Disclaimer

Posted 2:55pm Sunday 4th October 2015

Disclaimer, by Renee Knight, is a thriller. Catherine Ravenscroft, after recently moving house with her husband, Robert, finds a book called The Perfect Stranger among her possessions. She has no recollection of buying the book. While reading it, she realises that the main character is a Read more...

Murder That Wasn’t: The Case of George Gwaze

Posted 1:31pm Sunday 27th September 2015

Unusually for true crime, Goodyear-Smith takes the position that no crime actually happened. Charlene contracted HIV at birth from her mother. Both her birth parents died, and Charlene and her older sister Charmaine were adopted by their mother’s sister Sifso and her husband George. For Read more...

The Mountain Story

Posted 2:00pm Sunday 20th September 2015

Thr Mountain Story, by Lori Lansens, is a survival novel. On his 18th birthday, Wolf Truly takes a tram up the mountain he spent much of his adolescence exploring with his best friend Byrd. A year before, Byrd was in an accident on the mountain that Wolf feels responsible for. This, along with the Read more...

Paying with their Bodies: American War and the Problem of the Disabled Veteran

Posted 1:55pm Sunday 13th September 2015

Paying with their Bodies: American War and the Problem of the Disabled Veteran, by John M Kinder, takes on the subject of disabilities caused by warfare and the treatment of disabled veterans throughout American history. Kinder begins with the treatment of disabled war veterans and chiefly focuses Read more...

Rich Man Road

Posted 1:55pm Sunday 6th September 2015

Rich Man Road,by Ann Glamuzina, tells the separate stories of two immigrants to New Zealand. One morning the novice nun, Pualele Sina Auva’a, awakes to find that her friend and fellow nun, the elderly Olga Mastrovic, has died in the night. She has left behind a letter to Pualele, confessing Read more...

The Fish Ladder: A Journey Upstream

Posted 1:31pm Sunday 30th August 2015

The Fish Ladder: A Journey Upstream is a memoir by Katherine Norbury. After miscarrying a much-desired pregnancy, Norbury distracts herself from her grief with the writing of a man named Neil Gunn. One of Gunn’s novels, The Highland River, tells the story of a young man walking a river to its Read more...

The Monogram Murders

Posted 2:02pm Sunday 16th August 2015

Sophie Hannah’s The Monogram Murders is a murder mystery starring Agatha Christie’s most famous detective, Hercule Poirot. Poirot is dining at a coffee house when a woman enters in an obvious state of panic. Poirot asks what is troubling her, and she tells him that she is about to be Read more...

On Immunity: An Inoculation

Posted 1:37pm Sunday 9th August 2015

On Immunity: An Inoculation, by Eula Biss, is the author’s personal meditation on  vaccinations and the web of subjects she connects to them, including disease, safety, motherhood and social responsibility. Biss looks at the metaphors and legends of immunity, the social ramifications of Read more...

Foreign Gods, Inc.

Posted 2:47pm Sunday 2nd August 2015

The protagonist of Foreign Gods, Inc. — a novel of magical realism by Okey Ndibe — is Ike Uzondu, a Nigerian living in New York who is unable to get the high-paying work he is qualified for, due to his accent. Instead, he works as a taxi driver. When his green-card-driven marriage ends Read more...

A Vision of Fire: Book One of the Earthend Saga

Posted 2:15pm Sunday 26th July 2015

AVision of Fire: Book One of the Earthend Saga is a science-fiction thriller by Gillian Anderson and Jeff Rovin. As a sticker on the front aggressively proclaims, Gillian Anderson is the actor who played Dana Scully in The X-Files. After an attempt is made on India’s ambassador to the United Read more...