Books

  We are so in love, as a species, with the admittedly very attractive idea of love that we often over-romanticise it. Decking it with roses and chocolates, viewing with rose-coloured glasses and Vaseline-tinted lenses, love is elevated as a warm-and-fuzzy ideal which can answer and make up for all Continue Reading

  There is a particular pleasure that comes from reading a book by Maria Lewis, the happy result of the author’s singular ability to seamlessly blend the mythical and the magically real into the ordinary everyday to the point where the most outlandish of concepts suddenly seem not just possible Continue Reading

  It’s probably fair to say that many of us have a starry-eyed view of what it must be like to work in the entertainment industry. All those red carpet moments, confected though they are, glamorous two-minute pieces on entertainment reporting shows and the general aura of rose-tinted dreams being Continue Reading

  Going home, as in back to our home town the place where it all began, or in my case, began all over again after perfectly fine starts in two other places, is a fraught experience. In theory it shouldn’t be, especially if you have a family, like mine, with Continue Reading

  We are captives of our calendars. How else to explain the way looming dates, particularly those for major life events, send us into a flurry of activity and anxiety, a maelstrom of hoping and wishing, planning and organising that in the end, Shakespeare be paraphrased, amount to nothing? Or Continue Reading

  “Wuv, true wuv”, as the Impressive Clergyman in 1987’s classic The Princess Bride rather hilariously puts it, often tends to get short accurately-portrayed shrift in popular culture. Not in terms of how often it is featured, which is a considerable amount, dappled as it is in the many hues Continue Reading

  If there’s one thing humanity has fund itself particularly adept at, and this is not a cause for blue ribbons or backslapping with gusto, it is placing itself on a gleaming pedestal and fancying itself as some sort of nature-ordering deity. You can trace that god-like fascination to religions Continue Reading

  Extinctions the 2017 winner of Australia’s Miles Franklin award is an ambitious novel on a lot of levels. In its 280-page length, Josephine Wilson has packed an impressive number of issues, sending the two main characters in the book, ageing academic engineer (obsessed with the use of concrete and Modernist Continue Reading

  There’s a certain romanticism attached to the idea of time travel. While stories as diverse as Back to the Future and H G Well’s The Time Machine have offered some darkly cautionary tales, and the idea of time paradoxes have caused anyone outside of pure physics a major headache Continue Reading

  Days of Wonder, the second book from Keith Stuart (A Boy Made of Blocks), is an inestimable joy from start to finish. The story of Tom and Hannah, a father and daughter who make a magically theatrical life for themselves in a small English town after wife and mother Continue Reading