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.

Alexandra Mathew is reading Laurinda by Alice Pung

I wish I’d read Alice Pung’s Laurinda eleven years ago when I was still sixteen and trying to navigate the roller coaster of emotions experienced during year ten. Although my high school was a veritable paradise compared to the setting of the novel, Pung has a knack for describing the all-too-familiar hierarchies of teenage friendships, and the silent power a group of confident sixteen-year-olds can wield. The protagonist Lucy Lam is strong and intelligent, and through her eyes we experience no-frills home life in the mythical west Melbourne suburb of Stanley, and the privilege, wealth and prestige of Melbourne’s No. 1 Ladies College.

While Laurinda is aimed primarily at teenagers, Pung’s beautiful writing is accessible to an adult readership, and will resonate with anyone who, at some point in his or her life, has ever tried to simply fit in.

Elke Power is reading Karen Joy Fowler and Adelle Waldman

My current reading forms a list of ‘at lasts’. After darting off on other reading missions, I finally had the chance to go back to Adelle Waldman’s hilarious work of social commentary, The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., which I then read in one sitting. Needless to say, I loved it. Rather than explaining what it is about, I urge you to read Belle Place’s excellent review of the book here or to jump right in and read the book yourself if you enjoy prose so entertaining, realistic and slyly cutting that it makes you squirm even as you laugh.

I’m now in the thick of Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves which Nina recommended to me earlier this year and, as she predicted, I am thoroughly enjoying.

Nina Kenwood is reading Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng

I picked this book up thinking it was a literary crime or mystery novel. The premise – a fifteen-year-old Chinese-American girl goes missing and her body is found in the local lake – made me think a little of Serial (okay, that’s probably just because I’m obsessed with Serial). I was prepared to enjoy a slow-burn who-dunnit. But that’s not what this novel is about at all, really. How Lydia died is less important than why, and who she was before her death.

Everything I Never Told You is the story of a family. It moves expertly from character to character, capturing their inner frustrations, their yearnings and their desires to be someone other than who they are. It’s also a fascinating examination of race. The novel is set in small-town America in the 1970s, and the author Celeste Ng says in a recent interview that she drew on her own experiences of racism.

I had tears streaming down my face reading the last two chapters of this book. It’s a heartbreaking novel, but well worth the read.

Fiona Hardy is reading Acute Misfortune: The Life and Death of Adam Cullen by Erik Jensen

My knowledge of the art world is fairly limited – I know that Manet is not a Monet typo, but that’s about it. I hadn’t heard of Adam Cullen before this book came out (I had heard of its author Erik Jensen, the editor of The Saturday Paper) but I was about ready to dive into some non-fiction and it really is a beautifully packaged book.

This is the story of an artist whose edginess transcends his work and affects his own life via frequent terrible decisions about his own health and that of those around him. Jensen, initially under the impression that he is a biographer on behalf of Thames & Hudson, is one of the people who finds himself privy to Cullen’s insecurities, talents and destructive behaviour, but most of the book rings with an admirable sense of distance. Jensen’s strength of pacing is highly effective, as we are drawn through neatly sculpted stories of Cullen’s life, up to his death.