Books

  It hasn’t been easy being a romantic comedy fan of late. Ever since Meg Ryan, and later Sandra Bullock shuffled off their mortal rom-com coil, and to be honest not always even then, has this genre ever matched the giddy heights of the golden age of Hollywood when Gregory Continue Reading

  Let’s face it – Death does not have the best reputation around. It is seen, at least in much of Western secular thought, as the end of things, the loss of everything we know and love and hold dear, a terrifying journey into a dark unknown from which there Continue Reading

  It would be hard to argue with the fact that humanity has, over the countless eons of its existence, provided a plethora of reasons why its future shouldn’t be every bit as fractious and be devilled as its past. And yet, for all the evidence stacked high to the Continue Reading

  It’s often not until something traumatic or highly unusual happens in a family that you discover how well you do or don’t know these people with whom you have spent all or much of your life. And that many of the assumptions you have made about them come unravelling Continue Reading

  A curious thing has happened in the realm of apocalyptic fiction of late – the arrival of hope. Previously hope was nowhere to be seen, an unimaginable luxury in a darkly dystopian world where civilisation had collapsed, humanity had surrendered to its basest instincts and Darwinism was having an Continue Reading

  It’s only after you’ve had an extraordinary pet in your life, an animal that was far more than just a companion and came to define your life in ways you never expected, that you can understand why a book like Gizelle’s Bucket List is so immensely affecting. It’s a Continue Reading

  It’s often not until someone dies that you truly come to understand how deeply connected they were to a whole host of people, all of whom deal with the grief of their loss in their own unique ways. It happened to me last year when my dad died from Continue Reading

  The great Arthur C Clarke once sagely remarked, in what has become known as one of his three laws, that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. In Robert Dickinson’s The Tourist, that threshold has long since been transgressed with the people of 24th century earth routinely back and forwards Continue Reading

  The need to belong is a powerful imperative for all of us. It’s why we form ourselves into religious congregations, clubs, sporting teams and a thousand other permutations of togetherness, surrounding ourselves with likeminded souls who affirm who we are (or gently challenge it) while giving us a a Continue Reading

  Life, pretty much any way you stretch it, is disconcerting. Few of us actually admit to such a thing since to do so would be to admit that the bricks-and-mortar sanity of the everyday, the bills, the commute and the meals that anchor us to comfortingly set routines, is Continue Reading