When you fall in love with a character from a book, your fondest wish is to stay with them, enjoy their company and see where they go next. It’s a natural reaction to any character who leaps off the page and into your heart, or indeed any person you meet Continue Reading
Books
UPCOMING READS: A. G. Riddle’s Quantum Radio’s perilous discoveries loom thrillingly large
SNAPSHOTAt CERN, a scientist has just made an incredible discovery – a breakthrough that may answer the deepest questions about human existence. But what he’s found is far more dangerous than he ever imagined. Dr. Tyson Klein is a quantum physicist who has dedicated his entire life to his research. Continue Reading
Lost in a sea of beautiful words: My 25 favourite books of 2022
Reading has always been my happy place. My safe space too, a place of escapism and reassurance, especially when I was growing up and my days were filled with bullying and a constant sense, gleaned from some of the people at the church where my dad was a minister, that Continue Reading
Book review: Tinsel – The Girl Who Invented Christmas by Sibéal Pounder
You would think by now that’s there not a lot of imaginative newness that can be brought to bear on the story of Santa; after all, his story is well documented, to the point of exhaustive detail, and you could rightly assume that’s all the festive mythmakers wrote. But, as Continue Reading
Book review: Christmas Island (A Very Hygge Holiday, Book 2) by Natalia Normann
If you’ve ever taken an extended overseas holiday, chances are you’ve experienced the interesting existential remove that happens when you are plucked from your everyday life and find yourself looking back at your life and into your soul in ways you simply don’t do when the priorities of the day Continue Reading
Kids’ festive book review: Jim’s Spectacular Christmas by Emma Thompson & Axel Scheffler + Marvin and Marigold: A Christmas Surprise by Mark Carthew & Simon Prescott and Christmas Lights by Ruth Symons & Carolina Rabei
While I am huge fan of novels aimed at adult Christmas tragics such as yours truly, there’s something innately pure and escapist about losing yourself in books aimed at children. They draw me back to a simpler time when Christmas meant, quite apart from freedom from school bullies, the chance Continue Reading
On 10th day of Christmas … I read Once Upon a December by Amy E. Reichert
Christmas is often described as a magical time of year but the word is more commonly used to suggest atmosphere and sensibility than actual supernatural influencing of time and events. But in Once Upon a December by Amy E. Reichert, Yule time is literally magical, a place where an alleyway Continue Reading
Book review: A Merry Little Meet Cute by Julie Murphy and Sierra Simone
If romantic comedies were your only yardstick, it would be all too easy to believe that true love, the kind made of meet-cutes, playful flirting and sweet connections, is as chaste and celibate as they come. But the fact is we fall in love with our minds and bodies, often Continue Reading
Who wouldn’t want to have A Pudding for Christmas with Winnie-the-Pooh?
There is something innately warm and comforting dear old Winnie-the-Pooh at any time of the year but somehow it is at Christmas, when everything is supposed to be epitome of warmth and comfortable, that spending time with him feels most special. Even more so when in Winnie-the-Pooh: A Pudding for Continue Reading
On 7th day of Christmas … I read The Christmas Bookshop by Jenny Colgan
While we all like to think that life is endlessly possible and lustrously malleable, the truth is, often to quite accidentally, that we end up in craterous ruts of our own making. We don’t mean to send our life down some dead-end road to nowhere but one badly handled sliding Continue Reading