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! Forgive me, o blogosphere, for I have been a terrible book blogger. I’m utterly ashamed to admit that although Ananda Braxton-Smith’s Tantony landed on my doorstop some months ago, it has languished...

Anne of Green Gables and its accompanying volumes had pride of place on the shelves of the local library of my childhood, with multiple dog-eared copies of each jammed on to the shelves. But for some reason, despite reading close to everything in that humble little venue, I bypassed Anne, and it wasn’t until I began a concerted effort to work through...

  If there’s a topic that can never be exhausted in literature, it’s death. The cult of death is something evident in so many aspects of daily life, and its shadow necessarily haunts us. In her novel Fallen Grace young adult author Mary Hooper touches on the topic in myriad and complex ways, exploiting her morbid Victorian London setting to...

  Most agree that character growth and development is the key component of a successful narrative. After all, what’s the point in completing a journey if one emerges from it utterly unchanged? Even a small change is significant in the greater scheme of things, with even incremental shifts in outlook changing the way we approach things. These small...

There’s something enchanting about a train station, and it’s no surprise that they are so frequently evoked in literature as a setting or a context. Train stations, after all, are perfect for bringing people together again, tearing them apart, sending them on journeys, or greeting them as they return. And it’s those large, central stations in particular,...

The setting of John Vaillant’s remarkable work of narrative non-fiction The Tiger is Primorye, a little known province in Russia’s far east, a cruel and inhospitable place that is, counter-intuitively, crowded with the most unlikely profusion of wildlife, an array of flora and fauna so rich that the like of it exists in few other places in the world....