Books

Whenever we consider what the end of the world might look, or at least the end of the world in the form with which we are most familiar, we think of it in epic, sweeping ways, a period of time writ large with destruction, loss, pain and immeasurable grief. All Continue Reading

If you’ve been alive for longer than a day, it will have become dispiritingly obvious that do-overs or second-go-rounds are not exactly thick on the existential ground. Even the much-vaunted concept of closure seems maddeningly elusive much of the time, with mistakes and regrets irreversible and what-ifs purely the stuff Continue Reading

ARC courtesy Angry Robot Books – release date 8 February 2022 in UK and 22 March 2022 in Australia. How can you possibly resist a book which winningly pitches itself as the story of a lesbian gunslinger who fights spies in space? Reader, you cannot, and honestly, why would you Continue Reading

Life can be incredibly, disorientingly and emotionally destructively cruel. That might not be immediately apparent to anyone with a reasonably cushy middle class existence in a plush Western liberal democracy, but for many people the stark, horrifying reality is that their hopes and dreams often take a distant back seat Continue Reading

Growing up in a place where your lived experience is not part of the mainstream is daunting indeed. It becomes even more pronounced in rural areas where the lack of anonymity provided by the diversity hustle and bustle of the big city leaves many people exposed and open to ridicule, Continue Reading

Having your heart ripped out of you and then placed back in again may not be at the top of everyone’s list of great things to do in your mortal waking hours. But when you are reading the transcendentally affecting delight that is TJ Klune’s (The House in the Cerulean Continue Reading

Split narratives, whether its differing timeframes, character point-of-view or physical location, can be problematic in novels. While they can shed illumination aplenty on the storyline, their two vantage points providing dual and hopefully complementary insight on the unfolding story, they can often end up with one being compelling and the Continue Reading

No book is ever read in an experiential vacuum. Any reader brings to a novel their world view, their pain and their sorrow, their hopes and their joys and all of them go into how they react to any story, often dialling it up or shaping into ways more intense Continue Reading

I am huge reader of sci-fi and fantasy books, and as such, I love it when authors, and just as importantly publishing houses, decide to go all out to do something a little, or a lot, different with the genre. It’s why I love Angry Robot Books who, quite apart Continue Reading

The world, nay the galaxy is a big, messily wonderful and diverse place and it’s a joy to see it reflected in the pages of Light From Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki, a vigorously alive novel that takes a brilliantly out-there premise and runs with it in ways that will Continue Reading