Love & family Wildflowers by Peggy Frew, A&U

Australian author Peggy Frew creates characters you feel you know and long to help. That aching compassion draws you in and despite its traumatic world of addiction, Wildflowers is impossible to put down. Meg and Nina have always lived in their dazzling sister Amber’s shadow, but that promise didn’t turn out as anyone expected. Amber should have been a brilliant actress but now her siblings are staging an intervention to try and break her spiralling drug habit. In a remote house in Far North Queensland the sisters are tested and lives unpicked. We flit back to scenes from the past, bleak reminiscences as we see how Amber’s drug habit touched everyone in the Atkins family.

Mad Honey by Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Finney Boylan, A&U

This expertly-paced courtroom drama combines whodunnit suspense with a poignant love story and a smart delve into the secrets people keep. Ava Campanello and Olivia McAfee have both moved to a quiet town in New Hampshire looking for a new start. Following a difficult divorce Olivia is taking over her dad’s beekeeping business in her childhood house and raising son Asher away from his abusive dad. Ava later moves to the area with daughter Lily for her crucial final high school year. There Lily falls for Asher. It is all going so well until Lily is found dead and Asher is arrested.

Song of the Sun God, by Shankari Chandran, Ultimo

A beating heart of ancestors, family, land and religion burns in this sweeping history of the civil war which divided Ceylon, following its independence from Britain in 1946. Colombo, 1936, and Rajan, 11, watches a monk set fire to himself. The monks are angry about the Tamils. Rajan loves the Tamil language; the richness of Hinduism. In 1945, Nala, 17, prays for a good husband. An astrological match is found and Rajan, now a consultant doctor with his own house, sleeps with his back to her, reading a P.G. Wodehouse book. Nala, a talented artist, mixes with the landowners. “Ceylon is the spice shelf in the Empire’s pantry,” says one. A rich heritage tapestry to embrace.

Daughter of the Home Front Jennie Jones, by HQ Fiction

Maturely crafted handling of the pregnant Catholic girls taken into church-run homes and made to give up babies for adoption. In 1942, Emma, 15, longs to leave her poor Queensland home (where she raises four brothers for her unthankful mother) to see the world. Opportunity comes when girls over 16 are required to join the war effort in Townsville. When Emma meets warm bar hostess Cassie, 17, and Frank, a handsome serviceman “... her first ever friend and first ever kiss, what a splendid day!” Acute observation of when society did not allow women to feel important, and innocent girls went astray.

The Work Wives Rachael Johns, by HQ Fiction

Rachael Johns dedicates her latest novel about friendship, love and the emotion inbetween to “women who are striving to keep kids, partners, houses and pets from falling apart, all the while trying to maintain a thread of sanity”, and her tale will certainly chime some chords. Debra and Quinn met at the photocopier at work and immediately hit it off. But away from the office they are very different. Quinn is on a dating app mission to find Mr Right; Deb is a single mum who has no interest in men. Meanwhile, her teenage daughter Ramona is rattling her cage trying to find the identity of her sperm-donor father. The scene is set!