About a year ago, I was at a book launch in Dublin and a card caught my eye as I was leaving. I had my newborn in the pram with me (I figured she wasn’t sleeping anyway, so she might as well come to a book launch). It was coming up to Mother’s Day, and
Part of the job here at STORGY is that I have to read a tonne of books, everything from short story collections, to anthologies, to independently published fiction, to the great novels from the larger publishers – poetry sometimes, experimental the next… I read everything and everything. Eden is one of those books that wraps
How does your garden grow? Dan Coxon’s, needless to say, grows supernaturally, with infinite, unruly species. The author’s new mini-collection Green Fingers is a secret garden of horror stories: shadowy, motley, but robustly knotted together by one thematic root. We jump from cabin in the woods to waggon in the snow, stumbling across invasive pot-plants,
Hannah Rothschild’s House of Trelawney is an unexpected and gripping read. Using the crumbling yet charming Trelawney House as a central character and backdrop, complete with eccentric characters and plenty of scandalous gossip, the result is a humorous and modern take on a classic period drama. Set against the tumultuous time of the 2008 crash
From the Bram Stoker nominated author Gemma Amor, author of Dear Laura and Cruel Works of Nature comes her latest slice of horror White Pines. This is a book that is hard to categorize given its genre bending appeal, it seems to cross and blend genres at will. White Pines is like a rock falling
A daringly bold and funny novel, Laura Cassidy’s Walk of Fame is a colourful portrayal of grief, mental illness, and dysfunctional families. Laura plays her part of the “leading lady” wonderfully, a hugely likeable and muddled character, who has ambitious dreams. McMonagle encourages us to see past her – and the other characters’ – mental
I first encountered Michael Nath’s work in my final year of university. A friend of mine suggested an impromptu trip to Leicester Literary Festival, and though we were both exhausted from cramming the night before, we summed up the courage to go. At a small stall, tucked away in a corner of the festival building,
A rich and compelling novel, A Long Petal of the Sea by Isabel Allende is an ambitious and outstanding feat of literature, spanning multiple families, generations, and continents, taking the reader on a journey through key moments of recent history. Despite being set against the chaotic backdrop of work, the book is far from bleak.
The Black Gate Series by Joseph Sale is a collection of novels that I’ve been fully invested in since the first book came out; it’s a genre bending, Gothic, cosmic horror which had me gripped from page one of the first book to the last page of this – Return To The Black Gate the
I am quite a fan of Dan Brotzel’s dry wit and comical situations so when Hotel du Jack got released, I immediately jumped on it and I was not disappointed! The collection is centred around depicting the lives of the average English families for the most, and is humour is not only close to the
