You have to hand it to humanity – no matter where we go, or what we accomplish or how grand and impressively expansive we become, we never really relinquish the inherent things that make us human, good and bad. Just how stubbornly we cling to the building blocks of our Continue Reading
Books
Book review: Sharks in a Time of Saviours by Kawai Strong Washburn
There are novels that quite happily skim the surface of the deep well of emotions that make up most people and then there are novels like Sharks in the Time of Saviours, the immersively impressive debut novel from Kawai Strong Washburn, which dive in, hard, deep and long, unafraid it Continue Reading
Book review: Wolfe Island by Lucy Treloar
Life can be tough so it makes sense that there comes a time when we want to hide from it, push it away and create a haven, as much as that is possible, that feels safer, kinder and less reflective of our past. But as Kitty Hawke, the protagonist of Continue Reading
Book review: The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep by H. G. Parry
If you’re an inveterate reader, you will be well acquainted with the inestimable pleasure of losing yourself for hour upon hour in a good book. But what if instead of you diving headlong into it, the book, particularly the characters cane rushing out to meet you? That’s exactly what happens Continue Reading
Book review: This Will Only Hurt a Little by Busy Philipps
Celebrity is a curious thing. While the near-omnipresence of a famous person suggests we know them intimately and well, know everything about them in fact, the truth is that we really only know what they and their publicity team choose to reveal. It’s a carefully-constructed facade that, if you dig Continue Reading
Book review: Desire Lines by Felicity Volk
There is an exquisite beauty and longing to Desire Lines by Felicity Volk which never departs from the idea that life is a chaos of messy entanglements which none of us can ever quite pull apart. That should be obvious but time and again, society, or at least the shouty Continue Reading
Book review: The Girl Who Could Move Sh*t With Her Mind by Jackson Ford
Rather ironically for an age in which difference has rapidly become villified by far too many people looking for a quick, greasy populist win, pop culture is more obsessed with the Other of all stripes than ever before. The creative arts have often celebrated and held up those who differ Continue Reading
Book review: Greenwood by Michael Christie
If you read enough dystopian or apocalyptic literature, and this reviewer most certainly does, you will quickly come to appreciate how many possible ways there are in which humanity could, as a species, shuffle off this mortal coil. Numerous they may be but none are likely as poetic in their Continue Reading
Book review: The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal by Sean Dixon
Book reading is, by and large, a blessedly passive activity. Not so for the members of the Lacuna Cabal Montreal Young Women’s Book Club of Montreal, the heartbeat and narrative core of The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal by Sean Dixon, who see the appreciation of all literature as Continue Reading
Book review: Maggie’s Going Nowhere by Rose Hartley
There is a universal agreement, the exact origins of which are lost to time, that people born into this world will enjoy a fun-filled childhood full of learning and love, somehow survive the confused indignities of the teenage years before moving onto adulthood where they will get a job, find Continue Reading