Vivid. That’s the word that strikes most often as you dive into and are gloriously consumed by The Last Blade Priest by W. P. Wiles, a novel that is, in every conceivable respect, a story well told, vividly realised and epically alive. A fantasy story grounded in the earthy fallibility Continue Reading
Books
Book review: The Eulogy by Jackie Bailey
There is a curious time in everyone’s lives, in the immediate, disorienting aftermath of the death of a loved one, when time seems to stop but also go into a mad overdrive, mixing together the past and the present in an blender-frenzied attempt to make sense of a loss so Continue Reading
Head back, waaaay back to Middle-earth: Trailer drops for Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power
SNAPSHOTPrime Video’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power brings to screens for the very first time the heroic legends of the fabled Second Age of Middle-earth’s history. This epic drama is set thousands of years before the events of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of Continue Reading
Life, death and scarred humanity: Five Days at Memorial (Apple TV+)
SNAPSHOTFive Days at Memorial chronicles the impact of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath on a local hospital. When the floodwaters rose, power failed, and heat soared, exhausted caregivers at a New Orleans hospital were forced to make decisions that would follow them for years to come. The stacked ensemble cast Continue Reading
Book review: The Boy With a Bird in His Chest by Emme Lund
It’s all too easy to begin hiding yourself away from the world, especially if you’re told repeatedly that this is something wrong with you, that people will reject you if they know. Or even if they don’t. Sometimes that rejection and sense of fear can be cruelly anticipatory, foreseeing problems Continue Reading
#ChristmasInJuly book review: Window Shopping by Tessa Bailey
Christmas is, however you choose to view it, a time of rebirth and redemption. The overwhelming message of Christian theology is that on this day, with the birth of Jesus as the saviour of the world, humanity had a chance to start again, freed off the sins of fallen Eden Continue Reading
Book review: Gone to Ground by Bronwyn Hall
The review copy was supplied by NetGalley / publication date is 3 August 2022 There are novels, the sole motivation of which is to push the pedal to the metal and go hell for leather towards the narrative finish line, characters sacrificed on the altar of a thrilling story; then Continue Reading
Tomes to add to the TBR #2! The Pallbearers Club by Paul Tremblay, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin and August Kitko and the Mechas From Space by Alex White
There’s a meme that keeps popping up on Facebook that runs something along the lines of “I said to myself ‘I won’t buy any more books until I’ve read the ones on my TBR … and then I laughed and laughed and laughed”. Honestly, if you paid me a dollar Continue Reading
Book review: The Near Daphne Experience by Alison Reynolds
Farcically brilliant as Alison Reynold’s sparklingly clever debut novel, The Near Daphne Experience is – the inspired title alone is frankly worth the price of admission alone, one thing must be said from the start … you really should get as far from Daphne as you can. Quite why is Continue Reading
Book review: Stars and Bones by Gareth L. Powell
If you’ve read a lot of science fiction, there’s an extremely good chance that you have read an enormous amount of space opera, a significant chunk of the genre that dares to imagine what humanity might be like spread out among the stars and what threats might await those engaging Continue Reading