(courtesy Pan Macmillan Australia) There is an enormous luxury and sense of expansive indulgence that comes with settling into a sci-fi epic that stretches for almost 900 pages. That sense of narrative pleasure only grows greater still when the author who has penned this magnificent space operatic masterpiece is Peter Continue Reading
Books
Book review: Down in the Sea of Angels by Khan Wong
(courtesy Penguins Books Australia) A preview of this novel was provided by Angry Robot Books in return for a free and fair review. Plunging into any fictional book is an act of active and engaged imagination. It can’t not be; here you have a story that recounts events that have Continue Reading
Book review: Cheddar Luck Next Time by Beth Cato
(courtesy Penguin Books Australia) A digital preview copy of Cheddar Luck Next Time provided by Angry Robot Books Books in return for an honest and objective review; the novel released 8 April 2025. Cosy mysteries are becoming quite the thing. It makes sense – we live in a world rapidly Continue Reading
Easter book review: Friends of Dorothy by Sandi Toksvig
(courtesy Hachette Australia) While this book is not set at Easter, it carries themes of redemption and renewal, and of love and connection which surely are at the heart of this most redemptive of seasons … If you ask most people, they would tell you that they are very nicely Continue Reading
Book review: The Montegiallo School of Swearing by Andrew HC McDonald
(courtesy The Fremantle Press) Reinventing your life is no easy thing. Oh everyone dreams of Eat. Pray.Love.-ing the hell of their tired, meaningless or traumatically disrupted lives, but dreaming of it happening is far easier than taking the concrete steps necessary to manifest it in the real world. But sometimes Continue Reading
Book review: Cascade Failure by L. M. Sagas
(courtesy Pan Macmillan Australia) There are countless space operas out there in the world of science fiction, a great many of them imaginatively adept at crafting galaxies of possibility, good and bad, and of taking us on rip-roaring journey from planetary pillar to cometic post. But not all of them Continue Reading
“Do you think we can trust it?” The innate humanity of Murderbot is on full display in its first trailer
(courtesy IMP Awards) SNAPSHOTBased on Martha Wells’ Hugo & Nebula Award-winning book series, Murderbot is a sci-fi thriller/comedy about a self-hacking security construct who is horrified by human emotion yet drawn to its vulnerable clients. Murderbot must hide its free will and complete a dangerous assignment when all it really Continue Reading
Book review: By Her Hand by Marion Taffe
(courtesy Harper Collins Publishers Australia) By and large this reviewer, an habitual buyer of books even though his TBR is threatening to collapse on him at some point in the not-too-distant future, doesn’t usually have books bought for him. But when that does happen, when someone does take the chance Continue Reading
Book review: When the Moon Hits Your Eye by John Scalzi
(courtesy Pan Macmillan Australia) At first glance, the premise for When the Moon Hits Your Eye, seems nonsensically silly and hardly the kind of plot to support a hard-hitting and substantially thoughtful exploration of humanity and the many it expresses itself under pressure. But then, then if anyone can weave Continue Reading
Book review: The Bookshop Detectives #2: Tea and Cake and Death by Gareth Ward and Louise Ward
(courtesy Penguin Books Australia) Cosy crime has become quite the thing in recent years, and while those unacquainted with the genre might wonder how something so awful could be considered in the same vein as warm fires, knitting and supportive found families, there’s something about combining cosiness and crime that Continue Reading