Having your world turned upside down is no easy thing. Even if, like Jackson Sweeney, protagonist of Georgina Young’s novel Bootstrap, seemingly the only gay in the small seen-far-better-days Aussie town of Koornang, your life is hardly worth tweeting out about. Much of the lacklustre pall of Sweeney’s spectacularly unambitious Continue Reading
Books
#ChristmasInJuly festive book review redux: The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus by L. Frank Baum
This post was originally published on 12 December 2018. There are some figures that loom so large in the public consciousness that it’s easy to feel like you know, or you can imagine, pretty much everything about them. Santa Claus is one of those figures. We owe our collective modern Continue Reading
A dystopian or utopian future? Claire G. Coleman’s new novel Enclave imagines both (curated article)
by Maggie Nolan, Associate Professor in Humanities, Australian Catholic University I was reading Noongar author Claire G. Coleman’s third novel, Enclave, a few days after the US Supreme Court overturned the Roe v Wade judgement, a political victory for a conservative project many years in the making. As Michael Bradley Continue Reading
More #ChristmasInJuly tree decorations: The Mad Hatter (Alice in Wonderland), Bernard (The Rescuers), Pixar’s Pizza Planet truck, Stitch (Lilo and Stitch) + Charlie Brown (Peanuts)
Yes, I am at it again! Adding yet more ornaments to my Christmas in July tree which is, really, just my Easter and Halloween tree pressed into triple duty. The Christmas in July tree is nowhere as lavish as my December efforts but still, it’s fun to bring some of Continue Reading
Book review: Eversion by Alastair Reynolds
If you’ve read any of masterful storyteller Alastair Reynolds, you will be well acquainted with what a superbly good writer he is. In all of his books, which normally takes place on emotionally rich and expansive science fiction narrative landscapes, he gives characters that pop, stories that are epic and Continue Reading
UPCOMING READS: Book of Sand by Mo Hayder
SNAPSHOTSand. A hostile world of burning sun. Outlines of several once-busy cities shimmer on the horizon. Now empty of inhabitants, their buildings lie in ruins. In the distance a group of people—a family—walks toward us. Ahead lies shelter: a “shuck” the family calls home and which they know they must Continue Reading
Book review: The Last Blade Priest by W. P. Wiles
Vivid. That’s the word that strikes most often as you dive into and are gloriously consumed by The Last Blade Priest by W. P. Wiles, a novel that is, in every conceivable respect, a story well told, vividly realised and epically alive. A fantasy story grounded in the earthy fallibility Continue Reading
Book review: The Eulogy by Jackie Bailey
There is a curious time in everyone’s lives, in the immediate, disorienting aftermath of the death of a loved one, when time seems to stop but also go into a mad overdrive, mixing together the past and the present in an blender-frenzied attempt to make sense of a loss so Continue Reading
Head back, waaaay back to Middle-earth: Trailer drops for Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power
SNAPSHOTPrime Video’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power brings to screens for the very first time the heroic legends of the fabled Second Age of Middle-earth’s history. This epic drama is set thousands of years before the events of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of Continue Reading
Life, death and scarred humanity: Five Days at Memorial (Apple TV+)
SNAPSHOTFive Days at Memorial chronicles the impact of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath on a local hospital. When the floodwaters rose, power failed, and heat soared, exhausted caregivers at a New Orleans hospital were forced to make decisions that would follow them for years to come. The stacked ensemble cast Continue Reading