Book Details:

Author: Cody Burke
Release Date: 24 March 2026
Series:
Genre: Memoir
Format: E-book 
Pages: 274 pages
Publisher: Eternal Lotus Publishing
Blurb:
The Father, the Dog and the Conspiracy Theorist is Cody Burke’s unfiltered story of breaking down and breaking free. In this raw and darkly funny memoir, the author battles his ego and demons as he navigates the absurdity of 2020 as a “conspiracy theorist”. His father is dying, but his family is more concerned about social distancing. He attempts to destroy the government narrative to save his family and to save the world… or is he just stroking his own ego? Through psychological spirals, absurd humour, and uncomfortable honesty, the author strives to “question everything”. This memoir pulls you inside to not only the chaos of mental collapse, but to the chaos of evolution. You will find humour in the madness, hope in the heartbreak, and perhaps even you will begin to question everything. Just don’t lose your head…

Review

The Father, the Dog and the Conspiracy Theorist by Cody Burke is a raw and candid memoir about mental health, family, masculinity, fear, spiritual awakening, political disillusionment, and grief. Beginning with author Burke’s sense that part of him “died” at twenty-seven, the book moves through childhood in the west of Scotland, anxiety, insecurity, marijuana dependence, self-diagnosis, lockdown, conspiracy thinking, his intense bond with his father, and finally the arrival of Tuco (the little Jack Russell) who becomes the emotional and spiritual centre of the memoir.

What makes the book compelling is its voice. Author Burke writes with rough-edged honesty, lacing profanity, humour, wounds, and self-awareness in an often brutally unfiltered way. The prose is not polished in a conventional literary sense, but it has a strong confessional force. The early chapters are especially effective because they reveal the emotional foundation beneath everything that follows. The sections on lockdown and conspiracy thinking are likely to be the book’s most polarising. Still the book is most interesting when read less as a manifesto and more as a portrait of a mind under pressure.

If I had one reservation, it is that the book can sometimes feel overextended. There are moments where the digressions into politics, online rabbit holes, and ideological analysis could have been tightened to give the memoir a sharper emotional through-line. However, the sprawl also feels inseparable from the book’s identity. This is not a neat memoir about healing. It is a messy, searching, sometimes uncomfortable account of a man trying to understand how fear enters the body, love keeps people tethered, and grief can split reality into a before and after.

Overall, The Father, the Dog and the Conspiracy Theorist is a fiercely personal memoir with a great deal of heart beneath its anger and chaos. Its most powerful achievement is its portrait of love: love between father and son, love for a dog who becomes family, and love as the fragile force that keeps a person from disappearing into fear completely.

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Book Details:

Author: Luanne Castle
Release Date: 1 January, 2026
Series:
Genre: Memoir
Format: E-book 
Pages: 172 pages
Publisher: ELJ Editions
Blurb:
Luanne Castle’s new hybrid flash memoir, Scrap: Salvaging a Family (ELJ Editions 2026), is now available to purchase on Amazon and ELJ Editions.

Scrap: Salvaging a Family explores the stain of childhood fear and anxiety on the adult spirit and the experience of reconciling with an aging or dying parent. A daughter has grown up in a household with an angry and abusive father. He keeps the secret of his own biological father’s identity from his daughter for decades. Can this family be salvaged?

Review

Scrap: Salvaging a Family by Luanne Castle is a fragmented, lyrical, and emotionally precise memoir that sifts through family memory, inherited shame, childhood fear, and the difficult work of understanding a parent without excusing the harm they caused. Written as a “memoir in flash,” the book is built out of short, vivid pieces, named as scraps of childhood, domestic scenes, remembered violence, questions, photographs, family stories, documents, and imagined reconstructions, all stitched together into something devastating and incredibly artful.

At the centre of the memoir is Castle’s father, Rudy, a man carrying the wound of being born “illegitimate,” by the absence of his own father, and by the shame that surrounded his origins. But Castle does not simplify him into villain or victim. He is frightening, volatile, sometimes cruel but he is also resourceful, hardworking, wounded, loving in broken and bewildering ways, and capable of gestures of strange tenderness. This complexity is what gives the memoir its emotional maturity. Author Castle is not writing to settle a score; she is trying to understand the system of hurt that made her father who he was, and how that hurt passed through him into her childhood.

The form of the book is one of its strongest elements. The flash structure mirrors the nature of memory itself as nonlinear, sensory, sharp-edged, and sometimes contradictory. Author Castle’s prose is beautifully controlled, often poetic without becoming ornamental. She has a remarkable ability to locate trauma in objects. The title Scrap is perfect because the memoir is not only about salvage in the literal sense, but about salvaging meaning from what was damaged, hidden, discarded, or misunderstood.

