Emily Paull

A Lifetime of Impossible Days Tabitha Bird Penguin Books (Viking) 2019 My copy provided by the author in exchange for a review.  While on the outside, A Lifetime of Impossible Days  is a cheerful shade of sky blue, the contents of the book tell a darker story, more akin with last year's stellar debut The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart. The book begins with Willa Waters, aged 93. Willa keeps a list of things she knows for sure and item number one instructs her to mail two parcels on the 1st of June 2050. The first parcel is addressed to someone in the year 1965, and the second to a recipient in 1992. Those recipients are Willa herself at different points in the timeline and the contents of the parcel will change the course of Willa's life-- all three of her.  This charming, unusual time-slip novel looks at the power of humans to overcome tragedy through love in a highly original way, and explores the extended metaphor of self-forgiveness by literally giving t...

Machines Like Me Ian McEwan Jonathan Cape Publishing (Penguin Books) My copy provided by the publisher in exchange for review. The Artificial Intelligence novel is hardly new. Novels which imagine the possibilities of the technology-- its potential for disaster as well as for progress -- have been a constant in the science fiction genre for a number of decades, but in recent times, we have seen an increase in the number of big name literary authors turning their attention to the concept. In 2019 alone, we have Frankissstein  by Jeanette Winterson, as well as Ian McEwan's Machines Like Me , a counterfactual look at England in the 1980s, where the central changes in technology seem to hinge on the fact that Alan Turing did not in fact suicide in the 1950s. Both novels make reference to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein , a novel which began science fiction's preoccupation with the line between human and inhuman. Machines Like Me  is the story of Charlie Friend, a hi...

AKA all the wonderful short story collections that have inspired me on this journey. Little White Slips by Karen Hitchcock A Lovely and Terrible Thing by Chris Womersley The Weight of a Human Heart by Ryan O'Neill Heat and Light by Ellen van Neerven Zebra and Other Stories by Debra Adelaide You Know You Want This by Kristen Roupenian The True Colour of the Sea by Robert Drewe The Bodysurfers by Robert Drewe Australia Day by Melanie Cheng Pulse Points by Jennifer Down The Love of a Bad Man by Laura Elizabeth Woollett Bird Country by Claire Aman Like a House on Fire by Cate Kennedy Dark Roots by Cate Kennedy Portable Curiosities by Julie Koh Only the Animals by Ceridwen Dovey Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri The Thing Around your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie The Promise by Tony Birch Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout Rosie Little's Cautionary Tales for Girls by Danielle Wood Mothers Grimm by Danielle Wood Feet to the Stars by Susan Midalia ...