Review: The Wrath and the Dawn by Renee Ahdieh

A retelling of the classic Arabian Nights or One Thousand and One Nights, Renee Ahdieh’s YA novel The Wrath and the Dawn (the first of two) is charismatic and engaging. Told from the perspective of Shahrzad, daughter of a former vizier and now the bride of the Caliph, facing death at dawn, it is a...

Review: The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

Even living in the UK, it’s pretty hard to not have heard about the Black Lives Matters movement in the USA, especially if you spend any amount of time on social media. Angie Thomas’s fictionalised account of a young girl’s experience is heart-breaking and moving. Telling the tale of Starr, a sixteen year-old girl torn...

Novel Chapter: Love in a Fearful Galaxy

Chapter One The new translator in his ear sat wrong. No matter how many times James shifted it it didn’t get less irritating, and there were only so many times that you could fiddle with it without becoming offensive to six different species. Unfortunately for James, he was sitting in a meeting with two of...

Short story: A Moment in Time

Alice was born two weeks late and nothing has changed since then. She’s never wanted to leave you, and you’ve never entirely been in a rush to force her out. Your partner can roll his eyes as he will (and often does), but he can’t understand the relationship between mother and child. It’s just not...

Short story: The Sam Smith Affair

A/N: This short is based on a true story. For an assignment during the third year of my degree, we were asked to go and find someone to tell us a story and then retell it as fiction. Well, this is my (now ex-)girlfriend's answer when I asked her for a story. The Charlie referenced...