Books

When you come to know someone later in their life, it is all too easy to assume, and we often do, that they have always been exactly like the person you see before you. We do it with parents and grandparents, teachers and authority figures of all kinds, even new Continue Reading

A strange affliction affects a few people in an isolated college town in California before cases begin to mount and what started as a small outbreak soon becomes a major contagion, a virulent wave of disease that sweeps through the town, and thanks to the efforts of a few willful Continue Reading

ARC courtesy Angry Robot Books – release date 12 January 2021 in UK and 4 May in Australia. The possible existence of a multiverse, an infinite string of worlds in which life is the same, but very much not too, in its expression, is, for many people, an entirely alluring Continue Reading

Adventures are usually supposed to be fun, giddily exciting undertakings, thekind of thing that The Famous Five or The Lord of the Rings cohort set out on (though admittedly the latter group did have the weight of theworld on their shoulders, what with ending great evil and all that) and Continue Reading

Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell is one of those rare books that successfully and with quietly devastating effect takes you deep into the life of an historical figure and brings them into life with a vivacity so palpable you feel as if you known them as well as your own friends. Continue Reading

It was Lysander, in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream who remarked that “The course of true love never did run smooth” but it’s Ollie, the protagonist from Sophie Gonzales’s passionately heartfelt tale of young gay love, Only Mostly Devastated, who can issue a hearty “Amen!” some 400 years after the Continue Reading

In one sense, there is nothing in The Left-Handed Booksellers of London by Garth Nix that you haven’t read a thousand times before in any number of fantasy books where an ordinary everyday mortal discovers they have a far richer and more fantastical inheritance than they could ever have imagined. Continue Reading

Life can be so unremittingly bleak at times, 2020 being a perfect case in point, that it’s important to be reminded of the opportunities it affords for salvation, redemption and fresh starts. These are not exactly lying on the ground for us to gather up as we will, but as Continue Reading