Brick Lane by Monica Ali

Paperback:  Nazneen's inauspicious entry to the world, an apparent stillbirth on the hard mud floor of a Bangladeshi village hut, imbues in her a sense of fatalism that she carries across continents when she is married off to Chanu.

Her life in London's Tower Hamlets is, on the surface, calm.  For years, keeping house and rearing children, she does what is expected of her.  Yet Nazneen walks a tightrope stretched between her daughters' embarrassment and her husband's resentments. 

Chanu calls his elder daughter the little memsahib.

'I didn't ask to be born here,' says Shahana, with regular finality.

Into that fragile peace walks Karim. He sets questions before her, of longing and belonging;  he sparks in her a turmoil that reflects the community's own;  he opens her eyes and directs her gaze - but what she sees, in the end, comes as a surprise to them both.

While Nazneen journeys along her path of self-realization, a way haunted by her mother's ghost, her sister Hasina, back in Bangladesh, rushes headlong at her life, first making a 'love marriage', then fleeing her violent husband.  Woven through the novel, Hasina's letters from Dhaka recount a world of overwhelming adversity.  Shaped - yet ultimately not bound - by their landscapes and memories, both sisters struggle to dream themselves out of the rules prescribed for them.

Beautifully rendered and, by turns, both comic and deeply moving, Brick Lane establishes Monica Ali as one of the most exciting new voices in fiction in 2003.

About the author:  Monica Ali is the daughter of English and Bangladeshi parents.

She came to England aged three years, her first home being Bolton in Greater Manchester, and later studied at Oxford University.  Her first novel, Brick Lane (2003), is an epic saga about a Bangladeshi family living in the UK, and explores the British immigrant experience.  It was shortlisted for the 2003 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, and made into a film, released in 2007.

Her second novel, Alentejo Blue, set in Portugal, was published in 2006, and her third, In the Kitchen, in 2009.  Monica Ali lives in London and was named in 2003 by Granta magazine as one of twenty 'Best of Young British Novelists'.  Her latest novel is Untold Story (2011).

Rating:  5/5

The Meek Man

Blessed Are They

Musing Upon Something

Quote No 2711

Sage Advice

Murder In The Sentier (Aimée Leduc Investigation Series) by Cara Black

Paperback:  Parisian PI Aimée Leduc finally has the chance to find out the truth about her missing mother but will the truth leave more dead victims in its path?

When Parisian private investigator Aimée Leduc picks up the phone one hot July afternoon, the call turns her life upside down.  The voice on the other end, with its heavy German accent, belongs to a woman named Jutta Hald.  Jutta claims to have shared a jail cell with Aimée’s long-lost mother, a suspected terrorist on Interpol’s most wanted list.

If Aimée wants to learn the truth about her mother, she is to meet Jutta at a rendezvous point in an ancient tower in the Sentier.  But when Aimée arrives, Jutta is dead, shot in the head at close range.

Aimée realizes she has stumbled into something bigger than Jutta let on, and that her own life is in danger.  She has a lot of unsolved mysteries in front of her:  Jutta Hald’s murder, resurfaced materials from Sydney Leduc’s terrorist activities in the 1970s, police suppression of important information.

The question is, can Aimée put the pieces together before someone else ends up dead?

Murder In The Sentier (2002) is the third instalment in the captivating PI Aimée Leduc Investigation series set in Paris and was nominated for two Anthony Awards - Best Novel and Cover Design.

To keep up to date with Cara Black's engrossing series, Murder in Saint-Germain is the seventeenth and latest instalment published on 6 June 2017 and fans and readers will be delighted to know that the eighteenth book - Murder on the Left Bank - is set to be published on 19 June 2018.

About the author:  Cara Black is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of 17 books in the Private Investigator Aimée Leduc series, which is set in Paris.  Cara has received multiple nominations for the Anthony and Macavity Awards, a Washington Post Book World Book of the Year citation, the Médaille de la Ville de Paris - the Paris City Medal, which is awarded in recognition of contribution to international culture - and invitations to be the Guest of Honour at conferences such as the Paris Polar Crime Festival and Left Coast Crime.  With more than 400 000 books in print, the Aimée Leduc series has been translated into German, Norwegian, Japanese, French, Spanish, Italian, and Hebrew.

