Books

No one ever handles life quite like they expect to, nor the way triumphantly-inspiring feel good Hollywood tales laud or cajole you. That’s partly because life is unpredictable daring you to ready yourself for its almost wilful twists and turns but because we are imperfect beings, our heads full of Continue Reading

In a perfect, idealised world, every love story would have a happy ending, the kind that consumes your heart, sweeps you of your feet and convinces you in the very depths of your being that you are valued, loved and belong. But life, lovely though it is at times, is Continue Reading

Dystopian novels are, by their very nature, meant to be disturbing. They are intended to prompt us to question whether we’re headed as a society, which may or may not manifest as the novel details, is something we want, awakening us to the “boiling frog” of slow, seemingly innocuous trends Continue Reading

Have you ever made a titanically bad life decision, the kind for which there is no reasonable response, other than to run for the hills and tried to pretend that barn burner of a life-changing incident never happened? Beatrix Babbage has; after an accidental confession lays her best friend Cassandra’s Continue Reading

History can be cruel. A person can stand, deservedly or not, atop the passing colossus of time, full as it is of flimsy whims and fickle fortunes, as if they were and are always meant to be there, and then a scant generation later, they are nothing but a footnote Continue Reading

Delving into the past is a risky proposition at the best of times. We may think we remember what lurks there and how it might affect us when we take a metaphorical shovel to long-buried memories and feelings, but the truth is our minds have a funny way of distorting Continue Reading

One of the truly exhilarating things about plunging into a book by Blake Crouch is that you know you are going to be treated to a wildly imaginative, enormously clever, fast-paced but emotionally-resonant take on a pivotal issue of the day. It takes a great deal of skill to hold Continue Reading

It’s hard to say when it happened but somewhere along the way, people have lost their ability to empathise. Rather than putting themselves in someone else’s shoes and trying to understand what drove or drives them to act in a certain way, people too often condemn and decry, letting fear Continue Reading

By any idealistic measure, childhood is supposed to be an untouched idyll, a place of innocence and untrammelled happiness where the sun shines, the birds sing and anything wonderful is possible. 11-year-old Tippy Chan, however, inhabits a wholly different world in The Nancys, one where the bounteous escapism of youth Continue Reading

We are an idealistic species. It may not look that way at times, most times if we’re honest with ourselves, with war, poverty, disease, brutality and avaricious criminality the seemingly obvious defining marks of what it means to be human; dig down a little further, however, and it becomes clear Continue Reading