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.

Nina Kenwood is reading Vendela Vida and Lauren Groff.

President Obama has just revealed his favourite book of the year to be Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies (which is also one of our top ten fiction books of the year), so it seems a relevant time for me to mention I recently read and enjoyed this novel. Fates and Furies is the story of a marriage told from two perspectives (his, and then hers), and it’s a fascinating character study of two people and their very different views of the world, and of their own relationship. If you are looking for a summer read that’s a juicy, literary page-turner, this is an excellent choice.

I also read this week Vendela Vida’s The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty, another terrific novel that is a juicy, literary page-turner. I think the less you know about this sharp, twisty tale, the better. I would go as far as saying don’t even read the blurb on the back of the book. All you need to know is this: it’s the story of a woman who travels to Morocco and has her backpack stolen upon arrival – a bag which contains her wallet, money, passport and pretty much everything of necessity and value to her.

I really loved The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty – I read it over the course of a weekend, and each time I returned to the book, I was never sure where it was going, but I was always excited to be there.

Amy Vuleta is reading The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith

I have just started reading The Talented Mr. Ripley after falling in love with Patricia Highsmith’s writing and style when I read Carol last month for our queer book club. I love the portrait of 1950s New Yorkers and the city that she creates, and the ominous tension and suspicion surrounding here characters. So far, a dozen chapters through, Tom Ripley is one of the most intriguing and unknowable characters, by turns repulsive and endearing.

I also can’t stop raving about how absolutely brilliant the ABC TV show Please Like Me is. It is seriously good and smart and so funny! Based on local gen-Y superstar comedian Josh Thomas’s stand-up show, it is a refreshingly real show about a young gay man coming out, about living with a parent and friends with mental illness, and about a group of people in their early twenties working out how to be. The writing is spot-on, and I laugh out loud every episode. But it is also touching and earnest.

Look out for a box-set of the first three seasons, which will be available in January.

Stella Charls is reading Ugly Girls by Lindsay Hunter

I am normally a painfully slow reader, but I raced through Lindsay Hunter’s Ugly Girls. This debut novel has just hit the shelves in Australia, after generating a lot of buzz in America over the past year. I picked it up because of gushing endorsements from Roxane Gay (‘gorgeous and necessary’) and Laura van den Berg (‘a canny examination of American girlhood under pressure-gritty, terrifying, and funny as hell’), both writers whose work I love and whose taste I take seriously.

Ugly Girls demands to be read quickly and furiously, largely due to Hunter’s background writing flash fiction. The novel follows teenage best friends from a rough neighbourhood, Perry and Baby Girl, who ditch school, steal cars, shoplift and consider thgemselves invincible. A Facebook friendship with a boy they’ve never met but who wants to meet up in person drives the narrative, which takes the form of short vingnettes from alternating perspectives of key characters, told in the third-person.

While I think Ugly Girls definitely suffers from an adolescent preference for shock value over resonance, Hunter is skilled at writing complex, nasty characters and convincing the reader to empathise with them. I found it a fascinating book that definitely necessitates further discussion. If you read it, come talk to me!