Books

Preview copy provided by Angry Robot Books via NetGalley – The Warrior releases 23 August. There is an enthralling expansiveness to beautifully and richly told fantasy novels, a sense of imaginative foreverness that envelops you so completely you forget that there’s a real world waiting out there to rudely break Continue Reading

Who among us doesn’t want a fairytale ending? It’s a tough ask in a world more inclined to injustice, vest self-interest and cruelty, accidental or otherwise, but that doesn’t stop us hoping that in amongst all of the hellish loose ends, there might be a definitive moment when all the Continue Reading

Having your world turned upside down is no easy thing. Even if, like Jackson Sweeney, protagonist of Georgina Young’s novel Bootstrap, seemingly the only gay in the small seen-far-better-days Aussie town of Koornang, your life is hardly worth tweeting out about. Much of the lacklustre pall of Sweeney’s spectacularly unambitious Continue Reading

by Maggie Nolan, Associate Professor in Humanities, Australian Catholic University I was reading Noongar author Claire G. Coleman’s third novel, Enclave, a few days after the US Supreme Court overturned the Roe v Wade judgement, a political victory for a conservative project many years in the making. As Michael Bradley Continue Reading

If you’ve read any of masterful storyteller Alastair Reynolds, you will be well acquainted with what a superbly good writer he is. In all of his books, which normally takes place on emotionally rich and expansive science fiction narrative landscapes, he gives characters that pop, stories that are epic and Continue Reading

SNAPSHOTSand. A hostile world of burning sun. Outlines of several once-busy cities shimmer on the horizon. Now empty of inhabitants, their buildings lie in ruins. In the distance a group of people—a family—walks toward us. Ahead lies shelter: a “shuck” the family calls home and which they know they must Continue Reading

Vivid. That’s the word that strikes most often as you dive into and are gloriously consumed by The Last Blade Priest by W. P. Wiles, a novel that is, in every conceivable respect, a story well told, vividly realised and epically alive. A fantasy story grounded in the earthy fallibility Continue Reading

There is a curious time in everyone’s lives, in the immediate, disorienting aftermath of the death of a loved one, when time seems to stop but also go into a mad overdrive, mixing together the past and the present in an blender-frenzied attempt to make sense of a loss so Continue Reading