(courtesy Angry Robot Books) Coming up with a truly original idea in any genre or medium of storytelling is always a big ask. No matter how brilliantly one-of-a-kind your creatively epiphanic moment might be, it’s tricky not to sound like a thousand other great narrative ideas that have gone before; Continue Reading
Books
Book review: A Mirror Mended (Fractured Fables #2) by Alix E. Harrow
(courtesy Pan Macmillan Australia) Much as we love things as they were written originally, there’s also a great deal of fun to be had, and in this postmodern world of ours we love to indulge it, subverting and playing with all kinds of storytelling forms. While the purists will insist Continue Reading
UPCOMING READS: The Mercy of Gods (Captive’s War #1) by James S. A. Corey
(courtesy Gizmodo (c) Orbit) SNAPSHOTHow humanity came to the planet called Anjiin is lost in the fog of history, but that history is about to end. The Carryx—part empire, part hive—have waged wars of conquest for centuries, destroying or enslaving species across the galaxy. Now, they are facing a great Continue Reading
Book review: The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter & Other Essential Ghosts by Soraya Palmer
(courtesy Allen & Unwin) Making sense of life can often take everything we’ve got. While many events are ostensibly straight forward such as births, deaths and marriages, they never occur in a vacuum and are tangled, rather ferociously and labyrinthinely, in a whole host of grievances, hurts, family dynamics and Continue Reading
Book review: Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop by Hwang Bo-reum (translated by Shanna Tam)
(courtesy Bloomsbury Publishing) Bookshops are, for book buyers at least, innately warm and comforting places. Quite apart from the fact that they offer a wealth of possible storytelling possibilities, they also feel like a step away from the hustle and bustle of day-to-day life which to greater or lesser extents Continue Reading
#Christmas preview book review: Weirdo by Sara Pascoe
(courtesy Allen & Unwin) This will hardly come as a news flash to anyone but life rarely lives up hype and expectation. When we’re younger, we expect bounteous riches, if not material then at the very least existential, to flow down upon us like confetti at an environmentally unsound wedding, Continue Reading
Book review: Starling House by Alix E. Harrow
(courtesy Pan Macmillan Australia) We live in a perilously binary world, one that separates everything into stark Os or 1s and refused to entertain the idea of halves, gradients or places in-between. Armed with that dangerously blinkered mindset, people then begin to assign worth and blame to those that either Continue Reading
Book review: The Death of John Lacey by Ben Hobson
Humanity loves its motherhood statements. There’s something comforting about referring to brotherhood, mercy and justice because they sound full of virtue and goodness and the assumption is made, somewhat erroneously, that everyone knows exactly what’s meant by them. But, like the word “love” itself, there’s often little examination of what Continue Reading
#Halloween book review: Daisy Darker by Alice Feeney
If you are an inveterate reader, the odds are good, better than good actually, that fellow readers or close friends (sometimes, happily, they are both) that at some point they will recommend a book to you. A book, they will assure you with a mix of solemnity and enthusiasm, is Continue Reading
Book review: The Bandit Queens by Parini Shroff
(courtesy Allen & Unwin Book Publishers) We live in a grievously unbalanced world. No surprises there you say; one look at the 24/7 news cycle or at the place we work or the society in which we live and it becomes clear that fairness very rarely rules the day and Continue Reading