Ordinary human failings

Read Ordinary Human Failings by Megan Nolan

It’s 1990 in London and Tom Hargreaves has it all: a burgeoning career as a reporter, fierce ambition and a brisk disregard for the « peasants » – ordinary people, his readers, easy tabloid fodder. His star looks set to rise when he stumbles across a scoop: a dead child on a London estate, grieving parents loved across the neighbourhood, and the finger of suspicion pointing at one reclusive family of Irish immigrants and « bad apples »: the Greens.

At their heart sits Carmel: beautiful, otherworldly, broken, and once destined for a future beyond her circumstances until life – and love – got in her way. Crushed by failure and surrounded by disappointment, there’s nowhere for her to go and no chance of escape. Now, with the police closing in on a suspect and the tabloids hunting their monster, she must confront the secrets and silences that have trapped her family for so many generations.

Ordinary human failings is a sad and painful exploration of everything that can go wrong in a poor immigrant family. It takes place in 1990s London and follows an Irish family, after the youngest child, a ten-year-old girl, is taken into custody for possibly killing a toddler from the same neighbourhood. Points of view alternate…

River East, River West

Read River East, River West by Aube Rey Lescure

Shanghai, 2007: Fourteen-year-old Alva has always longed for more. Raised by her American expat mother, she’s never known her Chinese father, and is certain a better life awaits them in America. But when her mother announces her engagement to their wealthy Chinese landlord, Lu Fang, Alva’s hopes are dashed, and so she plots for the next best thing: the American School in Shanghai. Upon admission, though, Alva is surprised to discover an institution run by an exclusive community of expats and the ever-wilder thrills of a city where foreigners can ostensibly act as they please.

1985: In the seaside city of Qingdao, Lu Fang is a young, married man and a lowly clerk in a shipping yard. Though he once dreamed of a bright future, he is one of many casualties in his country’s harsh political reforms. So when China opens its doors to the first wave of foreigners in decades, Lu Fang’s world is split wide open after he meets an American woman who makes him confront difficult questions about his current status in life, and how much will ever be enough.

River East, River West was nominated to the Women’s Prize for fiction. It follows two stories: The main one is 14 year old Alva, born of an American immigrant and an unknown Chinese father. She wants to be American; her mom has completely rejected her country of origin and loves China more than anything. The…

Some people need killing: a memoir of murder in my country

Read Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country by Patricia Evangelista

Journalist Patricia Evangelista came of age in the aftermath of a street revolution that forged a new future for the Philippines. Three decades later, in the face of mounting inequality, the nation discovered the fragility of its democratic institutions under the regime of strongman Rodrigo Duterte.

Some People Need Killing is Evangelista’s meticulously reported and deeply human chronicle of the Philippines’ drug war. For six years, Evangelista chronicled the killings carried out by police and vigilantes in the name of Duterte’s war on drugs—a war that has led to the slaughter of thousands—immersing herself in the world of killers and survivors and capturing the atmosphere of fear created when an elected president decides that some lives are worth less than others.

Around the world: Philippines Are you wondering why I read a 500-page book on government-sanctioned murder in the Philippines? Me too. Here, Patricia Evangelista tells us about her story as a journalist covering crime scenes. She weaves it with President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs. The man said a dealer or addict didn’t deserve to…

Enter Ghost

Read Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad

After years away from her family’s homeland, and reeling from a disastrous love affair, actress Sonia Nasir returns to Haifa to visit her older sister Haneen. While Haneen made a life here commuting to Tel Aviv to teach at the university, Sonia remained in London to focus on her acting career and now dissolute marriage. On her return, she finds her relationship to Palestine is fragile, both bone-deep and new.

When Sonia meets the charismatic and candid Mariam, a local director, she joins a production of Hamlet in the West Bank. Soon, Sonia is rehearsing Gertrude’s lines in classical Arabic with a dedicated group of men who, in spite of competing egos and priorities, all want to bring Shakespeare to that side of the wall. As opening night draws closer and the warring intensifies, it becomes clear just how many obstacles stand before the troupe. Amidst it all, the life Sonia once knew starts to give way to the daunting, exhilarating possibility of finding a new self in her ancestral home.

Around the world: Palestine I picked up this book in a bundle of many other books and I didn’t remember which. The cover of this novel is incredibly old-school, which only added to my confusion since I knew I had gotten mostly bundles from 2023 and 2024. It took me about three-quarters of the book…

Doppelganger: a trip into the mirror world

Read Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein

Not long ago, the celebrated activist and public intellectual Naomi Klein had just such an experience—she was confronted with a doppelganger whose views she found abhorrent but whose name and public persona were sufficiently similar to her own that many people got confused about who was who. Destabilized, she lost her bearings, until she began to understand the experience as one manifestation of a strangeness many of us have come to know but struggle to define: AI-generated text is blurring the line between genuine and spurious communication; New Age wellness entrepreneurs turned anti-vaxxers are scrambling familiar political allegiances of left and right; and liberal democracies are teetering on the edge of absurdist authoritarianism, even as the oceans rise. Under such conditions, reality itself seems to have become unmoored. Is there a cure for our moment of collective vertigo?

I’m slightly annoyed at this book, because I’d like to review it and recommend it as a nice find, but also everyone has already raved about it (Cory Doctorow, Alice Cappelle and Ben Werdmuller, among others) and it even has a Women’s Prize now. That’s fine, I’ll talk about it still. In Doppelganger, Naomi Klein…

8 Lives of a Century-Old Trickster

Read 8 Lives of a Century-Old Trickster by Mirinae Lee

SLAVE. ESCAPE-ARTIST. MURDERER. TERRORIST. SPY. LOVER. MOTHER. TRICKSTER.

At the Golden Sunset retirement home, it is not unusual for residents to invent stories. So when elderly Ms Mook first begins to unspool her memories, the obituarist listening to her is sceptical. Stories of captivity, friendship, murder, adventure, assumed identities and spying. Stories that take place in WWII Indonesia; in Busan during the Korean war; in cold-war Pyongyang; in China. The stories are so colourful and various, at times so unbelievable, that they cannot surely all belong to the same woman. Can they?

This novel follows the 8 lives, supposed or real, of a woman who was a « comfort woman » during several wars or who interacted with them; who murdered a few men; who was a spy for North Korea in the South; who was a loving wife to a man who thought she was someone else. It’s…