Redemptive power of friendship

Set in 2011, Crux is a story of intense friendship between two Californian teenagers, bookish Dan and his near-feral best friend Tamma, a lesbian from the wrong side of the tracks and grit, two-down-and-out teens escape the hopelessness of their lives and chase a different future through rock-climbing- from Gabriel Tallent, the New York Times bestselling author of My Absolute Darling. Dan and Tamma are two teenagers in their last year of high school in the southern Mojave Desert, are passionate climbers, one is a gifted golden child, the other a mouthy burnout, who spend their evenings and weekends conquering … Continue reading Redemptive power of friendship

Murder of a politician

A third-two-year-old sex worker is shocked when she’s approached by undercover government agents to aid them in a top-secret plot to assassinate a politician known as Meat Neck. But once the deed is done, she realizes what-made her the perfect recruit: She’s 100 per cent disposable. Holed up in an off-the-grid cabin in the woods, she now has only two days, her wits, and a laptop to save her own life. Her best bet is to reach out to the wildly popular feminist investigative podcast Justice for Bimbos, in a hastily typed series of emails, the newly minted “Murder Bimbo” … Continue reading Murder of a politician

Realities of entrepreneurship: Greed, Wealth and Ambition of US business in the ’80s

The Bonfire of the Vanities in a ’87 satirical novel by Tom Wolfe, where there is a drama about ambition, racism, social class, politics and greed in 1980s New York City, and centres on three main characters: WASP bond trader Sherman McCoy, Jewish assistant attorney Larry Kramer, and British expatriate journalist Peter Fallow. This novel was phenomenal success, and is often been called the quintessential novel of the ’80s. Sherman McCoy, the central character of Tom Wolfe’s first novel, is a young investment banker with a fourteen-room apartment in Manhattan. When he is involved in a freak accident in the … Continue reading Realities of entrepreneurship: Greed, Wealth and Ambition of US business in the ’80s

Guilt, Grief, physical and mental perils of human fragility

Samanta Schweblin, Argentine author of Fever Dream translated into 20 languages, and three-time Booker finalist, longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize, and winner of prestigious Juan Rulfo Story Prize, explores a world in which violence and horror exists with daily domesticity- as one woman taking extreme measures to escape family life, to another running away to a writer’s retreat in China. Schweblin’s Good and Evil is sculpted and lucid, strange and uncanny, with six stories that lure us into the shadows to confront the moinsters of everyday life- ourselves. In one tale, a mother surfaces from the depths of … Continue reading Guilt, Grief, physical and mental perils of human fragility

Lilly becomes first drug maker to achieve $1trillion valuation

Indianapolis-based company, Eli Lilly’s weight-loss drugs have enabled it the first pharma company to join an elite group of businesses valued at more than $1trillion, including eight tech giants, Tesla and Berkshire Hathaway.  Clinically approved by U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Eli Lilly’s weight loss medication which promises to lose up to 20 per cent of your body weight by reducing cravings and regulating appetite, costing from £70 Continue reading Lilly becomes first drug maker to achieve $1trillion valuation

Imaginations: Connections between real life and art

This is the amazing memoir of one of the greatest storytellers of our time, over six decades of writing, from 1961 onwards, with her towering influence, who wrote New York Times bestseller’s and modern classics like The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), or The Testaments or Alias Grace (1996) are a reproach to the Swedish Academy. In 1939, with a world war under way, born in Ottawa and raised by ruggedly independent, scientifically minded parents- Carl, an entomologist father, and Margaret Dorothy, a former nutritionist mother. She and her siblings were taken by their mother to throw tin cans at a large … Continue reading Imaginations: Connections between real life and art

Love Triangle

Lily King’s understands good love stories- their secrets and subtext, their highs and their free falls, suffused with love triangles that even the narrator’s 12-year-old son at some point tells her that he has been invited to be part of a thruple which he declines. His mother, the narrator whose name we are not told until the final lines of the book. In the fall of her senior year of college. She meets two students from her 17th century Lit class: Sam who had coppery brown hair and Yash with a thick black pontytail. Best Friends living off-campus in the elegant … Continue reading Love Triangle

How we end up saying things that relate to an idea rather than experience

An unnamed 40-year-old, Protagonist writer of Big Kiss, Bye-Bye, who grew up in the South West of England before moving to Ireland, struggle to explain to her lover why she can’t explain how she feels: “ Somethings are resistant to words maybe, and when you start trying to apply them you end up with something else, another thing a theory, I suppose” Claire-Louise Bennett clarify – how easily language falls into pre-formulated phrases that fail to capture our intended meaning- how we “end up saying things that relate to an idea, rather than to the experience itself”. The protagonist’s unorthodox … Continue reading How we end up saying things that relate to an idea rather than experience

Abandoned by fathers, betrayed by lovers

Braithwaite’s Cursed Daughters is about intergenerational trauma and female kinship. The Falodun family have been cursed for generations, since an ancestor’s affair with a married man provoked the vengeful wife to declare that the woman and her female descendants would never prosper in love: “men will be like water in their palms.”   Setting her story between 1994 and the present day, Braithwaite braids together the fates of three women bound by the curse. A young woman must shake off a family curse, and widely held belief that she is the reincarnation of her dead cousin in this wickedly funny, brilliantly perceptive … Continue reading Abandoned by fathers, betrayed by lovers

Life outside a rigid hierarchy, amid tradition and modernity

Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Her previous novels Hullaballoo in the Guava Orchard (1998), set in India of her childhood- born in Delhi, The Inheritance of Loss which won the 2006 Booker Prize.  This tale is about Sonia Shah and Sunny Bhatia, whose once-wealthy families connected through their grandparents, are part of the first generation of young Indians to experience migration, travel and life outside a rigid hierarchy, caught in between tradition and modernity, between pleasing parents and pleasing themselves. They fall in love, but are soon parted by self-doubt, pride … Continue reading Life outside a rigid hierarchy, amid tradition and modernity