Books

Most of us like to think we have life all figured out. We don’t, of course, none of us really, bar some rather opinionated religious types and vague philosophers with scattered words of pseudo wisdom, but it’s the story we tell ourselves to keep our souls from exploding with a Continue Reading

Even the most ardently optimistic of us reach a point in life where we have to admit, or more accurately, feel we have to admit, that all of our lofty hopes and dreams are not going to come to fruition (recurrent type A personalities and social media influencers aside, of Continue Reading

There’s a certain blinkered quality to true love that only becomes when you actually enter a relationship, or are possibly on the way to doing so. All those swirling, richly-red, rose petal-coloured wafty dreams about falling headlong and completely in love suddenly look a lot more earthbound when you run Continue Reading

When you pick up a book with the invitingly whimsical title, A Lady’s Guide to Fortune-Hunting, which is set in 1818 London during the height of the Season when balls are held and marriages sealed among the English elite known as the ton, you have every right to expect there Continue Reading

Good fantasy tales often rise and fall on the strength of their world-building. Sure, you need compelling characters in whom you can become invested and a driving narrative that takes you to utterly extraordinary places but none of which really stacks up if the world in which it all takes Continue Reading

If only real life could be as good as the ones we imagine for ourselves. Twelve-year-old Ricky Bird, the titular protagonist of The Improbable Life of Ricky Bird, knows how good these made-up wafts of storybook confection can be; while her actual life falls apart around her as her parents Continue Reading

Whenever you pick up a book, the hope, always springing eternal, is that this will be a read that will touch you deeply on some level. After all, what is a book if it doesn’t whisk you off to other realms or peer incisively into your soul, or at the Continue Reading

SNAPSHOTTwo Ships. One Chance To Save The Future. Fleeing the final days of the generations-long war with the alien Felen, smuggler Jereth Keeven’s freighter the Jonah breaks down in a strange rift in deep space, with little chance of rescue—until they encounter the research vessel Gallion, which claims to be Continue Reading

There are a great many novels out there that explore the idea of a multiverse, or at least the idea of alternate realities or time shifts, and which do so in a way that is often imaginative, compelling and fantastically immersively readable. The new novel by Emily St. John Mandel Continue Reading