Crowning Moment

Modern Vs Victorian

Golden Boy: A Murder Among The Manhattan Elite by John Glatt

Paperback: In Golden Boy (2021), New York Times bestselling author John Glatt tells the true story of Thomas Gilbert Jr, the handsome and charming New York socialite accused of murdering his father, a Manhattan millionaire and hedge fund founder.

By all accounts, Thomas Gilbert Jr led a charmed life. The son of a wealthy financier, he grew up surrounded by a loving family and all the luxury an Upper East Side childhood could provide: education at the elite Buckley School and Deerfield Academy, summers in a sprawling seaside mansion in the Hamptons. With his striking good lucks, he moved with ease through glittering social circles and followed in his father’s footsteps to Princeton.

But Tommy always felt different. The cracks in his façade began to show in warning signs of OCD, increasing paranoia, and - most troubling - an inexplicable hatred of his father. As his parents begged him to seek psychiatric help, Tommy pushed back by self-medicating with drugs and escalating violence. When a fire destroyed his former best friend’s Hamptons home, Tommy was the prime suspect - but he was never charged. Just months later, he arrived at his parents’ apartment, calmly asked his mother to leave, and shot his father point-blank in the head.

Journalist John Glatt takes an in-depth look at the devastating crime that rocked Manhattan’s upper class. With exclusive access to sources close to Tommy, including his own mother, Glatt constructs the agonizing spiral of mental illness that led Thomas Gilbert Jr to the ultimate unspeakable act.

Thomas Gilbert Jr is currently Inmate Number 19A3615, locked up in the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, New York, a six-hour drive from Manhattan. Gilbert is serving a term of 30 years to life for second-degree murder. His earliest release date is in April 2044.

About the author: English-born John Glatt is the author of more than thirty books including The Lost Girls and My Sweet Angel, and has over thirty years of experience as an investigative journalist in England and America. He has appeared on television and radio programs all over the world, including Dateline NBC, Fox News, ABC’s 20/20, BBC World News, and A&E Biography.

Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens by Shankari Chandran

Paperback: Welcome to Cinnamon Gardens, a home for those who are lost and the stories they treasure.

Cinnamon Gardens Nursing Home is nestled in the quiet suburb of Westgrove, Sydney - populated with residents with colourful histories, each with their own secrets, triumphs and failings. This is their safe place, an oasis of familiar delights - a beautiful garden, a busy kitchen and a bountiful recreation schedule.

But this ordinary neighbourhood is not without its prejudices. The serenity of Cinnamon Gardens is threatened by malignant forces more interested in what makes this refuge different rather than embracing the calm companionship that makes this place home to so many. As those who challenge the residents’ existence make their stand against the nursing home with devastating consequences, our characters are forced to reckon with a country divided.

Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens (2022) is about family and memory, community and race, but is ultimately a love letter to storytelling and how our stories shape who we are.

Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens won the the 2023 Miles Franklin Literary Award, Australia's biggest literary prize, on 25 July 2023. The 2023 judges were the State Library of NSW Mitchell librarian and chair Richard Neville, author and literary critic Bernadette Brennan, academic and translator Mridula Nath Chakraborty, critic James Ley and academic and poet Elfie Shiosaki. Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens is Shankari Chandran's third novel.

About the author: Shankari Chandran is an Australian Tamil lawyer and author of Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens, Song of the Sun God and The Barrier. Song of the Sun God was long-listed for the International Dublin Literary Award (2019) and short-listed for Sri Lanka’s Fairway National Literary Award (2018). The Barrier was short-listed for the Norma K Hemming Award for Speculative Fiction (2018). Song of the Sun God is being adapted for television, starring Bridgerton’s Charithra Chandran (no relation).

Her next novel (untitled) will be published by Ultimo Press in 2024. Her unpublished manuscript, a political thriller called Unfinished Business, will be published as an Audible Original in 2024, and is the first in her Ellie Harper thriller series.

Her short stories have been published in the critically acclaimed anthologies, Another Australia and Sweatshop Women (Vol 2) by Affirm Press/Sweatshop and she is the deputy chair of Writing NSW. She is particularly grateful for generous grants from the Blake-Beckett Scholarship Trust, Create NSW and the Australia Council for the Arts that have supported her to write.

