Max Porter, Daisy Johnson, Avni Doshi and Guardian readers discuss the titles they have read over the last month. Join the conversation in the comments

I recently read Gaining Ground by Joan Barfoot. It’s one of the best novels I’ve ever read about what it means to live with others, or decide not to; what we owe the people we love, the natural world, and ourselves. I also really enjoyed Robert Frost, by Robert Frost and Stacy Skolnik. It’s not that Robert Frost; it’s an itinerant young American Robert Frost who jots down his thoughts and observations on homelessness, food, value, music, drugs, the philosophical wastelands of contemporary life, and Stacy Skolnik has turned them into these delightful, oddly profound, poems. Also, coming soon, End Times Fascism by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor. Everyone should read it. It tells us exactly what’s going on.

Covering three generations, this tangled story of secrets, childhood, abandonment and care might be her best work yet

In 2018 Daisy Johnson was the youngest writer ever to be shortlisted for the Booker prize, for her debut novel Everything Under, a gender-fluid reimagining of the Oedipus myth involving canal boat communities and their complex family dynamics, plus a strange monster lurking in the depths. Before that, her short‑story collection Fen, with its blend of the uncanny and the workaday, was critically acclaimed. She has since written Sisters, a psychological horror that uses supernatural elements to explore sibling bonds and grief, and The Hotel, a series of seriously chilling interlinked ghost stories. Now comes Long Wave, which, while it shares some of these hallmarks, is in many ways finer and more subtle: perhaps her strongest work yet.

Long Wave is a story of three generations of mothers. As a small child Ori was found after being “abandoned” by her mother on a wild, uninhabited island somewhere off the coast of England. What happened to Ori’s mother, and why they fled to the island together, only for Ori to later be found and adopted by a scientist specialising in hares, is a question that returns to her with full force in adulthood when she finds herself newly postpartum and struggling to cope.