Jacinta Mulders

In Melissa Ferguson’s impressive sci-fi début, wealthy, tech-enhanced Homo sapiens cordon themselves off behind a shining wall. In the desert outside their City (‘City 1’), ‘Demi-Citizens’ live in slum conditions, riddled with disease, hunger, and mistrust. Among them is orphaned Alida, who hustles to support her sister, Graycie, by scavenging and occasionally being trafficked inside Ci ... (read more)

Leah Kaminsky’s novel The Hollow Bones focuses on Ernst Schäfer, a German who was sent to Tibet by Himmler in the late 1930s, outwardly to collect plant and animal specimens; secretly to ‘search for the origins of the Aryan race’. Himmler’s abhorrent obsessions are not focused on – indeed, Schäfer’s expedition only makes up the final third of Kaminsky’s book. The first two-thirds c ... (read more)

Ginger Gorman’s book-length piece of investigative journalism, Troll Hunting: Inside the world of online hate and its human fallout, arose from her experiences as a victim of cyberhate in 2013. Through her own example, and the examples of others, she shows the vulnerability of all internet users to cyberhate, and how quickly and unpredictably it can be triggered. In the remit of trolling – a w ... (read more)