Black Glass
Meg Mundell
Scribe 2011
ISBN: 9781921640933
$32.95
288 pp
Black Glass is gripping, frightening, clever and thought-provoking. It is written in an unusual style with an unusual structure and I resented every interruption that prevented me from reading it in one sitting.
Humans are illogical, which is contrary to what we tell ourselves and each other but consistent with our animal nature. We can reason and debate, make lists of arguments for and against something but, when we act, we seem to act at the behest of some other process.
Fall Girl
Toni Jordan
Text Publishing 2010
ISBN: 9781921656668
$32.95
240 pp
Following a successful debut novel with a second one can be daunting for a writer. With Fall Girl, Toni Jordan has come up with a worthy, well-crafted follow-up to Addition, showing that she has it in her to keep on entertaining us. (more…)
Dear Madam,
I am writing to you as a penultimate resort as you are the CEO of New Concept Builders and you have the power to set things right. My last resort will be to take this matter to the media, but please don’t read this as a threat. I do not know if your General Manager (New Housing) has passed on to you any of my last twenty-eight letters, so I will recap.
Thank you for purchasing a Klastelle Baby-Bounce-and Play Center. We congratulate you on the wisdom of your choice and support your obvious commitment to ensuring your baby has the very best in environmental stimulation and constructive play activity.
We seem obsessed with best, worst, highest, lowest, first, last, youngest, oldest. Any extreme seems to do. People go out of their way to have their names in the record books. Recently, the world’s oldest women died at the age of 115. Now her ‘runner-up’ is the oldest woman. It is a good thing that centenarians are not often given to bumping off their ‘competitors’ in order to make it into the record books.
The Force: living safely in a world of electromagnetic pollution
Lyn McLean
Scribe 2011
ISBN: 9781921640292
$35
400 pp
As Hamlet told Horatio: “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy”1. This could be a slogan for much of what affects our lives today. We live almost constantly immersed in an electromagnetic ‘soup’, but most of us are unaware of it. In The Force, Lyn McLean renders this soup visible and exposes much of the misinformation and obfuscation perpetrated by those with vested interests. She compares the current state of denial of adverse health impacts to the situation that for so long surrounded asbestos and tobacco.
what the world will look like when all the water leaves us
Laura van den Berg
Scribe 2011
ISBN: 9781921640896
$25.95
192 pp
Never judge a book by its cover; I know this but judge it I did – by its cover and by its title. The title (taken from the closing story) misled me, as this is not a book about environmental issues although issues of species survival come up in a few instances. The stories in this collection are about the internal environments of a number of women. A better title may have been taken from the opening story: ‘where we must be’.