Books

  When you pick up a book and the back cover blurb happily proclaims that J. Ryan Stradal’s novel is “joyous, quirky and heartwarming”, you fully expect it to be all those things. After all, a blurb writer at a publishing company wouldn’t just make that sort of stuff up Continue Reading

  SNAPSHOT Though the title might suggest a focus on the hard-shelled animals, publisher Dutton Books, an imprint of Penguin Young Readers, says the novel “begins with a fugitive billionaire and a cash reward. It is about lifelong friendship, the intimacy of an unexpected reunion, Star Wars fan fiction, and Continue Reading

  It is oft said that you should never discuss politics, religion or social issues. As truisms go, this is one that still carries a great deal of cautionary weight, especially in today’s world where people have retreated to hermetically-sealed belief towers into which no other line of thought should Continue Reading

  However you choose to play it, life has a way of constantly mixing it up, turning the tables when you least expect it, reversing roles, and exposing the richness or paucity of your character when you least expect it. We all know this on some level, and yet whenever Continue Reading

  There is something deliciously subversive about Noami Novik’s Uprooted, an epic fantasy novel that seems to promise something sweetly benign in the first few chapters, before giddily defying expectations every step of its uniformly excellent way. The book starts out innocently enough with the protagonist and narrator Agnieszka, a 17 Continue Reading

  Facing up to grief and the many ways it ripples into your life is never an easy thing. The challenge to move on from a tragic event though grows exponentially more difficult when you’re a new dad left alone to raise your unexpected six week old daughter who, like all Continue Reading

  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