The Mountains of Instead

Championing fiction as an escape from pandemics, politics and bad TV.

A Short Hiatus Before Ed Book Fest 2013!

As you may have noticed, things have been a little quiet here on The Mountains of Instead over the last few weeks.  This is largely due to the fact that my daughter is in the middle of her last summer holiday before starting school and I'm keen to spend some quality time with her.  Additionally…

Being Human (Review: Sorry Please Thank You by Charles Yu)

Sorry Please Thank You: Stories Charles Yu Pantheon 2012 "Is language all about desire? Is desire all about loss? Would we ever need to say anything if we never lost anything? Is everything we ever say just another way to express: I will lose this, I will lose all of this. I will lose you."…

People Are Strange, When You're A Stranger (Review: The Humans by Matt Haig)

The Humans Matt Haig Canongate 2013
Dr Andrew Martin of Cambridge University is a mathematician. A pretty good one by all accounts. And on one, not particularly special day, he solves a mathematical problem almost as old as mathematics. And promptly disappears. You see, there are folks elsewhere in th…