Sticking the landing is the thing. Not just in gymnastics but in trilogies, whatever medium they occupy; you can have the most glorious story unfurl with grace and fury over two gripping first instalments but if you don’t land the finale just so, all anyone will remember is how you Continue Reading
Books
Book review: One Day in December by Josie Silver #ChristmasinJuly
Making an enduring love affair, especially one thwarted by time and circumstance feel wholly and immersively believable is no easy feat. Especially when you are also trying in the grandest of all romantic comedy traditions to keep the escapist magic alive and well too. But Josie Silver manages it with Continue Reading
Book review: Writers & Lovers by Lily King
It’s not until all consuming grief hits you that you realise how tenuous your grip on the world around you is and how easily it can shaken. Throw in any additional kind of emotional destabilisation such as moving, a stressful job or a break-up and suddenly what seemed certain, stable Continue Reading
Book review: The Life of Elves by Muriel Barbery
For most people in the heavily secular 21st century, the world begins and ends with the things we can touch, see and taste. We live, as Madonna observed, in a material world and the majority of us are content with boundaries that are physical and see no need to venture Continue Reading
The delightfulness of Charlie Brown’s Christmas Stocking #Peanuts #ChristmasInJuly
There’s no question that Peanuts makes Christmas special. Spending time with Snoopy, Charlie Brown. Lucy, Sally and the rest of the thoughtfully lovable cast of characters brings not only a richness to proceedings since these are kids who really think things through, but a quirky delightfulness as they pose the Continue Reading
Book review: Ghost Species by James Bradley
As the dominant species on the ever-worsening earth block, Homo Sapiens has developed quite the existential swagger. Unchallenged for some 300,000 years, we think we are the be-all and end-all of sentient, kings and queens of all we survey, so mighty and in control that there is nothing we cannot Continue Reading
Book review: Captain Moxley and the Embers of the Empire by Dan Hanks
ARC courtesy Angry Robot Books (via NetGalley) – release date 8 September 2020 in Australia and UK. Buried somewhere deep within a great many of us is a compulsive need to seek grand, soul-soaring adventure, the kind that plucks you giddily out of the banal and the everyday and sends Continue Reading
Woof! Asterix’s Dogmatix gets his own book!
One of the great delights of the Astérix comics (and they are multitudinous), which began in 1959 under the stewardship of writer René Goscinny and illustrator Albert Uderzo – these duties are now handled by Jean-Yves Ferri and Didier Conrad respectively – is a very small, feisty and mischievously lovable Continue Reading
Book review: The Gravity of Us by Phil Stamper
Something that LGBTQIA+ people of a certain age accepted, reluctantly it is best to add and with great disappointment, was that, growing up, they were likely to never see people like them reflected in grand and epic love stories on TV, and in movies and books. It meant that as Continue Reading
Time for some adventure! Join Doctor Who: The Runaway TARDIS
SNAPSHOTIn this adventure, 9-year-old Lizzie runs away from home (with a bag full of peanut butter sandwiches) after feeling lonely at her new school. She accidentally ends up in the TARDIS and meets The Doctor. Things go awry when Lizzie drops her sandwich into the TARDIS console, causing it to Continue Reading