisters separated by a betrayal neither has managed to escape.

Declan’s strongest material lies outside the romance. His father has spent years treating football success as both destiny and obligation. Declan’s identity becomes inseparable from athletic achievement, public admiration and the belief that he must reach the NFL to justify everyone’s investment in him.

Onyx Storm is the first Empyrean novel that convinced me Rebecca Yarros had moved beyond the sheer momentum of her premise and begun exploring the more interesting possibilities within the world she created.

Anthea Hodgson’s The Palace of Lost Virtue begins with one woman believing she's been called to save another.