Janiene Farquharson

Living While Black is an exploration and confrontation of “the nuances of Blackness,” and how to heal and overcome when anti-Blackness breeds racial trauma by formulating a “tailored self-care plan.” This book is borne out of author Guilaine Kinouani’s lived experiences and evidence as a Black woman.

Girl A is a gripping look at collective, familial healing and how raw and complex this journey and experience can be. Lex is a fiercely convincing protagonist: she’s intriguing, with a distinctive voice and outlook on the situation. Lex is an individual, and the product of Dean’s incredible skill as an author. Dean’s writing has made for an exceptionally strong debut – making those that read Girl A excited for her next title, which she is currently working on.

The Lost Sister seems like the kind of novel that is great in theory, but in practice it falls very short. With a seemingly underdeveloped writing style, which then takes away from the strength of its plot, constituting a read I honestly found disappointing and lacklustre, The Lost Sister only earns 2 out of 5 stars.

In Klara and the Sun, Ishiguro completely reframes the genre of dystopian science-fiction by restructuring what one has come to expect from it: the despair; the desperation; the futurism; the love. This novel is such an enchanting and immersive read led by an exceptionally strong-willed an exceptionally strong-willed and kind-hearted (artificial) girl that it easily earns five out of five stars.

Having won gal-dem’s Valentine’s Day giveaway on Instagram, I got a free copy of Caleb Azumah Nelson’s debut novel Open Water in the post sometime last month. And it is an absolute gem. Open Water reads much like a love song, or like an open love letter.

Kink, with its multitude of characters across the spectrum of sexual interest, is profoundly queer in its nature. The link between queerness and BDSM is one that hasn’t received much attention historically, but Kink explores this phenomenon from start to finish through the art of storytelling.

Being the middle child sounds difficult enough, and for eleven-year-old Lincoln Loud those trials and tribulations are worsened by being the only boy… with ten sisters. Inspired by creator Chris Savino’s own childhood growing up with five sisters, the show is set in the fictional suburb of Royal Woods,...

Full of anthropomorphic animals, hard-to-swallow self-truths, addiction, generational family trauma, and raunchy sex against the glitzy backdrop of Los Angeles, this unforgettable series was never for the lighthearted.

Helen Fisher’s Space Hopper has been called ‘the most recommended debut of 2021’ and for good reason. This novel is about mothers and daughters, and how memories alone are not enough to cope with the grief caused by losing a loved one, especially a parent, and that, if given the opportunity, you would do something absolutely insane just to see them again. The unreliability of our memories is also hugely important in the telling of this story.

The Glass House (also known as The Daughters of Foxcote Manor) is a lush, deeply descriptive novel about mothers and their daughters – about families and the age-old secrets they hold deep in the pits of their memories and their hearts. A suspenseful family mystery, with some elements of romance, this novel unravels in two distant (yet fundamentally connected) timelines.

This review is spoiler-free!

She rolls over and reaches for her instinctively: her baby. Her hand hits air and flaps reduntantly. She stumbles out of bed and switches on the light. But this only confirms it. The baby is gone. Someone has taken her. Sixteen years ago, Lizzie Armitage woke to find her newborn baby gone. Just days later, Lizzie was dead. Her sister Paula swore she would do everything she could to find the child. If she hadn’t promised to keep Lizzie’s pregnancy secret, maybe the...

By chronicling the lives of five flatmates in 1980s London, It’s A Sin provides an incredibly powerful (yet deeply heartbreaking) insight into the little-known history of the HIV/AIDS crisis in the UK, which took place against the backdrop of Margaret Thatcher’s hateful and homophobic policies.

To say that last year was difficult is a painful understatement, but one of the few good things that happened in the hellscape that was 2020 is the brilliantly creative TV shows we were blessed with. Television often acts as an escape for me under normal circumstances, so as we were told to isolate and put under national lockdown I...

Sometimes my thoughts scare me. It’s not uncommon that I’ll be doing something mundane and a frightening thought suddenly appears in my mind. Quite often I ruminate on them and they get stuck on an uncontrollable loop so intense that I want to crawl out of my own brain. These thoughts worsen my already persistent anxiety, at which point it becomes all too easy to drown in the whirlpool of distress that these thoughts create.

Disney+ has finally released the first two episodes of the long-awaited WandaVision miniseries. Set after the events of 2019’s Avengers: Endgame, the series follows Wanda Maximoff / The Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olson) and Vision (Paul Bettany) as they cycle through the decades and well-known TV tropes as a newlywed couple in the American suburb of Westview.