Books

It is never any easy thing straddling the chasm-like divide between heritage and intent. Some people, of course, make it look effortless, bringing together who they were raised to be with who they innately are, or at least, desire to be, their lives barely raising a ripple of existential tension. Continue Reading

ARC courtesy Angry Robot Books – release date 14 December in UK and 16 March 2022 Australia. There are some books that, when you plunge eagerly into them – hope always springs eternal when it comes to each and every new novel – come rapidly alive, so well-expressed and vibrant Continue Reading

One of the great appealing aspects of any science fiction worth it’s slave planet-mined salt is the imaginative audacity of the premise on which it sits. Time and again if you read or otherwise consume brilliant sci-fi, it’s hard not to sit back and gasp in wonder at the ideas Continue Reading

Until the COVID pandemic came along and furiously and comprehensively disrupted life as we once knew it, most, if not all, people would have had trouble thinking in terms of a world ruinously different from our own. As a hypothetical concept, many of us accepted that without actual, substantive action Continue Reading

One of the inestimable joys of reading anything by Alix. E Harrow, who has given the superlatively evocative joys of The Ten Thousand Doors of January and The Once and Future Witches, is her sublimely invigorating gift for gloriously reinventing well-worn tropes and cliches for the better. Equipped with rich Continue Reading

When you dive into a book, there are three key things you hope will be presented and accounted for: Characters who are so fully-realised that you swear they are but a sentence or two from leaping off the page. Writing that sweeps you up in its grasp such that you Continue Reading