Emily Paull

I wanted to take a second to rave a bit about a book that I have just finished reading.  Sara Foster's latest book, The Hush , was released late last month. In many ways, it was like a second debut for Foster, whose six previous books were all psychological thrillers set in the quote/unquote 'real world'. The Hush  is still a thriller, but it does have one notable difference- it's set in a dark, possible future ten years post pandemic, and it has a dystopian feel to it that feels like an updated nod to The Handmaid's Tale . There is a different sort of medical emergency gripping the public's attention now, and this has led to an increasingly disturbing number of government mandates curbing the public freedoms of British citizens, in particular women.  After an alarming rapid increase in the number of unexplainable stillbirths among the population, conspiracy theories begin to run rife. The novel begins with discussion of a video that has been posted on Youtube, ...

Gold Fame Citrus Claire Vaye Watkins Quercus 2015 (I own a copy courtesy the publisher) I have to admit, the first thing that drew me to this book is the amazing cover.  I am such a sucker for a beautiful book. The second thing that drew me in was hearing that the writer is the child of two members of the Manson family.  I don't know why that was enticing though, so don't ask... Claire Vaye Watkins is the award winning writer of short story collection Battleborn , which aside from sharing its name with an album by The Killers I know nothing about... but now that I have read Gold Fame Citrus I will definitely be checking it out.  Gold Fame Citrus is the story of Luz (pronounced Looz as far as I can tell) and Ray, who have stayed behind in California after most of the residents of that state have been evacuated due to vast environmental disaster.  There is a shortage of water, one which has caused a massive 'dune sea' to form, and those who survive out there ...

The Gracekeepers Kirsty Logan Harvill Secker 2015 (I own a copy courtesy the publisher) This weekend, our unseasonably warm Perth winter finally turned cold and rainy, which meant perfect circumstances for reading a book about a world that is almost totally under water.  This book was Kirsty Logan's The Gracekeepers, a fantastical and yet oddly real novel about two girls, a floating circus and a bear.  How marvelous it was to listen to the rain beating down on my window and the wind howling outside, all the while imagining myself floating away on a stormy sea with a brown bear for company. The Gracekeepers is the story of North, the bear girl, who performs each night with her trained brown bear on board the Circus Excalibur, a circus on a boat which travels between island archipelagos to entertain the Landlockers, or people who live on land.  North and her people are Damplings, an outcast minority of people who choose to live on the sea, even though the sea is n...

I've just recently finished Hugh Howey's Silo trilogy at the recommendation of my significant other, and it's got me thinking about end of the world fiction.  More and more, as I read the second and third novels in this trilogy ( Shift and Dust ) I became convinced that Hugh Howey must be a fan of Margaret Atwood.  While the Silo trilogy is distinctively American, particularly in its description of the US Government's involvement in the central premise, both novels are anti-establishment and environmentalist in scope.  The end of the world, in other words, has been caused by us.  We have ruined our landscape and made it impossible for ourselves to go on living the way we know. In Wool, the first of Howey's trilogy, we are introduced to a new way of life.  People live in a silo underground where their way of life is governed by their specific skill set.  Our protagonist, Juliette, is a worker from Mechanical, way down deep towards the bottom of the sil...