Cara was born in Chicago but has lived in California’s Bay Area since she was five years old.  Before turning to writing full-time, she tried her hand at a number of jobs:  she was a barista in the Basel train station café in Switzerland, taught English in Japan, studied Buddhism in Dharamsala in Northern India, and worked as a bar girl in Bangkok (only pouring drinks!).  After studying Chinese history at Sophia University in Tokyo - where she met her husband, Jun, a bookseller, potter, and amateur chef - she obtained her teaching credential at San Francisco State College, and went on to work as a preschool director and then as an agent of the federally funded Head Start program, which sent her into San Francisco’s Chinatown to help families there - often sweatshop workers - secure early care and early education for their children.  Each of these jobs was amazing and educational in a different way, and the Aimée Leduc books are covered in fingerprints of Cara’s various experiences.

Her love of all things French was kindled by the French-speaking nuns at her Catholic high school, where Cara first encountered French literature and went crazy for the work of Prix Goncourt winner Romain Gary.  Her junior year in high school, she wrote him a fan letter - which he answered, and which inspired her to make her first trip to Paris, where her idol took her out for coffee and a cigar. Since then, she has been to Paris many, many times.

On each visit she entrenches herself in a different part of the city, learning its secret history.  She has posed as a journalist to sneak into closed areas, trained at a firing range with real Paris flics, gotten locked in a bathroom at the Victor Hugo museum, and - just like Aimée - gone down into the sewers with the rats (she can never pass up an opportunity to see something new, even when the timing is not ideal - she was headed to a fancy dinner right afterwards and had a spot of bother with her shoes).

For the scoop on real Paris crime, she takes the flics out for drinks and dinner to hear their stories - but it usually turns into a long evening, which is why she sticks with espresso.

Rating:  5/5

Ghost Hero (Bill Smith, Lydia Chin Series) by S J Rozan

Paperback:  American-Born Chinese PI Lydia Chin is called in on what appears to be a simple case. Jeff Dunbar, art world insider, wants her to track down a rumour.  Contemporary Chinese painting is sizzling hot on the art scene and no one is hotter than Chau Chun, known as the Ghost Hero.

A talented and celebrated ink painter, Chau's highly-prized work mixes classical forms and modern political commentary.  The rumour of new paintings by Chau is shaking up the art world.  There ia only one problem - Ghost Hero Chau has been dead for twenty years, killed in the 1989 Tianamen Square uprising.

But not only is Ghost Hero Chau long dead, but Lydia's client is not who he claims to be either.  And she is not the only PI hired to look for these paintings.  Lydia and her partner, Bill Smith, soon learn that someone else - Jack Lee:  PI, art expert, and, like Lydia, American Born Chinese - is also on the case.

What starts as rumours over new paintings by a dead artist quickly becomes something far more desperate - a high-stakes crisis the PI's will find themselves risking everything to resolve.

Ghost Hero (2011) is the eleventh instalment in the PIs Bill Smith and Lydia Chin series set in New York City's Chinatown and won the Dilys Awards for Best Book in 2012.

About the author:  S J Rozan, a native New Yorker, is the author of fifteen novels and five dozen short stories.  Her work has won the Edgar, Shamus, Anthony, Nero, and Macavity awards for Best Novel and the Edgar for Best Short Story.  She is also the recipient of the Japanese Maltese Falcon Award and recently received the Life Achievement Award from the Private Eye Writers of America. Bronx Noir, a short story anthology S J edited, was chosen NAIBA “Notable Book of the Year.”  She also co-edited, with Jonathan Santlofer, the anthology Dark End of the Street.

S J has served on the National Boards of Mystery Writers of America and Sisters in Crime, and is ex-President of the Private Eye Writers of America.  She speaks, lectures and teaches, and runs a summer writing workshop at the Art Workshop International in Assisi, Italy.

In January 2003 SJ was an invited speaker at the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.  The 2005 Left Coast Crime convention in El Paso, Texas made her its Guest of Honor and she was Toastmaster at Bouchercon 2009.

