Till He Takes Up A Pen To Write

Reading Away Their Debt

Reading A Good Book In Silence

Definition: Lagniappe

The Volunteer: The True Story Of The Resistance Hero Who Infiltrated Auschwitz by Jack Fairweather

Paperback: Would you sacrifice yourself to save thousands of others?

In the Summer of 1940, after the Nazi occupation of Poland, an underground operative called Witold Pilecki accepted a mission to uncover the fate of thousands of people being interned at a new concentration camp on the border of the Reich.

His mission was to report on Nazi crimes and raise a secret army to stage an uprising. The name of the detention centre - Auschwitz.

It was only after arriving at the camp that he started to discover the Nazi’s terrifying plans. Over the next two and half years, Witold forged an underground army that smuggled evidence of Nazi atrocities out of Auschwitz. His reports from the camp were to shape the Allies response to the Holocaust - yet his story was all but forgotten for decades.

This is the first major account to draw on unpublished family papers, newly released archival documents and exclusive interviews with surviving resistance fighters to show how he brought the fight to the Nazis at the heart of their evil designs.

The result is an enthralling story of resistance and heroism against the most horrific circumstances, and one man’s attempt to change the course of history.

The Volunteer (2019) won the 2019 Costa Biography/Book of the Year Award.

About the author: Jack Fairweather is a British writer and former war reporter in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the author of A War of Choice, The Good War and The Volunteer. He splits his time between the UK and Vermont.

Saraswati Park by Anjali Joseph

Paperback: Famous for its electric chaos, the city of Bombay also accommodates pockets of calm. In one such space works Mohan, a contemplative man who has spent his life observing people from his seat as a letter-writer outside the main post office. But Mohan's lack of engagement with the world has caused a thawing of his marriage. At this delicate moment Mohan - and his wife, Lakshmi - are joined at their home in Saraswati Park by their nephew, Ashish, a sexually uncertain 19-year-old who has to repeat his final year in college.

As the novel unfolds, the lives of each of the three characters are thrown into relief by the comical frustrations of family life: annoying relatives, unspoken yearnings and unheard grievances. When Lakshmi loses her only brother, she leaves Bombay for a relative's home to mourn not only the death of a sibling but also the vital force of her marriage. Ashish, meanwhile, embarks on an affair with a much richer boy in his college and, not long afterwards, succumbs to the overtures of his English tutor.

As Mohan scribbles away in the margins of the sort of books he secretly hopes to write one day, he worries about whether his wife will return, what will become of Ashish, and if he himself will ever find his own voice to write from the margins about the centre of which he will never be a part.

Saraswati Park (2010), won the Desmond Elliott Prize, the Betty Trask Prize and India’s Vodafone Crossword Book Award for Fiction. It is chosen as one of the Telegraph’s ‘20 under 40’ best UK writers and shortlisted for the Ondaatje Award, the Hindu Best Fiction Award and a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize.

About the author: Anjali Joseph was born in Bombay in 1978. She read English at Trinity College, Cambridge, and has taught English at the Sorbonne, written for the Times of India in Bombay and been a Commissioning Editor for ELLE (India). She graduated from the MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia with distinction in 2008. Saraswati Park is her first novel. Another Country, her second novel, was published in 2012. Her third novel, The Living, was published by 4th Estate in 2016.

Rating: 4/5

Dear Bookcase

Shadow Daughter: A Memoir of Estrangement by Harriet Brown

Hardback: Shadow Daughter (2018) is a riveting, provocative, and ultimately hopeful exploration of mother-daughter estrangement, woven with research and anecdotes, from an award-winning journalist.

The day of her mother’s funeral, Harriet Brown was five thousand miles away.

For years they had gone through cycles of estrangement and connection, drastic blow-ups and equally dramatic reconciliations. By the time her mother died at seventy-six, they had not spoken at all in several years.

Her mother’s death sent Brown on a journey of exploration, one that considered guilt and trauma, rage and betrayal, and forgiveness.

Shadow Daughter tackles a subject we rarely discuss as a culture. Family estrangements - between parents and children, siblings, multiple generations - are surprisingly common, and even families that are not officially estranged often have some experience of deep conflicts.

Despite the fact that the issue touches most people one way or another, estrangement is still shrouded in secrecy, stigma, and shame. We simply do not talk about it, and that silence can make an already difficult situation even harder. Brown tells her story with clear-eyed honesty and hard-won wisdom; she also shared interviews with others who are estranged, as well as the most recent research on this taboo topic.

