There have been plenty of books and movies about pandemics. Given the current reality, if you want to read about a pandemic, it may be more satisfying to read about the more idiosyncratic, literary ones. For example, in Ling Ma’s Severance, people who succumbed to the virus found themselves endlessly repeating common tasks. But there…
Booker Prize winning author Aravind Adiga takes on the issue of refugees and asylum seekers, focusing on Australia in his latest novel Amnesty. Set in Sydney, on a day sometime in the recent past, the book concentrates on Dhananjaya Rajaratnam, aka Danny the Cleaner, as he grapples with his duty to society and his…
American Dirt opens with a scene that is as shocking as it is gripping. Eight-year-old Luca is going to the toilet when a bullet fired from downstairs narrowly misses him. The next thing he knows he is cowering in the shower with his mother Lydia; below them, assassins systematically slaughter his whole family. This is…
Sarah Hopkins’ latest book The Subjects delves into the murky world of big pharma and more particularly, the use of drugs to control and modify the behaviour of young offenders. Except that, for most of its length, it is not directly about this at all. It is only very late in the piece that the…
At first glance, Greenwood appears to be yet another environmental dystopia. The novel opens with a group of environmental tourists in 2038 being shown some of the last of the world’s great trees on an island off the west coast of Canada. And whilst there is a deep strain of environmentalism in Greenwood, it is…
Eoin Colfer is best known as the author of the highly successful children’s fantasy series Artemis Fowl. This series, pitched squarely at the older child market, features a ten-year-old super rich, hyper-intelligent, criminal mastermind who finds and takes on a technologically advanced fairy world. But the first Artemis Fowl book came out in 2001, putting…