A former architect in a practice that focused on police stations, firehouses, and zoos, S J Rozan lives in lower Manhattan.

Rating:  5/5

Sarong Party Girls by Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan

Paperback:  Sarong Party Girls (2016), a sensational and utterly hilarious novel, rather like Breakfast at Tiffany's set in modern Asia, is about a young woman's rise in the glitzy, moneyed city of Singapore, where old traditions clash with heady modern materialism.

On the edge of 27, Jazzy hatches a plan for her and her best girlfriends, Sher, Imo, and Fann.  Before the year is out, these Sarong Party Girls will all have spectacular weddings to rich ang moh - Western expat - husbands, with Chanel babies (the cutest status symbols of all) quickly to follow.

Razor-sharp, spunky, and vulgarly brand-obsessed, Jazzy is a determined woman who doesn't lose. As she fervently pursues her quest to find a white husband, this bombastic yet tenderly vulnerable gold digger reveals the contentious gender politics and class tensions thrumming beneath the shiny exterior of Singapore's glamorous nightclubs and busy streets, its grubby wet markets and seedy hawker centres.  Moving through her colourful, stratified world, she realizes she cannot ignore the troubling incongruity of new money and old-world attitudes that threaten to crush her dreams. Desperate to move up in Asia's financial and international capital, will Jazzy and her friends succeed?

Vividly told in Singlish - colourful Singaporean English, with its distinctive cadence and slang - Sarong Party Girls (2016) brilliantly captures the unique voice of this young, striving woman caught between worlds. 

With remarkable vibrancy and empathy, Cheryl Tan brings not only Jazzy but her city of Singapore to dazzling, dizzying life.

About the author:  Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan is a New York-based journalist and author of “Sarong Party Girls” (William Morrow, 2016) as well as “A Tiger In The Kitchen: A Memoir of Food & Family“ (Hyperion, 2011). She is the editor of the fiction anthology “Singapore Noir“ (Akashic Books, 2014).

She was a staff writer at the Wall Street Journal, In Style magazine and the Baltimore Sun.  Her stories have also appeared in The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Washington Post, Bon Appetit, Food & Wine, National Geographic, Foreign Policy, Marie Claire, Newsweek, Bloomberg Businessweek, Chicago Tribune, The (Portland) Oregonian, The (Topeka) Capital-Journal and The (Singapore) Straits Times among other places.

She has been an artist in residence at Yaddo, where she wrote “A Tiger in the Kitchen,” Hawthornden Castle, Le Moulin à Nef, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, Headlands Center for the Arts, Ragdale Foundation, Ledig House and the Studios of Key West.  In 2012, she was the recipient of a major arts creation grant from the National Arts Council of Singapore in support of her novel.

Born and raised in Singapore, she crossed the ocean at age 18 to go to Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.  Unsure of whether she would remain in the US after college, she interned in places as disparate as possible.  She hung out with Harley Davidson enthusiasts in Topeka, Kansas, interviewed gypsies about their burial rituals in Portland, Oregon, covered July 4 in Washington, DC, and chronicled the life and times of the Boomerang Pleasure Club, a group of Italian-American men that were getting together to cook, play cards and gab about women for decades in their storefront “clubhouse” in Chicago.

An active member of the Asian American Journalists Association, she served on its national board for seven years, ending in 2010.

She started her full-time journalism career helping out on the cops beat in Baltimore - training that would prove to be essential in her future fashion reporting.  Both, it turns out, are like war zones.  The difference is, people dress differently.

Rating:  5/5 (for hilarity and originality)

Last Weekend of November

E L Doctorow (1931-2015), American Novelist, Editor, and Professor

Readers' Conundrum

Truth

Any Successful Person's Past

How To Stay Relevant by John Doerr

Courtesy of Forbes

KEEP GOING

The Dry by Jane Harper

Paperback:  I just can't understand how someone like him could do something like that.

