We are positively flush this holiday season with great new fiction offerings. Personally, I’ve always tried to abide by the rule “one for me, one for you” when buying books as presents (because that way you guarantee yourself immense joy on both sides of the literary...
Is it possible to conjure absolute dread with just a single sentence? Well, yes. Often you’ll be needing more than that (a whole book is usually recommended), but these creepy lines are a testament to what can be triggered in the mind by a few well-chosen words....
Within the many genres that go into making up modern literature, horror has a special place. The shelves are positively teeming with vampires, zombies, psychos, apocalypses… it’s a wonder they don’t drip when we aren’t looking. And yet, as a subset of fiction, it...
This Halloween week, or indeed any week, you can get your shivers and chills from a good monster story or a dark paranormal encounter… or you can gaze into the fascinatingly heinous minds of people harbouring true wickedness. Christopher Berry-Dee is one of the...
Do kids still do a Christmas list every year? I hope that’s still a thing. But mostly, I hope that said list consists of nothing but books! Sort out Christmas gifts for the young folks early this year, save yourselves the stress of the last minute rush, and save a...
We all know the Christmas Shopping madness. Every year you promise yourself that you’ll get it done early, that you’re gifts will be neatly and timeously prepared, safely stacked somewhere secure until the family and friends arrive. Then you glance at the calendar and...
The past couple of months, like many of those that preceded them, have seen the publication of some really good books exploring the recent goings-on of this country and exploring the many things that go into constructing the South African Identity. For humorous,...
Stories of Auschwitz, the Holocaust, Survival and Hope It might feel a little odd, celebrating this particular subset of literature – we can be happy that these books exist, but we must inevitably be sobered by the events that brought them into being. Tales of the...
One of the very best things about the Booker Prize is that it brings to the very forefront of the publishing world the kinds of literary and diverse works that so often lack effusive marketing campaigns, books that are true achievements regardless of genre and...
Big word, heritage, isn’t it? You could go on for hours about what it entails: there’s such a host of intellectual, personal and cultural factors that make up the topic, all very important… Ultimately though, Heritage Day is about celebration. So whether you spend it...
