Monica was a guest on Radio National’s The Bookshelf, discussing Cassandra Austin’s latest novel, Like Mother.

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Michael Mohammed Ahmad's character Bani Adam is back, walking the streets of his town, railing against stereotypes, working the heavy bag in a boxing gym, reading books and trying to please his family. But now he has a baby, a child he addresses as he tries to make sense of his new identity as a father, in The Other Half of You (Hachette).

Parenting is also at stake in Cassandra Austin's Like Mother: a story layered with secrets and surprises and the hot heaviness of being in a small town in the 1960s. Monica Dux, who has herself written on motherhood, reads this for us.

And entire new worlds are created, drawing upon West African mythology and the layers of colonialism, in Suyi Davies Okungbowa's epic fantasy, Son of the Storm read by speculative fiction writer Eugen Bacon.