Humanity, well most of us anyway, like to think of ourselves as a laudably progressive lot, constantly pushing up living standards, lengthening lifespans and generally behaving ever more like the inclusive, caring, beautiful people we like to think we are. But as Chen Qiufan’s magnetically-readable novel, Waste Tide (translated by Continue Reading
Books
Book review: DEV1AT3 by Jay Kristoff
SOME SPOILERS AHEAD BUT I DO MY BEST TO LIMIT THEM, TRUST ME The apocalypse may not seem like the best place to ask the big questions of life – who am I? Why am I? Who are my real friends and why? – but in Jay Kristoff’s pedal to Continue Reading
Book review: The Slow Waltz of Turtles by Katherine Pancol #BastilleDay
One of the great joys of plunging into a great deal of French literature is its capacity to be both resolutely true to life and yet quirkily magical at the same time. It’s not an easy balance to pull it off, and while The Slow Waltz of Turtles by Katherine Continue Reading
Christmas in July … Reading Paddington and the Christmas Surprise
Paddington Bear, who first appeared on 13 October 1958, courtesy of creator Michael Bond, in the children’s book A Bear Called Paddington, is precisely the sort of person (and he is in every way that matters) I would want to do anything and everything Christmas-y with. Innocent, free-spirited, determined despite Continue Reading
Christmas in July … Reading Christmas at Little Beach Street Bakery by Jenny Colgan
It’s supposed to be the most wonderful time of the year. But ask anyone, even those of us who are so enamoured of the festive season that refraining from decorating in early October takes an iron will and ridiculous amounts of self control, and they will tell you that Christmas Continue Reading
Book review: Small Days and Nights by Tishani Doshi
No one ever handles life quite like they expect to, nor the way triumphantly-inspiring feel good Hollywood tales laud or cajole you. That’s partly because life is unpredictable daring you to ready yourself for its almost wilful twists and turns but because we are imperfect beings, our heads full of Continue Reading
Book review: Ellie and the Harp Maker by Hazel Prior
In a perfect, idealised world, every love story would have a happy ending, the kind that consumes your heart, sweeps you of your feet and convinces you in the very depths of your being that you are valued, loved and belong. But life, lovely though it is at times, is Continue Reading
Book review: 84K by Claire North
Dystopian novels are, by their very nature, meant to be disturbing. They are intended to prompt us to question whether we’re headed as a society, which may or may not manifest as the novel details, is something we want, awakening us to the “boiling frog” of slow, seemingly innocuous trends Continue Reading
Book review: While You Were Reading by Ali Berg and Michelle Kalus
Have you ever made a titanically bad life decision, the kind for which there is no reasonable response, other than to run for the hills and tried to pretend that barn burner of a life-changing incident never happened? Beatrix Babbage has; after an accidental confession lays her best friend Cassandra’s Continue Reading
Book review:The Lady From the Black Lagoon by Mallory O’Meara
History can be cruel. A person can stand, deservedly or not, atop the passing colossus of time, full as it is of flimsy whims and fickle fortunes, as if they were and are always meant to be there, and then a scant generation later, they are nothing but a footnote Continue Reading