Her love…

Nigerian travel writer living in America, Chiamaka, alone in the midst of the pandemic, recalls her past lovers and grapples with her choices and regrets. Zikora, her best friend, is a lawyer who has been successful at everything until – betrayed and broken hearted- she must turn to the person she thought she needed least. Dream Count is a unremarkable story about three affluent Nigerian women, Chiamaka the writer, her best friend Zikora, a lawyer, and her cousin Omelogor, a financial executive.  They navigate their mid-thirties, wrangle with romance and manage dislocations of diasporic identity in the US.   Omelogor, is a … Continue reading Her love…

Entangled pursuit of a fulfilling life

Ohio-born fiction writer, Sittenfeld has a gift for making daily events of regular people compelling moment by moment, and take the readers in from the start and make them want to keep turning pages.  In “White Women LOL”, a woman urges a group of black restaurant patrons to take their drinks elsewhere, because they are crashing her friend’s birthday party in a private room – not realising that the period for which the room was rented has run out. The encounter is filmed which goes viral online, and tars the protagonist as a racist. She is also helping her friend … Continue reading Entangled pursuit of a fulfilling life

Cruelty and Trauma 

Carrion Crow is Glasgow-based Heather Parry’s fourth book, set in London’s Chelsea in the late 19th century, where  Marguerite Périgord, a 19-year-old  daughter of once aristocratic French family, is confined to the attic by her mother “for the sake of her well-being”. Her mother Cécile doesn’t believe she is quite ready for married life. So she leads Marguerite to the attic, where the lack of light will allow her to “acquire the upper-class Pallor” required of a new wife, and the small meals that Cécile delivers on a tray will help Marguerite “establish within herself the reserved palate and physical restraint of the … Continue reading Cruelty and Trauma 

Impulsive decision

Spiky Cece who is in love, has arrived early at her in-laws’ beautiful lake house in Salish, Montana, to finish planner her wedding to Charlie, a cardiac anaesthesiologist with a brilliant future. Charismatic and generous doctor Charlie Margolis, a Swede Levov descendant asks Garrett, a depressed baggage handler at the local airport and his best friend from college, to officiate the wedding. Great-hearted Charlie hopes to reinvigorate melancholic, near misanthropic Garrett, and he wants him and Cece to hit it off, so encourages to spend time together before he arrives for the wedding. Quirky Cece immediately don’t like Garrett, but … Continue reading Impulsive decision

Addictive focus on the wrong things for too long

Journalist Chris Hayes explains why attention and experience which are essential components of being human are under threat. The speed, scale and scope of technological innovation in that past two or three decades mean that the quality of our daily life is being altered – and not for the better, as we are all caught up in it. The utopian early days of internet has given way to fear and loathing, and yet we cannot tear ourselves away from our screens. Even people who work in Silicon Valley insist that their children real actual books and play board games with … Continue reading Addictive focus on the wrong things for too long

Is Big Apple, a place to find and remake yourselves 

A young woman from India feels the pull from Lady Liberty’s lifted torch in New York Harbour and crosses the globe to make a new life, although she knows the path won’t be straightforward but also that the Big Apple is the place to support and nurture her dreams. Kay Sohini, raised in the suburbs of Kolkata and given an English education, reading Jack Kerouac, Joan Didion and Alison Bechdel and dreamt always of New York. When she finally moved to the city, leaving behind an abusive relationship. Sohini refuses to look away from the city’s flaws, from the damage … Continue reading Is Big Apple, a place to find and remake yourselves 

Drug addict in Harlem rubble, surviving miraculously

Richard Price, American author and screenwriter write crime fiction with a social conscience giving us razor-sharp anatomy of an ever-changing Harlem. In Lazarus Man, Richard Price, creates intertwining portraits of a group of compelling and singular characters whose lives are permanently impacted by the disaster. East Harlem, in 2008, a five-storey tenement collapses into a fuming hill of rubble, pancaking the cars parked in front and coating the street with a thick layer of ash, resulting in several deaths. Anthony Carter, a recovering drug addict is retrieved from the rubble buried for days beneath tons of brick and stone, some … Continue reading Drug addict in Harlem rubble, surviving miraculously

Insight into lost world

Travel writer Norman Lewis spent a whole life of writing inscrutably on the road, revealing th world in all its unspoiled beauty, also reflecting a world now totally lost to us, from Yemen of the Imams to bandit chieftains, Neapolitan men of honour and tribal chieftains in Central America, as well as darker scenes: the doomed cultures of French rule in Indo-China, Cossaks being sent home to their death and the quiet holocaust of the indigenous peoples in the jungles of South America. Lewis (1908-2003) was the author of 15 novels and 20 works of non-fiction. The author descirbes “The … Continue reading Insight into lost world

Sheldon Edwards, London-based designer barber

Qatar Airways flies in Sheldon Edwards of HD Cutz, a favourite among celebrities to cut their hair in the paddocks of Doha Formula One. His visitors at F1 paddock stall in Doha ahead of the race included Nowak Djokovic, Rio Ferdinand and several others who sat in the brown leather chair and got their hair styled for viral looks. Sheldon Edwards started from humble beginnings in Clarendon, Jamaica, and expanded to renting barber chair spots all over UK, with the flagship shop at Battersea, 103a Lavender Hill, London SW11 5QL. Sheldon is a third-generation British-Jamaican barber who first hated cutting … Continue reading Sheldon Edwards, London-based designer barber

Shifting tides of society

A novella composed as a triptych, about two sisters and a night that changes everything, from the master chronicler of our heart’s hidden desires. Evelyn had the surprising thought that bodies were sometimes wiser than people inside them. She’d have like to impress somebody with this idea, but couldn’t explain it. On a Winter Saturday night in post-war Bristol, bringing to life with its docks, bombed out streets and crumbling grand houses, with ever moving sea and endless rain act as brooding backdrops and metaphors for the characters’ emotional turbulence. Sisters Moira and Evelyn, newly middle class,  their mother a … Continue reading Shifting tides of society