Ultimately, Shadow Daughter is a thoughtful, provocative, and deeply researched exploration of the ties that bind and break, forgiveness, reconciliation, and what family really means.

About the author: Harriet Brown is the author of Body of Truth and Brave Girl Eating. She has edited two anthologies and has written for the New York Times Magazine, O Magazine, Psychology Today, Prevention, and many other publications. She is a professor of magazine journalism at the SI Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University.

75th Anniversary of the Liberation Of Auschwitz

Know My Name by Chanel Miller

Hardback: She was known to the world as Emily Doe when she stunned millions with a letter. Brock Turner had been sentenced to just six months in county jail after he was found sexually assaulting her on Stanford's campus. Her victim impact statement was posted on Buzzfeed, where it instantly went viral - viewed by eleven million people within four days, it was translated globally and read on the floor of Congress; it inspired changes in California law and the recall of the judge in the case. Thousands wrote to say that she had given them the courage to share their own experiences of assault for the first time.

'You took away My worth, My privacy, My energy, My time, My safety, My intimacy, My confidence, My own voice, Until today.'

Now she reclaims her identity to tell her story of trauma, transcendence, and the power of words. It was the perfect case, in many ways - there were eyewitnesses, Turner ran away, physical evidence was immediately secured. But her struggles with isolation and shame during the aftermath and the trial reveal the oppression victims face in even the best-case scenarios. Her story illuminates a culture biased to protect perpetrators, indicts a criminal justice system designed to fail the most vulnerable, and, ultimately, shines with the courage required to move through suffering and live a full and beautiful life.

Know My Name (2019) will forever transform the way we think about sexual assault, challenging our beliefs about what is acceptable and speaking truth to the tumultuous reality of healing. It also introduces readers to an extraordinary writer, one whose words have already changed our world. Entwining pain, resilience, and humour, this memoir will stand as a modern classic.

Know My Name became a best-seller and named one of the top ten books of 2019 by the Washington Post and nominated for Best Memoir and Autobiography at the 2019 Goodreads Choice Awards. The New York Times also selected Know My Name for its "100 Notable Books of 2019."

About the author: Chanel Miller is a writer and artist who received her BA Literature from the College of Creative Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She lives in San Francisco, California.

Death Notice (Death Notice Trilogy) by Zhou Haohui

Paperback: 恭禧发财! Happy Lunar New Year!

Chengdu, China: The vibrant capital of Sichuan Province is suddenly held hostage when a shocking manifesto is released by an anonymous vigilante known as Eumenides. It is a bold declaration of war against a corrupt legal system, with Eumenides acting as judge and executioner.

The public starts nominating potential targets, and before long hundreds of names are added to his kill list.

Eumenides’s cunning game has only just begun. First, he publishes a “death notice,” announcing his next target, the crimes for which the victim will be punished, and the date of the execution. The note is a deeply personal taunt to the police. Everyone knows who is going to die and when it is going to happen, but the police fail to stop the attack.

The 4/18 Task Force, an elite group of detectives and specialists, is assembled to catch Eumenides before he strikes again. In the process, they discover alarming connections to an eighteen-year-old cold case, and they find out that some members of the team have much to hide.

Death Notice (2018) is the first instalment in the "fiendishly inventive" high-concept police procedural Death Notice trilogy set in China.

Death Notice is translated from the Mandarin by Zac Haluza.

The second instalment, Fate, will be released on 3 September 2020.

About the author: Zhou Haohui is regarded as one of the top three suspense authors in China today. Zhou is the author of more than ten novels exploring the intersection of human nature, criminal motive, and the art of detection. His books include Killing Notice, The Evil Hypnotist, The Horrific Picture, and The Ghost Mountain. His works have been translated into French, English, Korean, and Japanese, and many have been adapted for film and television. Born in Yangzhou City, Jiangsu Province, Zhou received his master’s degree in engineering from Tsinghua University.

The Death Notice trilogy is China’s best selling and most popular work of suspense fiction to date. The online series based on these novels has received more than 2.4 billion views and achieved almost legendary status among Chinese online dramas.

About the translator: Zac Haluza is the translator of Death Notice (Doubleday, 2018), which was named a 2018 Crime Book of the Year by the Sunday Times and featured in articles in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal.

