Daniel Handler isn’t quite as famous as Lemony Snicket. The Unfortunate Series of Events series catapulted the Snicket name into the upper-echelons of literary stardom. The series became one of the most popular among children, bazillions of the books were sold and an unfortunate (snap) movie was even made.

All the while the man behind the Snicket pseudonym – Daniel Handler – published three books under his own name (The Basic Eight, Watch Your Mouth and Adverbs) none of which were received nearly as well. There was just something more appealing about Lemony Snicket. Even his picture books like The Composer Is Dead and even his piece supporting the Occupy Wall Street movement had a certain flair that ‘Daniel Handler’ had never quite captured. Happily, this changes with Handler’s first Young Adult novel - Why We Broke Up.

Min Green has recently broken up with Ed Slaterton, co-captain of the school basketball team. In a grandiose act of closure she dumps a letter and a big box on Ed’s front porch. The box contains a mix of eclectic objects – each one a piece of memorabilia from their relationship – bottle caps from the beers they drank on first meeting (as seen below), a movie stub from their first date, stolen sugar from a favourite café and more. Each chapter revolves around an object – each of which is gorgeously portrayed in full colour by illustrator Maira Kalman. The book is Min’s letter to Ed, a catalogue of their time together and reasons for the breakup – although you’ll have to wait till book’s end to find out how things really ended.

Min’s narration is kind of jarring on first read, with strange sentence constructions and phrasings, but it has a wonderful rhythm to it and once you’re in with it, you stay in. The more you bounce along with Min’s rhythm, the more it becomes apparent that Handler has crafted the beautifully honest voice of someone recovering from the peaks and valleys of first-time love.

There’s much to relate to in Why We Broke Up: the falling for the wrong person, the euphoria of new love, the friends and family members who aren’t yours but must be navigated anyway and the awfulness of a break-up that happens suddenly, even though it has been coming for some time. And yet, for the most part, relationship clichés are avoided. Ed wants the relationship to exist in and around his basketball life, but Min has other ideas and ensures they do other things together too - like stalking an old woman who may or may not be a movie star from yesteryear and making a miniature igloo from cubed eggs and stolen sugar.

Lemony Snicket found his groove long ago. Reading Why We Broke Up it is clear that Daniel Handler has now found his. This novel just feels right. And while the spoiler is in the book's title (they break up), Handler's meditation on and dissection of a relationship is equal parts heartbreaking, heartwarming, ugly and beautiful. Which again, feels exactly right.

As an avid reader of YA books, I was desperate for something new and fresh. I’ve read my fair share of vampire romance, dystopian conflicts and fantasy fiction. The Fault in our Stars, is the new novel by John Green and there is nothing supernatural featured within its pages. This book touches on sensitive subjects and it will definitely take you on an emotional rollercoaster.

Sixteen year old Hazel Grace has spent most of her life battling a terminal illness. The experimental and fictional wonder drug called Phalanxifor has managed to buy her some time though no one is certain how long she has left. Hoping to lessen the pain of her death on her parents, Hazel retreats from those who are present in her life. Fearing she is entering into a deep state of depression, her parents insist she attend a support group specifically for those who are suffering or have suffered from cancer. It is here she meets Augustus Waters, an attractive and intelligent cancer survivor with a prosthetic leg. His attraction for Hazel is instant and the two form a deep friendship over books, in particular Hazel’s favourite, An Imperial Affliction. A book that tells the story of a young girl who has leukaemia. Both Hazel and Augustus are drawn to the novel for its real depiction of one’s suffering. The only problem is the book ends midsentence and the need to know what happens to their favourite characters sees them travel to Holland in search of the author.

The Fault in our Stars is a bittersweet novel. It is about life and death but more importantly it is about having hope during the darkest times. This beautifully constructed book will make you laugh and it will make you cry.

In 1738 French inventor Jacques de Vaucanson built a robotic duck that ate grain, which went through a ‘digestive’ system and produced faeces at the other end. Peter Carey uses meticulous research in this story about love and devotion, set in contemporary London and the nineteenth-century German clock-making town of Furtwangen. The idea of de Vaucanson’s duck is a starting point for this wonderful and poignant novel. More than any other novelist, Carey has the ability to refashion bits of reality to create a truly original and compelling work. As a reader, I derive great pleasure from hunting out those clues.

