Night Shift working Dr Laura Strong, an A&E doctor struggling with each soaring debts and a severely disabled brother to look after. She needs a miracle to stop her life collapsing around her. One day Rafael Fernandez, a handsome Colombian businessman, appears with is young son Max, who is suffering badly from Crolin’s disease. When Fernandez offers to pay her vast sums of money to leave her job and move to Bogot[i]á to care for Max, which Strong eventually accepts. But if somethings appears to be too good to be true, then it probably is. Behind the façade of Rafa’s … Continue reading From the slums of Bogotá to its luxurious villas

Christina Li’s haunting novel “The Manor of Dreams”, is about the secrets that lie in waiting in the crumbling mansion of a former Hollywood starlet, and the intertwined fates of the two Chinese American families fighting to inherit it. Vivian Yin is dead. The first Chinese actress to win an Oscar , the trailblazing ingénue rose to fame in the eighties, only to disappear from the spotlight at the height of her career and lvie out the rest of her life as a recluse. Now her remaining family members are gathered for the reading of her will and her daughters … Continue reading Dreams of crumbling mansion

Mercedes’ 19-year-old Italian, Kimi Antonelli, overtakes Lando Norris to win the Miami Grand Prix, his third win in a row moving him 20-point commanding championship lead. His team-mate George Russell, finished fourth on Sunday behind McLarens’s Oscar Piastri. Antonelli had a three-car fight including Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc before the race narrowed down to a tussle between the Mercedes and Norris. “This is just the Beginning. The road is still long. We are working super hard and the team is doing an incredible job,” Antonelli said. Red Bull’s Max Verstappen finished fifth after recovering from a first-lap spin, and was given … Continue reading Kimi Antonelli wins Miami Grand Prix

In 1961 Penguin Books became a listed company, as five months earlier, a jury had cleared Penguin of publishing an “obscene” work: the unexpurgated paperback of DH Lawrence’s late novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, one of the best-known and most resonant works of the twentieth century. Originally considered obscene and unpublishable in numerous countries, its scandalous story of class divide and the English countryside is notorious. But since the 1920s we have repeatedly re-created Lady Chatterley, from film and TV to music and tourism. A record print run of 3 million copies earned Penguin pre-tax profits for 1960 almost quadrupled. The … Continue reading Struggle from freedom of expression

Lucy Caldwell, winner of the EM Foster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, and the BBC National Short Story Award winner, in her latest novel Devotions which focuses on the point of live itself – via various unmoored protagonists, from a young widow facing up to the essential hopelessness of existence in “Hamlet, a Love Story” to a forty-something, divorced dad who is clearing his dead mother’s home in “All Grown UP”.  A young Belfast theatre troupe brings their experimental production of Hamlet to New York. Harmony Hill is about a … Continue reading Understanding of what it might mean to love