When God Was A Rabbit by Sarah Winman, Hachette, $29.99.

I was a bit nervous about a book featuring a talking rabbit, especially when young Elly, the narrator, names her pet “God”. Whimsical charm can curdle awfully easily.

Yet Winman is one clever (debut) author. In two parts over 40 years — from the revolutions of 1968 to the collapse of the Twin Towers — she writes of love in all its forms: gay, straight, parental, predatory, platonic and random, but first and foremost the love between Elly and her brother, Joe.

Disaster and tragedy rain down upon their highly unconventional family, testing bonds to breaking point, but a lifetime of shared secrets and some deep soul connection between the siblings ensure it never snaps.

The novel’s sense of heart and high weirdo count reminded me a bit of John Irving’s The World According To Garp (swapping rabbits for bears), though its strong connection with real-life events make it a true original.

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The Wreckage by Michael Robotham, Sphere, $32.99.

He’s mastered the psychological thriller. Now, with his seventh novel, set amid the wreckage of the recent global financial meltdown, Robotham stretches the canvas to take in money, power and international conspiracy.

In Baghdad, prize-winning journalist Luca Terracini is risking his life to chase a story about the disappearance of tens of millions of dollars from Iraqi banks.

In London, our old friend ex-cop Vincent Ruiz is searching for a young woman on the run after she scammed, drugged and robbed him — but who, he realises, has made herself some far tougher enemies than the kindly Ruiz.

The bombs explode, the body count rises as Luca follows the money and Ruiz the runaway girl.

What lifts it above your standard action thriller is the care Robotham takes with his characters and his skill at threading the plots to reveal a scarifying degree of corruption at the highest level of finance and politics.

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Me And Mr Bookerby Cory Taylor, Text, $32.95.

Martha is a bored 16-year old desperate to escape the tedium of small-town Australian life.

Mr Booker is the perfect and oh-so-obvious solution. He turns up in a slick white suit trailing smart lines, cigarette smoke and low-rent glamour — married, of course — and the book is Martha’s diary of their inevitable affair.

Taylor gets her voice exactly right, a combination of innocence and fake world-weariness (“I started to feel old when I was about 10”) so that even though you know how it’s going to end — badly, d’oh — it reads fresh and funny and free of self-pity or any need to explain or teach anything.

Mr Booker is a fabulous creation, a charming and despairing drunk. Equally vivid are Martha’s warring parents, both too preoccupied with themselves to bother noticing what’s going on.

Not that Martha wants to be stopped, she’s the heroine of her own romance and only we, the readers, can see the gap between her self-conscious sophistication and her true ignorance. Where the heartbreak lies.

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Last Man In Tower by Aravind Adiga, Allen & Unwin, $32.99.

If you’re looking for cheap thrills in snatched moments, this is not the book for you. Last Man In Tower powerfully rewards the time and attention of the patient reader.

Adiga won the Booker prize for his darkly comic novel The White Tiger and in Last Man In Tower he revisits the desperate but booming streets of metropolitan India.

Property developer Dharmen Shah is choking on the pollution of Mumbai, but is determined to build the biggest and best of the city’s new residential developments.

To do so, he makes an offer to the residents of a tired apartment block. It’s an offer so good, it’s quickly accepted by most of the aspirational residents.

Only one stands firm, Masterji, a retired school teacher mourning the recent death of his beloved wife.

It’s a conflict that will pit neighbour against neighbour and shed light on the power of friendship, corruption, tradition and progress.

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The Daughters Of Rome by Kate Quinn, Headline Review, $32.99.

As members of one of ancient Rome’s most privileged families, the four Cornelii women have ringside seats to all the brutality, danger and passion of the bloodthirsty sports of the Coliseum.

Yet, with Rome in turmoil, Marcella, Cornelia, Lollia and Diana are going to need as much courage and cunning as any gladiator, if they are to survive.

Clever Marcella wants to write history, but her access to power tempts her into the perils of making history.

Cornelia dreams of becoming empress, but happiness may lie in more humble circumstances.

Heiress and part-slave Lollia marries again and again, as her wily grandfather aligns himself with those in power.

And distant beauty Diana thinks only of horses, until invasion shows her true mettle. Kate Quinn creates four very different women, modern but believable.

Yet her real skill is subtly evolving their shifting loyalties and their growth in the face of tragedy, war and political upheaval.

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The End Of The Wasp Season by Denise Mina, Orion, $24.99.

Evil Lars Anderson hangs himself from a tree on his criminally acquired country estate and his dark shadow hangs over his family and those unfortunate enough to meet them.

