Books

The alternate history genre of storytelling is often dismissed as a fanciful game of “what ifs”, a moving around of real world people and events to create an altogether different perspective on a particularly transformative moment in time. But the really good alternate histories perform an altogether more important role Continue Reading

SNAPSHOTThis children’s book is a journey about an endangered red panda who eats its way through the world, meeting other animal friends and trying food that is unique to their countries. It is a celebration of food, animals, and art, promoting biological diversity, cultural diversity, and belonging. (synopsis via Laughing Continue Reading

Humanity has a perverse gift for shooting itself comprehensively in the foot even as it tries to take heady and hopeful steps into a necessary future. This enduring Achilles Heel is on full and invigoratingly involving display in Laura Lam’s novel Goldilocks, which is less about bears, young girls and Continue Reading

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