Books

  Days of Wonder, the second book from Keith Stuart (A Boy Made of Blocks), is an inestimable joy from start to finish. The story of Tom and Hannah, a father and daughter who make a magically theatrical life for themselves in a small English town after wife and mother Continue Reading

  Jasper Wishart is a remarkable 13-year-old boy. A child on the autism spectrum, he also has synaesthesia, a condition which joins one or more senses together, meaning that where we might just hear someone speaking, someone like Jasper both hears them and sees what they are seeing in various Continue Reading

  There is something brilliantly seductive about a story that grabs you right from the get-go, that immediately and successfully plunges you into a world far removed from your own, making it feel like it’s somewhere with which you’ve always been familiar (and yet not), populated by people who are Continue Reading

  Grief, though intimately personal, can often feel like a very public weapon of mass disruption. As the searing loss of saying goodbye to someone, or not in some cases with the grief more for what’s lost than whom, ripples out in an every-widening wave, families, friendship groups and communities Continue Reading

  Lord Hadrian Marlowe is, by his own admission, his own worst enemy. A patrician son of the cruelly authoritarian ruler of the planet Delos, Sir Alistair Marlowe, who does not share his class’s love of crowd-pleasing bloodsports, oppression of the poor or dismissive attitude of anything below their imagined Continue Reading

  Using a glowing pink miniature elephant as the vehicle through which to address the moral and ethical complexities of genetic research may not at first seem to be the most obvious idea in the storytelling book. But Elefant, a tale of one such quite unnatural, lovable oddity, the people Continue Reading

  As a lifelong avid reader, there have been several key moments in my reading journey when things have taken a quantum leap up to a whole other level. One of those times was around 11 or 12 when I was no longer as challenged by children’s novels as I Continue Reading

  You have to admire any author who plunges into the well-travelled waters of genre literature, particularly when it concerns mutants, often held aloft as humanity’s possible evolutionary future and the subject of many a graphic novel or film series. But Australian author Lynette Noni, who is best known for Continue Reading

  Romantic comedies are one of those cinematic genres that the cool people of the world love to rain hate and scorn down upon. Possessed, you must assume, of love lives so magnificently perfect and satisfying that Cupid himself looks on with rose-ripped envy, they look disdainfully at films which Continue Reading