‘Some people were born just so they could be buried.’ The Devil All The Time is a sprawling, gritty, powerhouse of a book that follows the lives of a handful of characters as they fight to survive in the town of Knockemstiff and the surrounding towns of Ohio and West Virginia. The opening of this
Penelope Greensmith, a divorced, cardigan-wearing, lonely bio-librarian, is responsible for a vast seed bank made possible by the mysterious Vice she inherited from her father. One day she receives an unexpected visitor: the charming Horticulturalist, who wants to see her collection. He thinks it could hold the key to stopping a terrible plague, which turns
A writer who has shaped (and is unarguably still shaping) the face of modern American literature, Richard Ford’s latest collection of short stories is another triumph, showcasing his recognisable wit and affinity for analysing the average American, with clever, subtle humour. As is the case with Ford’s writing, there’s lots to unpack in these short
Songbirds & Stray Dogs is an astonishing accomplishment in a debut novel and there is no surprise that this book won the ‘Next Generation Indie Book Awards for best novel‘ because it is a scintillating book, one that grips the reader and takes them on an unforgettable encounter, one which you will leave battered, bruised,
Hunger Pangs is the debut collection from Scott J. Moses, a new voice in horror for me but a collection that dredges the very depths of horror, you can tell from reading this varied collection that Moses is a person that has been moulded by horror his entire life. There are stories that are vampiric
Every now and then a book comes out that when you read it, your world is changed, whether that is that you’ve just discovered a writer who you now adore, whether it moves you in ways you’ve not been moved before, or that the storytelling is so sublime that the book you believe is destined
Seventy years is a long time right? It’s in fact a lifetime, but what we have with An Inheritance is a gripping novella-in-flash that takes us on this journey at breakneck speed, as we flit through seventy years and four generations of family life – with all its love, grittiness, despair, hope, loss, grief and
It’s hard to go through childhood in your second language. And when your father puts you on the spot by teaching you the wrong way to pronounce the word “knife”, making you the class’s laughing stock, it doesn’t get better. It’s that time when you find out that parents don’t always have all the answers,
Taking a closely considered look at grief and guilt, Here is the Beehive is an enchanting and poetic novel that uses form to unravel the relationship between Ana, Connor and Rebecca. Ana, the grieving ‘other woman’ struggles to come to terms with how to mourn someone whose ‘real-life’ she knew very little about, despite their
The Earth is healed and humans have been extinct for 500 years. Those two things are connected. In the dying days of human civilisation a scientist created a better species, the Erta. Human-like but with none of their physical and emotional flaws. They are walking problem solvers with one purpose – to fix the Earth.
