Books

(courtesy Fremantle Press) As I discovered fairly early in life, much of the world has very fixed and fiercely defended ideas about a “normal” person should be. And if you don’t fit that mold, then woe betide you because you will finds yourself battling against terrifyingly intense forces that won’t Continue Reading

(courtesy Pan Macmillan Australia) Ostensibly the magically real world of The Lighthouse at the Edge of the World by J. R. Dawson is about a man and his daughter Nera who play a vital role in shepherding the souls of the dead, those immediately passed and those who lingered for Continue Reading

(courtesy Pan Macmillan Australia) While we are all familiar with the slow and steady march of time, inexorably changing everything in small and big ways, it’s those dramatic, one-moment-in-time events which change everything in the blink of an eye which probably make more of an impact. One minute life is Continue Reading

(courtesy Pan Macmillan Australia) How do you get over a broken heart? Especially one ten years in the making? It’s a question with a huge and open-ended answer, an unwelcome one that Elly has to grapple with when her boyfriend of ten years and husband of less than a year Continue Reading

(courtesy Allen & Unwin Australia) As a content writer by trade and a reader of 55 years standing or so, I am a huge fan of writing that sings and comes alive, of words fairly dancing off the page and not simply impressing the mind but filling the heart with Continue Reading

(Pan Macmillan Australia) Somewhere back in the dim dark days of my youth, when dinosaurs roamed the earth and the world wasn’t ending at the hands of several hundred disparate and palpable threats, I was heavily into crime fiction. To be more exact, the books of Agatha Christie which my Continue Reading

(courtesy Wakefield Press) Growing up, it’s often well nigh impossible to feel comfortable in your own skin. Things are changing fast, and figuring which way is up or down emotionally, socially and in a thousand other hugely challenging ways, becomes the stuff of exhausting everyday coming-of-age parkour-ing. It’s not as Continue Reading

(courtesy Allen & Unwin Australia) Romcom detractors, and honestly who stole your rose-eyed, happily romantic hearts and replaced with them stones, will tell you that once you’ve read one story in the story, you’ve read them all. But that dismissive assessment of an entire genre completely ignored the fact that Continue Reading