Books

SNAPSHOTAbandoned by his father as a small child, Sir Gareth Inglis has grown up prickly, cold, and well-used to disappointment. Even so, he longs for a connection, falling headfirst into a passionate anonymous affair that’s over almost as quickly as it began. Bitter at the sudden rejection, Gareth has little Continue Reading

If our current day and age has taught us anything, beyond of course cementing the realisation that the world is an inherently selfish place, it is that fascists and those who inhabit the murderously bleak extremes of the human experience never really go away. Oh, but if they had only Continue Reading

Book blurbs are interesting things. They are there clearly to sell the book by hooking us with an idea of who the protagonist is or where the book may lead us or how its themes may make us think or feel, and they are, by and large, reasonably good at Continue Reading

Not all romantic comedies are created equal. Sure, they all have roughly the same parts – a meet-cute, whether recent or long-established, instant attraction, snappy dialogue, fun moments, a falling out or misunderstanding, and a desperate rush to (usually) the airport to declare undying love – but not all of Continue Reading

If you are part of a marginalised community, any marginalised community, you will all too painfully how much the mainstream abhors non-adherence to orthodoxy. People who simply want to be authentically and honestly themselves are treated like some of personal abomination, an affront to some weirdly collective idea of what Continue Reading

How you react to a given situation says a lot about who you are as a person. In Stina Leicht’s evocatively intense novel, Persephone Station, set in the future when humanity has colonised the stars to good and bad effect, depending on where you stand in society or if you’re Continue Reading

If you ask most people, especially inveterate readers for whom books hold an almost mystically romantic quality, working in a bookstore would have to be the best of all possible worlds. The people who work there talk highly about the merits and rewards of helping books and people make happily Continue Reading

There is something breathtakingly wondrous about being plunged into a whole new fantastical world, especially one as expansively and vividly realised as that in Stacey McEwan’s debut novel, Ledge, the first entry in The Glacian Trilogy. While the title might be taut and sparing in its use of letters, the Continue Reading

Despite all its lustrous, wondrously glittering possibility, life has a way sometimes, or much of the time if it has dealt you more than a few harsh blows, of feeling like it’s done as much as it’s going to do. That doesn’t necessarily mean you have given up on life; Continue Reading

It will hardly come as a newsflash to anyone that we live in a world with very fixed, and by “fixed” I mean concreted and superglued in place with all the concrete and super glue every produced, idea about everything. EVERYTHING. Of course, no one ever stands up and hands Continue Reading