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! Anyone whos been reading this site for a while knows that I regularly pass on zingy series fiction to my husband. Though his reading interests are polar opposites of mine, hes possibly an even tougher...

Back when I was in uni I had a bit of an affair with the short fiction of Jeffrey Ford. Though not the most elegant writer out there, his work is famously strange, wide-reaching and wide-ranging. Of his long-form work Id only read bizarre and eerie'The Portrait of Mrs Charbuque, which I remember quite enjoying, particularly as I read it around the same...

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,...

  Its like were complementary coloursyou know what those are, right? Colours that make each other disappear? So if you cross red with green'or blue with orange, or yellow with purple'you get a pale, pale colour, almost white Interestingly, though, if you put complementary colours next to each other, they make each other...

  The other night I attended a Christmas dinner for fourteen people, only a handful of whom actually knew each other. We all know how these events play out: awkward introductions where people try to define their lives as concisely as possible so as not to bore the others, and yet verbosely enough that they might find something, anything in common so that...

  Laura Powells recently released Burn Mark is a book that seems to tick all the right boxes. The premise is solid and intriguing, the world-building is rich and believable, and the characters realistic. And yet I found it disappointingly bland. Perhaps its that my paranormal palate has been overwhelmed over the past few years. Perhaps...