Books

Meeting Millie Gogarty is likely one of the best things you’ll ever do in life. An 83-year-old Irish woman from the village of Dun laogshire in Dublin, Ireland, Millie is growing old, to co-opt a well worn phrase, disgracefully. Not that she is necessarily try to settle into a rebellious Continue Reading

Apocalypses are usually pretty intense affairs. How can they not be? The world is ended, much life has been lost (or reanimated), civilisation has fallen and those caught up in it, know, they just know, that somehow if they manage to survive life will never be the same again. So, Continue Reading

We live in a world capable of great beauty and enormous cruelty. Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens, her first fictional book after non-fiction works detailing her time as a wildlife scientist in Africa, captures these two opposing and yet often cheek-by-jowl parts of life in heartrendingly moving writing Continue Reading

One of the things that has always defined space opera in all its thrillingly expansive glory is the idea of starting anew. Countless authors have filled their daring, action and adventure dashes across the universe with characters needing a fresh, life-transformative start, the kind which doesn’t come easy but which Continue Reading

Happiness has been in short supply over the last couple of years as the COVID pandemic has run rife through once iron-clad certainties and disrupted lives in ways that were unpredictable and often unceasing. While Kent Haruf’s final novel, Our Souls at Night, wasn’t written with the status quo-busting messiness Continue Reading

Time heals all wounds, so people say. Quite who these myopically wise people are is never made clear, but in their pithy, not-quite-fully-formed view of the world, they assure anyone who will listen that given enough time that all the hurt, pain, sadness and grief of life will eventually pass Continue Reading

It will hardly come as a surprise to anyone that we live in an infamously intolerant world (except of course to the intolerant themselves who simply see themselves as upholding all manner of decency, truth etc etc). If you are an outlier of any kind to the scarily homogenous cisgender Continue Reading

I have always found books to be the most perfect of escapes. When I was a kid and into my teenage years, they helped me to screen out the bullies, who were damn near omnipresent in life and escape to all kinds of magical, wonderful places, and as an adult Continue Reading

As the COVID pandemic sweeps across the world again and again and again, it’s all too easy to feel like this is the end of the world. It isn’t, of course, well not yet anyway (and we can only hope that science and the dedication of an expansive cohort of Continue Reading