Tag: fiction

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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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Life of Outcasts with tainted nobility who scrub and clean the stains of our consumer society

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Canadian writer, social worker, and sociologist, Simon Paré-Poupar who did his first round as garbageman in Montreal as a teenager in “Trash” writes “The Garbageman is the Sisyphus of our consumer society. My fellow garbagemen and I scrub clean the stains of our consumer society.” He says he has personally shifted nearly 70, 000 tonnes of junk, but he and his peers are given a wide berth by the households they serve, “people thank the courier… the mover, and the small carrier. But they barely see the garbageman. They wish we could be invisible, just as they hope their garbage … Continue reading Life of Outcasts with tainted nobility who scrub and clean the stains of our consumer society

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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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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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Rise and dominance of the world’s first “Jet age lion of cricket”

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West Indian all-rounder Garry Sobers, got 90 votes in the 2000 Wisden, the bible of cricket, which named the five best players of the 20th century, a choice made by 100 voters from around the world.  Duncan Hamilton in The Man Who Walked Out of the Sun,  fell in love with Sobers when he was a schoolboy in Nottingham, and over the years  followed him around the country as he spoke at lunches and dinners. But he only once approached Sobers and that to request an autograph. He never asked for an interview when writing this book. Instead of contacting Sobers, Hamilton has … Continue reading Rise and dominance of the world’s first “Jet age lion of cricket”

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Devastation of separation and the pain of betrayal

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Avni Doshi, the Booker Prize finalist author of Burnt Sugar  comes a fascinating novel of rupture and rebirth, of one woman’s journey to understand the fault lines in her marriage, her home, and her family, her betrayal, renunciation, and renewal, who swims to the other side and comes up for air. When my husband comes into the bedroom we have shared thirteen years and tells me he doesn’t want to be married anymore, I reach for my neck. My head is missing. A husband announces he is leaving, that he was never happy. A woman is left behind with their two … Continue reading Devastation of separation and the pain of betrayal

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One’s own story submerged by someone else’s

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The haunting, multigenerational saga of a family of Sámi women fighting the devastation of their way of life. Elin Anna Lanna’s novel The Home of the Drowned, traces the story of a family- Ingá, her mother Rávdná, and her Aunt Anne – from 1942 to 1982. At a nearby lake recently dammed to build a hydroelectric power station floods their village. Their home, a type of hut called a goahti, is being submerged by the water. The Sámi are an indigenous people who historically inhabited northern Norway, Sweden, Finland and part of Russia. Due to state-sanctioned assimilation policies over the … Continue reading One’s own story submerged by someone else’s

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Memoir of self-development

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When Irish writer, Brian Dillon was sixteen his mother died and he simply gave up all schoolwork. But his real education was going on elsewhere: with books, music, films and television. When at least he made it to university, his head was already full of avant-garde writing, art and ideas. Could academia liveup to the hopes and dreams he had invested in it? Halfway through college his father died, and the stakes of reading and writing seemed even higher. Ambivalence explores what learning meant to is author, what it enabled and denied between the ages of seventeen and twenty-six, when … Continue reading Memoir of self-development

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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