‘The Monsters We Deserve’ by Marcus Sedgwick (Book Review)

It started off so well and went downhill so quickly. Marcus Sedgwick’s stunningly bound and illustrated The Monsters We Deserve starts out as a good, atmospheric gothic novel and ends up as…well, I’m still not sure what it ends up as. The Monsters We Deserve (admittedly an awesome title) opens in a remote chalet in the Swiss…

‘The Day the Sun Died’ by Yan Lianke (Book Review).

As ponderous as a Russian novel and twice as exhausting, Yan Lianke’s The Day the Sun Died is an old-fashioned, feel-bad political satire of the folkloric Animal Farm persuasion. A night of mass somnambulism, or ‘dreamwalking’, as it is called in Chinese, serves as a metaphor for the casual horror perpetrated by the Jinping regime, and the lethal consequences…

Notes on the first ‘Game of Thrones’ Season 8 trailer.

The first trailer of Game of Thrones Season 8 promises a Helm’s Deep-like hellscape of death, and shining moments of the heroism, ugliness and beauty that can result when thousands of people are locked up in the dark with no chance of escape.

‘Night Waking’ by Sarah Moss (Book Review)

Sarah Moss’ Night Waking is a mournful tale of motherhood and family life that is likely to put you off having children forever. While its brutal honesty on the downsides of child bearing is a welcome change from the usual moonshine and roses version of the thing, pacing issues and a lack of narrative spark make…