Sunday, 28 September 2025

Dark Academia, Deconstructed: beyond the aesthetic

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Tweed blazers. Ancient libraries. A murder among the privileged. Dark academia has become a cultural moodboard, spilling across TikTok, Inst...
Wednesday, 24 September 2025

Where have all the epics gone? A revisit to Lonesome Dove

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I’ve just finished reading  Lonesome Dove . Again. Though technically a reread, it felt startlingly fresh – like coming back to a place you ...
Saturday, 20 September 2025

When writers go serial: The fiction newsletter Renaissance

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Somewhere between a Dickens cliffhanger and a Substack subscriber list, a curious thing is happening. Fiction is going serial again. Once th...
Thursday, 18 September 2025

Unfinished business: the allure of the incomplete novel

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There’s something magnetic about the unfinished novel. These are books that gesture towards a whole, yet never quite arrive. They end mid-th...
Saturday, 13 September 2025

Books that broke the internet: when novels go viral

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In the past, a book’s success was measured in reviews, literary awards, and maybe, if the stars aligned, a TV adaptation.  Now, a novel migh...
Wednesday, 10 September 2025

What writers can learn from pop stars

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It might sound a little unexpected to set Dua Lipa and Helen Garner on the same page, yet both demonstrate something fundamental: how to bui...
Saturday, 6 September 2025

The annotated life: Why marginalia is back in style

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Marginalia, you either love it or hate it. Once considered the mark of a disrespectful reader, someone scribbling on the pristine pages of n...
Friday, 5 September 2025

This ain’t no cowboy song: writing through grief with music

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This is a bit left-field for this blog. Usually, I’m writing about books and fiction. But creativity doesn’t always stay neatly in its lane....
Wednesday, 3 September 2025

Genre-blending that defies labels: From Romantasy to experimental fiction

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What do you call a novel that blends gothic romance, dark academia, political allegory, and a magic system based on linguistic theory?  In 2...
Sunday, 31 August 2025

Why men read less than women — And how to change it

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It remains a sad truth universally acknowledged that women read more books than men. Twenty years ago, Ian McEwan remarked that ‘when women ...
Friday, 29 August 2025

When cosy meets cathartic: the revival of WWII family sagas

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There is something quietly astonishing about returning to a decades-old series and finding it not only still relevant, but newly resonant. T...
Wednesday, 27 August 2025

Beyond genre: experimental and alt-lit’s bold new directions

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Genres are meant to be helpful. They signpost where to look on the shelves in bookshops and libraries, offering a comforting sense of what t...
Monday, 25 August 2025

Eco-fiction and cli-fi: why climate-centred narratives are more crucial than ever

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Not long ago, a story about climate disaster might have been shelved neatly in the realm of science fiction. Now, it reads like realism with...
Thursday, 21 August 2025

The quiet power of slow books

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Some novels refuse to be hurried. They ask for patience, not because they’re difficult, but because they move differently. You don’t tear th...
Tuesday, 19 August 2025

Why we keep coming back to the same books over and over

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There are books I’ve read two or three times, and picked up more times. Not out of duty, but from a pull I can’t quite explain.  They’re not...
Saturday, 16 August 2025

Why the Literary western endures — and what’s driving Lonesome Dove’s TikTok resurgence

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There’s something quietly electric about  Lonesome Dove’s return in the BookTok universe: the dust-swept epics and tender, layered characte...
Thursday, 14 August 2025

Reading for Joy: How to escape a reading slump and embrace comfort in 2025

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It happens quietly. It has happened to me. The pile of unread books grows taller, the will to open one grows thinner, and suddenly reading—t...
Tuesday, 12 August 2025

How to write like Joan Didion

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What makes a Joan Didion sentence unmistakable? It’s not only the vocabulary or the rhythm. It’s the control. The precise needlepoint balanc...

Experimental & Alt-Lit movements — When internet culture writes fiction

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If you’ve ever found yourself falling down a rabbit hole of Tumblr confessions, TikTok poetry, or a Reddit thread that reads like a novella,...
Monday, 11 August 2025

Climate fiction and Neurodivergent narratives — The rise of conscious storytelling

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Something’s shifting in the novels. The stories feel sharper somehow, as if they know they’re not just here to entertain. They’re here to nu...