Books

For all the beauty, love and grandeur of which humanity is capable, there is also a frightening capacity for evil on a horrifying scale. Nowhere has this dark part of our collective soul been more terribly expressly that in the Holocaust when the Nazis murdered six million Jews (along with Continue Reading

One of life’s great joys is watching or listening to someone who is not only passionate about the thing or things they love, but who can talk about them in ways that inform, move and inspire you. That’s why watching any of British presenter Simon Reeve’s documentary series is such Continue Reading

With words like “complete destruction” and “catastrophe” echoing around its definition like rabid World War Z zombies, it’s hard to see an apocalypse as anything other than an expansive, overwhelming, world-ending event. It is, in other worlds, no small thing. Quite how small it isn’t comes home in full force Continue Reading

SNAPSHOTAs princess of the island kingdom Visidia, Amora Montara has spent her entire life training to be High Animancer ― the master of souls. The rest of the realm can choose their magic, but for Amora, it’s never been a choice. To secure her place as heir to the throne, Continue Reading

Who are we without our memories? Are we better off? Diminished markedly or does our present state of being and our innate sense of self make up for any perceived deficiency caused by the loss of an lifetime’s worth of accrued experiences? It’s a weighty question indeed but it is Continue Reading

A title like The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna might lead you to suspect that this remarkably-involving novel by Juliet Games is one whimsically quirky moment after another, a tale of one woman staring death in the face multiple times and somehow living to tell the tale. But Continue Reading

Humanity, well most of us anyway, like to think of ourselves as a laudably progressive lot, constantly pushing up living standards, lengthening lifespans and generally behaving ever more like the inclusive, caring, beautiful people we like to think we are. But as Chen Qiufan’s magnetically-readable novel, Waste Tide (translated by Continue Reading

SOME SPOILERS AHEAD BUT I DO MY BEST TO LIMIT THEM, TRUST ME The apocalypse may not seem like the best place to ask the big questions of life – who am I? Why am I? Who are my real friends and why? – but in Jay Kristoff’s pedal to Continue Reading

One of the great joys of plunging into a great deal of French literature is its capacity to be both resolutely true to life and yet quirkily magical at the same time. It’s not an easy balance to pull it off, and while The Slow Waltz of Turtles by Katherine Continue Reading