Books

(via Shutterstock) If you’re after novels that are packed to the imaginative brim with clever ideas, fantastically engaging characters and fantasy/sci-fi/horror premises that absolutely come alive and practically fly off the page, and yes, a buoyant sense of escapist adventure with lots of heart, then British author Dan Hanks is Continue Reading

(courtesy Text Publishing) As someone who spent much of my childhood and youth stuck well and truly out of the mainstream – that’s partly true now really but adulthood affords you far more options for ameliorating its worst effects and doing it on your terms – bullied and harassed, there’s Continue Reading

(courtesy Penguins Books Australia) Life takes a heavy toll on all of us. How much damage it causes us in amongst all the good and happy times doesn’t become readily apparent until much later in life and usually only when some lightning rod of an event causes us to be Continue Reading

(courtesy Hachette Australia) Is it possible to be funny both funny and incisive about mental health? It is if you’re comedian Susan Calman, who, when she’s not making us laugh from the stage or on TV – her Grand Day Out series is a joy and makes travelling just as Continue Reading

(courtesy Penguin Books Australia) It may not sound like an attractive proposition to be told that a novel will break your heart little-by-little before it breaks it completely but what about if we told you that while all that rending and slow motion rupturing is taking place that some quite Continue Reading

(courtesy Hachette Australia) We’re all used to the rom-com idea of love being swift, heavily meet-cutey and complicated just enough to make the reaching of the romantic finish line feel like an earned thing. But the truth is, love isn’t ever really that straightforward, and while we might fall for Continue Reading

(courtesy Hachette Australia) There is a point, when you have read many novels, where you begin if there is truth to the fact that there is nothing new under the sun. It’s not that what you’re reading isn’t clever, heartfelt or imaginative; they often are and they make reading the Continue Reading

(courtesy Penguin Books Australia) Key Lime Sky was provide as a preview through NetGalley and is due for release in print and digital formats on 13 August 2024. It is always impressive to read a book by an author where an audaciously out-there premise is not only brilliantly and fulsomely Continue Reading

(courtesy Simon & Schuster Australia) It goes without saying, and yet of course we are going to stay it still, that romantic comedies come up with a bulging Cupid’s quiver full of tropes, clichés and expectations. That’s not a bad thing necessarily since the reason we love a particular type Continue Reading