Books

  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

  SNAPSHOT The Littlest Bigfoot follows lonely Alice Mayfair, who is neglected by her parents and sent to a string of boarding schools. She’s self conscious about her body and frizzy hair and wants to find a friend. She does so in kindred spirit, Millie Maximus, a Bigfoot, and fights Continue Reading

  Shakespeare may have been the one to remark on it in his play As You Like It, but the truth is all of us, at least the self-aware among us, have wondered at one time or another if we are merely playing the parts assigned to us and if Continue Reading

  There are many things that define us as human – the need for belonging and connection, a craving for justice, a fear of the unknown, violence, tenderness, love, the need for redemption and forgiveness, and a curiosity about happens when we shuffle off this mortal coil. All of these Continue Reading

  If you’ve ever had the feeling that your life isn’t your own, that the life you’re living is just a little bit off-kilter, than you’ll find a lot to identify with in Gavin Extence’s second novel, The Mirror World of Melody Black. Creatively-titled since the titular character isn’t the Continue Reading

  Barney is a loser. Shhhh that’s OK, he won’t mind me saying that – after all it’s not like it isn’t something that Barney Conroy, protagonist in Guy Sigley’s hilariously all-too-relatable novel Barney (A novel about a guy called Barney) hasn’t told himself every day of his miserable, unfulfilling Continue Reading