I was going to offer titles to Book Club in somewhat the order I read them over the past year, but after finishing Meg Mason’s 'Sorrow and Bliss’ the other week I had that urge to want to push it into everyones hands again right away.

‘Sorrow and Bliss’ manages to be one of the most sensitive, heartfelt yet utterly hilarious books. It portrays a young woman Martha's nuanced life living with mental illness that is so cleverly never named by Mason. It explores what happens when you try with everything to push every one of your intricately complicated relationships away, leaving you with only the harshest parts of yourself for company.

I dog eared a page from this book that made my heart break and swell simultaneously, much like most of the rest of the book.

‘And I wonder, is there any way you could come to see that what you’ve been through is for something? Is it why you feel everything and love harder and fight more ferociously than anyone else? Is it why you are the love of your sister’s life? Why you’ll be a writer of much more, one day, than a small supermarket column? How you can be my fiercest bloody critic, and someone with so much compassion she’ll buy glasses she doesn’t need because the man fell off his stool. Martha, when you are in a room, nobody wants to talk to anybody else. Why is that, if not for the life you have lived, as someone who has been refined by fire?'

If you have read this book, share your thoughts with fellow Book Club readers below in the comments.