We are captives of our calendars. How else to explain the way looming dates, particularly those for major life events, send us into a flurry of activity and anxiety, a maelstrom of hoping and wishing, planning and organising that in the end, Shakespeare be paraphrased, amount to nothing? Or Continue Reading
Books
Book review: The Light Between Us by Katie Khan
“Wuv, true wuv”, as the Impressive Clergyman in 1987’s classic The Princess Bride rather hilariously puts it, often tends to get short accurately-portrayed shrift in popular culture. Not in terms of how often it is featured, which is a considerable amount, dappled as it is in the many hues Continue Reading
Book review: The Biggerers by Amy Lilwall
If there’s one thing humanity has fund itself particularly adept at, and this is not a cause for blue ribbons or backslapping with gusto, it is placing itself on a gleaming pedestal and fancying itself as some sort of nature-ordering deity. You can trace that god-like fascination to religions Continue Reading
Book review: Extinctions by Josephine Wilson
Extinctions the 2017 winner of Australia’s Miles Franklin award is an ambitious novel on a lot of levels. In its 280-page length, Josephine Wilson has packed an impressive number of issues, sending the two main characters in the book, ageing academic engineer (obsessed with the use of concrete and Modernist Continue Reading
Book review: The Psychology of Time Travel by Kate Mascarenhas
There’s a certain romanticism attached to the idea of time travel. While stories as diverse as Back to the Future and H G Well’s The Time Machine have offered some darkly cautionary tales, and the idea of time paradoxes have caused anyone outside of pure physics a major headache Continue Reading
Book review: Days of Wonder by Keith Stuart
Days of Wonder, the second book from Keith Stuart (A Boy Made of Blocks), is an inestimable joy from start to finish. The story of Tom and Hannah, a father and daughter who make a magically theatrical life for themselves in a small English town after wife and mother Continue Reading
Book review: The Colour of Bee Larkham’s Murder by Sarah J. Harris
Jasper Wishart is a remarkable 13-year-old boy. A child on the autism spectrum, he also has synaesthesia, a condition which joins one or more senses together, meaning that where we might just hear someone speaking, someone like Jasper both hears them and sees what they are seeing in various Continue Reading
Novella review: Manifest Recall by Alan Baxter
There is something brilliantly seductive about a story that grabs you right from the get-go, that immediately and successfully plunges you into a world far removed from your own, making it feel like it’s somewhere with which you’ve always been familiar (and yet not), populated by people who are Continue Reading
Book review: Afternoons with Harvey Beam by Carrie Cox
Grief, though intimately personal, can often feel like a very public weapon of mass disruption. As the searing loss of saying goodbye to someone, or not in some cases with the grief more for what’s lost than whom, ripples out in an every-widening wave, families, friendship groups and communities Continue Reading
Book review: Empire of Silence (The Sun Eater: Book One) by Christopher Ruocchio
Lord Hadrian Marlowe is, by his own admission, his own worst enemy. A patrician son of the cruelly authoritarian ruler of the planet Delos, Sir Alistair Marlowe, who does not share his class’s love of crowd-pleasing bloodsports, oppression of the poor or dismissive attitude of anything below their imagined Continue Reading