Mary Ann Wood’s debut book The Pricklebottoms is comprised of four short (and I mean short!) stories centred on a family of five anthropomorphic hedgehogs, parents with three children, living in a forest community made up of a variety of traditional woodland creatures. A classic, well-established setting for a children’s tale. […]
As a consequence of the economic downturn post-2008, the UK faced a severe job shortage. Even now, 6 years on, unemployment levels have only just started approaching pre-crash levels. In this environment, knowing exactly what you want to do professionally and how to best go about it is a huge […]
When was the last time you picked up a book and couldn’t put it down until it was finished? For me, it was first thing this morning when I picked up Changing Light to read a few chapters before breakfast. A couple of hours later, breakfast had been spectacularly forgotten, […]
“What do you want to be when you grow up?” It’s a question many children hear and one which, as far as I can remember at least, conjured up fantastical ideas of exotic jobs and reveries of a rose-tinted future. From astronaut to gymnast to vet, I imagined myself doing […]
Titles are interesting things. They are one of the first things a potential reader notices about a book, and can fire up the imagination, as well as often fulfilling the obvious task of telling you what a book is about (Trams or Mushrooms of the United Kingdom). But how does one […]
How long does it take to get from Inverness to Edinburgh by train? At time of writing, East Coast estimate your potential travelling time from anything between 3 hours and 14 minutes to 4 hours 56 (excluding any delays). To write his latest book, Simon Varwell completed the 156 mile […]
With the general rise in living costs and the increasingly bad publicity for ready meals over the last few years (not to mention the backdrop of Jamie Oliver’s ceaseless campaign for proper food in schools), a new wave of cookery books has swept onto the shelves to show people that […]
The notion of ‘balance’ underlies aspects of all the natural sciences: One of the first things a student of physics learns is that for every action there is a reaction. Biology teaches that nature is maintained in a constant state of balance; and the many hours spent balancing out chemical […]
With the recent gale of ‘Twilight-mania’ that swept across the genre of teenage (and adult) fiction, it’s kind of an inevitable mind-track to think of vampires when the words ‘supernatural’; ‘high school’; and ‘small country village’ are combined. However, James Dawson makes a very successful detour from this assumed trajectory, […]
Imagine a country where everyone is the same; where individuality is slowly being eradicated, and all interaction with the outside world is blocked by a vast electrified dome. Sara Grant’s dystopian debut novel Dark Parties is set in our future, in a country which was sealed off from the rest […]
