Books

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

It’s hard to say whether it’s an unwillingness to face up to the stark realities of someone dying and the deleterious effect that has on the living left behind or a desperate need to delusionally convince ourselves that life is lot more happy than it actually is, but grief is Continue Reading

If you have ever suspected that humanity is a pawn in some great galactic game of brinkmanship, then you will love the very idea of a book like the superlatively good A History of What Comes Next by Sylvain Neuvel. In this tightly told story, which brims with as much Continue Reading

Grief is debilitating no matter what form it comes from; but it is even more damaging to your emotional and mental wellbeing and to the overall forward momentum of your life when it arrives with a slew of question marks hanging over its harrowing arrival. One person who knows this Continue Reading

Returning to spend time with a literary character you love is always fraught with a little bit of trepidation. Much like catching up again with someone with whom you really hit it off, there’s always this nagging worry that the magic won’t be there in quite the same way as Continue Reading

It is pretty accepted by many people these days that the old idea that the evolutionary path for humanity isn’t as idealistically rosy as it once was. Much of that idealism had its roots in postwar optimism, the kind that existed almost because it had to in the wake of Continue Reading

No one likes to think they are going to get to near the end of their lives and be buried under a mountain of simmering regret. What we all want is to march into the latter decades of our life, head held high, heart full and a list of flawless Continue Reading