Photo: SH Design via AdobeStock “‘The time has come,’ the Walrus said, / ‘To talk of many things: / Of shoes — and ships — and sealing-wax — / Of cabbages — and kings — / And why the sea is boiling hot — / And whether pigs have wings.’”—Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass “Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality. It’s a way of understanding …
Continue reading Stepping through the Looking Glass: A Journey through Speculative Fiction
Authors: Bridget Collins, Laura Purcell, Elizabeth Macneal, Imogen Hermes Gowar, Jess Kidd, Natasha Pulley, Kiran Millwood Hargrave, and Andrew Michael HurleyPublished by Sphere, 2021, 293 pages There is something about December that seems to call for ghost stories. So I have picked a collection of eight ghostly tales written by contemporary writers. The stories are …
Continue reading The Haunting Season—Ghostly Tales for Long Winter Nights
Edited by David Stuart DaviesPublished by Macmillan, 2024, 310 pages There is something about reading a well-written horror story: the chills that run down your spine, the fear, and the feeling of being in the story while sitting at a comfortable distance from any actual danger. This collection is guaranteed to make you shiver, with …
Published by Vintage, 2023, 136 pages “Rotating about the earth in their spacecraft they are so together, and so alone, that even their thoughts, their internal mythologies, at times convene. Sometimes they dream the same dreams—of fractals and blue spheres and familiar faces engulfed in the dark, and of the bright energetic black of space …
Translated from French by Robin BussPublished by Penguin, 1996, 1276 pages. Original version serialized in 1844-46 and published as a book in 1846. First unabridged translation by Emma Hardy, 1846. France, 1815. Napoleon is in exile, but has escaped from Elba. The Bourbons are on the throne. France is divided between the Bonapartists, who secretly …
Published by Storm Publishing, 2024, 352 pages. Two perfect suburban families: Lorrie and Ed, and their children Knox, Archie and Chloé; and Eden and Witt, and their daughter Summer. Summer and Knox, both seniors in high school, are dating. Lorrie and Eden—who are very close friends—joke about the children getting married and becoming each other’s …
Translated from Japanese by Edward G. SeidenstickerPublished by Penguin, 1956, 121 pages. Original version published in 1948. Shimamura takes a train to a town in the mountains of Japan. It is cold, and there is heavy snow. Shimamura, a wealthy married man from Tokyo, is travelling to the town to see a geisha called Komako. …
Published by Vintage, 2015, 260 pages. Lost children: children without an anchor to steady them, to keep them safe. The main characters in this book are adrift and just about manage to survive. It is the 1950s. The book centres around Monica, a young English woman, the daughter of a schoolteacher. She gives up her …
Published by Solaris, 2023, 345 pages. Beatriz marries Rodolfo Solórzano, a wealthy landowner, to escape her circumstances as a poor relative who is treated by her aunt as a servant. But when she arrives at the Hacienda San Isidro, the home that is to be her domain, it is not at all as she had …
Published by Bloomsbury, 2020, 366 pages. “This was what it meant to be exiled and disinherited—to straddle closed borders, never whole anywhere.” “I know now that going from place to place is just something exiles have to do. Whatever the reason, the earth is never steady beneath our feet.” Nahr, a Palestinian woman, sits in …
Talking About Books 