Grub’s up.
What are you eating and what’s eating you? Survival of any individual, and of any species on this planet, is a matter of balance. While you are alive, you eat to stay alive and, hopefully, thrive and pass on your set of winning genes to the next generation of critters. (more…)
Year of Wonders
Hannie Rayson
Harper Collins 4th Estate 2001
ISBN: 9781841154589
$19.99
320 pp
A novel set in the years of the Great Plague in England (1665-66) would not seem, at first blush, to be a ‘good read’. However, Geraldine Brooks surprises the reader.
Year of Wonders is set in the village of Eyam, in the Peak District of Derbyshire. In 1666, the village voluntarily quarantines itself – no-one to leave, no-one to enter – when plague (Yersinia pestis) arrives and starts felling the villagers. This is historically correct and some of the characters in the story are based on historical people. (more…)
Hello, Beautiful!
Hannie Rayson
Text Publishing 2015
ISBN: 9781922182128
$29.99
320 pp
Autobiographies are stories – they contain truth, but they are still stories. How much truth they convey depends on the author – subject to accuracy of memory and to the courage to reveal personal matters. There is also the question of how much the autobiographer is prepared to include family, friends and enemies in the revelations. (more…)
Once upon a muddled time, in a country full of uncertain people, there was a confused king, bouncing from one ill-defined idea to another. No-one seemed to know that things could be different, because everyone had forgotten that they ever were different. (more…)