Family tensions amid America’s immigration policies

Lionel Shriver’s A Better Life, is a provocative novel addressing contemporary immigration, where a New York family takes in a Honduran migrant- who may or may not be the innocent paragon she claims to be. Shriver rages about the influx of illegal immigrants to America, but when asked if he writes op-eds about this, he replies “Oh no, no, no, no,.. I most certainly do not,”. Gloria Bonaventura, living in a sprawling house in Brooklyn with her 26-year-old son Nico, an Italian American engineering major  who spent  four years since graduation telling on the dime of his divorced mother of three, decides … Continue reading Family tensions amid America’s immigration policies

Fever Pitch: Two protoganists rivalry

Nadia Davids, an award-winning South African author, paints a gothic psychological thriller set in the 1920s in her latest novel Cape Fever. A young Muslim maid finds herself entangled with the spirits of a decaying manor and the secrets of its enigmatic owner. In small unnamed city in a colonial empire in 1920, Soraya Matas believes she has found the ideal job as a personal maid to the eccentric Mrs Hattingh, whose beautiful, decaying home is not far from The Muslim Quarter of a harbour city where Soraya lives with her parents. She comes highly recommended to Mrs Hottingh through … Continue reading Fever Pitch: Two protoganists rivalry

“RULE BRITANNIA” DAPHNE DU MAURIER – an eye opening strangely topical story featuring“US-UK”

.First published in 1972 by Victor Gollanz Ltd this is Daphne Du Maurier’s last novel. Du Maurier wrote many fictional books and those adapted to film include: – “Rebecca”, “Frenchman’s Creek”, “My Cousin Rachel” and “The Birds”.Ella Westland pointed out – “The author had known the story of Peter Pan since early childhood. Her father Gerald du Maurier regularly played Captain Hook on stage since Daphne was born and observed Emma plays Wendy to Mad’s Peter Pan, Mad’s boys being the six adopted lost boys adopted by The Darlings. Westland has a book in print “Reading Daphne . A Guide … Continue reading “RULE BRITANNIA” DAPHNE DU MAURIER – an eye opening strangely topical story featuring“US-UK”

Who’s “Heiffer”?

In the glorious summer of 1914, Emily Grey, a young Cambridge undergraduate is studying German in Heidelberg, where she meets Hans, a philosopher with grey eyes and long lashes, who wins her heart and asks her to marry him.  Grey, like all women at the time, has not been allowed to graduate -which may be why she has sympathies for the growing demand for women to have a vote. When the First World War intervenes, she is forced to return to England, leaving Hans behind to join the Imperial Navy. A year later, Emily is recruited to serve in fledgling Secret … Continue reading Who’s “Heiffer”?

Glamour, greed from ruthless dealer, super curator and a fawning auctioneer

“Artists are slaves to their vanity. But in the end, in time, they see things as they are”. Today’s commercial art world is a marketplace of extremes, mysterious dealing with unbelievable money, glamour with excess grubbiness, visions of great beauty, generosity, and greed. James Cahill give us the ruthless dealer Claude Berlins, who is only interested in dollar signs. The super curator Fritz Schein, is definitely involved.  A fawning auctioneer, Florian Roth, set on getting his hands on the collection of mega-rich octogenarian collector, Leo Goffman for the sale of the century. Lorna Bedford, whose gallery was the first home of … Continue reading Glamour, greed from ruthless dealer, super curator and a fawning auctioneer

Can good law topple the powerful

Jolyon Maugham, a King’s Counsel, charismatic and successful obscure tax barrister, whose memoir cum social action manifesto Bringing Down Goliath, a product of the bird site, and large portions of it cannot really be understood unless the  reader has followed our hero’s perambulations  through Twitter. He started a mild successful blog, which led him advising the Labour Party on tax policy and even to fleeting fantasies of becoming attorney general in the House of Lords in an Ed Miliband government. But what really made him famous was hi energetic consistent abuse of anyone who disagreed with him on Twitter  where he has 420, … Continue reading Can good law topple the powerful

Astonishingly heroic woman

On September 5 1951 Elzbieta Zawacka arrived home from her teaching job to find two officials waiting for her, Ransacking her tiny flat in Torun, northern Poland , they pounced upon a cotton-reel containing a $10 note, money she had given to her late mother who had never spent it. Owing foreign currency in communist Poland carried a 10-year prison sentence with torture.  She had already fought to defend Lvov , then a city in eastern Poland now in Ukraine and known as Lviv, from the Nazis and joined the Home Army – one of the largest resistance movement in … Continue reading Astonishingly heroic woman

How can you be American and Vietnamese, “both the killer and the person being killed”?

An unconventional memoir with insight, humor, formal invention and lyricism by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen in A Man of Two Faces, rewinds the film of his own life wrestling with dual identity, entwining his family experience with racism, refugeehood and colonisation and ideas of Vietnam and America, writing with his trademark sardonic wit and incisive analysis, as well as a deep emotional openness about his life as a father and a son. At the age of four, Nguyen and his family are forced to flee his hometown of Ban Me Thu?t and come to … Continue reading How can you be American and Vietnamese, “both the killer and the person being killed”?