Love and loss You'll shed a tear for two best friends to the end

This is the most devastatingly beautiful book. It is deeply, deeply sad yet also uplifting and life affirming, perhaps surprisingly so for a novel that is largely about the end of a life.

- Nicky Pellegrino

We All Want Impossible Things by Catherine Newman (Penguin Random House, $37) 

Edi and Ash have been best friends since childhood. For 40 years, they've been through every milestone together and share many memories. Now their friendship is in its final days. Edi is suffering from incurable ovarian cancer and doesn't have very long left. And Ash's world is reshaping itself around the hospice where she is slowly dying.

It all sounds too sad to bear, but even as it was breaking my heart, this novel was making me smile. The messiness of Ash's life, her family, her behaviour - she divides her time between caring for the friend she adores and sleeping with pretty much anyone available that she comes across - her observations, her determination to track down the exact recipe for the lemon polenta cake that Edi has always wanted to taste again; there is so much warmth and tenderness here, so much life in a story about death.