For 13 years, Catherine Gehrig, horological conservator at the Swinburne Museum, and her colleague, Matthew Tindall, Curator of Metals, had conducted a secret affair of snatched weekends in Suffolk and secret emails (‘I kiss your toes’). Their affair was known only to Catherine’s boss, Eric Croft, the Head Curator of Horology, who encouraged it. When Matthew dies suddenly, Catherine is denied the public rituals of death, and Eric organises for her to work on a project in an annex of the museum away from public view.

The project is the restoration of an ancient automaton, its parts packed randomly in old tea chests. In one of the chests she finds some old journals that give her a key to the nature of their contents. The journals belonged to Henry Brandling, an heir to the Brandling railway company. Henry’s first-born had died and when his second son also appeared sickly, his wife had ‘dared not love the little chap’. Henry would not abandon his little Percy and embraced all manner of treatments enthusiastically; when the London Illustrated News reproduced the plans for de Vaucanson’s duck, it aroused such delight in young Percy that Henry determined that he should have one, travelling to Germany with the plans to commission the finest clockmaker to build him the Digesting Duck. In Karlsruhe, he meets a mysterious stranger, Herr Sumper, who speaks English with an East London accent and agrees to make the duck for him. But Sumper, the former apprentice to the English inventor Albert Cruickshank, who had been commissioned by Prince Albert to build a machine that could calculate and reproduce Admiralty tables, had other things in mind. He would use Henry’s money to produce a silver swan, so cleverly and ingeniously made that it would be a fitting tribute to Cruickshank’s legacy.

As Catherine reads through these journals, Henry’s obsession and his arguments with Sumper become her obsession as she and her assistant, Amanda, a young graduate planted by Eric to keep an eye on her, painstakingly restore the swan. For Eric, the beauty and ingenuity of the swan will seduce the ‘loots and suits’ to give money to support the museum in the new philistine age. As the work progresses, Catherine’s grief becomes more real and more manageable. Carey’s tortured Catherine is one his greatest characters.

The Chemistry of Tears has all of Carey’s fabulist trademarks, while at the same time examining the nature of love and grief in a unique and compassionate way: Catherine’s secret relationship with Matthew consumed her, but when he died her love could not be acknowledged; Henry’s love for his son blinded him to other relationships and experiences. It’s a deeply satisfying book on many levels.

Mark Rubbo is the Managing Director of Readings

‘Australia Fair Lookout. Introspection strictly forbidden,’ reads a favourite Leunig cartoon of mine. I thought of this when reading Michael Sala’s fine debut novel, The Last Thread, for in it he summons a degree of self-examination which our culture is certainly not noted for, and (until J.M. Coetzee arrived on our shores, perhaps) is likewise none too common in Australian letters. Sala, for whom the move to Australia in the 1980s – as a young boy only on the cusp of understanding – was a significant and traumatic upheaval, clearly experienced a turn within almost from the beginning. This book, all these years later, is perhaps the reckoning (one can’t say ‘working out’) he had to have.

The book’s narrative arc is straightforward enough: the dimly remembered early childhood in 1970s Holland of Michaelis/Michael, from whose perspective the story is told, and his older brother Con; their emigration to Oz with their mum and stepdad; a return visit, maybe for good; but then back to Australia, and a hardscrabble upbringing literally at the hands of their stepdad, Dirk, and their Holocaust-obsessed (and in her life-choices seemingly masochistic!) mother Nici.

But I would caution against reading The Last Thread too much in the autobiographical vein. For all we know, everything that happens in the book (and be warned, there are some squeamish moments) happened ‘in reality’, exactly as described; but the fashioning of a self is always about perspectives, about the stories that we tell ourselves and those that are told to us. And it is here where Sala’s storytelling gifts are everywhere on display: from his astonishingly sensitive, steady gaze as young Michaelis tries to process and understand his fissured world, to the vivid tableaux he conjures of the misty Dutch countryside, or the wild lonely seas of Australia’s east coast, or the many and varied faces of the city of Newcastle.

By the end I almost wanted to look away. But as W.G. Sebald has written, ‘the description of misfortune contains within itself the possibility of its overcoming’. This tale could never be written dispassionately – the emotions are too raw, the sadness too heavy – but the filaments of hope that bind and sustain are also everywhere present. The Last Thread is a gutsy, moving, beautifully wrought and utterly compelling work by Sala – a hymn to love that I don’t think will be forgotten by any reader.

