Books

  Jason Dessen has it all. Well, almost everything. He hasn’t even come closing to realising the impressive potential he showed at university as one of the most promising astro-physicists to come along in years, a man destined for great things. But while that nags at him, and he wonders Continue Reading

  No matter how well-educated we might be, all of us have a tendency, to  a greater or lesser degree, to interpret other cultures, peoples’ situations or even ancient civilisations through the lens of our modern worldview. We might have all the facts or evidence we need at hand but Continue Reading

  Guylain Vignolles, blighted by a name that in French is uncomfortably close to a spoonerism, Vilain Guignol or Ugly Puppet, is a 36 year old man astride two worlds. By day he works at a book-pulping factory, overseen by “Fatso”, the corpulent supervisor of the plant, where is in charge of Continue Reading

  In almost every respect Simon Spier is your typical American 16 year old. He’s popular but not too popular, dabbles in drama productions at school where he sits with a motley array of old friends, jocks and new arrivals at lunch, has lifelong friends in Nick and Leah, a Continue Reading

  SNAPSHOT We never saw them coming. Entire cities disappeared in the blink of an eye, leaving nothing but dust and rubble. When an alien race came to make Earth theirs, they brought with them a weapon we had no way to fight, a universe-altering force known as thelemity. It Continue Reading

  Expectations. They form the cornerstone of the way we approach life – how fulfilling our careers will be, how our relationships will flourish and grow, how we will love our parents, siblings and children, how rewarding out everyday lives will be. And naturally they are rarely lacking in positivity Continue Reading

You’ve met Hope Arden a thousand times before. You simply don’t remember. Examining themes of identity, memory, self-awareness and the commodification of humanity, The Sudden Appearance of Hope by British writer Claire North (a pseudonym for Catherine Webb) goes to the very heart of what it means to be a person. Continue Reading

  Ending up smack bang in the middle of a book series when all you thought you were doing was buying a standalone volume can be disconcerting. But now when it’s John Scalzi and not when you’ve picked volume 6 in the Old Man’s War series, a space opera that spans Continue Reading

  Love can find you in the most unexpected of places. Even so, if you’re Connie MacAdair, a mathematics prodigy who has spent her entire life in love with numbers and theorems, and reviled in certain quarters as a hopeless nerd as a result, it’s a fair bet you’re not even Continue Reading

  There is no such thing as half an apocalypse. But what if, as South by Frank Owen (a pseudonym for two authors, Diane Awerbuck and Alex Latimer) postulates, you lived in a USA divided between a prosperous, healthy North with all the mod cons of life and an impoverished, Continue Reading