Tag: Books

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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…

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Metamorphosis and morality…

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Silver polisher, Flora, a 40-year-old Londoner visiting her family in Mexico – where Aridjis spent some of her childhood, is bitten on the hand by their dog Diego, who knows her well, but he is old with cataracts and saw nothing but “a disembodied hand”. She winds up in hospital where she undergoes several surgeries under anaesthesia “three surgeries… each time it felt sawn in half and put back together”.  The hospital becomes a hermetic space for Flora, sealed off from the outside world. She meets Wilhelmina, an elderly German woman with pneumonia, who collects pre-cinema toys and instruments. The two … Continue reading Metamorphosis and morality…

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Women plagued by brittle relationships

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Award-winning novelist, Riley who won a Betty Trask and Somerset Maugham award, and a Windham-Campbell prize worth $175,000, from her analyst’s couch, drills into the gaps between her characters to reveal strained relationships with their parents, particularly their mothers set in north of England or in the US.  Palm House is narrated by Laura Miller, a writer living in precarious life of house shares and freelancing in London. Laura Miller and Edmund Putnam is the deputy editor of a literary magazine called Sequence, who have been friends for a long time whose happy meeting of minds, with long evenings spent huddled … Continue reading Women plagued by brittle relationships

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A world defined by the violence of ancient patriarchal traditions

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Shortlisted for The International Booker Prize 2026, author Rene Karabash’s She Who Remains, is a landmark Bulgarian queer novel, secrets readers into a rural Albanian village where to this day, the Kanun of Leké dukagjini- a collection of Archaic laws- looms over the lives of villagers with the same haunting presence to the surrounding mountains. Bekija, painfully aware of why she cannot have what she most wants, chooses to become a “sworn virgin, setting off a bloody and heart-breaking chain of events that shatters a family and destroys a cherished relationship, but also reveals how trauma can lead to vital, … Continue reading A world defined by the violence of ancient patriarchal traditions

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Shadow before bright future

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Writer-activist, Rebecca Solnit’s sequel to her enduring bestseller Hope in the Dark, offers a brilliant account of our immediate past and a thrilling account of the sheer breadth and scale of social, political, scientific, and cultural change over the past three quarters of a century.  Her survey of the world that has changed dramatically since the year 1960. Despite the forces seeking to turn back the clock on history, change is not a possibility; it is an inevitability. The changes amount to backlash drives individualism and isolation, this new world embraces antiracism, feminism, a more expansive understanding of gender, environmental thinking, … Continue reading Shadow before bright future

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Sole witness to a deadly crime

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Ava Glass introduces Maya Landry, who’s seeking a fresh start deep in the Rocky Mountains of Montana after a messy divorce. When a senator is murdered, Landry’s sanctuary turns into a place of danger and she is forced on the run. She reinvents herself and moves to Texas to work as a barmaid and waitress.  She is relieved when she’s hired as a summer keeper of billionaire owned ski lodges left empty after snow season ends, and her new life of peace and isolation is going exactly as hope… until she stumbles across a dead body on the living room floor … Continue reading Sole witness to a deadly crime

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Lessons from the time loop saga

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In the fourth instalment of Balle’s expansive, Danish writer Solvej Balle’s speculative fiction septology, we pick up with Tara Selter, former antiquarian book dealer, who has been repeating the 18th of November for 1,892 days, over five years, According to her calculations, she is now about 35 years old and teems with new faces, new people and voices from every corner of the western world. She is no longer alone in her repetitions. In Book III, Tara met other people also trapped in the same repeating day, first sociologist Henry Dale, whom she encountered at a University lecture on Roman supply … Continue reading Lessons from the time loop saga

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Dispossessed, displaced, politically homeless and economically excluded immigrant

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Ever wondered what is it like to be an immigrant- without a home in a world where people with home make the rules? Longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Non-fiction from the internationally acclaimed Turkish Ece Tmelkuran author of How to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to Fascism: A personal exploration of exile and a galvanizing new vision of home. Dear stranger. Are you home? Do you feel home? For how much longer? Across the world the number of refugees and exiles, the dispossessed and displaced, the politically homeless and the economically excluded is growing. In the … Continue reading Dispossessed, displaced, politically homeless and economically excluded immigrant

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The Chemistry that made the iconic movies with an empire of their own

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The Last Kings of Hollywood is the untold, intimate story of how three young visionaries – Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg – revolutionised American cinema, creating the most iconic films in history while risking everything, redefining friendship, and shaping Hollywood as we know it.  In the summer of 1967, as the old Hollywood studio system was dying an intense, uncompromising young film school graduate named George Lucas walked onto the Warner Bros backlot for his first day working as an assistant to another up-and-coming, largely-unknown filmmaker, a boisterous father of two called Francis Ford Coppola. At the … Continue reading The Chemistry that made the iconic movies with an empire of their own

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Terry falls for “Pixie Pamela”

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Pamela Pixie Colman Smith is young woman of stark contradictions:  plucky yet naïve, artistically gifted despite lacking classical training, fascinated by the esoteric but skeptical of the world around me. After the deaths fo her beloved mother and her troubled but well-intentioned father, Pixie finds herself in the complex, political world of fin-de-siécle art, trying to get her stunning work seen and to forge a name and a path for herself in life. Across Jamaica, Devon, London and Brooklyn, Pixie is a novel of epic proportions, a tale of the twists and turns, séances and secrets, successes and devastation, of one … Continue reading Terry falls for “Pixie Pamela”