The Wedding People, by Alison Espach

After many failed rounds of IVF, a failed marriage and a dead cat, academic Phoebe has had enough of life and travels to a luxury hotel in Newport to end it on a high note. But Lila has booked out the entire hotel, apart from Phoebe’s room, for her six-day wedding extravaganza and she is not having a suicide wreck her big event. Against all odds the two women become friends, or at least trusted collaborators, both finding a new path that offers a hopeful future. Phoebe and Lila both take a similar journey of self-discovery, although with quite different outcomes. They get to know themselves and what they really want and how to go about getting it. It’s an interesting and often amusing examination of familial and friend relationships with a satisfying conclusion.

Murder on North Terrace, by Lainie Anderson

It is September 1917 and a member of the Board of Governors has been found murdered in the art gallery on Adelaide’s North Terrace. This sequel to The Death of Dora Black sees Woman Police Constable Kate Cocks’s offsider Ethel Bromley seconded to use her society contacts to help investigate the murder. Left overstretched and under resourced, Miss Cox struggles to keep the women and children of Adelaide safe, with the added worry of a rapist leaving a young girl for dead in the parklands. In the wearying fourth year of the war there are both demobbed and newly recruited soldiers to deal with as well. Lainie Anderson’s chops as an historian provides a fascinating window into Adelaide in the 1910s alongside a cracking mystery with engaging, if flawed, heroines.

The Devil Wears Prada 2 (2026), directed by David Frankel

At the top of her game in journalism, Andy Sachs nevertheless finds herself in need of a job and back at Runway Magazine to rescue its reputation after a fast fashion scandal. Twenty years after the original, all the major players have reunited for this sharply funny sequel that softens the focus on fashion to depict the dire state of publishing. It also makes some digs at tech bros and media magnates along the way. Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway, Emily Blunt and Stanley Tucci clearly have fun with it, with Streep and Tucci looking not a day older than in the first outing while Hathaway and Blunt certainly don’t show two decades – that’s Hollywood. The star-studded cast includes innumerable celebrity cameos, including speaking roles for Donatella Versace and Lady Gaga. There is some interesting casting in smaller roles, including Lucy Liu as a white knight, Kenneth Branagh as Mr Miranda, Justin Theroux as a tech bro and Patrick Brammall, allowed to be Australian without explanation, as a love interest. The film attempts to show that no-one is a total villain or hero, as every human is flawed, but it is difficult to accept the blind loyalty commanded by Miranda Priestly when she is so awful most of the time. Her softer side doesn’t quite ring true, making her looking like a better option only because the alternative monsters are even worse. A case of better the devil you know?