It is always a welcome thing when a novel completely and utterly subverts expectations. Novels like Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore by Matthew Sullivan which, while sporting a back cover blurb that clearly announces there is darkness sitting at the heart of its immersively compelling narrative, gives off the sense Continue Reading
Books
Book review: The Very Last List of Vivian Walker by Megan Albany
It goes without saying, and yet this review by necessity will say it anyway, that there is a searing, jarring finality about death. There are many other things in our life that we can duck and weave around, mould and shape into a size or shape that we like, or Continue Reading
Book review: The Circus Infinite by Khan Wong
Escaping from a dark and terrible situation usually demands one thing, and one thing only – just get the hell away! Whatever comes after that is the subject of improvisation and desperation, and if it’s a good thing, something that changes your life, well that is the luxuriant icing on Continue Reading
Book review: Glow by Tim Jordan
Most apocalyptic fiction rests solely on the basis that the end has come, civilisation has been shown the door and humanity is existing, if it can even be called that, in its smouldering, soon-to-disappear ruins. Granted these types of stories aren’t meant to have much hope or be even remotely Continue Reading
UPCOMING READS: An A-List for Death by Pamela Hart
SNAPSHOTTV researcher Poppy McGowan has never sought the spotlight and is none too happy to be photographed with rock god Nathan Castle. When the photo pops up on celebrity gossip sites, it sparks a media feeding frenzy, forcing Poppy to go to ground, don a wig, and pull some nifty Continue Reading
Book review: Em & Me by Beth Morrey
When it comes to life, we always have the best of intentions. We’re going to carpe diem, triumph over the odds, find success and happiness in multitudinous quantities and prove to all the naysayers from our past that we have what it takes, and then some. It’s a glowing, exciting Continue Reading
Book review: The Competition by Katherine Collette
Life rarely works out quite like we plan it, does it? Oh, we have grand and vaulting plans when we’re young, a time when we expect that our adult decades will be all self-fulfillment, donuts and parades; then we actually grow up and find that making those heady plans come Continue Reading
Book review: This Fragile Earth by Susannah Wise
With so much of life uncontrollable and intangible, people often place great stock in the fact that the physical world around us has a solidity and permanence to it. Sure, natural disasters and pandemics can shake that to the core in profoundly traumatic ways at times, something we all have Continue Reading
Book review: The Torrent by Dinuka McKenzie
What truly makes an arresting novel? Answers will likely vary as widely as every reader out there, and their numbers are considerable, but usually most people will agree that you need a gripping narrative, superlatively engaging writing, a beguiling sense of palpable time and place, and a protagonist that captures Continue Reading
Book review: Deep Dive by Ron Walters
Much as we like to think of reality as a concrete, palpable thing, immovable and unchangeable, the fact is that it is altered by any number of variables, not least how we perceive the world around us and what our mind accepts as real and not real. It might look Continue Reading