Thursday Soapbox: Regi Claire on illness and creativity

The Story Behind Fighting It This is the first piece of sustained writing I have attempted in a very long time. It all started last summer, with our golden retriever’s belly swelling up – a phantom pregnancy, the vet said. Then there was the smell of rotting wood in our toilet – a leaking joint [...]

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J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings

As the title suggests, I’m going to review J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy (and I should point out that here be spoilers). But first, let’s set the scene. I received The Fellowship of the Ring back in 1995 – I can be so precise because that’s what it says in the cover, “For [...]

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Julius Winsome by Gerard Donovan

Guest review by Tom Vowler. Those who live the longest and those who die the soonest lose the same thing. The present is all that they can give up, since that is all you have. – MARCUS AURELIUS Gerard Donovan’s third novel, Julius Winsome, is one of those rare books – a tale so masterful, [...]

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Love in a Cold Climate/The Pursuit of Love ~ by Nancy Mitford.

This was my first encounter with Nancy Mitford and my reason for reading these two novels – arguably, her best-known – wasn’t just for themselves. I decided I ought to read them before I got started on Letters Between Six Sisters (Charlotte Mosley’s collection of correspondence between her Mitford relatives) and Decca – Jessica Mitford’s [...]

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Coming Up on Vulpes Libris

Drum roll… After eighteen months of working on Vulpes Libris, we’ve finally done it. We have a review of the most famous novel trilogy on the planet. Oh yes, we present to you the epic work of storytelling genius that is The Lord of the Rings. *Fireworks* (by Gandalf, of course) Except, from what I [...]

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Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli

Part of Bohemian Week. I’m a huge fan of Jerry Spinelli (you’ll find I’ve already reviewed Eggs) and he’s my daughters favourite author.  Actually Eggs would also be a pretty good book to review in Boho week but I’m taking the opportunity to tell you about another one which fits nicely into this category – [...]

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Jean Rhys – Good Morning Midnight

Fiction shares much with its narrative siblings drama, film, epic, myth and non-fiction, but what makes it unique is that it can let us into someone’s mind, and into more than one person’s at that. If you want to point out that so, too, can memoir, the crossover genre which uses the techniques of fiction to write autobiography, [...]

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Renate Benedict – A Life Less Ordinary.

Part of Bohemian Week. The first I knew about the bohemian community of Mountain Drive was when regular VL guest Jay Benedict emailed me in November of last year to say that he’d just seen his old childhood home going up in flames on the television. Some intensive Googling eventually revealed Elias Chiacos’s book (reviewed [...]

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Mountain Drive.

Part of Bohemian Week. (This spectacular aerial photograph of the area destroyed by the Tea Fire is reproduced with the kind permission of S B John Wiley on Flickr, who retains the copyright.) On November the 13th 2008, a fire broke out at the abandoned Bothin Tea House in the hills of Montecito, Southern California.  [...]

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Pondering the hippies of Kith and Kin

Part of Bohemian Week. Kith and Kin by Stevie Davies is a novel that invites the reader into the world of the common hippie. These are not glamorous, Hollywood hippies of the type that only exist in films, these are your everyday garden variety hippies, as might be found in any small town or village [...]

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