Is Big Apple, a place to find and remake yourselves 

A young woman from India feels the pull from Lady Liberty’s lifted torch in New York Harbour and crosses the globe to make a new life, although she knows the path won’t be straightforward but also that the Big Apple is the place to support and nurture her dreams. Kay Sohini, raised in the suburbs of Kolkata and given an English education, reading Jack Kerouac, Joan Didion and Alison Bechdel and dreamt always of New York. When she finally moved to the city, leaving behind an abusive relationship. Sohini refuses to look away from the city’s flaws, from the damage … Continue reading Is Big Apple, a place to find and remake yourselves 

Game of Cat and Mouse, addictively suspenseful

David McCloskey, a former CIA officer, whose thriller Damascus Station, one of the best spy thrillers in years, this time “ The Seventh Floor” has become addictively suspenseful and espionage thriller. A Russian arrives in Singapore with a secret to sell. But when the Russian is killed and Sam Joseph, the CIA officer dispatched for the meet, goes missing, Artemis Procter is made a scapegoat and run out of the service. Traded back in a spy swap, Sam appears at Procter’s central Florida doorstep months later with an explosive secret, there is a Russian mole hidden deep within the upper … Continue reading Game of Cat and Mouse, addictively suspenseful

Drug addict in Harlem rubble, surviving miraculously

Richard Price, American author and screenwriter write crime fiction with a social conscience giving us razor-sharp anatomy of an ever-changing Harlem. In Lazarus Man, Richard Price, creates intertwining portraits of a group of compelling and singular characters whose lives are permanently impacted by the disaster. East Harlem, in 2008, a five-storey tenement collapses into a fuming hill of rubble, pancaking the cars parked in front and coating the street with a thick layer of ash, resulting in several deaths. Anthony Carter, a recovering drug addict is retrieved from the rubble buried for days beneath tons of brick and stone, some … Continue reading Drug addict in Harlem rubble, surviving miraculously

Lauren Goldie

Muse Gallery – FUTURESCAPE – Lauren Goldie until 17 November 2024269 Portobello Road London W11 1LR http://www.themuse@269.comhttp://www.laurengoldie.com Check for opening times before setting off. Nearest tube is Ladbroke Grove.Lauren is a graduate of the annual Muse Residency programme. She is also a PHD Researcher at Central St Martins and is continuing her interest in speculative technologies and potential environmental consequences of asteroid mining.Lauren employs artistic practices to represent distant space entities and excavation processes. Futurescape is directly representative of a NASA sample retrieval mission to the asteroid Bennu and the MISSE – Materials International Space Station Experiment. The presentation of … Continue reading Lauren Goldie

Shifting tides of society

A novella composed as a triptych, about two sisters and a night that changes everything, from the master chronicler of our heart’s hidden desires. Evelyn had the surprising thought that bodies were sometimes wiser than people inside them. She’d have like to impress somebody with this idea, but couldn’t explain it. On a Winter Saturday night in post-war Bristol, bringing to life with its docks, bombed out streets and crumbling grand houses, with ever moving sea and endless rain act as brooding backdrops and metaphors for the characters’ emotional turbulence. Sisters Moira and Evelyn, newly middle class,  their mother a … Continue reading Shifting tides of society

Boarding school challenges

Alan Hollinghurst, the Booker Prize-winning author of The Line of Beauty, bring us a “Our Evenings”. Gay life in England across the decades, from 1960s to the pandemic captured with glowing intensity through an actor’s memories. A dark luminous and wickedly funny portrait of modern England through the lens of one man’s acutely observed and often unnerving experience. It is a story of race and class, theatre and sexuality, love and the cruel shock of violence, from on the finest writers of our age. Dave Win is thirteen years old when he first goes to stay with the sponsors of … Continue reading Boarding school challenges

Focus on real-life injustice

John Grisham the master of legal thriller teams up with Jim McCloskey, who has dedicated his life to exonerating innocent people, to uncover stories that shine an astonishing light on miscarriages of justice. Joe Bryan suffered the unbearable tragedy of his wife’s murder, only to be tried and found guilty of the crime himself – despite being 120 miles away at the time of the murder. Clarence Brandley spent nine years in Death Row, coming to within six days of execution, before new evidence emerged clearing him of all charges. The case of Norfolk Four, police and prosecutors continued to … Continue reading Focus on real-life injustice

Paula’s vulnerability and strength that radiates energy and life

Booker Prize-winning Roddy Doyle first introduced “ The woman who walked into doors’ a mid-90s TV show whose subsequent novels featured woman’s story  and the second of which is Paula Spencer. The initial response was relentless and polarised with some critics outraged by his representation of domestic abuse and sceptical that such grim phenomenon could exist in modern Ireland. At sixty-six, Paula Spencer – mother, grandmother, widow, addict, survivor – is finally living her life. A job at the dry cleaners she enjoys, a man – Joe – with whom she shares what she wants, friends who see her for who … Continue reading Paula’s vulnerability and strength that radiates energy and life

Lust while the daylight dims

Alan Hollinghurst, the Booker Prize-winning author of The Line of Beauty, brings us a dark, luminous and wickedly funny portrait of modern England through the lens of one man’s acutely observed and often unnerving experience. It is a story of race and class, theatre and sexuality, love and the cruel shock of violence, from one of the finest writers of our age. Our evenings the flames of gutter and dwindle pleading for a snuffer. The author’s own life spanning from 1960s boarding school to the scoundrel times of just yesterday, graphic explanations of cosiness battles with lust  amid dimming of the daylight.  … Continue reading Lust while the daylight dims

Overwhelming incandescent rage

Zoe Stamper, Junior researcher in Ancient Greek Tragedy, the younger partner in a same-sex marriage which has produced two children, Zoe is, after almost 20 years, now messily attempting to separate from her spouse, Dr Penny Cartwright. Complications are added by the fact that Robin, the children’s biological father, who donated sperm to both women and is fully present in their lives, occupies the flat below theirs. Robin’s uncompromising parental role, rigidly set out before either child was even conceived, is amplified by a fourth party, his sister Justine – who also happens to be Penny’s-ex. Zoe, down the academic … Continue reading Overwhelming incandescent rage