Australia is in the grip of its worst drought in a century, and it has not rained in the small country town of Kiewarra for two years.  Tensions in the community become unbearable when three members of the Hadler family are brutally murdered.  Everyone thinks Luke Hadler, who committed suicide after slaughtering his wife and six-year-old son, is guilty.

Policeman Aaron Falk returns to his hometown for the funeral of his childhood best friend, and is unwillingly drawn into the investigation.  As questions mount and suspicion spreads through the town, Falk is forced to confront the community that rejected him twenty years earlier. 

Because Falk and Luke Hadler shared a secret, one which Luke's death threatens to unearth.  And as Falk probes deeper into the killings, secrets from his past bubble to the surface as he questions the truth of his friend's crime.

The Dry (2016) is one of the most stunning debuts by a debut author and won both the Victorian Premier's Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript in 2015 and the Dagger Awards for Best Book in 2017.

About the author:  Jane Harper was born in Manchester in the UK, and moved to Australia with her family at age eight.  She spent six years in Boronia, Victoria, and during that time gained Australian citizenship.  Returning to the UK with her family as a teenager, she lived in Hampshire before studying English and History at the University of Kent in Canterbury.  On graduating, she completed a journalism entry qualification and got her first reporting job as a trainee on the Darlington & Stockton Times in County Durham.  Jane worked for several years as a senior news journalist for the Hull Daily Mail, before moving back to Australia in 2008.  She worked first on the Geelong Advertiser, and in 2011 took up a role with the Herald Sun in Melbourne.

In 2014, Jane submitted a short story which was one of 12 chosen for the Big Issue's annual Fiction Edition.  That inspired her to pursue creative writing more seriously, and that year she applied for the Curtis Brown Creative online 12-week novel writing course.  She was accepted with a submission for the book that would become The Dry.

Jane lives in St Kilda with her husband and daughter.

Rating:  5/5

Brexit: A Dark Period In British History

The State Of The World We're In Right Now

Silence Is...

Without Art, Without Science

I Am Haunted By Waters

Opinion: Best-Seller

How Do You Read?

Fatherless (The American Tragedy Trilogy) by Brian J Gail

Paperback:  Called "a book of the century", powerful, gripping, deeply moving, hauntingly beautiful, masterfully done, a must read and a freight train page turner, Fatherless (2013, Third Edition) is an intensely human tour of the great spiritual battles in the US Catholic church during the late 20th century.

Brian Gail takes us out into the "trenches" and shows what life was like for Catholics, good and bad, during this critical time.  This book is a great opportunity for Catholics to take hold of who they really are.

Meticulously researched, brilliantly crafted, Fatherless takes the reader on an unforgettable journey inside Fortune 500 boardrooms and Madison Avenue screening rooms, behind one-way mirrors in America's heartland and two-way screens in church confessionals, to the very peak of Ireland's highest mountain and inside the papal dining room of John Paul II in Rome.

It is the searing journey to the centre of conscience, however, that marks Fatherless as the signature Catholic novel of its generation.  In its pages we meet flesh and blood characters - noble and flawed, driven and seeking;  each struggling to achieve the American Dream but discovering instead a uniquely American nightmare.

How each confronts the reality of ethical and moral dilemmas - while struggling to balance faith, family, and career - goes to the very heart of the Catholic experience in America in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

This is a tale you will never forget.

About the author:  Brian J. Gail was a schoolboy baseball phenomenon recruited by Division One universities and scouted by Major League baseball teams;  he suffered a disabling shoulder injury early in his college career and was sent to the Philadelphia Phillies team doctor whose efforts to help him regain his exceptional pitching velocity were unsuccessful.

Fueled by a white hot competitive fire and magnetic rhetorical gifts, he rocketed to the top of the Madison Avenue advertising world in his mid-30s only to see his career derailed by a great moral business dilemma and a direct challenge to his Catholic faith.  A gifted entrepreneur and CEO, he provided strategic marketing counsel to elite Fortune 500 corporations and directed a variety of non-profit boards focused on assisting the underprivileged in Philadelphia.

Today, Brian J Gail is a critically acclaimed author, a Knight of the Immaculate, a co-founder of three catholic classical academies, a patent holder, and a highly sought after speaker on matters of faith and family.  Brian’s remarkable novel Fatherless is published by Emmaus Road Publishing and has become a powerful tool for catechesis.

