Books

(courtesy Hachette Australia) When a novel starts with four young friends accidentally steal a spaceship on a near-future earth stumbling towards environmental and societal collapse, you know you’re in for something rippling with verve and imagination. But then, when said novel throws in a big, deep mystery – just where Continue Reading

(courtesy Hachette Australia) For all the talk of “it takes a village” and laudatory proclamations about the power of community, there remains this sense that somehow we need to muddle through on our own terms and not trouble anyone else. Quite where this individualistic drive to not bother anyone with Continue Reading

(courtesy Simon & Schuster Australia) Well-written romantic comedies are always good for the soul. There’s something about a rom-com which possesses not only the fairytale loveliness of two people meet-cuting and finding they need each other more than any one else they’ve encountered to date, but also some real emotional Continue Reading

(courtesy Penguin Books Australia) Finding somewhere to belong, to truly, absolutely and irrefutably to belong, is something we all crave. We want our people, need our people, whoever they may be, but traumatised by past events and blinded by the scars they leave behind, we often lack the means to Continue Reading

(via Shutterstock) If you’re after novels that are packed to the imaginative brim with clever ideas, fantastically engaging characters and fantasy/sci-fi/horror premises that absolutely come alive and practically fly off the page, and yes, a buoyant sense of escapist adventure with lots of heart, then British author Dan Hanks is Continue Reading

(courtesy Text Publishing) As someone who spent much of my childhood and youth stuck well and truly out of the mainstream – that’s partly true now really but adulthood affords you far more options for ameliorating its worst effects and doing it on your terms – bullied and harassed, there’s Continue Reading

(courtesy Penguins Books Australia) Life takes a heavy toll on all of us. How much damage it causes us in amongst all the good and happy times doesn’t become readily apparent until much later in life and usually only when some lightning rod of an event causes us to be Continue Reading

(courtesy Hachette Australia) Is it possible to be funny both funny and incisive about mental health? It is if you’re comedian Susan Calman, who, when she’s not making us laugh from the stage or on TV – her Grand Day Out series is a joy and makes travelling just as Continue Reading

(courtesy Penguin Books Australia) It may not sound like an attractive proposition to be told that a novel will break your heart little-by-little before it breaks it completely but what about if we told you that while all that rending and slow motion rupturing is taking place that some quite Continue Reading

(courtesy Hachette Australia) We’re all used to the rom-com idea of love being swift, heavily meet-cutey and complicated just enough to make the reaching of the romantic finish line feel like an earned thing. But the truth is, love isn’t ever really that straightforward, and while we might fall for Continue Reading