Hundreds of miles away in a wealthy suburb of Glasgow, a young woman is viciously murdered. From the start of this imaginative police procedural, we know Lars’ son, Thomas, and his friend, Squeak, are involved.

Yet we are kept guessing, along with DS Alex Morrow, as to who did what and why. Denise Mina writes beautifully and in Morrow she has created a detective with a difference, an investigator with her own problems, but who’s happily married and pregnant with twins.

Fans of crime fiction will enjoy this fresh new talent and her charming policewoman.

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Summer And The City: A Carrie Diaries Novel by Candace Bushnell, HarperCollins, $24.99.

A 17-year-old Carrie Bradshaw leaves her small hometown to take on Manhattan, where she is determined to make it as a writer before the summer is over.

In this sequel to The Carrie Diaries, we finally learn how Carrie meets Samantha and Miranda, and how she falls in love with the unofficial fifth character of the Sex And The City series.

Although Summer And The City appears to be aimed at teenage audiences who can easily relate to the “making new friends, losing your virginity and the does he/doesn’t he like me” plot lines, the older Sex And The City fans will find the nostalgia of Carrie’s internal musings just as addictive as she navigates these coming-of-age experiences with the added hilarity of hindsight.

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No Regrets Edith Piaf by Carolyn Burke, Bloomsbury, $32.99.

“There has never been anyone like her; there never will be … ” wrote long-time platonic friend Jean Cocteau of Edith Piaf, “… her Bonaparte-like forehead, her eyes like those of a blind person trying to see … a voice that rises up from deep within, that inhabits her from head to toe.”

This brilliant biography delves deep into the world of the extraordinary woman who was born with impaired vision and led a vagabond existence with her oft violent acrobat father, Louis Gassion, when her singer mother “Line” went indefinitely on tour.

Belting out La Marseillaise on bistro tabletops, adoring daughter Edith learnt timing, patter and how to tug at heartstrings from contortionist Gassion, but was disturbed throughout her life by her drug-addicted mother, who sang for glasses of wine.

Knowingly fleeced and financially ruined by “friends” who amused her, she was shaped and loved by many, too, including Maurice Chevalier and lyricist Raymond Asso, who tamed the street singer, teaching her table manners and severing ties with low-lifes who got in the way of her career.

She became pregnant at 16 with daughter Marcelle, who died of meningitis aged two, and married twice, although the love of her life, boxer Marcel Cerdan, perished in an air crash.

Piaf died at 47 having suffered from arthritis and acute liver damage from medication most of her life.

She wrote nearly 100 songs, including La Vie En Rose, penned on a paper napkin at a cafe in the Champs Elysées and was happiest singing to the “Sunday” working-class audiences.

Her songs were direct, sincere and unpretentious — much like Burke’s engrossing biography.

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The Girl In The Polka Dot Dress by Beryl Bainbridge, Hachette, $29.99.

This is the novel British author Beryl Bainbridge was writing in the last decade of her life and right up to the moment she died in July last year.

At her bedside was Brendan King, who had edited many of her 17 novels and between them they devised a way of finishing the novel should she run out of time.

Bainbridge did lose her battle and the final pages were put together posthumously by King.

It’s a notably short novel for 10 years of work, but incredibly precise and layered, mixing elements of Bainbridge’s own life — her road-trip across America — with a thriller structure that tingles with menace.

Rose, an awkward and rather ordinary English woman, goes to America in the summer of 1968 to meet Harold, a lugubrious and rather disquieting American, to search for the man who inspired her life and, as we later discover, destroyed his.

As the pair cross-cross the States in a camper van meeting a bizarre ragtag of acquaintances, we come closer to the enigmatic Dr Wheeler and a pivotal moment in US history — the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in an LA hotel kitchen.

The narrative is typically dark and at times a little hard to follow, but filled with fascinating, well-observed characters.

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When My Husband Does The Dishes by Kerri Sackville, Ebury, $32.95.

Billed as what marriage looks like after three children and 150 years of togetherness, this memoir will have you giggling all the way to the laundry basket.

Kerri Sackville is a 40-something wife, mother and writer. While she loves her husband The Architect, admiring his immense wit and intellect, there are many more practical elements of their marriage she takes issue with — elements that will ring clanging bells with wives and mothers out there.

For example, would twin beds be more conducive to a night of genuine slumber? Does being married have to mean no flirting with other men? And have I really made noodles with melted cheese for dinner?

Pricking the balloon of “supermumdom”, Sackville takes us through the common but plainly ridiculous familial situations she finds herself in on a daily basis.

Mundane, certainly, but also pretty funny.

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