Books

People love new beginnings. There is something intoxicatingly appealing about the idea that poor decisions can be remedied, mistakes erased and in the case of the comprehensive slow destruction of planet earth and humanity itself, a whole new world, complete with a verdant virginal society, brought into being. It’s a Continue Reading

Grief is often portrayed as a hydra, a multi-headed beast of pain and loss that defies any attempt to get a true grasp on it. While humanity may over-complicate many things, this depiction of an escapable part of life, the mourning of who or what we have lost and the Continue Reading

If you have ever wondered if there is magic lurking within and without the banal cruelties of everyday life, if it is possible for dolls to talk and make active narrative companions or for apartments to change their architecturally-decreed configurations at will, then you need to dive a delicious deep Continue Reading

Live long enough, and there’s a fair chance that you’ll reach a point where you question everything about your life. Some people do it early, questioning the meaning of everything while sweating midnight deadlines for uni essays and wondering if life will play out the way they expect; other people Continue Reading

Washington Black by Canadian writer Esi Eugyan is, quite simply one of the most exquisitely, beautifully well-written books you will ever read about one of the most horrifying things imaginable. A recounting of one remarkable young man’s journey from the sweat-and-toil cane fields of Barbados, rife with aristocratic indulgence and Continue Reading

SNAPSHOTElouise (Lou) Parker is determined to have the absolute best, most impossibly epic summer of her life. There are just a few things standing in her way: She’s landed a job at Magic Castle Playland . . . as a giant dancing hot dog. Her crush, the dreamy Diving Pirate Continue Reading

To hear Disney, Hallmark or a thousand other purveyors of romantic dreamscapes tell it, all we want it to fall headlong into someone’s arms, surrender ourselves to them and live, fairytale-like, happily ever after. It’s a captivating idea, that love could be that all-consuming and satisfying, that everything we’ve ever Continue Reading

Dashing vicariously across the galaxy at literally the speed of light with a protagonist has to be one of the great pleasures of reading a great soap operatic sci-fi novel. Against a backdrop of an impossibly vast and dispersed empire or idealistic groupings of planets, our hero (woman, man alien Continue Reading