If you're new here, why not subscribe to our email updates or follow us on Facebook? You can also add us to your Google Reader. Thanks for visiting! (Contains spoilers, but the narrative of this book is circular, so its difficult to discuss without them) And the frontier in here? the North American had asked, tapping her forehead. And...

  EL Konigsburgs'Silent to the Bone is the third book Ive read recently involving a character who has withdrawn from the spoken world. Im fascinated by the idea of voicelessness, particularly as a form of protest: its a world apart from a mere failure to speak up. A deliberate, defiant silence is a removal of oneself from the...

Medicine might go down with the help of a spoonful of sugar, but Mary Poppins herself would surely agree that middle grade fiction is a sweet enough medicine in its own right. Its the genre I reach for whenever Im feeling a little down or disillusioned; my fictional heart home. Its a genre where its okay to be cheerful and upbeat,...

    About a fifth of the way through his travel memoir'Four Seasons in Rome'Anthony Doerr steps back from his rapturous scramble to describe everything around him to muse on Victor Shklovskys idea of habitualisation. The easier an experience, writes Doerr, or the more entrenched, or the more familiar, the fainter our...

  Sixteen years on the streets and you can learn a lot. But all the wrong things, not the things you want to learn. Sixteen years on the streets and you see a lot. But all the wrong sights, not the sights you want to see. One of the things I feel that I dont see enough of in todays YA is unpolished rawness. Instead theres...

We hover on the edge of what used to be said, caught up, as we used to be caught in the histories we made up for Rosina and Mandy. They were always changing. That was the best thing about the dolls. If the storyline didnt work out, we could always erase their pasts Increasingly as a reader Im drawn to unreliable narrators and...