Brian married his high school sweetheart, Joan Mary Kain, 40 years ago and they were blessed with seven children including two sets of identical twins and one set of “Irish twins.”  Brian has touched many lives with his optimism, humour, and unwavering Faith in Our Lady and the truths of the Catholic Church.  He and his lovely wife, Joan, divide their time between homes in Villanova, Pennsylvania and Jupiter Island, Florida.

Rating:  5/5

"The Great British Brexit Robbery"

Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880), French Novelist

What Is A Poet?

Speaks For Itself

Simple Truth

Continued Learning

Bring People Together

Pioneering Aviator

Author Unknown

Wisdom No 1011

Ailment: Bookitis

Rich People's Problems (Rich Series) by Kevin Kwan

Paperback:  Kevin Kwan, best-selling author of Crazy Rich Asians (2013) and China Rich Girlfriend (2015), is back with an uproarious new novel of a family riven by fortune, an ex-wife driven psychotic with jealousy, a battle royal fought through couture gown sabotage, and the heir to one of Asia's greatest fortunes locked out of his inheritance.

When Nicholas Young hears that his grandmother, Su Yi, is on her deathbed, he rushes to be by her bedside - but he is not alone.  The entire Shang-Young clan has convened from all corners of the globe to stake claim on their matriarch's massive fortune.  With each family member vying to inherit Tyersall Park - a trophy estate on 64 prime acres in the heart of Singapore - Nicholas' childhood home turns into a hotbed of speculation and sabotage.

As her relatives fight over heirlooms, Astrid Leong is at the center of her own storm, desperately in love with her old sweetheart, Charlie Wu, but tormented by her ex-husband - a man hell-bent on destroying Astrid's reputation and relationship.

Meanwhile, Kitty Pong, married to China's second richest man, billionaire Jack Bing, still feels second best next to her new stepdaughter, famous fashionista Colette Bing.

In this sweeping tale that takes us from the elegantly appointed mansions of Manila to the secluded private islands in the Sulu Sea, Kevin Kwan hilariously reveals the long-buried secrets of Asia's most privileged families and their rich people problems in his third and latest book in the Rich trilogy, Rich People's Problems (2017).

About the author:  Kevin Kwan was born and raised in Singapore, where he attended Anglo-Chinese School in the mornings and spent his afternoons either hiding from his Chinese tutor or chasing after neighbourhood dogs on his bike.  When he was eleven, he moved to the United States, where the next few years were a blur of trying to survive high school, reading too much F Scott Fitzgerald and Joan Didion, and dreaming of living in New York.

After obtaining his first degree in creative writing from the University of Houston, Kevin moved to Manhattan to pursue a BFA at Parsons School of Design.  Kevin's early years in the city were spent working for Martha Stewart Living, Andy Warhol's Interview magazine, and M&Co, the legendary design firm founded by Tibor Kalman.

In 2000, Kevin established his own creative studio, where he specialized in producing high profile visual projects for clients such as the New York Times, the Museum of Modern Art, Rockwell Group, and TED.com.  Many unforgettable experiences followed, like creating the ultimate publishing tribute to Oprah Winfrey's groundbreaking television show, handling Elizabeth Taylor's fabled jewel collection while producing Elizabeth Taylor:  My Love Affair with Jewelry, and serving as the visual consultant for the re-launch of the TED website, which exceeded a billion views in November 2012.

Throughout all this, Kevin always remained passionate about books.  As he became sought after as a visual consultant by acclaimed authors like Michael Korda, Gore Vidal, and Larry McMurtry, Kevin was inspired to return to his first love - writing.  His critically-acclaimed debut novel Crazy Rich Asians became an international bestseller in 2013 and is now being made into a major motion picture by director Jon M Chu and Warner Brothers Studios.  Its sequel China Rich Girlfriend also became a smash hit around the world, and the final book in the trilogy, Rich People Problems, was released in May 2017.

Kevin still resides in Manhattan, eats too much pasta, and these days dreams of living in Italy.

