Paddington Bear, who first appeared on 13 October 1958, courtesy of creator Michael Bond, in the children’s book A Bear Called Paddington, is precisely the sort of person (and he is in every way that matters) I would want to do anything and everything Christmas-y with. Innocent, free-spirited, determined despite Continue Reading
Books
Christmas in July … Reading Christmas at Little Beach Street Bakery by Jenny Colgan
It’s supposed to be the most wonderful time of the year. But ask anyone, even those of us who are so enamoured of the festive season that refraining from decorating in early October takes an iron will and ridiculous amounts of self control, and they will tell you that Christmas Continue Reading
Book review: Small Days and Nights by Tishani Doshi
No one ever handles life quite like they expect to, nor the way triumphantly-inspiring feel good Hollywood tales laud or cajole you. That’s partly because life is unpredictable daring you to ready yourself for its almost wilful twists and turns but because we are imperfect beings, our heads full of Continue Reading
Book review: Ellie and the Harp Maker by Hazel Prior
In a perfect, idealised world, every love story would have a happy ending, the kind that consumes your heart, sweeps you of your feet and convinces you in the very depths of your being that you are valued, loved and belong. But life, lovely though it is at times, is Continue Reading
Book review: 84K by Claire North
Dystopian novels are, by their very nature, meant to be disturbing. They are intended to prompt us to question whether we’re headed as a society, which may or may not manifest as the novel details, is something we want, awakening us to the “boiling frog” of slow, seemingly innocuous trends Continue Reading
Book review: While You Were Reading by Ali Berg and Michelle Kalus
Have you ever made a titanically bad life decision, the kind for which there is no reasonable response, other than to run for the hills and tried to pretend that barn burner of a life-changing incident never happened? Beatrix Babbage has; after an accidental confession lays her best friend Cassandra’s Continue Reading
Book review:The Lady From the Black Lagoon by Mallory O’Meara
History can be cruel. A person can stand, deservedly or not, atop the passing colossus of time, full as it is of flimsy whims and fickle fortunes, as if they were and are always meant to be there, and then a scant generation later, they are nothing but a footnote Continue Reading
Book review: A Lifetime of Impossible Days by Tabitha Bird
Delving into the past is a risky proposition at the best of times. We may think we remember what lurks there and how it might affect us when we take a metaphorical shovel to long-buried memories and feelings, but the truth is our minds have a funny way of distorting Continue Reading
Book review: Recursion by Blake Couch
One of the truly exhilarating things about plunging into a book by Blake Crouch is that you know you are going to be treated to a wildly imaginative, enormously clever, fast-paced but emotionally-resonant take on a pivotal issue of the day. It takes a great deal of skill to hold Continue Reading
Book review: The Beekeeper of Aleppo by Christy Lefteri
It’s hard to say when it happened but somewhere along the way, people have lost their ability to empathise. Rather than putting themselves in someone else’s shoes and trying to understand what drove or drives them to act in a certain way, people too often condemn and decry, letting fear Continue Reading