Books

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

If you’re a reader of any devotion, you will doubtless have an enduring and profound love with your local bookshop or, quite possibly, a great many bookshops. Part and parcel of that great and enduring romance with the retailer to end all retailers – that last phrase alone should establish Continue Reading

Finding, and keeping, a place to belong is one of the great imperatives of the human soul. We all need somewhere that feels our own, with people who will love us unconditionally and give us the room and the encouragement to be precisely the people we need to be. Discovering Continue Reading

SNAPSHOTFive years ago, ordinary Americans fell under the grip of a strange new malady that caused them to sleepwalk across the country to a destination only they knew. They were followed on their quest by the shepherds: friends and family who gave up everything to protect them. Their secret destination: Continue Reading

Meeting Millie Gogarty is likely one of the best things you’ll ever do in life. An 83-year-old Irish woman from the village of Dun laogshire in Dublin, Ireland, Millie is growing old, to co-opt a well worn phrase, disgracefully. Not that she is necessarily try to settle into a rebellious Continue Reading

Apocalypses are usually pretty intense affairs. How can they not be? The world is ended, much life has been lost (or reanimated), civilisation has fallen and those caught up in it, know, they just know, that somehow if they manage to survive life will never be the same again. So, Continue Reading

We live in a world capable of great beauty and enormous cruelty. Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens, her first fictional book after non-fiction works detailing her time as a wildlife scientist in Africa, captures these two opposing and yet often cheek-by-jowl parts of life in heartrendingly moving writing Continue Reading

One of the things that has always defined space opera in all its thrillingly expansive glory is the idea of starting anew. Countless authors have filled their daring, action and adventure dashes across the universe with characters needing a fresh, life-transformative start, the kind which doesn’t come easy but which Continue Reading

Happiness has been in short supply over the last couple of years as the COVID pandemic has run rife through once iron-clad certainties and disrupted lives in ways that were unpredictable and often unceasing. While Kent Haruf’s final novel, Our Souls at Night, wasn’t written with the status quo-busting messiness Continue Reading