Rating:  5/5

Poet's Tree by Shel Silverstein

The Cyanide Canary (Current Events) by Joseph Hilldorfer and Robert Dugoni

Hardback:  In the early 1900s, coal miners burdened with heavy picks, shovels, and candles for their headlamps, carted canaries into the bowels of the earth with them.  The small bird's internal organs were highly sensitive to the lethal gases the mining operations could disturb:  methane, carbon dioxide, and carbon monoxide.  If a canary fell from its perch, the miners knew they had scant minutes to get out of the mine before being overcome as well, or having a flame ignite a thunderous explosion.  So valued and respected were these tiny creatures that the miners brought glass cages with air tanks to revive them and carried them to safety.  The term cyanide canary became a common expression.  While the beloved birds have since given way to technology, the coal miners' compassion was strictly a human quality, neither improved upon nor necessarily shared by all men.

The Cyanide Canary (2004) is the riveting true story of a horrific crime - of a brave young man left for dead, an unscrupulous business mogul, and the relentless EPA investigator who fought to overcome injustice.

On a crisp summer morning in Soda Springs, Idaho, twenty-year-old Scott Dominguez kissed his fiancée goodbye and went to work for Allan Elias, the owner of Evergreen Resources, an enterprise Dominguez thought was in the business of producing fertilizer from mining waste.  A former high school wrestler blessed with Tom Cruise-like good looks, Dominguez seemed to have unlimited potential, but by eleven o'clock that morning he was fighting for his life, pulled unconscious from a cyanide-laced storage tank and not expected to live through the night.

In Seattle, Special Agent Joseph Hilldorfer of the Environmental Protection Agency was given the job of finding out what happened to Dominguez and why.

Initially, Hilldorfer did not want the case, still frustrated by an intense two-year investigation that concluded with corporate polluters walking out of a federal courthouse free.  But as he learned more, Hilldorfer, the son of a Pittsburgh cop with a blue-collar work ethic, was touched by Scott's suffering and outraged at Elias's callous disregard for his employees' well-being.

Hilldorfer and his partner, Special Agent Bob Wojnicz, joined forces with seasoned Boise Assistant US Attorney George Breitsameter and an indefatigable, brilliant young attorney from the Department of Justice's Environmental Crimes Section named David Uhlmann.  Together they would uncover the horrifying truths and build the criminal case against Elias.

A former New York whiz kid and Arizona real estate and business mogul, Elias owned businesses that had polluted Idaho with hazardous waste for nearly a decade.  Yet Elias never spent a single day in jail, openly boasted of beating the environmental quality regulations, and avoided any significant fines.

Would this case by any different?

Hilldorfer, Uhlmann, and the government trial team embarked on an epic courtroom battle that would stretch them to the limits.  What began as a struggle for justice for one young man became a fight by the EPA for its very ability to enforce the nation's environmental laws and to bring environmental polluters to justice.  In the balance was whether Allan Elias would ever spend a day in jail.

Gripping, powerful, and compulsively readable, The Cyanide Canary is a major achievement in the classic tradition of A Civil Action, a book that unfolds like fiction yet is alarmingly true.

About the authors:  Joseph Hilldorfer is a Special Agent for the Environmental Protection Agency and a member of the National Counter-Terrorism Evidence Response Team.  He has been involved in high-profile environmental investigations in the Pacific Northwest since 1992.  Prior to joining EPA, Hilldorfer was a distinguished Special Agent with the FBI in Seattle and New York City, working high-profile cases such as the Green River Killer and going undercover for the Counter-Espionage Squad.  With an MA in Criminal Justice Administration from Indiana University of Pennsylvania and a law degree from the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, he is admitted to the Pennsylvania bar.  He lives in Seattle, Washington.

Robert Dugoni has practised as a civil litigator in San Francisco and Seattle for seventeen years.  In 1999, he left the full-time practice of law to write, and is a two-time winner of the Pacific Northwest Writers Association Literary Contest.  He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Stanford University with a degree in journalism and worked as a reporter for the Los Angeles Times before obtaining his doctorate of jurisprudence from the University of California at Los Angeles School of Law.  He lives with his wife and two children in the Pacific Northwest.

