Author: rrn69

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Survival amid ultimate brutality…

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Paul Yoon’s Etna is set in a fictional country in the present day, this is story told through the eyes of an ex-military dog, Etna. Etna after surviving years of a devastating war,  decides one night to leave the men he has fought alongside for years and returns home- to the place where he has taken from when he was young, in the thin but persistent hope that if a home exists for him, it might be there. This exhilarating odyssey told through the eyes of a war dog in his own battle-weary, gritty voice, as he traverses across ruined landscapes … Continue reading Survival amid ultimate brutality…

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Unconscious desire, and irrational dreams

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Martin Lindstrom’s three-year, seven-million-dollar neuromarketing study in Buyology, with cutting edge experiment that peered inside the brains of over 2,000 volunteers from all around the world as they encountered various adverts, logos, commercials, brands and products.  Lindstrom’s mission to find out why consumers were drawn to a particular brand of clothing, a certain make of car, or a particular type of shaving cream, shampoo or chocolate bar.  He believed that if he could uncover the answer, it would not only help sculpt the future of advertising, but also revolutionise the way all of us think and behave as consumers.  It seems marketers … Continue reading Unconscious desire, and irrational dreams

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Needle in a loop of silent waves, fine-tuning out of Trauma

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Jamaica-born British writer Jacqueline’s new novel “Sky City” set in early 1990s North London, where a young mixed-race woman, Jaycee, lives alone in a sparsely furnished apartment in a block above a shopping centre, with just a DJ on the radio for company. She is isolated, her best friend Ella-G moved to New York, and she never takes time off from her job as a legal secretary because she “craves the order of the workplace”. Music is still crucial, “Walls hummed with overdriven bass lines. Doors bounced in their frames”- but the escape it offers Jaycee is not ecstatic but … Continue reading Needle in a loop of silent waves, fine-tuning out of Trauma

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Engage with the place to tend and to mend

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Amid women facing backlashes across the world, growing dangers for women, as their safety is being threatened and their freedoms are under attack, with authoritarian states, online misogyny and climate breakdown, wildfires burning in Europe and drought ravages harvests and apocalyptic summer of 2026. Academic and activist author Natasha Walter after decades of her advocacy work alongside refugee women: “When heat rises, so does male violence. The ecological crisis is amplifying every threat to women. Women’s bodies and the body of the earth in danger at one on the same time.” She wrote, The New Feminism ( 1998), an upbeat, … Continue reading Engage with the place to tend and to mend

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Tale of legacy and super rich

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New York Times bestselling author Ellery Lloyd’s “Time to Burn” is a gripping mystery about time travel tourism and the dangerous consequences which ensue when the privileged make the past their playground. Mercurial Tech entrepreneur Inigo Frank who has perfected commercial time travel, it is tightly regulated and and so expensive that it’s open only to the very wealthiest, has enlisted award-wining filmmaker Phoebe Hunt to create a fly-on-the-wall documentary. His company, Tempus Tours, has so far been approved for just one route: a journey back to London in 1941, to the days of the Blitz, allowing the super-rich to … Continue reading Tale of legacy and super rich

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Energy and wonder of a bygone era

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Samuel Thomas, a man of uncertain parentage, is a young magician who is convinced that he is destined for greatness in a far-off land. He travels across the world from India to London to the fog-shrouded streets of Boston in 1816, seeking honour, fame and fortune all the while hiding a secret. In this notorious year without a summer, with a season of unrelenting cold, Samuel arrive in a city alive with ambition, contradiction, and tension. Enter Walter Mepham, in many ways a world away from Samuel, hailing from the upper echelons of Boston society, nursing a problem of his … Continue reading Energy and wonder of a bygone era

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Devastating secret

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New York Times bestselling author Jessica Knoll’s latest novel Helpless, is a psychological thriller. Knoll is the bestselling author of Luckiest Girl Alive and Bright Young women. Helpless is about a successful Hollywood producer who is kidnapped by the man who once knew her best- and the devastating secret that could destroy them both. It’s been twelve years since Faye Heron broke Henry Spalding’s heart. Henry was her college boyfriend, her first intense love, but Faye was in danger of being subsumed by him. Now, Faye is one half of a power-producing duo with her Hollywood husband. Henry is a … Continue reading Devastating secret

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Legacy of a Mughal ruler

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Controversial Aurangzeb “Alamgir, last of the “Great Mughals”, whose empire touched Kabul on one side and Arakan on the other, was described by British Imperialists as “Crooked and Cruel, Dark and Devious”. The Raj-era historian Jadunath Sarkar described him as a bigotd despot who precipitated the “decay of Indian civilization”.  Aurangzeb’s death in 1707 left a divided legacy. India’s current Hindu nationalist government wants to send a bulldozer and raze his grave. His dynasty survived, in one form or another, until the British laid waste to its capital at Delhi in 1857, which lives on the political consciousness of over billion … Continue reading Legacy of a Mughal ruler

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Jackal and gatekeepers to the world of American literature

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Laura McGrath, assistant professor of English at Temple University and a National Endowment for the Humanities fellow, in Middlemen reveals the critical role in the making of American literature, from the famed three-martini lunch to the Frankfurt Book Fair,  and shows how agents influence what we read and explains why many debut novelists never publish another book, why agents champion short story collections even though they sell poorly, and how agents advocate for writers of colour in a system that values whiteness, and why there are so many New York novels. Middlemen demonstrates that agents-eighty percent of whom are in fact … Continue reading Jackal and gatekeepers to the world of American literature

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Simply dazzling: Peru’s Prince of provocateurs

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Essayist and novelist, Mario Vargas Llosa, Polemicist and politician (a Spanish citizen from 1993),  born in the Peruvian city of Arequipa in 1936, the Nobel Prize-winning literary colossus and debonair provocateur whose contradictory life is considered to be perhaps the greatest contemporary writer and most influential intellectual in the Spanish-speaking world. He was also indisputably the most controversial: He was never out of the headlines in more than six decades of literary and political activity, from the moment he exploded onto the cultural scene in the early 1960s with his first novel, The Time of the Hero, until his last, I … Continue reading Simply dazzling: Peru’s Prince of provocateurs