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

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

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

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