Books

Humanity loves, among its many peccadilloes and quirks, the idea of positive, elevating, life-inspiring emotions. With an alacrity bordering on the zealous and borne no doubt of a desperate desire to push aside any idea that we are trapped in a gothic horror show from which there is no reasonable Continue Reading

Happy Love Your Bookshop Day everyone! If you are like me, you love your bookshop every day and the books you get there with immense affection, but today is a day when you can shower love, praise and enduring pleasure upon the good people who put up with a lot Continue Reading

Belonging somewhere, truly belonging somewhere, is a powerful thing. It can provide the kind of safety and security of which adventurous, well-lived lives are made, it allows us to explore and express who we are without fear of sanction or condemnation, and it instils a sense of shared humanity through Continue Reading

As 2020 has demonstrated with almost devilish glee, life is a LOT. While it can be gloriously uplifting and fulfilling and loving and rich with endless possibility, it can also feel like the entire weight of the world upon you, a disappointment so raw and gargantuan that coping with it Continue Reading

By its very nature, writing lends itself to great, vaulting leaps of imagination. Stories vary greatly and may take you to worlds magical or thoughtful, startling or reflective, whimsical or gravely serious; but whatever their tone or intent, every last one of them is underpinned by a surfeit of expansively, Continue Reading

For a species laying careless waste to the planet and appallingly skilled in the messily chaotic art of death, destruction and war, humanity has a prevailing passion for neat and tidy recovery from trauma and grief. Pop culture celebrates triumphant comebacks from breakdowns and mental setbacks, inspirational speakers spruik the Continue Reading

One of the more noticeable aspects of any authoritarian regime, propaganda extolling its innate, inspiring virtue notwithstanding, is the starkly evident, almost palpable lack of humanity. There is power and control in abundance, toxic micro-managing and surveillance in abundance and a foreboding sense of loss any kind of freedom or Continue Reading

Love in our modern age has been reduced in many ways to an almosy infantile, fey semblance of its former vigorous self. Where once love compelled great Shakespearian sonnets or set in motions the events that led to the Trojan War, it is now imprisoned in cutesy greeting card rhyming Continue Reading

Figuring out who you are, where you belong and what you want to be is tough enough in the teenage years without a whole lot of other, somewhat weird and emotionally taxing stuff being thrown into the chaotic mix. One fifteen-year-old who can attest to the robust truth of that Continue Reading

It’s not often you come across a space opera, the authors of which thank readers in the acknowledgements for “following the Seven Devils Smash the Patriarchy In Space”. But that is precisely what Elizabeth May and Laura Lam do in Seven Devils, a sci-fi extravaganza with a very serious intent. Continue Reading