Tag: book-reviews

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Americans in the City of Light to find their happiness

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Love actually meets The Notebook in a tale of love, loss, and finding your way home, all set over the course of one life-changing week in Paris.International bestselling author and sportswriter, Massachusetts-born Kristin Harmel’s Meet Me in Paris, follows nine Americans in Paris, whose stories intertwining as they are soul searching for the meaning of true happiness and love. Julia Glover has brought her twenty-three-year-old daughter, Piper, to Paris for the first time- but they know it will also be their last trip together. Julia is dying, and as the mother and daughter desperately try to make memories together as … Continue reading Americans in the City of Light to find their happiness

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Reganomics effects on Harlem

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Colin Whitehead, two-time Pulitzer winner and #1 New York times bestselling author’s Cool Machine is an entertaining novel that brings to life 1980s New York in his Harlen Trilogy.  1918 New York City is beginning to emerge from financial ruin and decline, energized by rampant real estate development and a Wall Street unchained by Regan-era predatory capitalism. Up in Harlem, however, successful business owner/master fence  for stolen goods which keeps dragging Ray Carney violently into the criminal underworld which requires delicate balancing act, but this concept of “constant turbulent change”, has kept him moving. Just as Carney moves between different worlds, Whitehead … Continue reading Reganomics effects on Harlem

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Struggle for acceptance, greatness, capacity for self-destruction, guilt and freedom.

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East of Eden is a 1952 family saga novel by American author and Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck. Exploring themes of depravity, beneficence, love , the struggle for acceptance, greatness, capacity for self-destruction, guilt and freedom. Featuring the lives of two families, the Trasks and the Hamilton, and their interwoven stories. The Hamilton family in the novel is said to be based on the real-life family of Samuel Hamilton, Steinbeck’s maternal grandfather. Steinbeck carefully establishes the setting with the description of the Salinas Valley in Central California. The story between the beginning of the twentieth century and the end of … Continue reading Struggle for acceptance, greatness, capacity for self-destruction, guilt and freedom.

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New body sexualising it for the very first time

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New York Times bestselling author Sigrid Nunez has become one of the contemporary fiction’s most distinctive voices producing nine penetrating, profound novels celebrated by fans and critics alike. Ordinary and middle-aged women, living in cramped New York apartments feature in “It Will Come Back to You”. Elderly women, living in memory care facilities, somewhere upstate. Teenage girls, spending their summers in Connecticut, alienated by their parents. Divorcees, single mothers, daughters and grand-daughters. Women of the American middle class, women of the American proletariat. Women of the 1970s; women of the Covid-19 pandemic, Nunez who has always been a New York … Continue reading New body sexualising it for the very first time

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Emotional second chance romance as accident erases marriage on rocks 

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New York Times Bestselling author, Christina Lauren’s latest unforgettable novel The Romance Revival, one fateful accident erases a troubled marriage from memory and love gets one extraordinary second chance. Three years ago, Emery Finch did something completely out of character.  He’s an extrovert who always wanted a family but never even planned to get married. He also charms everyone he meets and like dogs more than people, and always like to dance with every grandma, drunk bridesmaid and adorable flower girl at a wedding.  When he attended his cousin’s wedding in Las Vegas, his eyes met, smile faltered for just … Continue reading Emotional second chance romance as accident erases marriage on rocks 

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Underestimated, overlooked and shrewd

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Beverley, Elise and Margot are repressed housewives of convicted killers. During the sun-drenched summer of 1966, the three women form an unlikely alliance after the discoveries of their husbands’ brutal crimes. With the exes- some of California’s most notorious murders- dad or behind bars, they are attempting to forge a new future for themselves. These women got mad, frustrated with their prisons of domesticity, they busted out to wreak havoc on the men in their lives or anyone who dared to cross them.  After all, a housewife is, at her very core, a woman who has made sacrifices, by putting herself … Continue reading Underestimated, overlooked and shrewd

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People living in the margins of society

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Josef Koudelka, 88, one of the world’s greatest and most revered photographers of the post-war period, who photographer lives on the edge of European society.  He came to prominence  through his powerful pictures smuggled out of his native Prague after the 1968 Soviet-led invasion, first published in western newspapers anonymously under the attribution P.P. ( “Prague Photographer”). Distilled from sixty-nine journal kept over the course of fifty-plus years, Hosef Koudelka: Diaries offers a peep inside the mind and artistic process of the iconoclastic Czech photographer renowned for a life in exile and legendary projects on the Roma, and the devastating impact humans … Continue reading People living in the margins of society

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Friendship that can shatters people and compassion that can hold some of these pieces together

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The Left and the Lucky is the moving large-hearted story of a young boy in danger of slipping through society’s cracks and the unlikely father figure who takes him under his wing. “And try to breathe, man. You gotta remember to breathe. You won’t get so panicky if you can remember that.” This novel is about neighbourliness in Portland, Oregon. Eddie Wilkens runs his own house-painting business ( a job Vlautin did in his thirties while trying to make it as a writer and musician). Eddie primes and refreshes the walls and windows of well-heeled locals, while covering up the cracks … Continue reading Friendship that can shatters people and compassion that can hold some of these pieces together

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Mysteries of male friendship

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Andrew Meehan’s Hey Man is the story of Ian and Tommy, whose rich and tender friendship stretches across three fateful decades. The story begins in 1989, when seventeen-year-old Dubliner Ian, a lonely teenager finds himself lodging with his father’s cousin, thirty-year-old actor Tommy Carmody in London. He needs to get away from the family home: his mother is dead and Ian and his father have not only buried her; they’ve buried the memory of her too, distracting themselves with anagram games.  “Eric Clapton, he said. Narcoleptic, I said.”  Tommy will be a change for Ian. He’s “What you ‘d call a character … Continue reading Mysteries of male friendship

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Job nightmare…

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Marcus Kliewer, a writer and stop-motion animator and a  new “titan of the macabre and unsettling” comes a supernatural horror about a young woman who accepts a caretaking job from Craigslist, only to discover the position has consequences far greater- and more dangerous- than  she ever could have imagined. His debut novel “We Used to Live Here began life as a serialised short story Reddit, where it won the Scariest Story of 2021 award on the NoSleep Forum. Film rights were snapped up by Netflix, and it was acquired by Simon & Schuster for publication even before it had been extended into … Continue reading Job nightmare…