Tag: Books

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Social media appearance a form of “coercive control”?

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Jeanette Winterson weaves together memoir, manifesto and a feminist reimaging of One thousand and One Nights in this impassioned exploration of the power of reading. A woman is filibustering for her life. Every night she tells a story. Every morning, she lives one more day. One Aladdin Two Lamps cracks open the legendary story of Shahrazad in One Thousand and One Nights to explore new and ancient questions. Who would we trust? Is love the most important thing in the world? Does it matter whether you are honest? What makes us happy? In her guise as Aladdin- the orphan who … Continue reading Social media appearance a form of “coercive control”?

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Self taught social empathy

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Would you predict that a British aristocrat would so energize American antifascist and civil rights struggles that Time magazine would crown her “Queen of Muckrakers”? Jessica Mitford, known as Decca, was brought up by eccentric English family to marry well and reproduce her wealth and privilege, not to advocate for the rights of others. Her beautiful sisters have been subjects of books and movies dedicated to their naughty, glamorous lives. Decca ran away to America to forge a rebel’s life. As this richly researched book details, Decca broke the Mitford mould. Instead of setting for life as a professional Beauty, … Continue reading Self taught social empathy

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Captivating generational saga

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Patrick Ryan conjures a vanished America with deep insight and lyrical intelligence about war and adultery, the mysteries of sexuality and family life, and the strange paths we have to travel to forgive or at least begin to understand the people who’ve hurt us the most.  A small-town novel about two midwestern families across generations, from World War II to the late twentieth century.  In Bonhomie, Ohio, a stolen moment of passion, sparked in the exuberant aftermath of the Allied victory in Europe, binds Cal Jenkins, a man wounded not in war but by his inability to serve in it, to Margaret … Continue reading Captivating generational saga

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Lonely and adrift in Manhattan

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Gish Jen is the award-winning author of The Resisters returns with an autobiographical novel tracing a tumultuous mother-daughter relationship. Gish’s mother Agnes Jen – Loo Shu-hsin – born in 1925 to wealthy Shanghai family where the chauffeurs wore leather gloves, expensive Persian opium was served to society women via a sous chef, and girls are expected to behave and be quiet.  No domestic chores were required of her as a child, but the sudden disappearance possibly sacking of her beloved nurse-maid Nai-ma caused an open wound, potentially poisoning her future maternal facility, combine this with the Cultural Revolution, a famine, other … Continue reading Lonely and adrift in Manhattan

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

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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

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Sally Evans

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“DRIVING IN THE BOOK LANE” – A MEMOIR BY DR SALLY  EVANS –  PHD IN LITERATURE – POET, House wife, Mother WIFE,  MOTHER  AND LONGTERM BOOKSHOP OWNER! Price £7 or £10 posted (UK) Fiction Direct Memoir at The Callender Press. 21 Chapters in total. @sallyevans2025 Poet, novelist, publisher, editor, bookseller and sometime librarian Dr Sally Evans uses the memoir form to consider what turned her into a “bookwoman”. From London to Newcastle, from Kirkby Lonsdale, Teesside and Edinburgh to a bookshop in the Trossachs, Sally drives around in a landscape of books and book people in search of the meaning of life. Questions, … Continue reading Sally Evans

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Guilt, Grief, physical and mental perils of human fragility

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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

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Lilly becomes first drug maker to achieve $1trillion valuation

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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

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Mushroom murderer

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Three renowned writers of true crime Helen Garner (greatest contemporary writer), Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein (legal expert) tracked Erin Patterson’s preminary hearings and trial, joined the media scrum at the Latrobe Valley Law Courts, slept over in Morwell, a town east of Melbourne, and close to Leongatha, where the deadly dish was served, and spent unlimited hours in fervent discussion of the case and the themes it raises: Love, Hate, Jealousy, Revenge, Marriage, Money, Mycology and Murder. The writers explore the gap between the certainties of the law and the messiness of reality, their own ambivalence about the true … Continue reading Mushroom murderer

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Meaning of Life: ride to infinity

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Ferries have a spooky association with death, Charon, an ugly demon employed by Hades as the underworld’s ferryman, picking up the souls of recently perished human beings in his skiff and depositing them in the afterlife, in Greek mythology. In The Ferryman and His Wife by 64-year-old bestselling Norwegian author and winner of the prestigious Brage Prize, Frode Grytten takes readers on an epic journey: Ferry Driver Nils Vik’s last route along the fjord instead of the River Styx, which he must cross to get there “it rumbles and rustles, it whispers and rushes, even on days with no wind”, … Continue reading Meaning of Life: ride to infinity