Tag: fiction

UncategorizedLeave a comment

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

rrn69

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

Uncategorized1 Comment

Don’t give the customer what they want, give them what they don’t know they want yet

rrn69

Gene Pressman’s memoir of his time working for the legendary New York Department store Barneys founded by his grandfather, comes when the authors helps open its vast new outpost on Madison Avenue in 1993. The luxury store, complete with mosaic floors, custom-made furniture, saltwater fish tanks, a restaurant and floors of beauty, jewellery and clothes. Pressman writes “ The store is amazing. It’s hard to be humble knowing stores just didn’t look like this – not anymore”. Barney’s had, he says, “gone back to the past to the grand  department stores just didn’t look like this – not anymore. Barney’s had … Continue reading Don’t give the customer what they want, give them what they don’t know they want yet

UncategorizedLeave a comment

Abandoned by fathers, betrayed by lovers

rrn69

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

Uncategorized1 Comment

Know your hatred and envy to avoid self-deceptions for successful intimacy

rrn69

Love’s Labour is a collection of psychoanalysis case studies, is long awaited follow-up of American-born, London-based, Stephen Grosz’s bestselling debut of 2013, The Examined Life,  a series of slender psychoanalytic case histories, which opened the world of the consulting room with vividness.  In Love’s Labour, Grosz, gives us insight into the twists and turns of the patient’s inner lives. The woman who is horrified to find her husband having an affair eventually turns out to have a secret gladness: It’s a get-out-of-jail free card she can now legitimately divorce. After deeper exploration, these patients turn out to be Russian dolls, with … Continue reading Know your hatred and envy to avoid self-deceptions for successful intimacy

Uncategorized1 Comment

Life outside a rigid hierarchy, amid tradition and modernity

rrn69

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

UncategorizedLeave a comment

Sex worker who makes a Faustian pact with the tycoon

rrn69

A woman meets a man on a train in Copenhagen and agrees to visit him in London, While she sits out a two-week Covid quarantine in his apartment, she begins to tell her story. Years ago and desperate for money, she sold herself to a stranger called T. She becomes his captive, holed up in a swanky apartment for total control of her body and severed from the outside world, in exchange for any material possession she desires. In the bed between them lay a large kitchen knife and the promise of an iconic death. She aborted the treacherous game … Continue reading Sex worker who makes a Faustian pact with the tycoon

UncategorizedLeave a comment

Imperfect Memories: Shocking murder in the Kiwi bushes 

rrn69

A young girl, starving and covered with blood, turns up in a general store in a remote village deep in New Zealand. She blurts out her name- Anya – but refuses to say anyting else. A shocking murder in the New Zealand bush and the witness who looks all too familiar draws a woman back to the very place she swore she’d never return to in this breakneck debut thriller. The phone rings for Effie, a police officer who fled that very village under terrifying circumstances 17 years earlier and is now in Scotland. An old friend, Lewis, is on … Continue reading Imperfect Memories: Shocking murder in the Kiwi bushes 

UncategorizedLeave a comment

What tech nerds got up to…

rrn69

Seven worried people have gathered for dinner in Notting Hill, London, but it’s the first time six of them have seen one another since 1999, when they spent a heady, intense summer building a website that was meant to revolutionize online dating by making matches based on psychological testing. They presence in Notting Hill to celenrate the life of their recently deceased ex-employer, a professor that brought them together in 1999. For them it was an unsettling experience, as they lived and worked on a remote countryside estate. Their boss was obsessive and opaque. Following a raucous night in which … Continue reading What tech nerds got up to…

UncategorizedLeave a comment

Antics of Renton, Spud, Sick Boy and Begbie

rrn69

In Men in Love, action takes place over roughly, three years upto 1990, Welsh has to think himself into an era before smartphones and the internet. Late 1980s, the closing years of Thatcher’s Britain. For the Trainspotting crew, a new era is about to begin- a time for hope, for love, for raving. Leaving heroin behind and separated after a drug deal gone wrong, Renton, Sick Boy, Spud and Begbie each want feel alive. They fill their days with sex and romance and trying to get ahead; they follow the call of the dance floor, with its promise of joy … Continue reading Antics of Renton, Spud, Sick Boy and Begbie

Uncategorized1 Comment

How can we love, or make sense of our lives?

rrn69

One night in August 1977, ten-year-old, Louisa and her father take a walk on the beach. He’s carrying a flashlight. He cannot swim. Later Louisa is discovered suffering from hypothermia and half-drowned found washed up by the tide, barely alive. Her father is gone, presumed drowned. Despite prolonged searches no trace of her father and the pair’s sandals remain side by sided where they were placed at the end of jetty. They become the objects of a temporary shrine of rice bowls, flowers, fruit and trinkets donated by local people, until they are washed away. What is left following this … Continue reading How can we love, or make sense of our lives?