Terry falls for “Pixie Pamela”

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”

Love Triangle

Lily King’s understands good love stories- their secrets and subtext, their highs and their free falls, suffused with love triangles that even the narrator’s 12-year-old son at some point tells her that he has been invited to be part of a thruple which he declines. His mother, the narrator whose name we are not told until the final lines of the book. In the fall of her senior year of college. She meets two students from her 17th century Lit class: Sam who had coppery brown hair and Yash with a thick black pontytail. Best Friends living off-campus in the elegant … Continue reading Love Triangle

Lyra’s fate…

Philip Pullman’s use of language of fantasy to illuminate our world and to explore the deepest question of what it means to be alive and awake to all the splendors and horrors around us.  In volume one his follow up triology which referenced John Milton’s Paradise Lost. The next volume depict Lyra at 20, battling anti-liberal forces, and the final volume published this week, those forces are confirmed to be multinational conglomerates that overdevelop erstwhile wholesome communities and even threaten to buy naming rights to Oxford colleges. Lyra Silvertongue was new Eve, Her “Fall” into sin reframed as a victory … Continue reading Lyra’s fate…

Sex worker who makes a Faustian pact with the tycoon

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

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

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?

Eternal City, that bring its people to life

Rome for centuries was an essential stop on the Grand Tour, part of the education of well-born visitors such as the great chronicler of Gilded Age, Edith Wharton.  A collection of short stories, set in Italy, France and America, with powerful portraits of women who live in “the world of propriety” at the turn of century, displaying emotions women feel in love, in jealousy, when they long for children or seek independence – and when their passions lead them to overstep the bounds laid down by exacting conventions. We see too what happens to those strong enough to break the … Continue reading Eternal City, that bring its people to life

Annie’s repressed upbringing

Catherine Fox has written at least five books solo and an additional autobiography (“Fight the Good Fight”) which is an entertaining history of her life growing up and being a young mother and a martial arts aficionado together with being wife of a man working in the Church of England. She first had the above book published in 1997, and has clearly re-published this year, as afore stated. Catherine studied English in Durham and went on to get a PHD in Theology. She is a former diarist for The Church of England Newspaper and is a writer who can pack … Continue reading Annie’s repressed upbringing

Entangled pursuit of a fulfilling life

Ohio-born fiction writer, Sittenfeld has a gift for making daily events of regular people compelling moment by moment, and take the readers in from the start and make them want to keep turning pages.  In “White Women LOL”, a woman urges a group of black restaurant patrons to take their drinks elsewhere, because they are crashing her friend’s birthday party in a private room – not realising that the period for which the room was rented has run out. The encounter is filmed which goes viral online, and tars the protagonist as a racist. She is also helping her friend … Continue reading Entangled pursuit of a fulfilling life

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

Spectacular Opal’s Gene operation begins a new era for deaf

In another trial at Addenbrooke’s NHS hospital, (Cambridge), Opal Sandy (18months) from Oxfordshire,  a girl completely deaf, after she was diagnosed with auditory neuropathy caused by disruption of nerve impulses going from her inner ear to the brain,  can now hear after having world-leading gene therapy.   A working copy of the fault gene that caused it  was delivered by infusion through a tube into her right ear during surgery last September. Within three months, her mum Joy 33, realised Opal could hear clapping. “ I thought it was a fluke, or something caught her eye, but I repeated it … Continue reading Spectacular Opal’s Gene operation begins a new era for deaf