Blog

Review: Shades Of Scarlet

14 Mar 2021

  Scarlet’s mum has moved out, and taken Scarlet with her. Of course, no-one is telling Scarlet the whole story. Is she expected to just accept this massive upheaval to her life without complaint? The adults in her life seem outraged if she expresses even the smallest amount of dissatisfaction or even curiosity. They’re treating her like a little kid, … Read more

Review: Klara And The Sun

04 Mar 2021

  Klara is an Artificial Friend (AF) intended to be bought for children as a companion. She spends her days staring out of a store window observing the humans and surroundings, dreaming of the life outside. When she is eventually purchased for an ill teenage girl and uprooted to the remote countryside, her unique and questioning nature is put to … Read more

Review: Amnesty

21 Feb 2021

  Danny, a young Sri Lankan man is determined to escape the brutality of his homeland’s security forces and a manipulative father. He pays a lot of money to start a dubious course at an Australian college but when he drops out, disillusioned that it is just a way to exploit migrant workers, he makes the desperate choice to stay … Read more

Review: The Gilded Ones

21 Feb 2021

  Set in a fictionalised West Africa, sixteen-year-old Deka lives in an intensely patriarchal empire (think Afghanistan under the Taliban) where women’s choices are utterly proscribed by religion and society. She’s about to undergo the ritual of purity, which is as sinister as it sounds, when her village is attacked by monsters whose terrifying shriek can kill anyone who hears … Read more

Review: Winterkill

12 Feb 2021

  It is very cold and dark in northern Iceland but Inspector Ari Thor is looking forward to a rare visit over the Easter weekend from his partner and young son who now live in Sweden. In the early hours he is shocked to be told the body of a young woman has been found in the street, and suddenly … Read more

Review: Love Is A Revolution

11 Feb 2021

  Set over the long summer holidays before Nala’s final year at High School, Love is a Revolution is a coming-of-age story with depth and resonance. Nala’s friends are inspiring community activists, who quote civil rights heroes and believe they can be the change they want to see in the world. All their clothes have slogans across the chest, and … Read more

Review: Light Perpetual

09 Feb 2021

  Francis Spufford’s entertaining romp of a first novel Golden Hill rightfully won him an armful of awards, and everyone was eager to see what would come next. Light Perpetual begins with the premise of a world altered, a ‘what if’ scenario where a V2 rocket would not hit a London Woolworths and instead the lives of five children within … Read more

Review: Brown Baby

08 Feb 2021

Nikesh Shukla is the editor of The Good Immigrant, several novels, screenplays and commentary on social issues. In these eleven chapters, Nikesh Shukla invites the reader into an intimate world of self-reflections written to his daughter on race, family and home. Penned in the style of a manual: How to talk to you about skin colour, How to talk to … Read more

Costa Book Of The Year 2020

26 Jan 2021

  Congratulations to Monique Roffey for winning the Costa Book Of The Year Award 2020! David, a lone Caribbean fisherman encounters a mermaid and is entranced. After she is brutally caught and about to be horribly exploited he rescues her and helps her recover. They fall in love and Aycayia begins to transform back to the young woman she was … Read more