12 great books guaranteed to rekindle your passion for reading.

If you love books but haven’t been able to find anything that grabs you lately – or if you’ve never been able to get into a regular reading habit – this list is for you.

They’ve been selected by Better Reading‘s Cheryl Akle. Enjoy.

1. Still Alice by Lisa Genova

An accomplished woman slowly loses her thoughts and memories to Alzheimer’s disease - only to discover that each day brings a new way of living and loving.

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Alice Howland, happily married with three grown children and a house on the Cape, is a celebrated Harvard professor at the height of her career when she notices a forgetfulness creeping into her life. As confusion starts to cloud her thinking and her memory begins to fail her, she receives a devastating diagnosis: early onset Alzheimer’s disease. Fiercely independent, Alice struggles to maintain her lifestyle and live in the moment, even as her sense of self is being stripped away.

In turns heartbreaking, inspiring, and terrifying, Still Alice captures in remarkable detail what it’s like to literally lose your mind…

2. The Farm by Tom Rob Smith

Daniel believed his parents were enjoying a peaceful retirement on a remote farm in Sweden. But with a single phone call, everything changes.

Your mother…she’s not well, his father tells him. She’s been imagining things – terrible, terrible things. She’s had a psychotic breakdown, and been committed to a mental hospital.

Before Daniel can board a plane to Sweden, his mother calls: Everything that man has told you is a lie. I’m not mad… I need the police… Meet me at Heathrow.

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Caught between his parents, and unsure of who to believe or trust, Daniel becomes his mother’s unwilling judge and jury as she tells him an urgent tale of secrets, of lies, of a crime and a conspiracy that implicates his own father.

3. The Light Between Oceans by M.L. Stedman

A mesmerising novel of loyalty, love and unbearable choices.

In 1926, Tom and Isabel Sherbourne are the solitary residents of Janus Rock, an isolated lighthouse in the ocean off the coast of western Australia. When a dinghy washes ashore carrying a dead man and a newborn baby, duty says they should report it. But what if they kept the child?

This heartbreaking debut is a story of dilemmas, responsibilities and consequences, of how people can make the wrong decision for the right reasons – and how they learn to live with their actions.

4. Personal by Lee Child

This new heart stopping, nail-biting thriller takes Jack Reacher across the Atlantic to Paris – and then to London.

Reacher walks alone. Once a go-to hard man in the US military police, he now is a drifter of no fixed abode. But the army tracks him down. Someone has taken a long-range shot at the French president. Only one man could have done it and Reacher is the one man who can find him.

The stakes have never been higher – because this time, it’s personal.

5. The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion

Don Tillman is getting married. He just doesn’t know who to yet. But he has designed the Wife Project, using a 16-page questionnaire to help him find the perfect partner. She will most definitely not be a barmaid, a smoker, a drinker, or a late-arriver.

Rosie Jarman is all these things. She is also fiery and intelligent and beautiful. And on a quest of her own to find her biological father - a search that Don, a professor of genetics, might just be able to help her with.

The Wife Project teaches Don some unexpected things. Why earlobe length is an inadequate predictor of sexual attraction. Why quick-dry clothes aren’t appropriate attire in New York. Why he’s never been on a second date. And why, despite your best scientific efforts, you don’t find love: love finds you.

6. Life or Death by Michael Robotham

Why would a man escape from prison the day before he’s due to be released?

Audie Palmer has spent a decade in prison for an armed robbery in which four people died, including two of the gang. Seven million dollars has never been recovered and everybody believes that Audie knows where the money is. For 10 years he has been beaten, stabbed, throttled and threatened almost daily by prison guards, inmates and criminal gangs, who all want to answer this same question, but suddenly Audie vanishes, the day before he’s due to be released.

Everybody wants to find Audie, but he’s not running. Instead he’s trying to save a life . . . and not just his own.

7. The Secret River by Kate Grenville

In 1806 William Thornhill, a man of quick temper and deep feelings, is transported from the slums of London to New South Wales for the term of his natural life. With his wife Sal and their children he arrives in a harsh land he cannot understand. But the colony can turn a convict into a free man.

Eight years later, Thornhill sails up the Hawkesbury to claim 100 acres for himself. Aboriginal people already live on that river. And other recent arrivals - Thomas Blackwood, Smasher Sullivan and Mrs Herring - are finding their own ways to respond to them.

Thornhill, a man neither better nor worse than most, soon has to make the most difficult choice of his life.

8. The Husband's Secret by Liane Moriarty

Cecilia Fitzpatrick, devoted mother, successful Tupperware business owner and efficient P&C President, has found a letter from her husband:

“For my wife, Cecilia Fitzpatrick
To be opened only in the event of my death”

But Cecilia’s husband isn’t dead, he’s on a business trip. And when she questions him about it on the phone, Cecilia senses something she hasn’t experienced before. John-Paul is lying.

What happens next changes Cecilia’s formerly blissful suburban existence forever, and the consequences will be life-changing for the most unexpected people.

9. The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins

Rachel catches the same commuter train every morning. She knows it will wait at the same signal each time, overlooking a row of back gardens. She’s even started to feel like she knows the people who live in one of the houses. ‘Jess and Jason’, she calls them.

Their life – as she sees it – is perfect. If only Rachel could be that happy. And then she sees something shocking. It’s only a minute until the train moves on, but it’s enough.

Now everything’s changed. Now Rachel has a chance to become a part of the lives she’s only watched from afar. Now they’ll see; she’s much more than just the girl on the train…

10. The Soldier's Wife by Pamela Hart

The Soldier’s Wife is a beautifully told story of love and loss and the profound and terrible impact of war. It’s deeply insightful into the lives of the women left behind in Sydney and how they coped while their men fought on the other side of the world.

We loved the vivid descriptions of wartime Sydney and fell in love with the headstrong heroine Ruby. She really gets under our skin so that we can almost feel her longing, as well as the frustrating injustice she faces with the restrictions and social pressures placed on a young woman moving into new times. Hart skilfully builds up suspense in this poignant novel and its dramatic conclusion is breathtaking.

11. Burial Rites by Hannah Kent

Based on a true story, Burial Rites is a deeply moving novel about freedom and the ways we will risk everything for love. In northern Iceland, 1829, Agnes Magnusdottir is condemned to death for her part in the brutal murder of two men.

Agnes is sent to wait on the farm of District Officer Jon Jonsson and his family, who are horrified and avoid Agnes. Only Toti, the young assistant reverend appointed as Agnes’s spiritual guardian, is compelled to try to understand her. As the summer months fall away to winter, Agnes’s story begins to emerge. And as the days to her execution draw closer, the question burns: did she or didn’t she?

In beautiful, cut-glass prose, Hannah Kent portrays Iceland’s formidable landscape, and asks: how can one woman endure when her life depends upon the stories told by others?

12. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Loved by adults and children alike, To Kill a Mockingbird is a coming-of-age story, an anti-racist novel, a historical drama of the Great Depression and a sublime example of the Southern writing tradition.

Through the young eyes of Scout and Jem Finch, Harper Lee explores with exuberant humour the irrationality of adult attitudes to race and class in the Deep South of the thirties.

If you choose one, read it, and aren’t inspired, go to the Better Reading Facebook page and say why. You'll get another recommendation, personally selected by Cheryl.

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