5 Stars – The Owlery Reader

Book Review: Foe by Iain Reid

In the near future, Junior and Hen’s quiet lives on their remote farm are interrupted by the arrival of Terrance, an employee of OuterMore. Terrance informs the couple that Junior has the honour of being selected to travel to the Installation, a space station set high above the Earth, where he will live for two years. Though Junior expresses apprehension, it doesn’t seem like saying no is a possibility. Junior really doesn’t want to leave his wife, the love of his life, but Terrance assures him that Hen will be fine without him. After all, she won’t be alone.

5 Stars Reviews

Book Review: Life of the Party by Olivia Gatwood

Olivia Gatwood’s first full length collection looks at what it’s like to grow up as a girl and grow into a woman in world where so much violence is afflicted upon girls and women; a world where our popular culture feeds on their pain.

5 Stars Reviews

Book Review: Over the Top: A Raw Journey to Self Love by Jonathan Van Ness

Jonathan Van Ness, one fifth of the fabulous Queer Eye team we’ve all come to know and love, tells his story from the very beginning, starting back when Jonathan was just little Jack living in a small town in the mid-west, all the way up to breaking onto our laptop screens with a Netflix-backed reboot that has become an international phenomenon.

5 Stars Reviews

Book Review: The Stopping Places – A Journey Through Gypsy Britain by Damian Le Bas

Damian Le Bas spent his childhood around travellers, hearing stories about his Romani heritage from his great-grandmother, spoken in the Roma tongue. In a bid to discover more about his own roots, Le Bas kits out a Ford Transit and heads on the road, touring the stopping places of old and new on a search for answers about his ancestry.

5 Stars Reviews

Book Review: If We Were Villains by M. L. Rio

At a prestigious upstate Liberal Arts college, a troupe of theatre students have formed a close clique in which they live, eat, and breathe Shakespeare. When a casting turns their roles upside down, the stage begins to blur into real life until one of them shows up dead.

5 Stars Reviews

Book Review: The Dutch House by Ann Patchett

When Cyril Conroy buys the Dutch House, he means it as a surprise for his wife, Elna. More glass than brick, with marble floors, gilt ceiling, and even a ballroom, their move from a tiny New York City apartment to this enormous home in Philadelphia is jarring for humble Elna. Bought from the Vanhoebeeks after their bankruptcy, the house also comes with their servants and all of their wordly possessions. Elna tries to adjust as the children, Maeve and Danny, marvel at their new life, but her selflessness and desire to help the neediest of society contradicts her new luxurious lifestyle. She begins to disappear, sometimes for weeks at a time, until one day she leaves for India and doesn’t return.

5 Stars Reviews

Book Review: Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge

Adapted from the viral blog post of the same name, Reni Eddo-Lodge’s Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race uncovers the often unmentioned history of race in Britain, and how relations stand today. She explores the issue from all angles, and this award-winning book has sparked conversations on what it means to be a person of colour in the UK in the twenty-first century. This is a topic which too often goes unspoken of and is relegated to history, but Reni Eddo-Lodge uses her work to show that an open dialogue on race is still incredibly important, now more so than ever.

5 Stars Reviews

Book Review: Nothing is Okay by Rachel Wiley

Nothing is Okay is Rachel Wiley’s second full-length poetry collection, in which she tackles issues such as race, queerness, fatness, and feminism. It is at once a celebration of the self and a critique of society, asking us to reconsider the ways in which we treat ourselves and others.

5 Stars Reviews

Book Review: The Strange Bird by Jeff VanderMeer

The Strange Bird sees Jeff VanderMeer return to the world that spawned Borne, crafting a novella from the point of view of a piece of Company biotech. The story follows its eponymous bird, who escapes from the laboratory in which she was built. Once in the outside world, she cannot connect with other wildlife and struggles to know which humans she can trust in a landscape destroyed by technology and the people that created it.

5 Stars Reviews

Book Review: The Truants by Kate Weinberg

Kate Weinberg’s debut novel, The Truants, pulls dark academia out of the elite and picturesque colleges of America and plunges it into a Brutalist-style university found in the east of England. Jess Walker begins her undergraduate degree enthralled by her enigmatic professor, Lorna Clay, whose class on the master storyteller Agatha Christie sets the scene for the rest of the novel and its mysteries. The Truants is a story about stories, but in particular, it’s about the reliability of our storytellers. Just how much of what they’re telling us is the truth?