Books

  Life isn’t very good with second chances. We wish it was, and many is the time we reflect back on an incident, big or small, innocuous or catastrophic and wish we could have said something different, done something unexpected, or frankly, not gone through the whole thing. But life Continue Reading

  Ah, the endlessly expansive possibilities of youth! There are a lot of things in our younger years that might make us cringe – the lack of knowledge about life, stunted self-awareness, naive belief in the goodness of others – but there’s one thing that we likely still have a Continue Reading

  The Feed, Nick Clark Windo’s brilliantly-chilling debut novel, is predicated on a simply though wholly terrifying idea – what if all knowledge, every last skerrick of understanding and know-how, every warm-and-fuzzy memory and emotional connection suddenly ceased to exist? What then? What would we do? How would we survive? And Continue Reading

  In this self-actualised age in which we live, we are sold the idea over and over that we can have anything we want if we just want it hard enough. Kind of like wearing down the universe until it caves in and grants us undying happiness, peace, contentment, and Continue Reading

  Alternate histories are an interesting fiction genre. Emboldened by the endless openendedness of “What if?”, they surge forward along an entirely new part of the time/space continuum, merrily playing Sliding Doors with history, asking us to imagine how different the world would be if one crucial aspect at one Continue Reading

  There is an exquisite beauty and loveliness to the writing of Sarah Winman. With every artfully-chosen word – artful in the sense that it is rich and poetic, not artificial or posed – and perfectly-expressed idea you are subsumed into stories that are suffused with humanity, joy, sadness, regret Continue Reading

  It is safe to say that the end, and indeed the beginning of the world, have never been rendered so poetically, or daringly, as in The End We Start From by English author Megan Hunter. A poet whose work has been shortlisted for illustrious awards such as the Bridport Continue Reading

  As we lurch somewhat uncertainly to the end of the second decade of the 21st century, fearfully drunk on the spectre of apocalyptic everything, it would be easy to see civilisation-ending reds under every bed, to co-opt some old Cold War anti-communist lingo. To some extent Happiness for Humans Continue Reading

  We are all, for better or worse, heavily influenced by the environments in which we grow up. Whether we remain captive to those influences is another matter entirely and the subject of an entirely different article possibly; but suffice to say, what happens to us in our formative years Continue Reading

  Imagine being told you have approximately 100 days to live, thanks to an incredibly aggressive tumour in your liver that has now metastasized to your lungs? No, seriously, go on do it; not that easy is it? That’s because, explains Lucio, the incredibly likable and real protagonist in Fausto Continue Reading