Books

(courtesy Fremantle Press) There are times in our lives, many times in our lives in fact, when waving a magic wand to make trenchant issues simply disappear is a very appealing option. Unfortunately outside of Harry Potter films, wands are not in general, everyday use and problems usually have to Continue Reading

(courtesy Harper Collins Publishers Australia) Life is all about playing parts. That’s not to say that’s healthy, unless of course you’re an actor in which case have at it and then some, but the reality is that, for a whole of reasons, many of us spend our days unconsciously being Continue Reading

(courtesy Penguin Books Australia) Despite living in it all the time, humanity is, by and large, not all that good with dealing with the reality. So averse are we to its omnipresence and the way in which it very rarely squares with our fairytale glossy hopes and dreams that we Continue Reading

(courtesy IMP Awards) Whether we’re conscious of it or not, we often tend to define ourselves in terms of our connection to others. In an ideal world, we would be who we are consistently and without change from one situation to another or one person to another, but a combination Continue Reading

(courtesy Harper Collins Booksellers Australia) There’s always been a lot to like about the gloriously flawed but found family-prioritising protagonists at the heart of the Chilling Effect series of playfully intense novels by Valerie Valdes but chief among them must surely be the fact the fact that here are saviours-of-the-day Continue Reading

(courtesy Penguin Books Australia) There are those books that you read that are beautifully written, lovely and sweet, full of great characters and a pleasingly wrought plot that leave nary a mark upon you emotionally; and then there are novels like The Collected Regrets of Clover by Mikki Brammer which Continue Reading

(courtesy Goodreads) If you’re not a natural fit for the societal mainstream, it can hard coming to grips with precisely who you are, especially in those pivotal teenage years when defining yourself is pretty much the first order of business. The reason why it’s so hard is that while those Continue Reading

(courtesy Hachette Australia) One of the great delights of reading, indeed of the consumption of any kind of pop cultured medium, is coming across a story that absolutely reinvents, emboldens and breathtakingly refreshes the genre of which it’s a part. When it happens it constitutes one of those wondrous moments Continue Reading

(courtesy Hachette Australia) Falling in love is sweet in a million different wonderful ways. But how much sweeter, especially if you’re a book lover, is it when it all happens against a backdrop of a bookstore, and concerns said owner of that literary retail establishment and a hunky writer who, Continue Reading