Books

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

Families are, by and large, rather wonderful things. They give us a sense of belonging, a place to call home, people who notionally, and often, literally have our back and a vital brick in our identity. We need our families – but do we, for all those laudable positives, want Continue Reading

Those jarring sounds you hear as you dive deeper and deeper into the emotionally complex but thoughtful accessible novel Miss Treadway & The Field of Stars by Miranda Emmerson are illusions being comprehensively and almost irretrievably shattered. In the world of 1965 London, smack bang in the middle of the Continue Reading

At the heart of every one of us is this insistent need to belong, to fit in, to be unconditionally cared for, loved and part of something that extends far beyond ourselves. It’s understandable; we are social creatures who have evolved to always be in concert with others, to find Continue Reading