Category: Issue Eight Reviews

  • Book Review: Clare Rhoden’s The Ruined Land

    Book Review: Clare Rhoden’s The Ruined Land

    Reviewed by Angela Wauchop “[…] Hector had no idea what Jarli’s business was with the ravine canini, but he had detected a bio-echo that troubled him. Jarli’s life-force, Hector’s sensors told him, read very like that of the human twins the canini had saved from the Pale. Jarli must be, the twins must be, thought…

  • Parallax by Robin Morgan

    Parallax by Robin Morgan

    Reviewed by Frances Bigger. I do love a story within a story, and Robin Morgan’s Parallax is just that, a group of stories within a story in a world where stories are relics no one is looking for. The Yarner tells The Stranger story after story, tales from a world that is both nothing like…

  • Book Review: Angela Savage’s Mother of Pearl.

    Book Review: Angela Savage’s Mother of Pearl.

    Reviewed by Angela Wauchop “Meg blinked back tears of frustration. This was not a conversation she wanted to have. She grasped her skirt in tight fists and took a deep breath. […] Meg’s lower lip quivered with suppressed anger. ‘I’ve never given up, Anna. All I’ve done is tame the grief. I’ve never, ever given…

  • Julienne van Loon’s The Thinking Woman

    Julienne van Loon’s The Thinking Woman

    Reviewed by Eugen Bacon. An insightful foreword by Anne Summers gives you hint of this philosophical book that celebrates being a woman.  It is a compelling piece of art, autobiography and scholarship full of enchantment with play. It offers in its meditative approach to the everyday a journey that is also an inspiration, a sharing…

  • Eugen Bacon’s Writing Speculative Fiction

    Eugen Bacon’s Writing Speculative Fiction

    Reviewed by Angela Wauchop “Genre and subgenre crossings in speculative fiction thrive in this world of blurred boundaries […] Genre bending is ‘writing different’[…] As more cross genre works emerge, authors and readers more and more realise text as a network spreading in all directions, as a field of possibilities unfolding […]” Writing Speculative Fiction…

  • Review of Toby Fitch Where Only the Sky had Hung Before.  (Vagabond Press, 2019)

    Review of Toby Fitch Where Only the Sky had Hung Before.
    (Vagabond Press, 2019)

    by Helen Moore “Retweets are the new/Realism” The cover of Toby Fitch’s latest collection features a painting by the Australian constructivist sculptor Robert Klippel made in 1950. A curving, spiky form composed of fragments of colour, it juts into the sky like a bird crossed with a light aircraft at the moment of take-off. This…