He began his translation career in 2014, when his translation of Hong Ke's Chui Niu, titled Shooting the Bull, won third place in the English category of that year's China International Translation Contest (organized by the State Council Information Office and China Writers Association).

Since then, Haluza has translated a variety of short and art criticism, game scripts, screenplays, novels, and non-fiction.

His published translations include Never Give Up on Yourself, the autobiography of the Chinese-American author Wang Yang; With Her Eyes, a short story by Hugo-Award-winning sci-fi author Liu Cixin, a series of non-fiction works on traditional Chinese art during the Ming and Qing dynasties, and Death Notice.

Rating: 5/5

A Tired Man Who Wants A Book To Read

Thinking

Keep Calm

Smoke And Ashes (Sam Wyndham Series) by Abir Mukherjee

Paperback: From the winner of the 2017 CWA Historical Dagger Award comes the third novel in the bestselling Sam Wyndham series, the follow-up to the Waterstones Thriller of the Month, A Rising Man (2016) and its explosive sequel, A Necessary Evil (2017).

India, 1921.

Haunted by his memories of the Great War, Captain Sam Wyndham is battling a serious addiction to opium that he must keep secret from his superiors in the Calcutta police force.

When Sam is summoned to investigate a grisly murder, he is stunned at the sight of the body: he has seen this before. Last night, in a drug addled haze, he stumbled across a corpse with the same ritualistic injuries. It seems like there is a deranged killer on the loose. Unfortunately for Sam, the corpse was in an opium den and revealing his presence there could cost him his career.

With the aid of his quick-witted Indian Sergeant, Surrender-not Banerjee, Sam must try to solve the two murders, all the while keeping his personal demons secret, before somebody else turns up dead.

Set against the backdrop of the fervent fight for Indian independence, and rich with the atmosphere of 1920s Calcutta, Smoke and Ashes confirms Abir Mukherjee as one of the most exciting new authors of historical mystery writing today.

Set in a Calcutta the Telegraph called ‘so convincingly evoked that readers will find sweat bursting from their foreheads’, Mukherjee brings India’s past back to life with startling vivacity; throwing fresh light on a unique city shaped by the competing influence of British and Indian cultures.

Throw in a nail-bitingly tense mystery and two compellingly realised central characters and you have a recipe for a truly gripping thriller.

About the author: Abir Mukherjee is the Times bestselling author of the Sam Wyndham series of crime novels set in Raj era India. His debut, A Rising Man, won the CWA Endeavour Dagger for best historical crime novel of 2017 and was shortlisted for the MWA Edgar for best novel. His second novel, A Necessary Evil, won the Wilbur Smith Award for Adventure Writing and was a Zoe Ball Book Club pick. His third novel, Smoke and Ashes, was chosen by the Sunday Times as one of the 100 Best Crime & Thriller Novels since 1945. His latest book in the brilliantly conceived Captain Sam Wyndham series - Death in the East - was published in November 2019. Abir grew up in Scotland and now lives in London with his wife and two sons.

Rating: 5/5

Sunday Thoughts

Consciousness

Teju Cole (1975- ), American Writer, Photographer and Art Historian

The Carmelites: A History of the Brothers, of Our Lady, of Mount Carmel Volume II, The Post Tridentine Period 1550-1600 by Joachim Smet, OCarm

Paperback: The Carmelites is the most complete history of the Order, compiled by Fr Joachim Smet for over forty years. Volumes were printed and released individually from 1977 until 1985. Each volume contains extensive notes and an index. Volume I covers circa 1200 until the Council of Trent; Volume II the Post Tridentine Period (1550-1600); Volume III, comprising of two parts, covers the Catholic Reformation (1600-1750).

This volume, The Carmelites Volume II: The Post Tridentine Period 1550-1600, was published by the Carmelite Spiritual Center in 1976.

About the author: Father Joachim Smet, Order of Carmelites, the oldest Carmelite in the Chicago Carmelite Province, died 4 October 2011. He was 95. Father Joachim was born in Chicago, IL, on 9 October 1915.

He entered the Province of the Most Pure Heart of Mary, Order of Carmelites, and was ordained a priest in 1942. He held a bachelor's degree in Library Science from the University of Chicago, a master's degree in Latin from the Catholic University of America, and a doctorate in Ecclesiastical History from the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, Italy.

