Books

Ladies and gentlemen of the pandemic current – even Doctor Dolittle has taken an apocalyptic turn, something that shouldn’t surprise in an age when horror seems to be writ large on just about every part of the human experience. Granted, Hugh Lofting, who penned the Doctor Dolittle series, saw his Continue Reading

Of the many things we mythologise in society, and they are great and many because life very rarely matches our ideal, small towns sit very close to the top of the aspirational heap. We see them as some perfect urban realisation of community, a place where you are known and Continue Reading

Life is, we know all too well, a one-way street. We are born, we live, we die with no chance of going back for any kind of do-over and absolutely no prospect of taking hard-won lessons back to situations crying out for their accrued wisdom. And yet, what if one Continue Reading

Home. For many people, it’s an almost physical concept, an idyll in an often-unwelcoming world where the people who love them and who have their back provide respite from the contrary vicissitudes of life. But for others like Aucklander Alex Preston, the protagonist of Sam Coley’s mesmerisingly-evocative State Highway One, Continue Reading

What would you do if the world ended … but didn’t quite? How would you handle things if the city you lived in suffered from a pandemic of sorts, one that bore all the hallmarks of the 1962 Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic, a disease which begins with uncontrollable laughter before a Continue Reading

There is a delicious, passionate, unpredictable contrariness at the heart of us all. We may only be dimly aware of it or fully aware of it in all its wildly contradictory glory depending our perceptive abilities and inclination, but our innate humanity, our capacity for good and evil, light and Continue Reading

Where does true evil lie? It’s an endlessly pertinent question for anyone seeking to understand where the terrible things that befall us have their origin and what, if anything, we can do to confront or mitigate these influences. The truth is, there may be no answer to the question; while Continue Reading

ARC provided by Angry Robot Books; The Phlebotomist is due for release on 8 September in UK and 8 December in Australia. One of the most rewarding aspects of reading any book, regardless of genre or author, is when the narrative doesn’t go anywhere near where you expect it to Continue Reading

There are books that come across your path which are beautifully written and eminently readable, and which, like all good books should do, make you feel glad for having taken the time to read them. And then there are books like Dear Edward by Ann Napolitano which go far beyond Continue Reading

If you have even a shred of your humanity intact, you cannot help but be deeply and profoundly moved by the emotionally powerful but nuanced storytelling in Jennifer Rosner’s debut novel The Yellow Bird Sings. Told with an elegant simplicity that belies its complex, at times (many times) heartbreaking material, Continue Reading