Books

(courtesy Penguin Books Australia) The world can be a scary, messy and wildly unpredictable place, and while we can’t always run, for any length of reasonable time anyway, from the things that haunt and scare us, we can seek temporary solace in happy places of our choosing. One of the Continue Reading

(courtesy Harper Collins Publishers Australia) There are romantic comedies, and then there are ROMANTIC COMEDIES (and, no, the demarcation does not lie in using all-caps alone). The greater difference, and one readily apparent in the superlative effort that is Just One Taste by Lizzy Dent, is the way in which Continue Reading

(courtesy Starlit Publishing) When is a restaurant far more than eating (hopefully) great food in a public setting? When it takes places at The Nameless Restaurant, the eponymous establishment in Tao Wong’s arrestingly involving novella which takes us to a mysterious place which offers far more than just very good Continue Reading

(courtesy Simon & Schuster Australia) The Fog was provided as a digital ARC ahead of its release on 4 September in Australia. The slow creep of horror that accompanies gothic thrillers is one of the reasons this particular genre is so widely read. There is something strangely enticing about reading Continue Reading

(courtesy Harper Collins Publishers Australia) What a liberating read Lucky Day by Beth Morrey is! All of us, to greater or lesser extent, live ourselves constrained by a host of weird little social paradigms, spoken or unspoken rules by which we are allowed to act, speak or react, and while Continue Reading

(courtesy NewSouth Books) There is something magnificently enthralling about bearing witness to a talented author conjuring up an entire near-future world from the ground up in just 110 tautly-written pages. From nothing, we are led with brutal vivacity and a readily identifiable broken humanity into a dystopian world where civilisation Continue Reading

(courtesy Hachette Australia) Dancing deftly between the whimsical and the emotional weighty is a tricky thing to pull off in any novel. Tip too far either way, and the now-lesser part of the story feels pointless, a drag on a narrative that clearly wants to go one way in particular Continue Reading

(courtesy official Holden Sheppard Twitter/X account) SNAPSHOTTwo Kings is a gritty and heartfelt gay coming-of-age story, set in the world of FIFO workers and tradies in Western Australia. Giacomo Brolo, aka Jack, is a mess, consumed by a self-loathing all too common for closeted men who have grown up in Continue Reading