Martin Shaw, Readings’ Books Division Manager, is what they call a 'career bookseller', which might be an interesting concept as the world turns 'E'. Formerly an avid fiction reader, now 'Jolly Jumper' supervisor to an adorable 7-month-old. Follow him on twitter - @thebooksdesk

Peter Twohig’s Melbourne is a sinister city of laneways, hideouts, secrets, and deserted tram yards crammed with adventure. From his protagonist’s home in 1950s Richmond, to South Melbourne, Windsor, Moonee Valley and Caulfield, he harnesses the city’s pulsating energy and turns it from mere setting into main character. His grasp of the place is beyond spectacular. Our journey comes via the 11-year-old narrator (enigmatically known to the reader as ‘T’). He takes us the back way, through the drainage system and the underground railway, illegally riding trams and stumbling upon grenades left over from the war.

Like young Harriet in Donna Tartt’s The Little Friend and nine-year-old Oskar in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, our narrator is on a quest, having suffered the death of a close family member (his twin brother Tom). But unlike the characters in those novels, whose missions are explicit (however misguided), our boy’s only purpose is to map his surroundings. Along the way, he stumbles upon adventure after adventure, which, rather unbelievably, all connect. We’re constantly left with the frustrating feeling that we’re looking through the eyes of an unreliable witness. First he’s scared of dogs, then he loves them. Names of people and streets subtly change (Kipling Lane becomes Kipling Street, Mollie becomes Molly.) It’s a comment on all first-person narratives and the trust we as readers must place in them.

We’re left to try to ponder this while the novel moves at a pace that would prompt smart loss of driver’s licence, were it a car. The tone is almost manic and becomes exhausting after a time. This is perhaps the point, as the Cartographer (the narrator’s superhero alter-ego) attempts to suppress his guilt and grief. In places, Twohig’s writing is overdone and clichéd, but the depth of plot saves it. It’s a fascinating debut that leaves the reader with myriad questions to muse upon, long after the last page is turned.

Amy Roil blogs as The Book Witch

The indomitable Martin Shaw handed me this book saying, ‘You should review this. It’s right up your alley.’ With this recommendation, he was spot on. Those in art historical and gallery/museum circles will surely recognise the name. Now based in Sydney, Candice Bruce is a well-respected art historian and curator, specialising in nineteenth century Australian Art. She is particularly well known in my other workplace (the NGV) as an expert on Eugene von Guerard.

As a first novel, The Longing is an impressive foray into literary fiction. Bruce deftly weaves concurrent narratives crossing time, culture and history around the central theme of loss. Isolated and struggling in her situation as housewife to a wealthy pastoralist she does not love, Ellis MacRorie is sent a young Gundtjimara woman, Leerpeen Weelan, as a housemaid. Leerpeen, witness to unspeakable acts of violence from colonialists, grapples with the loss of her family, tribal group and place. Ellis and Leerpeen, or Louisa as she is known throughout the book, gradually bond, and give strength to one another over their common grief. Both women stand out with strong writing from Bruce. The arrival of the American landscape painter Sandford P. Hart to the rural Victorian estate offers both women a distraction from their ennui, with the outcomes of their interactions with Hart leaving legacies which are separately devastating and exciting. More than a century later, it is NGV curatorial assistant Cornelia who brings one of these to light!

If you’re an aficionado of Australian art history or a keen gallery goer, or just simply on the lookout for a decent read with good writing and plot, then this is the book for you. I’m sure we’ll be reading more by Candice Bruce in the near future.

Julia Jackson is from Readings Carlton

American Dervish is the first novel from Ayad Akhtar, a Pakistani-American screenwriter and actor. Akhtar tells the story of Hayat, a young boy from a culturally Muslim family growing up in Wisconsin in the 1980s.When the beautiful and intelligent Mina comes to live with them, Hayat’s world is dramatically changed. While neither of his parents are devoutly religious, the family identifies culturally with Islam. Mina gives Hayat his first Quran and they begin to study the text together. He experiences a religious awakening of sorts which will have both wondrous and disastrous consequences for him and his family.

The novel is set in the 1980s because Akhtar was interested in depicting ‘a time before the world had politicised being Muslim’. This is an interesting approach and I think quite successful up to a point. Disappointingly however some of the characters will only reinforce Western stereotypes, particularly of Muslim men. Akhtar’s writing is clearly inspired by his filmmaking background; he cites Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese as influences. The prose is very visual and the pace and structure of the novel have a certain filmic quality. Unfortunately, the characters can also feel like actors at times, more caricatures than real people.

In the preface, Akthar writes that he ‘wanted to write a book that gave the American audience a felt sense of what it was like to grow up Muslim in America’. American Dervish is certainly interesting in this regard, and Hayat’s story vividly addresses the question of what it means to be both Muslim and Western.

Kara Nicholson is from Readings Carlton