Books

  Imagine for a second that you were plonked down in the middle of a foreign country with limited language skills and only a passing familiarity with the culture after a lifetime spent hidden away from the outside world. What would that feel like? How disorienting would it be? Would Continue Reading

  Walter Lavender Jr is a remarkable young man. Gifted with a preternatural ability to locate missing objects in a dazzlingly wide variety of circumstances the length and breadth of New York City, he lives with his mother Lucy at a bakery where the pastries and desserts come alive with Continue Reading

  When someone very close to you dies, it’s entirely natural for people to extend their condolences, to offer their love and support in any way they can and to be present with you in your emotionally-enervating moment of grief and loss. It’s a brief bubble when loving arms envelop Continue Reading

  When you think about characters as beloved as Christopher Robin, Winnie the Pooh, Piglet, Tigger and Eeyore and the rest of the residents of the Hundred-Acre Wood, it’s easy to assume that everything to do with them must be equally as bucolic and paradisaical as they are. After all, Continue Reading

  There is an immersive sense of otherworldliness that must be present in any fantasy tale worth it’s magical salt, if we are to truly buy into its escapist narrative. A sense that you are in a world completely and utterly not your own, and yet, and here lies the Continue Reading

  Time is one of those concepts we like to think we have a handle on. We know we can’t stop its progress, it goes by too fast (usually; although it can also go by far too slowly when we’re at the coalface of work or on a particularly boring Continue Reading

  Adam Kelly, University of York I am someone who reads, teaches, and writes about contemporary American fiction for a living. Knowing this, you might expect that fresh, experimental novels would constantly be arriving on my desk, that I would be inundated with literary innovation. But it is in fact Continue Reading

  We are the products of our life experiences. Even the most empathetic among us is subconsciously influenced by personal worldviews which inform how we interpret everything that anyone says or does to or around us, complicating how we respond to another’s life circumstances that divert greatly from our own. Continue Reading

  It’s hard not to fall in love with Eleanor Oliphant. True, at first, she’s socially awkward, judgmental and cleaves to routine like it’s a liferaft in a stormy sea (you soon discover that’s exactly what it is) and is as alone as a person can get. But as Gail Continue Reading