Ghosts hover within these walls Unseen footsteps patter in the halls Lions couchant guard the gates Marble pain on their sealed fates The stain on the carpet – blood or wine? Remember when we used this room to dine? Abandoned… Read More ›
literature
Dystopia in Lord of the Flies
1.0 Introduction William Golding’s Lord of the Flies is reminiscent of his predecessors, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Ballantyne’s The Coral Island in his situating the action on an uninhabited tropical island. Unlike his predecessors, however, Golding does not explore… Read More ›
Greek Mythology in the Spotlight: Circe by Madeline Miller, A Book Review
‘Humbling women seems to me a chief pastime of poets. As if there can be no story unless we crawl and weep.’ In her novel Circe, nominated this year for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, Miller takes this premise and… Read More ›
Beneath the Surface
I’ve devoted last couple of weeks to finalising my poetry collection titled Beneath the Surface. Some of these poems are new, some I have carried around in various notebooks and crumpled bits of paper for years, now it’s time for… Read More ›
What is a Human Woman? – Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine
As Elizabethan literary theorist Sir Philip Sidney claims in his 16th century work titled The Defence of Poesie, the purpose of poetry, later extended to encompass all literary genres, is to simultaneously teach and delight the reader. Gail Honeyman’s debut… Read More ›
The Forgetful Narrator: Elizabeth is Missing by Emma Healey
The idea of a completely reliable narrator is quite a questionable subject, since we are all unreliable when it comes to telling our own stories, hence, as the term ‘omniscient’ suggests, the reliable narrator must be some kind of divine,… Read More ›
The Addled Narrator: A.J. Finn’s The Woman in the Window
After I’d completed A.J. Finn’s The Woman in the Window, I put the book down in my lap, leaned back, and stared somewhere into the middle distance while my mind went through the events in the novel once again, weighing… Read More ›
Disintegrating
Dreams fall apart In my hands Seep through my fingers Into the cracks Through the floor And into the river Of tears and sweat Flowing down the canyons Of the aged face where Dead dreams rot and fester Un-lived, unrealised,… Read More ›
Ready Player One – A Dystopian Cliché?
Ernest Cline’s highly popular novel, Ready Player One, has been widely acclaimed for its originality and deep immersion into the 1980s, the decade when the video-gaming as we know it today set root in the form of hugely popular video… Read More ›
The Muse: Burton and Barthes
Jessie Burton again turns to the past to harness inspiration for her second book, The Muse. This time the plot moves back and forth between the 1930s civil-war-ravaged Spain and the 1960s London, yet the issue at hand is not… Read More ›