Among his assignments were Latin and English teacher at Mount Carmel High School in Chicago, IL, Assistant Novice Master at New Baltimore, PA, founding member of the Institutum Carmelitanum at the Collegio Internazionale de Sant' Alberto in Rome, Italy, editor of Carmelus, a journal of Carmelite Studies, President of the Institutum Carmelitanum in Rome; Assistant General of the Carmelite Order at the Carmelite General Curia in Rome. A gifted writer, he is well-known for his four-volume work The Carmelites and his Life of Saint Peter Thomas.

His other works are Familiar Matter of Today-Poems (2007), The Mirror of Carmel: A Brief History of the Carmelite Order, (2011), various publications on Carmelite Nuns, Carmelite Liturgy, Carmelite Libraries of Spain and Portugal and the Carmelites of Medieval England.

I've Been Thinking

Agent Running In The Field by John le Carré

Hardback: Nat, a forty-seven-year-old veteran of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, believes his years as an agent runner are over. He is back in London with his wife, the long-suffering Prue.

But with the growing threat from Moscow Centre, the office has one more job for him. Nat is to take over The Haven, a defunct substation of London General with a rag-tag band of spies. The only bright light on the team is young Florence, who has her eye on Russia Department and a Ukrainian oligarch with a finger in the Russia pie.

Nat is not only a spy, he is a passionate badminton player. His regular Monday evening opponent is half his age: the introspective and solitary Ed. Ed hates Brexit, hates Trump and hates his job at some soulless media agency. And it is Ed, of all unlikely people, who will take Prue, Florence and Nat himself down the path of political anger that will ensnare them all.

Agent Running in the Field (2019) is a chilling portrait of our time, now heartbreaking, now darkly humorous, told to us with unflagging tension by the greatest chronicler of our age.

Agent Running in the Field has been hailed Times Books of the Year, New Statesman Book of the Year, Guardian Books of the Year, Sunday Times Books of the Year, TLS Books of the Year, Daily Mail Books of the Year, Mail on Sunday's Best Books of the Year and Apple Best books of 2019.

About the author: John le Carré was born in 1931 and attended the universities of Bern and Oxford. He taught at Eton and served briefly in British Intelligence during the Cold War. For more than fifty years he has lived by his pen. He divides his time between London and Cornwall.

Rating: 5/5

The Prison Doctor: My Time Inside Britain's Most Notorious Jails by Dr Amanda Brown

Paperback: Horrifying, heartbreaking and eye-opening, these are the stories, the patients and the cases that have characterised a career spent being a doctor behind bars.

Violence. Drugs. Suicide. Welcome to the world of a Prison Doctor.

Dr Amanda Brown has treated inmates in the UK’s most infamous prisons – first in young offenders’ institutions, then at the notorious Wormwood Scrubs and finally at Europe’s largest women-only prison in Europe, Bronzefield.

From miraculous pregnancies to dirty protests, and from violent attacks on prisoners to heartbreaking acts of self-harm, she has witnessed it all.

In this eye-opening, no-holds-barred, inspirational memoir, Amanda reveals the stories, the patients and the cases that have shaped a career helping those most of us would rather forget.

Despite their crimes, she is still their doctor, a doctor devoted to caring for those most of us would rather forget.

About the author: Dr Amanda Brown was a regular NHS GP with a comfortable, suburban practice, before she made the move to working with prisoners. She has worked in a teenage detention centre and Wormwood Scrubs, and she currently works at Bronzefield, the largest women-only prison in Europe. The Prison Doctor (2019) is her first book.

You Read For The World

For My Books

Murder In Matera: A True Story Of Passion, Family And Forgiveness In Southern Italy by Helene Stapinski

Paperback: A writer goes deep into the heart of Italy to unravel a century-old family mystery in this spellbinding memoir that blends the suspenseful twists of Making a Murderer and the emotional insight of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels.

From the age of four, Helene Stapinski heard lurid tales about her great-great-grandmother, Vita. In Southern Italy, she was a loose woman who had murdered someone. Immigrating to America with three children in 1892, she lost one along the way. Helene’s youthful obsession with Vita deepened as she grew up, eventually propelling the journalist to Italy, where, with her own children in tow, she pursued the story, determined to set the record straight.

