Books

(courtesy Harper Collins Publishers Australia) What is there to be said about the wondrously fun and glittering festive fun that is the familially festive joyfest that is The Christmas Carrolls: A Fantastically Festive Family by Mel Taylor-Bessent? Why you could call it “‘festabulous” or “Christmasriffic”, “merrynifiscent” or perhaps even “bauble-illiant”. Continue Reading

(courtesy Simon & Schuster) Finding your way out of a dark and terrible place in life is never easy. For Holly that sense of being trapped somewhere she doesn’t want to be – divorced, alone and effectively homeless with nowhere to go but either to stay at her emotionally frigid Continue Reading

(courtesy Pan Macmillan Australia) Is it possible to successfully manage a new start in life when the halls aren’t decked, the world is not being joy-ed and a man in a red suit isn’t acting all merry and bright? Likely, yes, but honestly why would you want to when Christmas Continue Reading

(courtesy Sourcebooks Casablanca) Writing about people falling love, especially at Christmas, purported to be the most romantic time of the year (and honestly it sure feels like that, even in an Australian summer), is quite possibly one of the easiest things to do in the world. Throw in some cute Continue Reading

(courtesy Allen & Unwin) Christmas is supposed to be all merry and bright and wondrously lovely, escapistly free from the nastiness and brutishness of the rest of the year. Well, that’s the general, tinsel on the tree and deck the hall view of the season anyway. But in Janice Hallett’s Continue Reading

(courtesy Hachette Australia) Realising a dream is one thing, sustaining it is quite another. That is the stark reality of things for Carmen in Jenny Colgan’s Midnight at the Christmas Bookshop, the follow-up to The Christmas Bookshop, when the old, hitherto ill-tended second hand bookstore she was instrumental in saving, Continue Reading

(courtesy Hachette Australia) Dreams are supposed to come true at Christmas. Or Christmas adjacent, at the very least; that is the idea behind many a Christmas-based novel and it’s very much the case with Erin Green’s From Shetland, With Love at Christmas which is infused to its tree-topping star with Continue Reading

Miracles are, by and large in short supply in our humdrum, bread-and-butter world. We long for them, we hail the extraordinary moments that do occasionally thwart the drab banality of life as “miracle” and we love stories that embody them because, even if it is only fictional, here’s a chance Continue Reading

(courtesy Harper Collins Publishers Reach) There’s something about the most wonderful time of the year that makes us feel as if anything is possible, that all the baggage of the year can be wiped away in the effervescent glittery escapism of Christmas. While the new year is traditionally the time Continue Reading