Hope is rarely treated as something dangerous. Across literature, religion, and philosophy, it is often imagined as the force that enables human beings to endure suffering and imagine a life beyond it. Stories, too, depend upon this assumption. We continue reading because we believe that something might change: the detective may solve the crime, the…
There’s a specific kind of romance that doesn’t ask you to think. It just grabs you by the collar and makes you feel everything at once. Mile High is exactly that kind of book. I didn’t sit here dissecting it, I didn’t pause to admire the “craft.” I just… felt it. And honestly, that’s the…
Blinding flashes. White. Sparks. The sounds. Click. Click. Click. A synchronised symphony of camera buttons pushed at the same time. The name rings in a distance. Like the last remnants of an echo. Time slows. It replays the scene in slow motion. The sounds muffle or magnify but are heard as noises from a distance. …
It’s one of those days. The rare occurrence that I am up before sunrise. I stand in the kitchen and watch the sun climb higher. I could stare forever. At the angry, rising mass of fire. Clear skies, pale bands of colour spreading thin across them. A faint glow settling over everything. A perfect morning….
Narration from beyond the grave occupies a peculiar place in fiction. It borrows the language of the supernatural while often pursuing entirely different ends. Rather than using death as a source of terror, many works employ the dead narrator to extend the boundaries of memory, allowing the story to continue after the point where an…
Keigo Higashino’s The Devotion of Suspect X is, at first glance, a familiar kind of crime novel. A murder takes place. A seemingly perfect alibi emerges. Detectives investigate. Yet very quickly, the novel reveals itself to be something far more intriguing than a conventional mystery driven by suspense or shock. The story opens with Yasuko…
What It’s Like to Be Broken is a soft, emotionally resonant, small-town romance about people who come to love, not whole but honest. Erin Page doesn’t rush healing here, she lets it unfold slowly, through conversations, shared silences, and the quiet kindness of being seen. Plot: Marrying my husband was the worst mistake of my…
I see myself slipping. Again. I picture a room—the last floor of my mind. It should be nourished, swept, kept free of cobwebs. The base, the foundation strong enough to hold a multi-storeyed apartment. And yet, it’s a dark room. The lights are always out, not because of the bulbs, but because the wiring is…
Dear Diary, If I quit beating around my feelings in metaphorical bullshit, would it count as creative non-fiction? If I lay bare my thoughts and feelings and just talk like a 40-year-old woman done with life, complaining over mimosa to no one in particular, bitching with satire about how her father screwed her up emotionally?…
They say writing is freedom. I’m still trying to believe that. Even now, as I work on the second draft of my thriller novel, I sometimes hold back. I grit my teeth and wrestle with myself on every page. It is taking a lot of unlearning to break that. I want to dive headlong into…