Finding answers would take Helene ten years and numerous trips to Basilicata, the rural "instep" of Italy’s boot - a mountainous and undiscovered land rife with criminals, superstitions, old-world customs, and desperate poverty - filled with badlands-like hills, ancient caves, and fertile valleys with silver-tinged olive trees, whose isolation is matched by its forlorn, incredible beauty.

Though false leads sent her down blind alleys, Helene’s dogged search, aided by a few lucky - even miraculous - breaks and a group of colourful local characters, led her to the truth.

Yes, the family tales she had heard were true: There had been a murder in Helene’s family, a killing that roiled 1870s Italy. But the identities of the killer and victim were not who she thought they were.

In revisiting events that happened more than a century before, Helene came to another stunning realization  - she was not who she thought she was, either, sparking an upheaval of her own identity and sense of history.

Weaving Helene’s own story of discovery with the tragic tale of Vita’s life, Murder in Matera (2017) is a deeply researched and reported literary account about one family's hidden secrets. It is also a powerful and timeless story of immigration and motherhood - a profound testament to how far one woman would go in search of a better life in America, not only for herself, but for her children and the preservation of her family.

About the author: Helene Stapinski is the author of Five-Finger Discount: A Crooked Family History, which recounts her family’s criminal history, and Baby Plays Around: A Love Affair, with Music, which chronicles her years playing drums in a rock band in Manhattan. She has written extensively for the New York Times as well as for New York magazine, Salon, Travel & Leisure, and dozens of other publications and essay collections. On the documentary based on Five-Finger Discount, she has worked as a producer and writer. Stapinski has been a radio newscaster in Alaska; has appeared on National Public Radio; was a featured performer with The Moth; has lectured at her alma mater, Columbia University; and has taught at Fordham University. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two children.

Author's note: Vita was illiterate, so she left no diaries or letters, only stories passed down through the generations. Miraculously, the six-hundred-page criminal file exists and provided me with vivid details of what transpired more than a century ago. My historical re-creations are based on those pages, on archival materials, interviews with historians, residents and experts on the time period, in addition to the work of those writers who came and researched before me.

Spend More Time On Your Writing

The Lost Art Of Civil Conversation

Unnatural Causes: The Life And Many Deaths Of Britain's Top Forensic Pathologist (Non-Fiction) by Dr Richard Shepherd

Paperback: Meet forensic pathologist, Dr Richard Shepherd.

As the UK's top forensic pathologist, Dr Richard Shepherd has spent a lifetime uncovering the secrets of the dead. When death is sudden or unexplained, it falls to Shepherd to establish the cause. Each post-mortem is a detective story in its own right - and Shepherd has performed over 23,000 of them. Through his skill, dedication and insight, Dr Shepherd solves the puzzle to answer our most pressing question: how did this person die?

From serial killer to natural disaster, 'perfect murder' to freak accident, Shepherd takes nothing for granted in pursuit of truth. And while he has been involved in some of the most high-profile cases of recent times including some of the most high-profile cases of recent times; the Hungerford Massacre, the Princess Diana inquiry, and 9/11, it is often the less well known encounters that prove the most perplexing, intriguing and even bizarre. In or out of the public eye, his evidence has put killers behind bars, freed the innocent and turned open-and-shut cases on their heads.

But a life in death, bearing witness to some of humanity's darkest corners, exacts a price and Shepherd does not flinch from counting the cost to him and his family.

Unnatural Causes (2018) is a gripping and brilliant memoir which tells the story of not only the cases and bodies that have haunted Dr Shepherd the most, but also how to live a life steeped in death.

About the author: Richard Shepherd was born in West London but grew up in Watford. At the local grammar school he was introduced to a medical textbook smuggled into the classroom by a friend which opened his eyes to the world of crime and murder, setting him on a lifelong quest to understand death in its many forms. He trained as a doctor at St George's Hospital medical school at Hyde Park Corner, qualifying in 1977 and then completed his postgraduate training as a forensic pathologist in 1987. He immediately joined what was then the elite forensic department at Guy's Hospital. He has been involved nationally and internationally in the forensic investigation of thousands of deaths from unnatural causes, from headline-making murders to mass natural disasters, and many sudden and unexplained deaths that his investigations showed were from natural causes or due to accidents. His skills and expertise still remain in demand around the world.

