Books

(courtesy Tor Publishing Group) The crime genre, early teenage voracious consumption of Agatha Christie’s entire output aside, has never really compelled this reviewer to sit down and read like, say science-fiction or slice-of-life quirky dramas. While most sections of my favourite bookshops see regular footfall from me, the crime section Continue Reading

(courtesy Hachette Australia) Life can often like a series of existentially testing events, punctuated by rare moments of levity and joy and wrapped in a lifetime of pain, hurt, loss and hard-won gains. That might seem bleak but for most it’s an accurate take on this thing called life, and Continue Reading

(courtesy Pan Macmillan Australia) Plunging into the latest novel by John Scalzi, and fortunate to have read a number of his books before this, I was well aware of just good a writer this man is and how well he imagines realities beyond our own, bringing them to life with Continue Reading

(courtesy Ultimo Press) One of the ways we survive the many vagaries of life is to tell ourselves stories; they’re usually self-serving storylines that reinforce the internal narrative we have long told ourselves to help us make sense of events that would otherwise defy easy categorisation. Are they always truthful? Continue Reading

(courtesy Harper Collins Publishers Australia) Life, we are told, is a series of sliding door moments. Step one way, and your life will head down one, hopefully beneficial and rewarding course; go in the other direction and your trajectory takes on another look and feel entirely. If the choices were Continue Reading

(courtesy Allen & Unwin Book Publishers) Coming to grips with who you are isn’t easy. It’s even less easy when you’re a ten-year-old girl who’s been raised almost in a vacuum of information about yourself and who can tell that the world she inhabits is not only built on convenient Continue Reading

(courtesy Bloomsbury Publishing) Coming-of-age stories are known for asking big questions about life. The novels usually feature a protagonist going through the messy business of sorting out who they are, how they it into the world around them and what matters to them, not just in the moment but in Continue Reading

(courtesy Echo publishing) When you are consumed by anxiety, the kind that eats you alive in endlessly exhausting ways and turns even the simplest of moments into existential hell, can there even be room for love? That’s the question that consumes lifelong friends Kelly O’Mara and Finn aka Finely Walsh,protagonists Continue Reading