Shankari has spent two decades working as a lawyer in the social justice field, on national and international program design and delivery. She continues her work in social impact for an Australian national retailer. She is based in Sydney, Australia, where she lives with her husband and her four children and explores dispossession and the creation of community through her fiction.

Rating: 5/5

Definition: Hurkle-Durkle

The Nest by Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney

Paperback: The Nest (2016) is a warm, funny and acutely perceptive debut novel about four adult siblings and the fate of the shared inheritance that has shaped their choices and their lives.

Every family has its problems. But even among the most troubled, the Plumb family stands out as spectacularly dysfunctional. Years of simmering tensions finally reach a breaking point on an unseasonably cold afternoon in New York City as Melody, Beatrice, and Jack Plumb gather to confront their charismatic and reckless older brother, Leo, freshly released from rehab. Months earlier, an inebriated Leo got behind the wheel of a car with a nineteen-year-old waitress as his passenger. The ensuing accident has endangered the Plumbs' joint trust fund, "The Nest," which they are months away from finally receiving. Meant by their deceased father to be a modest mid-life supplement, the Plumb siblings have watched The Nest's value soar along with the stock market and have been counting on the money to solve a number of self-inflicted problems.

Melody, a wife and mother in an upscale suburb, has an unwieldy mortgage and looming college tuition for her twin teenage daughters. Jack, an antiques dealer, has secretly borrowed against the beach cottage he shares with his husband, Walker, to keep his store open. And Bea, a once-promising short-story writer, just can't seem to finish her overdue novel. Can Leo rescue his siblings and, by extension, the people they love? Or will everyone need to reimagine the futures they've envisioned? Brought together as never before, Leo, Melody, Jack, and Beatrice must grapple with old resentments, present-day truths, and the significant emotional and financial toll of the accident, as well as finally acknowledge the choices they have made in their own lives.

The Nest is a story about the power of family, the possibilities of friendship, the ways we depend upon one another and the ways we let one another down. In this tender, entertaining, and deftly written debut, Sweeney brings a remarkable cast of characters to life to illuminate what money does to relationships, what happens to our ambitions over the course of time, and the fraught yet unbreakable ties we share with those we love.

About the author: Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney is the author of the instant New York Times bestsellers The Nest (2016) and Good Company (2021). She is a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writer’s pick and her books have been named best of the year by People, the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, NPR, Amazon, Real Simple and others. Sweeney has been a guest on Today, Late Night with Seth Meyers, and NPR’s All Things Considered. The Nest is currently being adapted by AMC Studios as a limited series. Her work has been translated into 30 languages. Sweeney holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars and lives in Los Angeles with her family.

Rating: 5/5

A Woman's Heart

Whenever You Are Fed Up With Life

My Real Face

The Doomsday Mother by John Glatt

Paperback: In The Doomsday Mother: Lori Vallow, Chad Daybell, and the End of an American Family (2022), bestselling true crime author John Glatt tells the twisted tale of Lori Vallow, accused of having her two children murdered to start a new life with her new husband, doomsday prepper Chad Daybell.

At first, the residents of Kauai Beach Resort took little notice of their new neighbours. The glamorous blonde and her tall husband fit the image of the ritzy gated community. The couple seemed to keep to themselves until the police knocked on their door with a search warrant. Lori Vallow and Chad Daybell had fled to Hawaii in the midst of being investigated for the disappearance of Lori’s children back in Idaho - Tylee and JJ - who had not been seen alive in five months.

For years, Lori Vallow had been devoted to her children and her Mormon faith. But when her path crossed with Chad Daybell, a religious zealot who taught his followers how to prepare for the end-times, the tumultuous relationship transformed her into someone unrecognizable. 

As authorities searched for Lori’s children, they uncovered more suspicious deaths with links to both Lori and Chad, including the death of Lori’s third and fourth husbands, her brother, and Chad’s wife. 

In June 2020, the gruesome remains of JJ and Tylee were discovered on Chad’s property, and the newlyweds were arrested and charged with murder. And in a shocking development, horrifying statements revealed that the couple’s fanatical beliefs had convinced them the children had become zombies - a belief that may have led to their deaths.

Bestselling author and journalist John Glatt takes readers deeper into the devastating story of Lori Vallow and Chad Daybell in an attempt to unravel the lethal relationship of this doomsday couple.