Old-Fashioned Habits That Will Make Our Lives Better In 2020

New Year Office Chit-Chat by Brian Bilston

Prejudice

Life Is Precious

In Conversation With God: Daily Meditations Volume Six, Special Feasts (January-June) by Father Francis Fernandez

Paperback: In Conversation with God: Daily Mediations Volume 6, Special Feasts (January-June) (2005) consists of 58 meditations.  It is part of the series which offers a meditation for each day of the year.

Man's highest aspiration is to be able to converse with Jesus - to pray.

In Conversation With God helps the reader to pray with piety and confidence.  It is aimed not at the 'specialist' but is for the ordinary person - for the housewife, for the teacher, for the secretary, for the shop assistant and so on.

Following the thread of the Liturgy, this book gives many practical hints for deepening in one's relationship with God and those around one, improving one's character in and through daily work and family life.  The author has clearly succeeded in not creating a straitjacket;  rather the book, rich as it is in quotations from spiritual writers throughout the ages, is a source of open suggestions for daily meditation on every aspect of Christian life.  Sales of this series, running to several hundred thousand copies in all the main languages, are a testimony to its popularity.

In Conversation With God is a translation of Hablar con Dios - Vol VI first published in 1989 by Ediciones Palabra, Madrid, and in 1991 by Scepter with ecclesiastical approval.

About the author: Francis Fernández-Carvajal  was born in Granada in 1938.  A graduate in History from the University of Navarre, he also holds a doctorate in Canon Law from the Angelicum in Rome.  He is a priest of the Opus Dei Prelature.  Since his ordination in 1964, much of his pastoral ministry has been with university students.  For more than ten years, he has been Editor of the monthly magazine PALABRA.  Among his published works are an Anthology of texts (with more than 600 quotations from spiritual writers throughout the ages), Lukewarmness - the Devil in Disguise, and Commentaries on the Gospels of St Matthew and St Luke.

The End Of The Present World And The Mysteries Of The Future Life by Father Charles Arminjon

Paperback: Reading this was one of the greatest graces of my life. I read it at the window of my study, and the impression I received from it is too intimate and too sweet for me to express... All the great truths of religion, the mysteries of eternity, plunged my soul into a happiness not of this earth... - St Thérèse of Lisieux

All things pass. Glory fades. Nature groans in labour. The day of the Lord is coming and with it will come the end of the entire created order.

And yet so many of live with our eyes fixed on this passing world only, rather than on the everlasting world to come. Preoccupied with earthly pleasures and cares, we ignore our eternal destiny.

This was no less true in the late nineteenth century, when Father Charles Arminjon, a priest from the mountains of southeastern France, assembled his flock in the town cathedral to preach a series of conferences to help them turn their thoughts away from this life's mean material affairs - and toward the next life's glorious spiritual reward.

His wise and uncompromising words deepened in them the spirit of recollection that all Christians must have: the abiding conviction that heavenly aims, not temporal enthusiasms, must guide everything we think, say, and do.

When Father Arminjon's conferences were later published in a book, many others were able to reap the same benefit - including fourteen-year-old Thérèse Martin, then on the cusp of entering the Carmelite convent in Lisieux. Reading it, she says, "plunged my soul into a happiness not of this earth." Young Thérèse, filled with a sense of "what God reserves for those who love Him, and seeing that the eternal rewards had no proportion to the light sacrifices of life," copied out numerous passages and memorized them, "repeating unceasingly the words of love burning in my heart."

Now the very book that so inspired the Little Flower is available for the first time in English. Let the pages of The End of the Present World and the Mysteries of the Future Life fill you with the same burning words of love, with the same ardent desire to know God above all created things, that St Thérèse gained from them. Let them also enrich your understanding of certain teachings of the Faith that can often seem so mysterious, even frightening:

• the signs that will precede the world's end
• the coming of the Antichrist and how to recognise him
• the Judgment and where it may send us: heaven, hell and purgatory
• Biblical end-times prophecy: how to read it and not be deceived

Jesus commands us to be ever-watchful for his return, and ever-mindful that we have no lasting city on earth. The End of the Present World and the Mysteries of the Future Life is an invaluable aid to inculcating in your spirit that heavenly orientation, without which true human happiness cannot be found - in this world or the next.

The End of the Present World and the Mysteries of the Future Life was originally published in 1881 in French under the title Fin du Monde Présent et Mystères de la Vie Future.

