Books

  A curious thing has happened in the realm of apocalyptic fiction of late – the arrival of hope. Previously hope was nowhere to be seen, an unimaginable luxury in a darkly dystopian world where civilisation had collapsed, humanity had surrendered to its basest instincts and Darwinism was having an Continue Reading

  It’s only after you’ve had an extraordinary pet in your life, an animal that was far more than just a companion and came to define your life in ways you never expected, that you can understand why a book like Gizelle’s Bucket List is so immensely affecting. It’s a Continue Reading

  It’s often not until someone dies that you truly come to understand how deeply connected they were to a whole host of people, all of whom deal with the grief of their loss in their own unique ways. It happened to me last year when my dad died from Continue Reading

  The great Arthur C Clarke once sagely remarked, in what has become known as one of his three laws, that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. In Robert Dickinson’s The Tourist, that threshold has long since been transgressed with the people of 24th century earth routinely back and forwards Continue Reading

  The need to belong is a powerful imperative for all of us. It’s why we form ourselves into religious congregations, clubs, sporting teams and a thousand other permutations of togetherness, surrounding ourselves with likeminded souls who affirm who we are (or gently challenge it) while giving us a a Continue Reading

  Life, pretty much any way you stretch it, is disconcerting. Few of us actually admit to such a thing since to do so would be to admit that the bricks-and-mortar sanity of the everyday, the bills, the commute and the meals that anchor us to comfortingly set routines, is Continue Reading

  If you have ever fallen in love, you will be all too aware of how all-consumingly wonderful it can be, how it overwhelms you in the best possible way, reshaping your reality so profoundly that it becomes well-nigh impossible to remember a time when the object of your fierce Continue Reading

  For a concept that has only been successfully realised in fiction (as far as we know; anyone noticed any weird temporal shifts in their timeline lately?), there’s a great deal about time travel that is assumed to be true. For instance, it’s easy enough to ricochet back and forth Continue Reading

  All of come to the realisation, at one point or another, that the business of living is not for the fainthearted. What looks from the relatively uncluttered vantage point of childhood to be a straightforward undertaking, soon proves itself to be wildly unpredictable, immensely complicated and prone to as Continue Reading

  Barney Conroy is the literary Frank Spencer of our time. For those too young to remember the classic British sitcom Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em, Frank Spencer was the hapless but well-meaning protagonist who despite his best intentions, and there was no doubting the goodness of his heart, always Continue Reading