About the author: English-born John Glatt is the author of more than thirty books including The Lost Girls and My Sweet Angel, and has over thirty years of experience as an investigative journalist in England and America. He has appeared on television and radio programs all over the world, including Dateline NBC, Fox News, ABC’s 20/20, BBC World News, and A&E Biography.

The Killing Of Father Niall Molloy: Anatomy Of An Injustice by Maresa Fagan and Sharon Lawless

Paperback: Separating fact from fiction, Anatomy of an Injustice: The Killing of Father Niall Molloy (2022) re-examines the astonishing circumstances surrounding one of Ireland’s longest-running murder mysteries: the controversial and unexplained death of a 52-year-old priest almost 40 years ago.

The discovery in July 1985 of Father Niall Molloy’s badly beaten body in the bedroom of his close friends and business associates, Richard and Therese Flynn, was the stuff of soap operas, not of a small rural village in the Irish midlands. The gentle-natured cleric came to a violent and bloody end during a weekend of extravagant wedding celebrations at the Flynn stately home, Kilcoursey House. 

For decades, the events of that tragic night fuelled rife speculation and gossip, as well as allegations of a cover-up by the State and Church, and today his death remains unsolved.

From an extraordinary criminal trial and acquittal, which conflicted with a subsequent inquest verdict, to a botched investigation and questions over motive, the savage killing of Father Molloy continues to beg more questions than answers. 

This book builds on fresh revelations unveiled in a recent two-part TV documentary for RTÉ, ‘The Killing of Fr Niall Molloy’. Written by Sharon Lawless of Flawless Films, and Maresa Fagan, a journalist of 20 years standing, it lays bare the evidence like never before and is dedicated to the victims and families still searching for justice.

8 July 2023 was the 38th Anniversary of Father Niall’s murder. Requiescat in pace.

About the authors: Maresa Fagan is an award-winning journalist of 20 years standing, who has previously worked across a variety of local, national, and international media platforms. Based in the Irish midlands, she spent more than a decade working as a senior reporter with the Roscommon Herald, where she first became intrigued with the killing of Father Niall Molloy and the many unanswered questions the case continues to pose. Maresa contributed to the recent TV documentary, The Killing of Fr Niall Molloy, and has won several accolades for her in-depth reporting. She continues to work in the media and communications field.

Sharon Lawless is a producer, director and writer living in Dublin. Most of her career has been in the media and she is best known for her long-running TV series Adoption Stories, the award-winning The Killing of Fr Niall Molloy, the upcoming Inside the Hospice, and a feature film and documentary on the trailblazing motorsport icon Rosemary Smith. Sharon remembers the first news bulletin about Fr Niall's death in the year she left school and has followed the story every since. Meeting the Molloy family in 2017 was the spark for her determination to uncover the facts behind the case. Sharon is driven by bringing hidden stories of human resilience and injustice to a wide audience, and her work has been praised for its honesty and integrity.

No More Money For Books

Poetry From Prayer

To Stay With A Sentence

The Seven Virtues by Fulton J Sheen

Paperback: The Seven Virtues (2022) is an exact facsimile of the original 1940 edition. It is dedicated to Mary Immaculate, Mother Of God, in token of filial gratitude and affection. 

These meditations on the Seven Last Words correlated to the seven virtues make no pretence to absoluteness. The Words are not necessarily related to the virtues but they do make convenient points of illustrations.

This book has only one aim: to awaken a love in the Passion of Our Lord and to incite the practice of virtue. If it does that in but one soul, its publication has been justified.

The Seven Virtues is available from Amazon (UK and USA), www.eden.co.uk and www.blackwells.co.uk.

About the author: Fulton John Sheen (born Peter John Sheen, May 8, 1895 – December 9, 1979) was an American archbishop of the Roman Catholic Church known for his preaching and especially his work on radio and television. In the 1950s, his television show called "Life Is Worth Living" made him a household name.

Archbishop Fulton J Sheen was a master communicator with an unforgettable voice and ability to communicate the message of Christianity to all peoples.  He was a Catholic priest with a tremendous knowledge of Catholic Theology, as well as all Christian denominations and world religions.

