“Promise me you’ll make your life graceful, Molly. Promise me you’ll make your life grand and beautiful and poetic.” These are the words Molly Hook is left with before her mother disappears into the daytime sky. Words that guide Molly through bush and swamp and...
Arthur Less is staring down the barrel of his 50th birthday. His writing career still hasn’t taken off, his finances are a mess, and if that wasn’t enough to throw him into crisis, he’s just received a wedding invitation from his ex-boyfriend of nine years – further...
Would you go back in time even if you knew it wouldn’t change the present? Toshikazu Kawaguchi poses this very question to his characters and readers in the play-turned-novel, Before the Coffee Gets Cold. Poignant and thought provoking, this debut work is a refreshing...
Disappearing Earth is startling in its extremes – Julia Phillips’s writing is disarmingly raw and unpretentious, and at the same time beautifully polished. Gentle and subtle, but sharp as a knife. Phillips takes us to a small town on the harsh coastline of...
Just as there are some places you don’t want to live – Midsomer, the fictional town in the UK TV series Midsomer Murders, for example, or those towns in the US state of Maine where many of Stephen King’s scariest novels are set – there are some people you really don’t...
What happens when the things that bind families together also divide them? That’s the question Singaporean author Jeremy Tiang asks in his remarkable novel, State of Emergency (Epigram Books), which dives into Singapore’s and Malaysia’s tumultuous days of leftist...
