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! “When the doorbell rings at three in the morning, it’s never good news,” begins Stormbreaker, the first in Anthony Horowitz’s bestselling Alex Rider series. I would definitely concur. The...

My husband Jono and I have pretty divergent reading tastes: his section of the bookshelf is largely business books and non-fiction, whereas mine’s largely fiction with the odd piece of narrative non-fiction thrown in. But there is some overlap in our reading habits, and zingy fiction that treads the line between MG and YA definitely comprises a large part...

Anyone who’s 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, he’s possibly an even tougher critic. He’s basically a thirty-year-old teenage boy, and a mere paragraph of extraneous exposition results in him skim-reading–or...

  Late last year I chatted to Steven Lochran about the release of Vanguard Prime: Gold Rush, the first in a high-octane series that blends the pacing of Percy Jackson with the superhero cred of X-Men. The second in the series has just been released, and it’s a glorious ride of explosions, super-sonic travel and some very grey moral decisions. Having...

This post is part of Verseday, hosted by VerseNovels.com Lorraine Marwood’s Note on the Door is a mischievously eclectic collection: it’s a smattering of wondering, tangential thoughts about daily life and the tightrope of strangeness and familiarity we walk every day. Each poem is tiny and contained, and there’s something about them that...

In my experience, tins and fingers don’t go well together. A few years back I found myself at the hospital after losing terribly in a battle against a tin of kidney beans. Kidney beans are good for iron levels, I hear. Bleeding all over the kitchen floor, not so much. Oh, the agony of my hand and its plaintive sobs of haemoglobin. In tears, I called up...