For Catholics, Bishop Sheen is a saint of modern times. His cause for canonization for sainthood was officially opened in 2002. In June 2012, Pope Benedict XVI officially recognized a decree from the Congregation for the Causes of Saints stating that he lived a life of "heroic virtues" and proclaimed him "Venerable Servant of God Fulton J Sheen". On 3 December 2019, the Diocese of Peoria announced that the Holy See had decided on 2 December that Sheen's beatification would be "postponed." As of late 2022, the Holy See has not announced if the beatification will move ahead. Though not yet canonized, he is considered one of the most important Catholics that God has put on this earth in the 20th Century.

Rental Person Who Does Nothing: A Memoir by Shoji Morimoto

Hardback: 'In one of Aesop's fables, a character longs to tell a secret and so tells it to the reeds. I'm just there, like those reeds.' - Shoji Morimoto

Foreword: Twitter @morimotoshoji  I'm starting a service called Do-nothing Rental. It's available for any situation in which all you want is a person to be there. Maybe there's a restaurant you want to go to, but you feel awkward going on your own. Maybe a game you want to play, but you're one person short. Or perhaps you'd like someone to keep a space in the park for your cherry blossom viewing party... I only charge transport (from Kokubunji Station) and cost of food/drink (if applicable). I can't do anything except give very simple responses.

With this tweet, I became 'Rental Person', a Rental Person Who Does Nothing. At the time, I had 300 followers. Ten months later, I had 100,000. The number of requests has grown too, and now I get a steady flow of about three a day.

I find it utterly amazing. Why on earth has it happened? When I started the service, I thought it might be interesting, but I never imagined it would result in a book, a manga or TV programmes. And when I try to hide my surprise, people started talking about my 'aura', as though I'm some kind of star.

Readers must find it bizarre. Nobody could have predicted this reaction. After all, I do nothing. I am the type that people get cross with - at home, at work, at a barbecue. Why should a person like that be in demand?

This book, Rental Person Who Does Nothing: A Memoir (2023) - is an attempt to answer that question. 

If it was written simply by me, I think it would be too subjective. I'm very confused about what's happened and on my own, I'd find it tough to come up with a convincing book. So we tried an experiment. A writer (S) and an editor (T) asked me questions and I gave them very simple responses, and through that process we tried to find an answer. S is not a particular fan of Rental Person. He has written objectively, and in a way that people who don't know anything about my activities can get a clear picture.

So with that as my excuse, I have, as usual, done nothing. I have simply watched, with interest and surprise, as this book has developed.

Rental Person Who Does Nothing: A Memoir (2023) was originally published in Japan as Rental Nanmo Shinai Hito in 2019 and translated into the English by Don Knotting in 2023.

About the author: Shoji Morimoto was born in 1983. He began working as a rental person who does nothing in 2018 and has since been hired more than 4,000 times. He has been profiled by many media outlets worldwide and has written several books including Rental Person Who Does Nothing, which inspired a Japanese TV series. Morimoto lives in Japan with his wife and son.

Sacred And Great: A Brief Introduction To The Traditional Latin Mass by Joseph Shaw

Booklet: For Catholics used to the newer form of the Mass or Novus Ordo, experiencing the older form raises a lot of questions. 

Why has the priest got his back to me? 

Why is everything in Latin? 

Why is there so much chant, and so much silence? 

How am I supposed to participate in this liturgy? 

How might this seemingly strange, archaic ritual be spiritually fruitful for me? 

This booklet has been written to answer these and similar questions, as briefly, clearly, and serenely as possible:

1) How Do I Participate in the Traditional Mass?

2) What Does It Mean? Ceremonies and Prayers

3) Where Did It Come From? The Organic Development of the Liturgy

4) What Is It For? The Place of the Traditional Mass in the Church

Sacred And Great: A Brief Introduction To The Traditional Latin Mass (2023) ends with a helpful guide to readings and resources.

Sacred And Great: A Brief Introduction To The Traditional Latin Mass is available on Amazon (UK and USA) or directly from the publisher https://osjustipress.com/products/sacred-and-great.

About the author: Dr Joseph Shaw has a Doctorate in Philosophy from Oxford University, where he also gained a first degree in Politics and Philosophy and a graduate Diploma in Theology. He has published on Ethics and Philosophy of Religion and has edited The Case for Liturgical Restoration: Una Voce Position Papers on the Extraordinary Form (Angelico Press). He is the Chairman of the Latin Mass Society of England and Wales and President of Una Voce International. 

