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 You Will Know Me by Megan Abbott

If, like me, you’re enjoying the Olympics and looking to theme your reading a little, then I suggest You Will Know Me by Megan Abbott. Like all of Abbott books, it’s about teenage girls and involves a page-turning mystery but at its heart, this is a book about sport, and what it means to be at the top of your game. The sport in question is women’s gymnastics and You Will Know Me perfectly captures the physicality involved in the sport – from the toll it takes on your body to the gruelling training schedule and the discipline you need to keep going every day. You Will Know Me is a book about obsession, competition and talent, and reading it will make you rush to watch clips of gold medal winning American gymnast Simone Biles, if you haven’t already.

Chris Gordon is reading The Love of a Bad Man by Laura Elizabeth Woollett

I’ve been reading Laura Elizabeth Woollett’s debut story collection, The Love of a Bad Man, rather slowly as I’ve had to pull away between each story to have a little rest before tackling the next – the book is making me that anxious!

Each story in this collection imagines the inner thoughts of a particular woman who was a lover of a notorious real-life murderer. Some women are foolish, and some are not, but all their stories are horrific. Woollett covers a range of true crime accounts from all over the world and her ability to render each of these women’s experiences as familiar and responsive is truly a gift. Reading this book will allow any voyeuristic tendency you may have to simply go overboard.

Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk about Kevin taught us that we are all only a step away from loving a bad man ourselves and Woollett’s gift to readers is similar – she demonstrates that in the end, people only see what they want to.

Lian Hingee is reading The Trespasser by Tana French

When I first started working for Readings I was in the enviable position of discovering a new-to-me author, Tana French, whose work I loved, who had a fairly decent back catalogue of books I could binge-read. After polishing off her fifth book, The Secret Place, I pushed it on all my co-workers as I waited for the next instalment in the Dublin Murder Squad series – The Trespasser. This novel is due for release in late September but (lucky me) a colleague was able to score me an early proof copy late last week.

The Trespasser features the same detectives from The Secret Place – Stephen Moran and Antoinette Conway – but while that story was told by the easy-going Moran, The Trespasser is very much Conway’s story. Acerbic and angry, with a chip on her shoulder the size of Gibraltar and an axe to grind, everything in Antoinette’s life is a battle. The Murder Squad is a boys’ club, and there seems to be a campaign to force Conway out: paperwork goes missing, evidence is tampered with, and Conway has to contend with constant, insidious bullying from the other detectives. When yet another domestic violence case lands on her desk it seems to be a slam dunk, but there’s something off that Conway feels sure that they’re missing… And it’s something that leads directly back to her own workmates.

Forced into an awkward three-way partnership with the oleaginous Detective Breslin, Conway and Moran have to negotiate the politics of the Murder Squad while simultaneously – and secretly – trying to uncover whether the straight-forward answer is actually the correct one.

The Trespasser is a very different novel to The Secret Place, but then, all of Tana French’s novels are very different from one another – check out a beginner’s guide here. It’s a twisty, hard-edged thriller that leaves you feeling uneasy and on-edge and desperate to find out where the line lies between truth and fiction