Books

(courtesy Pan Macmillan Australia) While we are all familiar with the slow and steady march of time, inexorably changing everything in small and big ways, it’s those dramatic, one-moment-in-time events which change everything in the blink of an eye which probably make more of an impact. One minute life is Continue Reading

(courtesy Pan Macmillan Australia) How do you get over a broken heart? Especially one ten years in the making? It’s a question with a huge and open-ended answer, an unwelcome one that Elly has to grapple with when her boyfriend of ten years and husband of less than a year Continue Reading

(courtesy Allen & Unwin Australia) As a content writer by trade and a reader of 55 years standing or so, I am a huge fan of writing that sings and comes alive, of words fairly dancing off the page and not simply impressing the mind but filling the heart with Continue Reading

(Pan Macmillan Australia) Somewhere back in the dim dark days of my youth, when dinosaurs roamed the earth and the world wasn’t ending at the hands of several hundred disparate and palpable threats, I was heavily into crime fiction. To be more exact, the books of Agatha Christie which my Continue Reading

(courtesy Wakefield Press) Growing up, it’s often well nigh impossible to feel comfortable in your own skin. Things are changing fast, and figuring which way is up or down emotionally, socially and in a thousand other hugely challenging ways, becomes the stuff of exhausting everyday coming-of-age parkour-ing. It’s not as Continue Reading

(courtesy Allen & Unwin Australia) Romcom detractors, and honestly who stole your rose-eyed, happily romantic hearts and replaced with them stones, will tell you that once you’ve read one story in the story, you’ve read them all. But that dismissive assessment of an entire genre completely ignored the fact that Continue Reading

(courtesy Pan Macmillan Australia) There’s a real joy to reading a novel by someone who wields their words not simply with artistry but with a sense of deeply affecting humanity. It’s easy enough if you’re a masterful writer, to make sentences and paragraphs and chapters that sing with the sparkling Continue Reading

(courtesy Pan Macmillan Australia) It’s a constant feature of end-of-the-world stories that there’s a sizeable reckoning for any of the protagonists involved in the story; it makes sense – the world is about to go the way of the Dodo, life in all its forms is vapourising into nothing and, Continue Reading

(courtesy Penguin Books Australia) Imagination of varying degrees and intensity sits at the heart of all of the stories we read. Somewhere, somehow, an author has had the germ of an idea, a glimmer of a character, a snippet of a plot, and through hard work and a deft use Continue Reading