One of the highlights of my time as a bookseller was experiencing the exponential euphoria of bibliophiles the world over when Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give first hit the shelves, and then getting to hand-sell it ad infinitum. Hand-selling, for the uninitiated, is bookshop lingo for successfully convincing a customer to buy a title they weren’t …
The moment Marcella Morgan melts the face off her husband in VE Schwab’s Vengeful you know you’re in for a veritable five-course feast of a treat. She lifted an empty glass from the table. “To my husband,” she said, right before the ruin rushed to her fingers in a blossom of red light. Five years in …
Her voice was war conch and whale song and the distant rumble of a storm, all smoothed into words like glass shaped by the sea. YOU BETTER BELIEVE THAT IS THE DESCRIPTION OF A DRAGON’S VOICE. BIBLIOPHILES ASSEMBLE Ok… so, know that I speak as a galactic supernerd with two Tolkien tattoos who hails from …
Some earth is worth shattering… I can’t believe this is my very first sojourn into the scintillating realms of World Fantasy, Hugo, and Nebula Award-winning SFF Queen Nnedi Okorafor, but I emerged from under my rock to devour it in a couple of days. One of the most magical stories I’ve ever read, The Shadow …
“Take the fire as your OWN. You can use it! The houses that have been built around us are not made of stone. The stakes we have been tied to will NOT survive if our flames burn bright. If they try to burn you… may your fire be strong enough so you can burn the …
The Bone Season saga is a bewitchingly idiosyncratic steampunk-sci-fi-fantasy hybrid – after binging all three books currently out in the world, my imagination is reeling. The brain really does feel warm after finishing, like the body after a sumptuous roast… gravy-drenched Yorkshire puddings, turkey slices dipped in cranberry sauce, steaming brussels sprouts, peas and potatoes, …
Because I am a gargantuan dork willing to arise at the crack of dawn to stand in line for 2 hours with other gargantuan dorks, I managed to score a literal £5 ticket to have my eyeballs blessed for more than 3 hours by the symphonic nuances of Sir Ian Mckellen, Mithrandir himself, as the …
This is a deliciously dark book. Like steaming fillet steak soaked in peppercorn sauce with roast potatoes, buttered runner beans, and a glass of Merlot delicious. You know you’re reading Schwab by the second sentence, when the slender figure of Victor Vale sweeps through a cemetery at night, his billowing trench coat brushing the tops …
‘Stas reskon’ means ‘chasing danger’ in Arnesian, the language of Red London. It occurs in Book 2 of VE Schwab’s incandescent Shades of Magic series, A Gathering of Shadows, when the badass seamster and quirkily maternal Calla applies it to our relentlessly independent protagonist Lila Bard. It’s my favourite Arnesian phrase and captures in totality …
My word, this play. So, few really know this one, am I right? Like, I’m a few months away from the end of a literature degree and only just read it. Some people might know the story from the Iliad, and then fewer still might be familiar with Chaucer’s version, but has anyone really seen …
So, I had to re-read this for my last mammoth university essay – it was also around the same time the new BBC mini-series came out. I only made it through a couple of episodes, partly because I was so swamped, partly because Walter is a little… bland? A little vanilla… But Marian was great …
This is a strange book – strange, disturbing, violent, and thoroughly Victorian in every way. With extremely limited rights around ownership of their finances and even more limitations around opportunities to generate income, the burden of monetary concerns was a crippling one for women in Victorian society. In terms of actual law, women were little …
“This is Captain Kathryn Janeway of the Federation starship Voyager,” were words that quite literally defined my childhood. The most stable period of said hood occurred towards the end of primary school when established morning ritual was an episode of Voyager before school at the breakfast table, the opening credits serving as the theme tune of …
I started out really liking this book. The Hélène Cixous quote at the beginning hooked me in like a fish and I was immediately immersed in the intensity of the story, simultaneously surreal like a mystic dream vision and scalding as a sunburn slap. But about two thirds of the way in, I started to …
“These sit in the wilderness, pent like lousy rodents all the day long; appointed scape-beasts come to the waste-lands, to grope; to stumble at the margin of familiar things – at the place of separation.” Reading this slim novel-poem-memoir hybrid is like reading a book-length Waste Land without any of the lofty ambiguity. In Parenthesis …
“I guess it’s like an airplane: they’re the drag and we’re the thrust, together we make the thing fly. Too much of us and we’re nose-heavy, too much of them and we’re tail-heavy – it’s a matter of balance.” Thus conscience does make cowards of us all. This is Scout’s final realisation in Go Set …
“I have only to glance over my shoulder for all those years to drop away and I see it behind me again, the ravine, rising all green and black through the saplings, a picture that will never leave me. I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, …
“There was no mystery in the heart of a Buendia that was impenetrable for her because a century of cards and experience had taught her that the history of the family was a machine with unavoidable repetitions, a turning wheel that would have gone on spilling into eternity were it not for the progressive and …
“Ladies and gentleman of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.” Vladimir Nabokov, a Russian writer born at the close of the 19th century, undoubtedly penned one of the most beautifully written and equally horrific English language novels of all time. …
Ari sat cross-legged by the fire, watching closely as her mother pressed the point of the silver knife to the bare skin just below the crook of her elbow. Anukis drew the blade in one smooth motion down her forearm, her face a mask of composure. Ari heard her father’s sharp intake of breath, the …
