If you take a good hard look at love in the real world, it is far from the light, fluffy confection of romantic comedy legend. Sure, that’s appealing and who doesn’t want to feel wafted along on Cupid’s lighter-than-air ministrations, but the reality is that love, real love, is muscular Continue Reading
Books
Book review: Swashbucklers by Dan Hanks
ARC courtesy Dan Hanks – release date 1 February 2022 in Australia and 9 November 2021 in UK. No one ever really talks about what happens after the movie ends. Especially when the movie is a bright, adventurous blockbuster in which a band of gallant children come together and defeat, Continue Reading
Book review: The 24-Hour Café by Libby Page
Walk through the streets of any big city and you will quickly come to understand that while you are surrounded by an untold number of people, all surging past with steely and impatient intent, you are, in many important ways, very much alone. None of those people know you or Continue Reading
Book review: After Story by Larissa Behrendt
In our information-saturated digital age, it is all too easy to think that everything that needs to be said, has been said. But After Story by Larissa Behrendt, makes it abundantly and movingly clear that a great deal remains swept under metaphorical carpets or held close to the chest and Continue Reading
Book review: Notes From the Burning Age by Claire North
You would think after hundreds of thousands of years of evolution and the concomitant civilisation building that goes with it, that humanity would have learnt from its past mistakes and found a way to not repeat them ad infinitum. But this appears not to be the case with the twentieth Continue Reading
Book review: The Reading List by Sara Nisha Adams
There is real power in reading. Some people might find that surprising or amusing – how can something so apparently inert have the ability to make palpable change in someone’s life, or at the very least, give them the means and the support to cope with it? And can something Continue Reading
Mike Chen’s upcoming new book takes you Light Years From Home … and then back again …
SNAPSHOTMost families experience drama from time to time. But aliens don’t usually play a part in said drama. That is not the case in Mike Chen’s Light Years from Home. The upcoming novel combines space opera vibes with family feelings. Fifteen years ago, Jakob Shao and his father disappeared during Continue Reading
Book review: Loving Lizzie March by Susannah Hardy
Ah, the pursuit of love! If we all lived inside sparklingly quirky romantic comedies, and let’s face it the food, parking and occupational opportunities are unparalleled, then falling in love seems to be a simple matter of a whimsical meet-cute, a few further random but serendipitous meetings, a third act Continue Reading
Book review: The Misadventures of an Amateur Naturalist by Ceinwen Langley
There is a delicious feeling of immersive joy that overtakes any reader when they begin a book and discover in its first sparkling few sentences that not only does it possess the promise of a wholly engaging story that will propel you to turn pages with a fevered anticipatory eagerness Continue Reading
Book review: Engines of Oblivion by Karen Osborne
If you have ever wondered what the end point of mercenary capitalism looks like, and to be fair, it beginning and mid points too, then look no further than the chillingly imaginative second instalment in the Memory War series by Karen Osborne. Engines of Oblivion, the successor to the endlessly Continue Reading