Held is Anne Michaels' third novel in a little over 25 years, although she has produced poetry and other books during that time. She is best known for her first novel Fugitive Pieces, and Held was shortlisted for this year's Booker Prize. It's a story told in fragments, covering from 1908 to 2025, moving backwards and forwards through time, telling of the lives and losses of a number of, mostly, women with some familial connection. There are some real characters alongside the fictional, like Marie Curie and her associates.

Han Kang, the Korean novelist who won the 2024 Nobel Prize for Literature, has had two previous books translated into English. The White Book is a meditation on colour, white things, told in fragments with reflections on grief, loss, the strangeness of life, and the human spirit. It's not a novel, there is no plot as such, it reads like a collection of prose poems, with an accumulating emotional power. It's beautiful, and illustrated with a number of black and white images, thoughtful and meditative.

This novel is one hell of a ride! Grim and dystopian, (it shares some styling with Cormac McCarthy's The Road), it at the same time manages to be 500 pages of propulsive page turning excitement and tension. It also has some moments of family warmth, a romance, and a ton of humanity in the midst of climate induced terror. It's one of the most extraordinary books I've read in some time; you know right from the first sentences that Winton is in complete control of his material. This book deserves to be very widely read.

Markus Zusak is best known for his novels, especially The Book Thief, and this is his first work of non fiction. A memoir about the three large and chaotic dogs that his family have owned over the years, it's funny and tender and loving, and about how relationships with dogs can bring change, joy, despair and sadness into a family. But it's mostly about his love for dogs, and it will resonate with any dog lover.

Dick Frizzell can really write! This is a hilarious collection of anecdotes about his adventurous childhood and upbringing in Hastings in the 1950s and 1960s. It's nostalgic, charming, and very funny, full of escapades and adventure, innocently bad behaviour and more deliberate naughtiness! It's a light and quick read, in a beautifully packaged little hardback. Frizzell grew up in a world that no longer exists; this book is a celebration of mid-century New Zealand.

There are 5 stories in this collection, all featuring Yoshimoto's usual themes - lonely women, betrayal, difficult relationships, and community. The stories are effortlessly profound, stripping away the minutiae of life, and getting straight to the essential issues and truths. They are economical, quite formal in tone, and pack an emotional punch.