ALISON GIBBS examines how characters are shaped by politics in Nadine Gordimer’s short story, ‘The Catch’: ‘While Nadine Gordimer was known for both her fiction and her outspoken opposition to apartheid in her native South Africa, she always insisted that politics was not the driving motivation for her stories.’
TYLER MILLER, runner-up in the 2016 Feature Writing Competition, recommends The Martian Chronicles: ‘In 1950, precisely halfway through a century dominated by scientific endeavour and discovery, Ray Bradbury – the man from Illinois – released this slender volume filled with rocket ships, Martian cities, ray guns, telepathy, and interplanetary conquest. But, as Borges noted, from the very start The Martian Chronicles departed radically from its brethren…’
DORA D’AGOSTINO recommends ‘Silent Snow, Secret Snow’ by Conrad Aiken, a story about ‘Paul Hasleman, a boy who thinks, dreams and wishes for snow until it becomes an obsession…’
