Books

SNAPSHOTMost families experience drama from time to time. But aliens don’t usually play a part in said drama. That is not the case in Mike Chen’s Light Years from Home. The upcoming novel combines space opera vibes with family feelings. Fifteen years ago, Jakob Shao and his father disappeared during Continue Reading

Ah, the pursuit of love! If we all lived inside sparklingly quirky romantic comedies, and let’s face it the food, parking and occupational opportunities are unparalleled, then falling in love seems to be a simple matter of a whimsical meet-cute, a few further random but serendipitous meetings, a third act Continue Reading

There is a delicious feeling of immersive joy that overtakes any reader when they begin a book and discover in its first sparkling few sentences that not only does it possess the promise of a wholly engaging story that will propel you to turn pages with a fevered anticipatory eagerness Continue Reading

If you have ever wondered what the end point of mercenary capitalism looks like, and to be fair, it beginning and mid points too, then look no further than the chillingly imaginative second instalment in the Memory War series by Karen Osborne. Engines of Oblivion, the successor to the endlessly Continue Reading

It has become apparent to all but the comprehensively deluded among us that the planet is in deep, sustained ecological trouble. Wildfires whip through places annually that might’ve seen a terrible conflagration once a decade, droughts lay waste to once productive land and catastrophically violent storms are sweeping in with Continue Reading

It is one thing to love a book; quite another to fall so headlong in love with it that reading it feels like you’ve come home. In the latter scenario, it’s as if this was the book you were always meant to read, one that will stay in your heart Continue Reading

SNAPSHOTSeventy-five years from today, the human race has been cast from a dying Earth to wander the stars in a vast fleet of arks—each shaped by its inhabitants into a diverse and fascinating new environment, with its own rules and eccentricities. When her sister disappears while responding to a mysterious Continue Reading

Some bonds can never be broken it seems. In the mysterious perfection of Catriona Silbey’s Meet Me in Another Life, we are given devastatingly powerful insight into how some connections are so strong and unyielding that they persist in the face of every challenge or obstacle they encounter. To begin Continue Reading

People like, no, NEED to feel grounded and connected. Without that sense that we belong somewhere, to someone or to a particular time and place, we feel lost and unmoored, a debilitating condition that sends life into an agonisingly enervating limbo. Eileen Garvin explores exactly how this feels, with tenderness, Continue Reading

Humanity doesn’t do well with brokenness. Not so much the being in it, although god knows none of us like to loiter there for too long, but with the concept of brokenness itself, that troubling, unsettling sense that life is not as perfect or idyllic as we want it to Continue Reading