Shaw was also an early critic of Pope Francis’s motu proprio Traditionis custodes, which abrogated permissions for celebration of the Tridentine Mass. He teaches Philosophy at Oxford University and lives nearby with his wife and nine children.

I Wanted To Be A Reader

The Widening Of Tolo Highway: A Hong Kong Story Of Paranoia And Protest by Lucy Hamilton

Paperback: ANNA RETURNS TO FACE A PAST SHE NEVER TRULY LEFT BEHIND.

It wasn’t the middle but the very edge of nowhere.

It was always just a little too still.

It is 2017. Typhoon Hato has ripped through the streets of Hong Kong. National Day is looming. The momentum of the 2014 Umbrella Revolution has faded. British woman, Anna, has returned to her old village in the New Territories to search for Kallum, a disillusioned local activist, from whom she has heard nothing since her departure two years ago.

Suspecting he was targeted for his involvement in the protests, Anna widens her search, scouring the streets of Kowloon and the Island for signs he is alive. Alone in her tiny, rented room in the notorious Chungking Mansions, gruesome flashbacks disturb her sleep. Paranoia swells. Memory, delusion, and reality begin to blur.

Against a backdrop of construction works, storm damage and scaffolding, Anna is confronted by a daunting panorama. She may know more about the past than she has let herself believe.

The Widening of Tolo Highway: A Hong Kong Story of Paranoia and Protest (2022) is Lucy Hamilton's unputdownable debut semi-fictional novel. 

About the author: Lucy Hamilton grew up in Dronfield, a quiet town in the north of England. She lived briefly in Australia, before moving to Hong Kong, where she began work on her first novel, The Widening of Tolo Highway. The novel is a semi-fictional account of expatriate life in the New Territories, set against backdrop of the 2014 Umbrella Revolution. While writing Tolo Highway, she also trained as a Behaviour Analyst, dividing her time between the USA, Asia and the UK. In 2019, she completed a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Sheffield, where she had previously studied English Literature as an undergraduate. She now teaches in Stylistics at the University of Nottingham Ningbo, China.

Rating: 5/5

Immigrants And Immigration-Descended Population

Thinking About Thinking

Saint Raphael Kalinowski: An Introduction To His Life And Spirituality by Szczepan T Praśkiewicz OCD

Booklet: Little known outside his native Poland, Joseph Kalinowski (Raphael of St. Joseph, OCD) was born in 1835 and became, by turns, an engineer, a military officer, a leader in the 1863 insurrection against Russian domination, an exile in Siberia, a tutor, and eventually a Discalced Carmelite priest. He died in 1907 at the Carmelite monastery he had founded in Wadowice, the city where Karol Wojtyla - the future Pope John Paul II who would later beatify and canonize him - was born only 13 years later. 

Today Raphael Kalinowski is remembered especially as a man of boundless charity in the Siberian prison camps, a restorer of Carmel in Poland, a skilled confessor and spiritual director, and a tireless promoter of Marian devotion and of unity between the Eastern and Western Churches. 

In 1991, he became the first Discalced Carmelite friar canonized since St John of the Cross. 

This booklet offers a concise introduction to one of the pope's favourite saints, and includes a brief biography of Saint Raphael Kalinowski, a synthesis of his spiritual message, 12 photos, and for the first time in English, selections from his writings.

Saint Raphael Kalinowski: An Introduction To His Life And Spirituality (1998, 2016) is translated from the Italian by Thomas Coonan and Michael Griffin OCD; and from the Polish-to-Italian by Lawrence Sullivan OCD.

About the author: Szczepan T Praśkiewicz OCD was born in Chmielnik, Poland, in 1958. He attended the Carmelite Minor Seminary in Wadowice, founded by Raphael Kalinowski, and made his religious profession as a Discalced Carmelite in 1978. Ordained in 1983, he earned a diploma in Mariology and in 1988, completed his doctorate in theological anthropology at the Teresianum in Rome. From 1983 to 1990, he served as Prefect of the Order's International College in Rome. He assisted the OCD Postulator General in the final phase of the canonization process for Raphael Kalinowski and has published numerous studies on the Saint, including a Kalinowski bibliography and his own Italian translation of Raphael Kalinowski's Memoirs. He now serves as secretary of the missions for the Order at the Discalced Carmelite Generalate in Rome, Italy.