Storm Front by Jim Butcher
Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files series has been on my radar for years, so when the first book in the series popped up as a Kindle Daily Deal I pounced. A pandemic seemed like a great time for an overdue dive into a highly rated series that ticks so many of my boxes – fantasy, crime, humour, and many more to look forward to. I’m sorry to say I was not impressed. What ticked me off the most was the gender politics. Maybe it was so […]
Bruny by Heather Rose
“Because to live on an island isn’t just a location. It’s a sense of belonging. It’s history and sacrifice. It’s a choice to be remote. It’s a kind of metaphor.” I grew up in Tasmania, Australia’s island state, a place that has become a literary symbol of beauty with something dark hidden in the mist. Mainlanders, a group I now belong to, tend to look down on Tasmania as a dull backward place where nothing much happens except incest, while flying down for short […]
Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Biafra lived less than three full years, from May 1967 to June 1970. Its national symbol, half of a yellow sun, shining from the flag, gleaming on the arms of soldiers, hanging on a string around the neck of proud citizens. Today, for those who have heard of Biafra, the image most likely to come to mind is a starving child. Our story starts in the early 60s, Nigeria newly independent from Britain, ethnic fault lines papered over by a map wilfully ignorant of cultural, […]
Jazz by Toni Morrison
Jazz. The themes are laid down, a story old as dirt, a triangular tangle of middle-aged man and wife and young girl with the tragic end at the beginning. “Can’t rival the dead for love. Lose every time.” Harlem, 1926. The pulse of a city, “in halls and offices people are sitting and thinking future thoughts about projects and bridges and fast-clicking trains underneath”. These people have come north in the Great Migration from the rural south to the northern cities, looking to escape the […]
Quarantine by Greg Egan
Revisiting a book I loved from early 90s, I wondered if it would hold up. It sure does. It gripped me again from the killer opening line: “Only the most paranoid clients phone me in my sleep.” Nick Stavrianos is a PI, hired to search for a woman who disappeared from her room in a secure mental institution. He is an ex-cop who can use his standard police neurological mods to ‘prime’ himself into what his ex-wife called the ‘zombie boy scout’, “so earnest, so […]
