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.

Stella Charls is reading The Summer Book by Tove Jansson

I started 2016 reading Tove Jansson’s aptly named The Summer Book. I’d finished 2015 with a handful of thrilling page-turners, which I’d enjoyed and read in a breathless, adrenaline-fuelled state, but The Summer Book offers a completely different reading experience. It’s gentle, funny, wise and above all, calm.

I hadn’t read anything by Jansson before – the Sweedish author is most known for her Moomintroll comic strip and books – but last year I enjoyed my colleague Georgia’s beautiful piece about Jansson’s fiction for adults (an “under-appreciated treasure”).

Like Georgia, I also completely fell under the spell of Jansson’s quiet humour while reading The Summer Book. This brief novel follows six-year-old Sophia and her grandmother, who are spending their summer on a tiny island in the Gulf of Finland. Nothing especially significant happens over the course of the novel, but the conversations between these two characters as they amble around the island busying themselves with projects are unsentimental and utterly compelling.

I found The Summer Book refreshingly simple, full of small life-affirming joys, and I’m looking forward to reading more from this author in future.

Holly Harper is reading The Whites by Richard Price

I’ve been wanting to read more crime fiction lately. After marathon-watching Making a Murderer on Netflix and listening to the new Serial podcast, I wanted to add a bit of grit to my book list too. That’s how my colleague came to recommend The Whites by Harry Brandt (AKA Richard Price), and here’s how he sold it to me:

‘I can’t read anything else now. It’s so exciting it makes every other book seem boring by comparison.’

And if that wasn’t a strong enough recommendation, he also mentioned it was by one of the writers of The Wire. Sold.

I’m only a few chapters in, but I’m already hooked. Billy Graves is a good cop, but he’s less than perfect. After a few run-ins (namely the accidental shooting of a young boy) he’s been exiled to the night shift, which is where he first comes across the body of colleague’s ‘White’. Every cop has their own personal White: these are the criminals that they know are guilty, but who they never managed to put away. They’re the cases that haunt them long after everybody else has forgotten.

The Whites is a layered novel brimming with so much detail, and yet it’s never difficult – it’s the opposite, compulsively readable. It is dark and gritty, and the characters are so real you can practically see them in front of you. My only worry is that, like my colleague, I’m going to have a hard time finding another book to go onto after this one is done.

Lian Hingee is reading The Family Law by Benjamin Law

I’m a big fan of Benjamin Law’s writing in Frankie, The Monthly, and the myriad of other publications that he contributes to, but I’m embarrassed to admit that it took the announcement that his bestselling memoir The Family Law was being turned into a TV series before I finally picked up the book. I wish I hadn’t left it so long, because The Family Law is snort-laughingly funny. Law’s acerbic wit coupled with his unconventional family remind me a little of a David Sedaris’ Dress Your Family In Corduroy and Denim but the distinctly Australian voice (coupled with my own experience of growing up in an Asian family) lends the book a delicious familiarity.