The Power Of StoryTelling

Butterflies in November by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir

Paperback:  It is precisely at that moment that it first dawns on me that I am a woman caught in a finely interwoven pattern of feelings and time, that there are many things going on simultaneously that have a significance to my life, that events don't just simply occur in a linear sequence, but on several plains of thought, dreams and feelings at the same time, that there is a moment at the heart of every moment.  It is only much later that a thread through the turmoil that has occurred will emerge.

After a day of being dumped - twice - and accidentally killing a goose, a young woman yearns for a tropical vacation far from the chaos of her life.

Instead, her plans are wrecked by her best friend's four-year-old deaf-mute son, thrust into her reluctant care.  But when the boy chooses the winning numbers for a lottery ticket, the two of them set off on a road trip across Iceland with a glove compartment stuffed full of their jackpot earnings.

Along the way, they encounter black sand beaches, cucumber farms, lava fields, flocks of sheep, an Estonian choir, a falconer, a hitchhiker, and both of her exes desperate for another chance.

What begins as a spontaneous adventure will unexpectedly and profoundly change the way she views her past and charts her future.

Butterflies in November (2013) is a blackly comic, uniquely moving, charming, extraordinary, uplifting and hilarious tale of friends and lovers, motherhood, self-discovery and the legacy of life's mistakes.

Butterflies in November is translated from the Icelandic by Brian FitzGibbon.

About the author:  Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir was born in Reykjavík, Iceland, in 1958.  She studied art history and art theory in Paris and is a lecturer in history of art at the University of Iceland and a director of the University of Iceland Art Collection.  The Greenhouse, published in 2007 won the DV Culture Award for literature and a women's literary prize in Iceland, was nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Award and received unanimous acclaim.  Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir lives and works in Reykjavik.

Rating:  5/5

First Confession: A Sort Of Memoir by Chris Patten

Hardback:  'Who am I? Who are we?'

Most politicians write autobiographies to 'set the record straight' and provide retrospective justification for their careers.  That is not the case with this book.  'It occurred to me that to track down myself would enable me to discuss an issue that had begun to intrigue me, namely the relationship between politics and identity, the things that had shaped me and whether and how they had come to reflect my life and opinions. 

As I wrote, the question of identity moved from the wings to centre stage, and roiled politics and nations on both sides of the Atlantic.'

Chris Patten's career has taken him from the outer London suburbs to the House of Commons, a seat in the Cabinet, last Governor of Hong Kong, Chairman of the BBC and Chancellor of Oxford University.  About all of these he is enlightening and entertaining.  He has unexpected and telling things to say about each of the three Prime Ministers for whom he worked - Edward Heath, Margaret Thatcher and John Major.

But his political heroes - Baldwin, Macmillan, Butler - came from an earlier time:  he is proud to be 'wet', and reckons all his paladins were pretty damp themselves.  Then, unusually, Patten uses each phase of his life as a spur to reflect upon its contemporary situation - education, America, conservatism, Ireland, China, Europe and finally the question of links between violence and religion.  Unlike one No 10 press secretary, Patten definitely 'does God'.

At the end, the reader has an impression of someone who knows himself as well as any of us can, and who continues to think, passionately and intelligently, about the world around him.  Wise, funny and opinionated, First Confession (2017) is a different sort of memoir, a meditation on personal and political identity which, in an age of simplification, reminds us of the complexities of both.

About the author:  Chris Patten is currently Chancellor of Oxford University.  As a British MP (1979-92) he served as Minister for Overseas Development, Secretary of State for the Environment and Chairman of the Conservative Party, being described afterwards as 'the best Tory Prime Minister we never had' (Observer).  He is well known for being the last Governor of Hong Kong (1992-7), about which he wrote in East and West (1998).  Both that and his most recent book, Not Quite the Diplomat:  Home Truths about World Affairs (2005), were No 1 international bestsellers.  In 2008, he wrote What Next? Surviving the Twenty-First Century.  He was made a Companion of Honour in 1998 and a life peer in 2005.