While it’s not universally true, a great many novels about the multiverse come with a whimsical, wondrous edge, the idea that while there might be dangers aplenty in alternate realities, there is still an alluring sense of the different and the exciting. None of that exists in The 22 Murders Continue Reading
Books
Book review: Love in Theory by Elodie Cheesman
The heart vs. the head. Not quite a battle as old as time but almost; throughout our relatively short evolutionary history, humanity has long debated whether it is better to let the heart rule ,with its passion and spontaneity, or to leave the head hold sway as it calmly invokes Continue Reading
Book review: Unconquerable Sun by Kate Elliott
There is something gloriously, wondrously good about having a space opera take you racing across the heavens in heady pursuit of power, fame, treasures or other eg-burnishing existential bauble. It is even better when said space opera is superbly written with tightly intricate plotting, well thought-out and realised characters and Continue Reading
#ChristmasInJuly Book review: The Cosy Christmas Chocolate Shop (Cosy Chocolate Shop #1) by Caroline Roberts
There appears to be a neverending streak of cosy Christmas noels out there. Many of them are delightfully written, giving us 300 or so pages in which to sink into a world, usually composed of a quirky but loving English village, a shop of some kind that usually serves comfort Continue Reading
Book review: The Long, Long Afternoon by Inga Vesper
It will be a news flash to precisely no one that people are very good at trying to create the reality they desire. It usually bears no resemblance to life as it actually is, and can be irritating at best and murderously destructive at worst, and in Inga Vesper’s The Continue Reading
Book review: Three Women and a Boat by Anne Youngson
People coming together in found families is something particularly new or original in literature of late, a theme that has found currency in our ironically disconnected digital age where finding your tribe has been a prevailing need for many lost souls in search of an emotional home. So, the fact Continue Reading
Book review: The Perplexing Theft of the Jewel in the Crown by Vaseem Khan
In a world where many feel justice is scant and those in power or with the means to insulate themselves from consequence seem to get off scot-free far more than they don’t, there’s something intrinsically compelling about mystery and crime novels that often the reader the chance to experience the Continue Reading
Book review: Shards of Earth (Final Architecture book 1) by Adrian Tchaikovsky
In a world beset by a myriad of challenges right now, most notably COVID-19 and climate change, throwing yourself deep into the expansive surrounds of a brilliantly-written soap opera can be the panacea for a host of reality-driven ills. If you feel the need for such a diversionary road, you Continue Reading
Book review: One Hundred Days by Alice Pung
As a people, and even in the face of all evidence to the contrary, we like to believe that things can be as good as our daydreams. We see families as Norman Rockwell paintings of domestic perfection, Christmas as a uniform time of seamless joy and warm-spirited harmony and love, Continue Reading
Book review: Love Objects by Emily Maguire
How well do we really know those closest to us? There’s an assumption in many families that because we share the same bonds, and often times, the same space, that we must implicitly know what’s going with those nearest and dearest to us; after all, family is the closest thing Continue Reading