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.

Fiona Hardy is reading (and rereading!) Flora and the Penguin by Molly Idle

I have a stack of work to do at the moment so I am sadly in-between books. However, I have read one stand-out title recently and not just once, but over and over again.

A Christmas gift from a friend to my two-and-a-half-year-old, Flora and the Penguin is divinely illustrated – all soft colours and lines and gentle shading, with a Disney edge that really makes it pop, and has little flaps to lift. The book is completely wordless so you get to tell your own story about the friendship between the ice-skating Flora and the penguin who comes out of the ice to dance with her.

My daughter completely adores this story and the way it changes with every telling. Sometimes, she reads it to us and sometimes I walk past her room and get the thrill of hearing her tiny, excited voice as she reads the book to herself. The gift was a complete winner this Christmas and I’ve already bullied my friend into promising Flora and the Flamingo for my daughter’s birthday later in the year.

Robbie Egan recently watched Under The Skin

Under The Skin is Jonathan Glazer’s adaptation of Michel Faber’s brilliant novel. I read Faber’s book about 15 years ago and it has stayed with me in a way only great books do.

Glazer does not follow the novel directly, limiting the dialogue to snippets and declining to foreshadow entirely. The result is an experience both gripping and unsettling, in great part due to the swarming insistency of Mica Levi’s soundtrack. Scarlett Johansson is the cold and eerie focus of the film, cruising a damp and windswept Scotland in search of men. This is a remarkably well-made film, a kind of horror without the horror, a strange nightmare swirling in the Scottish mist. Trust me on this one, it’s awesome.

Mark Rubbo is reading The Snow Kimono by Mark Henshaw

I’ve just finished The Snow Kimono by Mark Henshaw. It’s truly remarkable book set in Paris, Japan and Algiers and Henshaw is an accomplished storyteller with a very unique style. The unconventional narrative is utterly compelling and fascinating. I knocked it off in a day – literally couldn’t put it down. If you like Coetzee or Murakami, this is a book for you.

Amy Vuleta is reading The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

I’ve often found that to fully appreciate the scope of these grand, lengthy epics of modern American experience (see Jonathan Franzen, Michael Chabon, A.M. Homes, Jess Walter), I’ll need some dedicated, uninterrupted reading time. These lovely days off around the Christmas and New Year period have provided just that and I’m really enjoying sinking my teeth into Tartt’s latest novel.

The narrator is Theo, a thirteen-year-old New Yorker, whose life is irreversibly changed one day as he and his mother are killing time in an art gallery. What follows is the steady, excruciating unfolding of his young life as it is pushed unceremoniously off the rails. Tartt’s writing perfectly expresses the angst and building tension of this character’s slowly unravelling sense of security in the world. He is wrenched and buffeted by circumstance and ambivalent adults. I’m about one third of the way into this book and frankly, quite worried about what will become of him!

After I finish The Goldfinch, I’ll be moving on to Michael Faber’s new novel The Book of Strange New Things. Like Robbie, I recently watched the film adaptation of Faber’s Under the Skin and have not been able to stop thinking about it since. I loved the film first for its cinematographic style, and second, increasingly, for the sparseness of information about exactly what was going on in the greater narrative. There has been a lot of buzz around The Book of Strange New Things so I can’t wait to get stuck into it as well.