Books

There is something utterly captivating about watching someone come alive after years, nay decades, spent making themselves into as small and non-descript a shape as possible. Or in the case of Oliver, the titular protagonist in The Likely Resolutions of Oliver Clock by Sydney author Jane Riley who finds himself, Continue Reading

There is a time, a heady and seemingly limitless time, when you are on the cusp of adulthood where everything seems possible. Everything’s on the table, you have all the time in the world (so you think) to pick them up and put them where you will at your leisure Continue Reading

If you exercise it properly, the imagination is a vast and wondrous place. It can also be thrillingly dangerous and intensely emotionally resonant in the most visceral and cuttingly real of ways as Marlon James makes vibrantly and chillingly clear in Black Leopard, Red Wolf, a book which brings together Continue Reading

Are our lives governed by fate or free choice? It’s a weighty question, one that pops up in religious and philosophical reasoning far more than it doesn’t and for good reason – a great many of us want to know whether we are responsible for our actions or can happily Continue Reading

SNAPSHOTUnable to watch her father waste away from a mysterious illness, fierce warrior Yenni, of the Yirba tribe, sets off for a distant empire. Determined to find a cure for her father, Yenni travels to Cresh, where she comes face to face with culture shock, prejudice, and a brazen shape-shifting Continue Reading

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