For people who have experienced great and enduring trauma, the kind that begins at birth and never really lets up, seeping into every pore of a blighted existence so profoundly terrible there is no adequate way to describe it or exist well with it, reality is a cruel and awful Continue Reading
Books
Book review: Sunfall by Jim Al-Khalili
It is, once again poor beleaguered citizens of planet earth, the end of the world as we know it. Or, at least the possible end of the world, anyway. In Jim Al-Khalili 2014-set, fast-paced race to a likely extinction line, Sunfall, there’s a very good chance that humanity is facing Continue Reading
Book review: The Hush by Sara Foster
Thrillers are wonderfully escapist books to read. Fuelled with adrenaline, powered by judiciously-placed reveals and always moving at something near to the speed of narrative light, they are a genre that is perfectly placed to take us on a wild journey that, happily in our famously loose end-addicted world where Continue Reading
Book review: The Sweetness of Water by Nathan Harris
There are some words that are thrown around with such giddy abandon and greeting card snappiness that we’re apt to see them as lightweight sentiments that have no real substance and can bear no real weight. “Hope” is one of those words, filled with longing and expectation and optimism, it Continue Reading
Book review: Deficiency by S. C. Eston
There are sage and oft-repeated words of warning that go something along the lines of, depending on your paraphrase of choice, that “if it looks too good t be true, it usually is.” It might feel like that phrase has been intoned so often that it has lost all meaning Continue Reading
Book review: A Song For a New Day by Sarah Pinsker
Prescience, thy name is Sarah Pinsker. Released in 2019, Song For a New Day finds the USA, and possible the world though that is never made clear (and nor is it really necessary for the story told), dealing with the aftereffects of a pandemic, so virulent and so comprehensively destablising Continue Reading
Book review: The Two of Us by Andy Jones
If only life, and love, was more like a romantic comedy. In its rarefied world, love is complicated but achievable, misunderstandings are always sorted out (usually at airports) and the soulmate factor is so pronounced and undeniable that it’s all but a given that the couple in question will be Continue Reading
Book review: Winter’s Orbit by Everina Maxwell
Love, as we know, can be a pretty powerful force. No, we’re not talking about the namby-pamby, floating on a gossamer cloud of pink fluffy nothingness that often obsesses the more romantically-inclined but the muscular, down in the trenches variety driven by searing connection and unyielding commitment that stares down Continue Reading
Book review: Two Steps Forward by Graeme Simsion & Anne Buist
We talk about “finding yourself” so often these days, it sounds like it’s as simple as sitting somewhere far away from the hustle and bustle of everyday life, grabbing an existential map and going to places in your psyche that had hitherto eluded a visit. It is, of course, a Continue Reading
Book review: They Both Die at the End by Adam Silvera
In a very real sense, there are no obvious spoilers in a novel like They Both Die at the End. Adam Silvera’s achingly beautiful, New York City-set story of two older teenagers who are forced to live an entire life in one after a phone call just after midnight from Continue Reading