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.

Ann Le Lievre is reading Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life by Jonathan Bate

This is an insightful, engaging book. It was happily residing in the middle of a pile of fabulous new October releases, but when I saw it had been shortlisted for the 2015 Samuel Johnson Prize, it made a sudden leap to the top! And just holding the book, I knew I was in good hands. This biography is beautifully produced – I love that it is a hardcover, that it has the perfect font for a long read (it certainly will be at 650 pages), and that the reader is assaulted with luscious art upon opening (the endpapers depict a detail from the work of Frieda Hughes, Hughes’s daughter with Sylvia Plath).

The story itself starts with the obligatory childhood setting, however this depiction of early family life is not at all boring. I was immediately captivated by Hughes’s connection with the outdoors and adventure, with nature and animals, and learning about how he became driven to express his love of nature and family in poetry. I am marking so many pages while I read thanks to passages like this: “Like an animal, a living poem depends on its senses: words that live. It is as if there is a sprite, a goblin, in the word, which is its life and its poetry, and it is this goblin which the poet has to have under control.”

Yes, I am in very good hands.

Alan Vaarwerk is reading Young Skins by Colin Barrett

This book was recommended to me by a friend last week, and I pretty much bought it on the spot. Largely flying under the radar in Australia since its low-key release in December 2014, Young Skins has garnered a lot of critical attention elsewhere, winning the Guardian First Book Award and the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award – the Big One in the world of short fiction.

The stories are all centred around Glanbeigh, a fictional small town in rural Ireland and its disaffected young inhabitants – boy racers, small-time criminals and petrol station attendants – that feels archetypal of so many dying regional towns, including in Australia. From what I’ve read so far, Barrett’s writing smashes together modern realism with the pastoral and folkloric in a style which echoes the American short fiction masters as much as the lyrical Irish novelists that came before him. Young Skins so far seems the sort of collection I could revisit regularly, each time finding new routes through the streets of Glanbeigh.

Bronte Coates is reading Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff

Fates and Furies is one of the funnest adult fiction books I’ve read all year. A kind of literary version of Gone Girl, this is the story of the marriage between Lotto and Mathilde – the first section (‘Fates’) is from Lotto’s perspective until a shifting focus reveals Mathilde’s perspective in the second section (‘Furies’). Groff is a gorgeously imaginative writer, and she has a keen sense of empathy and understanding for her characters that gives the book depth, even as the plot veers into soap opera territory. (I actually rather enjoyed this aspect of the novel after the starkly, bleakly, realist novels that have been in the spotlight recently.) As with Gone Girl, the central question of this novel is about marriage and what it means to be part of one.

Alison Huber is reading Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl by Carrie Brownstein

I’ve been looking forward to getting my hands on this memoir since I heard about it earlier this year, and I was lucky enough to get an advance proof of it yesterday (it’s due to arrive in stores in November). I’ve started it, and I’m all in.

Carrie Brownstein might be known to many from Portlandia, but before that she was part of the hugely influential 90s band, Sleater-Kinney. Hunger is her memoir of growing up and family, and about finding her identity in the burgeoning riot grrrl scene in the Pacific Northwest of the USA. It can be hard to write about music and what it means to you, particularly when it intersects with memory and nostalgia; it’s so easy for it to slip into the sentimental, or the well-worn tropes embedded in the phrases ‘the good old days’ and ‘you had to be there’. But Brownstein’s memoir falls into none of these cliché traps and is a book to read even if you don’t believe there were any good old days and/or you weren’t there.

So far, I am totally in love with this book and Brownstein’s wonderful ability to capture the ways that the stuff of popular culture shapes our lives.

Chris Gordon is reading The Women’s Pages by Debra Adelaide

I’ve been fortunate enough to gain access to an early copy of Debra Adelaide’s The Women’s Pages and I’m looking forward to other people reading it so I can talk to them about the hidden messages tucked away in this novel. Similarly to Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life, this innovative novel takes you forwards and backwards, across time and experiences, and it is a heartbreak and a joy to read all at once. The story celebrates motherhood and other shared memories of women, imagined or not, and presents three generations of women within the context of our own collective imagination. Adelaide’s writing is accurate and damning and this is a superb novel – I was sad to finish the last page.

Holly Harper is reading First Test by Tamora Pierce

No author holds a place in my heart quite like Tamora Pierce. When I was eleven I’d devour her tales of mages who could speak to animals and girls who dressed like boys to train as knights. But somehow I never got around to reading her Protector of the Small series. When a colleague of mine (who has an equally big place in her heart for Tamora) discovered this, she shoved the first book in my hands and ordered me to read. I’m so glad she did, because now that I’m working my way through the rest of the series, I’m reminded exactly why Tamora Pierce was such a huge part of my tween years.

In book one, First Test, Kel becomes the first girl to legally train as a knight in Tortall, and despite the overwhelming odds she faces from those who believe a female has no business wielding a sword, she triumphs time and time again. These are the books that really made me fall in love with reading when I was a kid, and it’s wonderful to know that my feelings haven’t dimmed over the years.

Stella Charls is reading Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill

I’m pretty late to the party, but I am pleased to announce that I’ve fallen head-over-heels in love with Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation. This gorgeously designed little book (in both paperback and hardback) has sat next to my bed for over a year, and now that I’ve finally finished it I can safely say that it’s the best thing I’ve read in recent memory. If I’d initially read it when I first bought it all those months ago, I feel like I would have made the time to read it another handful of times by now.

Dept. of Speculation is a difficult book to define and I think critic James Wood said it perfectly in his review for the New Yorker: “It’s a novel that’s wonderfully hard to encapsulate, because it faces in many directions at the same time, and glitters with different emotional colors. If it is a distressed account of a marriage in distress, it is also a poem in praise of the married state… It is often extremely funny, and often painful; earnestly direct but glancingly ironic, even whimsical.”

I could go on and on about why I adore Dept. of Speculation. I urge you to read this dazzling book for yourself – and give a copy to a friend so that you have someone to discuss it with afterwards!