Books

(courtesy Penguin Books Australia) Something superlatively wonderful happens when truly beautiful writing comes together with an arrestingly clever narrative. In an ideal world, this would happen in every single book you read, but it’s not always the case and so, when masterfully executed writing and a beguiling storyline rich in Continue Reading

(courtesy Harper Collins Publishers Australia) Reinvention is usually seen as something good, an exercise of personal agency that sees the old cast aside in favour of something hoped or believed to be new and different. But what happens with reinvention is forced upon you, usually by some kind of trauma Continue Reading

(courtesy Hachette Australia) We are in love with the road to love being quick, instant and one hundred percent assured. That’s why most romantic comedies strike a chord with us because they say you can have love, it will be immediately recognisable and there will be no guesswork at all Continue Reading

(courtesy Bloomsbury Publishing) The art of reinvention is one many of us practice throughout our lives but it is likely that few have undertaken quite so radical and life transformative a change as that of Mary Read, a real 17th century women who began life raised as a boy after Continue Reading

(courtesy Harper Collins Publishers Australia) Is it possible for a story to be both crushingly hopeless and full of hope all at the same time? They may seem to be diametrically opposed states, but as many of us know, it is possible to feel as if life is slipping through Continue Reading

(courtesy Bloomsbury Publishing) The phrase, “You can never go home again”, lifted from the title of a 1940 novel by Thomas Wolfe, is oft cited as proof that the past is somewhere so heavily coloured by nostalgia that viewing in anything like objective terms is all but impossible. That’s, on Continue Reading

(courtesy Little Brown) People have long debated whether it’s nature or nurture that shapes us and turns out into the human beings we grow to become; but what about robots? Can they ever really change? After all, aren’t they simply programmed Os and 1s working in algorithmic succession according to Continue Reading

(courtesy Penguin Books Australia) This one is. This phrase, which distills into three short but carefully chosen words a centred approach to life that forces, in the best way, to only think and concentrate on the present, repeats over and over in the imaginative joy that is The Last Gifts Continue Reading

(courtesy Allen & Unwin Book Publishers) If you have read any novels featuring a “Chosen One” hero, you will be quite familiar with the idea that someone of great talent and abilities but no real awareness of them will be plucked from anonymity and obscurity to become the saviour of Continue Reading