What I admired most is the book’s refusal to offer easy forgiveness. It moves toward compassion, yes, but not sentimental absolution. Scrap is a beautifully crafted and intelligent memoir about trauma, inheritance, girlhood, secrecy, and family wounds. It is painful, yes, but also tender in unexpected ways. It is a memoir that feels intimate, brave, and unforgettable.

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Book Details:

Author: James D. Reginato 
Release Date: 3rd November 2025
Series:
Genre: Memoir
Format: E-book 
Pages: 141 pages
Publisher: James D. Reginato
Blurb:
Quiet Endurance is James’ debut memoir of chronic illness, misdiagnosis, and endurance: a haunting exploration of identity, resilience, and the human need to be believed.
At aged 23, James Reginato was a law and commerce student who loved structure, precision and meaning. He found peace in order, whether through flying, study, or music. Life made sense until a trip overseas left him with a severe infection that marked the beginning of a long and confusing decline. What began as physical illness became something far more complicated when doctors could not explain his symptoms.
Quiet Endurance is a hauntingly raw recount of his journey through misdiagnosis, disbelief, and the quiet erosion of identity that comes from being treated as a problem instead of a person. It is an intimate account of how a once healthy body can become a source of fear and how the healthcare system can lose sight of the human being behind the data.

Through vivid storytelling and careful reflection, James explores the moments that broke him and the small acts of persistence that kept him alive. He writes about the hospitals that misunderstood him, the labels that trapped him, and the eventual discovery of the real conditions that he had been researching all along. Alongside the medical struggle runs a portrait of family, love, and endurance in the face of a system that could not see past its own limits.
This memoir is both personal and universal. It speaks to anyone who has been dismissed, doubted, or reduced to an explanation that does not fit. It is about what happens when you are forced to become your own advocate, when survival depends on refusing to be erased.
Quiet Endurance is not a story of miracle recovery. It is about the resilience that remains when there is nothing left to prove. It is a record of persistence, truth, and the strength that comes from still being here.
Disclaimer
This text includes detailed descriptions of medical treatments, trauma, hospitalisations, severe mental health challenges, suicidal themes, and systemic mistreatment. Reader discretion is advised. This work is based on the author’s personal experiences and medical history. Excerpts from medical correspondence and clinical records are drawn from the author’s own files and have been reproduced or paraphrased for context. Identifying details of individuals, institutions, and locations have been altered or omitted to protect privacy. These passages are presented in good faith as part of the author’s lived experience, and are not intended to criticise or make factual claims about any identifiable person or organisation.

Review

Quiet Endurance: A Memoir by James D. Reginato is an unflinching account of what happens when a body falls apart, and the systems meant to hold you together decide your suffering is “something else.” It opens with the author’s intent to show how misunderstanding, systemic rigidity, and misplaced psychiatric assumptions can fracture care, and the patient inside it.

What makes this memoir so memorable and really mand is the voice; it is controlled, articulate, and furious in the way only the truly exhausted can be. Author Reginato writes with the discipline of someone who thinks in procedures and that contrast becomes painful (and powerful) when medicine fails to offer the same clarity. The result is a narrative that reads like a slow, relentless erosion of selfhood, until “survival” stops meaning improvement and starts meaning persistence.

The book’s emotional hinge is how plausibly it tracks a descent from “treatable” to “suspect.” We watch an origin-point illness after a Bali trip (later identified as typhoid) and the cascade that follows as weight loss, gut dysfunction, hospitalisation, escalating fear, and a homecoming that doesn’t feel like safety so much as being left alone with the consequences. When validation finally arrives in the form of a POTS diagnosis, there’s a brief, aching sense of “finally, I have a name for this,” and then the bitter aftertaste. The memoir’s strongest chapters don’t just catalogue events; they show what repeated dismissal does to the mind and how it teaches you to doubt your own sensations, your own reality.

I want to be fair about what may not work for everyone. The clinical specificity, such as the cycles of admissions, tests, discharge plans, and the repeated need to “prove” symptoms, can feel intentionally repetitive, because that’s the point: the system’s loops become the patient’s prison. Still, readers who prefer a tighter memoir arc may find portions heavy with medical process. But for the audience this book is speaking to, such as patients with complex illness, caregivers, and clinicians who want to experience texture behind the file, those details are exactly what give it authority. And the ending pages, which return to the ethics of care and the radical act of reclaiming narrative (“keep the pen firmly in your hand”), leave the reader with something rarer than inspiration, a sober, hard-earned clarity.

If you pick up Quiet Endurance, do it with appropriate care as the book explicitly warns of trauma, systemic mistreatment, and suicidal themes. But if you’re in the right headspace, this is a compelling and necessary memoir that argues, persuasively, that medicine can’t be reduced to protocols alone.

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