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! My primary school was a tiny place, one so small that it had no play area to speak of. It did, however, look on to a vast park that was–and still is–a favourite landing place for the city’s hot air...

  Well, hello there, deja vu. It was only a few weeks ago that I was reviewing Louise Limerick’s Lucinda’s Whirlwind, a novel about a career-minded aunt called in as a last-minute caretaker after her sister has jet-set off overseas, and here I am reviewing a book that covers some very similar ground. Mysterious how these things work,...

As we speak my mother-in-law is planning for the apocalypse. Or, at least, three days’ worth of the apocalypse, which she is expecting to coincide (perhaps fittingly enough) with her husband’s sixtieth birthday. Her laundry is a-glug with bottled water, her pantry stocked with starches galore, and she’s planning on hitting the supermarket the...

Earlier this year I read Stephen May’s Life! Death! Prizes! (review) a title that refers to protagonist Billy’s nickname for those trashy magazines they stock by the counters of supermarkets and newsagents, the ones filled with stories about bizarre diseases, disturbingly weird relationships and twins separated at birth, and which are typically...

Goodness. And I thought I had some interesting in-laws to deal with, what with the whole being asked to sleep in cemeteries thing, helping to prepare for the end of the world, nodding along with Chinese karaoke, ignoring my father-in-law’s penchant for getting around in a Ministry of Sound Jacket, and pretending that of course I love the taste of durian,...

“When my first novel (Clean Sweep, formerly titled Cha Cha Cha) was published in 1994, the term ‘chick lit’ hadn’t even been invented,” says bestselling author Jane Heller. At the time she was told that she was writing “contemporary women’s fiction”. It was a categorisation she assumed was used strictly for booksellers so...