It’s a rare book indeed that doesn’t transport you far away from the everyday, taking you on a richly imaginative journey, whether it’s into someone’s life, their innermost thoughts or to magical places that defy the intervention of the ordinary. It’s one of the great, abiding joys of reading. The Continue Reading
Books
Book review: Spring Clean for the Peach Queen by Sasha Wasley
Redemptive tales are always good for the soul. There’s something immensely satisfying and endlessly restorative reading about people who have reached the very end of themselves, usually in messily complicated, destructive ways, and who need to find a way back to who they really are or want to be. Sometimes, Continue Reading
Book review: A Recipe for Family by Tori Haschka
You wouldn’t necessarily know it from looking at the messy clusterf__k that is modern society but people, by and large, like things neat and tidy. While life by its very unpredictable nature is messily chaotic and rife with glorious inconsistencies, and humanity is more than a little prone to not Continue Reading
Book review: The Warrior (Quest for Heroes #2) by Stephen Aryan
Preview copy provided by Angry Robot Books via NetGalley – The Warrior releases 23 August. There is an enthralling expansiveness to beautifully and richly told fantasy novels, a sense of imaginative foreverness that envelops you so completely you forget that there’s a real world waiting out there to rudely break Continue Reading
Book review: The People on Platform 5 by Clare Pooley
Who among us doesn’t want a fairytale ending? It’s a tough ask in a world more inclined to injustice, vest self-interest and cruelty, accidental or otherwise, but that doesn’t stop us hoping that in amongst all of the hellish loose ends, there might be a definitive moment when all the Continue Reading
Book review: Bootstrap by Georgina Young
Having your world turned upside down is no easy thing. Even if, like Jackson Sweeney, protagonist of Georgina Young’s novel Bootstrap, seemingly the only gay in the small seen-far-better-days Aussie town of Koornang, your life is hardly worth tweeting out about. Much of the lacklustre pall of Sweeney’s spectacularly unambitious Continue Reading
#ChristmasInJuly festive book review redux: The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus by L. Frank Baum
This post was originally published on 12 December 2018. There are some figures that loom so large in the public consciousness that it’s easy to feel like you know, or you can imagine, pretty much everything about them. Santa Claus is one of those figures. We owe our collective modern Continue Reading
A dystopian or utopian future? Claire G. Coleman’s new novel Enclave imagines both (curated article)
by Maggie Nolan, Associate Professor in Humanities, Australian Catholic University I was reading Noongar author Claire G. Coleman’s third novel, Enclave, a few days after the US Supreme Court overturned the Roe v Wade judgement, a political victory for a conservative project many years in the making. As Michael Bradley Continue Reading
More #ChristmasInJuly tree decorations: The Mad Hatter (Alice in Wonderland), Bernard (The Rescuers), Pixar’s Pizza Planet truck, Stitch (Lilo and Stitch) + Charlie Brown (Peanuts)
Yes, I am at it again! Adding yet more ornaments to my Christmas in July tree which is, really, just my Easter and Halloween tree pressed into triple duty. The Christmas in July tree is nowhere as lavish as my December efforts but still, it’s fun to bring some of Continue Reading
Book review: Eversion by Alastair Reynolds
If you’ve read any of masterful storyteller Alastair Reynolds, you will be well acquainted with what a superbly good writer he is. In all of his books, which normally takes place on emotionally rich and expansive science fiction narrative landscapes, he gives characters that pop, stories that are epic and Continue Reading