Books

Trauma has its own corrosive way of stopping life in its tracks. For many people it is a transitory thing, a period of loss and grieving that immobilises them temporarily but which eventually gives way to some form of healing and tentative then more confident steps forward to something new Continue Reading

There is a power and resilience, and yes, even a verdant sense of hope to Emily Spurr’s debut novel, A Million Things, that will leave you in wonder at the immense capacity of connection, friendship and love to rescue a lonely and adrift life … or two of them. But Continue Reading

For a species that craves certainty, humanity sure has an enduring fascination with the enduring endlessness of mystery and suspense. Perhaps now that we are mostly, pandemics and their wrathful disruption aside, snug and safe within the clearly-set bounds of civilisation – sure it’s an illusion of substance and assuredness Continue Reading

Diving into any of Becky Chambers wondrously good books is to enter a literal universe of rich possibility and exquisitely well-realised humanity (even when the characters are anything but) that engages you from the get-go and doesn’t let you go until the very end of each thoughtfully-written and insightfully emotive Continue Reading

ARC courtesy NetGalley – release date 7 July 2021 in Australia. Trauma in life is inevitable. None of us particularly want to admit to that since it means dismantling this cosy late twentieth century notion that it we do everything right we will lives as charmed as the happy-ever-after in Continue Reading

You not immediately think to link a viral sensation Disney + series with an Australian writer who calls Boonah, Queensland home, but as you soak yourself in the healing balm that is Tabitha Bird’s The Emporium of Imagination, which deals with grief in one of the creative and soul restorative Continue Reading

It’s a weighty question but one that is always worth asking – what does it mean to love? There will be as many answers to that as there are people on the planet but suffice to say that one person worth listening to, and listening to with rapture and wonder Continue Reading

When faced with the sheer enormity of evil and suffering, pain and despair, represented by slavery, it might be hard to see how love could make any real difference to people caught in its cruelly unyielding grip. But in the intimately expansive story of The Prophets by Robert Jones, Jr., Continue Reading

Every so often, and it’s not as often as you might think, a book comes along with an inspired premise so out there and yet so of its time, that you marvel at how someone managed to come up with such an original and insightful idea, one that casts a Continue Reading

Two of my absolute favourite books from the hellmouth of a year that was 2020 were The Phlebotomist by Chris Panatier and Captain Moxley and the Embers of Empire by Dan Hanks. Apart the books being engrossing reads that told their stories superbly well and with great imagination and intelligence Continue Reading