Books

Life is often a heartbreakingly beautiful mix of the good and the bad, the joyful and the morose, the ugly and the poetic. Life’s torturously contrary state of being is captured in all its tarnished glory by Mathangi Subramanian in her debut novel A People’s History of Heaven which centres Continue Reading

For a species wholly enamoured with its ability to stick around for the duration, humanity displays a surprising obsession with apocalyptic endings to its existence. Try zombies, alien invasions, viral epidemics, global warming, asteroid impacts, supernatural calamities … the list goes on and on and on. To this list of Continue Reading

Forging your own way in life is never easy. Society has a way, a very persuasive and often long entrenched way, of enforcing set ideas about appearance, behaviour, morality, sexuality and career choices, among a host of other things, that leave little wiggle room for those not inclined to adhere Continue Reading

From the moment we call tell the difference between a long-stemmed red rose and a box of quality chocolates, we have been schooled to view love as a thing of perfect glory. It is, so a certain rather dominant strand of popular culture tells us, a thing of glorious wonder Continue Reading

One of the great and multitudinous gifts of master science fiction storyteller Peter F. Hamilton is how masterfully well he can hold stories separated by time and space together in such a compellingly immersive manner. Time and again, across his Commonwealth saga and sundry other engrossing tales, he has slowly Continue Reading

Imagination is a necessary ingredient in every work of fiction you read. Whether it’s brilliantly or prosaically exercised, the ability of a writer to take an idea and run with it such that you, as the reader, have no choice but to run right alongside them, is one of the Continue Reading

Every last one of us needs some kind of purpose. Without it, no matter what we tell ourselves or how fiercely we push down the discontent, we always feel adrift, lost, as if we are heading nowhere even as we doggedly place one weary foot in front of the next. Continue Reading

Books have always been my happy place. From when I was a kid at school, battling bullies and the loneliness of having no friends – who wants to be friends with the object of the bullying? NO ONE – through to this year when I nursed my mother through the Continue Reading