The Reading Room | 28 June

Has Anyone Seen Charoltte Salter?  Nicci French. 1990When beautiful and vivacious Charlotte Salter fails to turn up to her husband Alec’s fiftieth birthday party, her children are worried, but Alec is not. As the days pass, Etty, Niall, Paul and Ollie all struggle to come to terms with theirmother’s disappearance. How can anyone just vanish without a trace? Left with no answers, the Salter children have no choice but to fear the worst. NOWEtty returns home after years away to help move

Wake the Dust  Rita McInnes. Jane Harper (The Dry) meets Nick Cave in backroad noir and beyond. When burnt-out Aussie nurse and wannabe writer, Ella, flees her suffocating life in Melbourne for a housesitting assignment on a remote rural property, she is thrust into a brutal and unfamiliar landscape. Her budding friendship with Tom from the neighbouring property reveals a more tender side to the land, with a vast beauty that penetrates her defences, and stirs neglected yearnings and unsayable

Sisterhood Cathy Kelly. She always looks out for other people.  Even at her own birthday party, all she does is worry whether everybody else is having a good time. Then a terrible secret upends the celebrations.  And she decides to do the one thing that nobody ever expects: something for herself. But to finally put herself first, she is going to need her sister.  Life has pulled Lou and Toni apart – yet now they set off on a journey,