Sometimes I’ll throw them. I’ll tell them about a book I read translated from the French version and I’ve lost them already. The Perfect Nanny, every working mother’s worst nightmare, was dead scary in every language. Any book that starts with the line “The baby is dead” isn’t going to be an easy read.

I couldn’t sell The Honey Farm to anyone either. It was hard to describe. A seductive, menacing thriller. One of the best books I’ve read in a long time.

Chris Hammer might have sold a few more copies of Scrublands too, I recommended that to a few people knowing they like a little crime.

It’s not like my bookshelf is free of non-fiction. Hugh MacKay’s Australia Reimagined made a lot of sense, so too The Happiness Curve: Why life gets better after midlife. At the moment the non-fiction title is Low Tox Life: A handbook for a healthy you and a happy planet by Alexx Stuart who talks about the ways she “lowered her toxic load”. Looking at body, home, food and mind, it’s giving me thought about the reasons I need to change a few things and the practical skills to do so.

But it’s fiction that feeds me. I fluctuate between genres, trying to supplement my steady diet of domestic noir with crime, espionage, and authors I return to again and again just because.

Here’s what’s on the bedside table at the moment.

The Outsider, by Stephen King. Hachette, $32.99.

It had been a long time since I read a Stephen King book. His 2011novel 11/12/63 about the John Fitzgerald Kennedy assassination was the last standalone I had read.  Late last year I read Sleeping Beauties which he co-authored with his son Owen, a tale that explored the idea of what happens when all the women in the world fall asleep.

So when The Outsider arrived I was super keen and it didn’t disappoint. You know how sometimes when you haven’t seen an old friend for a while and when you do you’re reminded of how much you love them? This book was like that. Chilling, endearing, horrifying in the best possible way. I’d forgotten what a genius he is.

How Do You Like Me Now? By Holly Bourne. Hachette, $29.99.

“Perfect for fans of The Cows” this one sang. A Bridget Jones for the millennial generation. I had high hopes. I loved The Cows “the girl (masturbating) on the train” book. And who didn’t love Bridg?

I didn’t have quite the same affection for Tori Bailey, influencer (and I hate that word and the whole concept it defines), a young 30-something woman who became “famous” in her 20s for writing a self-help book called Who The F*** Am I? Only to hit her 30s and realise life isn’t all it’s meant to be. But you can’t let your Instagram followers know that.

I’m an old lady now, I get that. My young friends would probably love this book. I just got a bit angry at the vacuousness of it all. Mind you, I read it in two nights. Love/hate, it’s hard to tell those emotions apart sometimes.

There Are No Grown-ups: A midlife coming of age story, by Pamela Druckerman. Doubleday, $29.99.

Midlife. That’s more like it. Even though it was one of those books authored by an American woman who “lives in Paris with her English husband and her children” (wish I could swan about being so cosmopolitan). Druckerman wrote the best-seller French Children Don’t Throw Food but I admit I stopped reading those books after French Women Don’t Get Fat. Wankers. But I persevered, hoping to find a kindred spirit, but I almost threw the book (do French children ever throw books?) when she started on about how when turning 40, one of her major concerns was how she looked and whether or not she should get botox. Really? But I did persevere. It’s the kind of book you can leave in the bathroom. Short essays about all sorts of things including how she organised a threesome for her husband’s 40th birthday. Druckerman has a keen eye, a wicked sense of humour and is cynical enough, as a former journalist, to know that we shouldn’t take it all too seriously.