The End of the Present World and the Mysteries of the Future Life is translated from the French by Susan Conroy and Peter McEnerny.

About the author: Father Charles Arminjon (1824-1885) was a priest from the town of Chambéry in the French Alps. After years as a seminary professor, Father Arminjon took up the mission of full-time preacher, and he went on to gain great renown for his ability to inspire in his listeners a deeper and more ardent love for Christ. Throughout France and abroad he delivered sermons, ran retreats, and preached at conferences – the most famous of which form the basis for The End of the Present World.

A Walk In The Dark (Guido Guerrieri Series) by Gianrico Carofiglio

Paperback: A Walk In The Dark (2010) is the second book in the appealing Guido Guerrieri part-legal series set in Bari, Puglia.

When Martina accuses her ex-boyfriend-the son of a powerful local judge-of assault and battery, no witnesses can be persuaded to testify on her behalf, and one lawyer after another refuses to represent her. 

Guido Guerrieri knows the case could bring his legal career to a messy end, but he cannot resist the appeal of a hopeless cause. Nor can he deny an attraction to Sister Claudia, the young woman in charge of the shelter where Martina is living, who shares his love of martial arts and his virulent hatred of injustice.

A Walk In The Dark is translated from the Italian by Howard Curtis.

About the author: Gianrico Carofiglio, born in 1961, was an anti-Mafia prosecutor in the southern Italy city of Bari, Puglia, for many years. He has been responsible for some of the most important indictments in the region involving organized crime, corruption and the traffic in human beings. He is now a member of the Italian Senate. He has sold over 2.5 million books and Involuntary Witness, his debut novel and the first in a series with defence lawyer Guido Guerrieri, is in its 49th edition in Italy. It won numerous literary prizes and has been translated into eleven languages.

About the translator: Howard Curtis is one of the top translators working in the UK and the USA and has been translating professionally since 1985. He translates from French, Spanish and Italian, and many of his translations have been awarded or shortlisted for translation prizes. He has mostly translated contemporary fiction, but is particularly pleased to be involved with the Penguin project to retranslate the works of his favourite writer, Georges Simenon.

Rating: 5/5

Without

New Year Resolutions - Give Back

The Night Fire (Ballard and Bosch Thriller Series) by Michael Connelly

Hardback: First read of 2020.

Harry Bosch and LAPD Detective Renée Ballard come together again on the murder case that obsessed Bosch’s mentor, the man who trained him - new from #1 New York Times bestselling author Michael Connelly.

Back when Harry Bosch was just a rookie homicide detective he had an inspiring mentor, John Jack Thompson, who taught him to take the work personally and light the fire of relentlessness for every case. Now John Jack is dead and Harry inherits a murder book that Thompson took with him when he left the LAPD 20 years before - the unsolved killing of a troubled young man in an alley used for drug deals.

Bosch brings the murder book to Renée Ballard and asks her to help him find what about the case lit Thompson’s fire all those years ago. That will be their starting point.

The bond between Bosch and Ballard tightens as they become a formidable investigative team. And they soon arrive at a worrying question: Did Thompson steal the murder book to work the case in retirement, or to make sure it never got solved?

The Night Fire (2019) is the second instalment in the excellent Ballard and Bosch thriller series set in Los Angeles.

About the author: A former police reporter for the Los Angeles Times, Michael Connelly is the international bestselling author of the Harry Bosch thriller series and the legal thriller series featuring Mickey Haller, as well as several stand-alone bestsellers. His most recent #1 bestseller is Dark Sacred Night, in which the legendary Harry Bosch joins forces with Connelly's newest LAPD protagonist, Detective Renee Ballard.

Michael Connelly’s books have sold more than seventy-four million copies worldwide. They have been translated into 40 languages and have won awards all over the world, including the Edgar and Anthony Awards. Michael Connelly has also been awarded the 2018 CWA Diamond Dagger, the highest honour in British crime writing.

Connelly is the executive producer of the successful TV series, Bosch, starring Titus Welliver. Bosch Seasons 4 and 5 are now available on SBS in Australia, with Season 6 also going into production.

Michael Connelly’s new true crime podcast, Murder Book, premiered on 28 January 2019.

Michael Connelly spends his time in California and Florida.

To find out more, head to:
Website: www.michaelconnelly.com.au
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Rating: 5/5

New Year Resolutions!

Happy New Year 2020