Thursday, 12 March 2026
Wednesday, 11 March 2026
Monday, 9 March 2026
Thursday, 5 March 2026
London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe
About the book: From the Baillie Gifford Prize-winning and Sunday Times bestselling author of Empire of Pain and Say Nothing comes a riveting story of wealth, violence and deceit at the heart of a glittering city.
In 2019, a London teenager, Zac Brettler, fell to his death from a luxury apartment building on the banks of the Thames. On a desperate quest to understand how their son had died, his grieving parents made a terrible discovery: Zac had been leading a fantasy life, posing as the son of a wealthy Russian oligarch.
In his inimitably gripping and forensic prose, Patrick Radden Keefe follows Zac’s parents on a dark journey to find out what brought Zac to the balcony that night – and how a teenager’s world of make-believe drew him into the city’s terrifying underworld.
London Falling is at once a devastating family tragedy, a riveting story of greed, power and deception, and an indictment of the culture that has transformed London into a haven for the malignant forces that have come to influence us all.
London Falling : A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City, and a Family’s Search for Truth will be released on 7 April 2026. It is available to pre-order now.
About the author: Patrick Radden Keefe is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family's Search For Truth, the bestsellers Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty (winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction), Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks (a collection of his New Yorker stories), and Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland (named one of the 20 Best Books of the 21st Century by the New York Times and now streaming as a limited series on Disney+), as well as two critically acclaimed books, The Snakehead and Chatter. He is the writer and host of the eight-part podcast Wind of Change, which The Guardian named the #1 podcast of 2020, and the recipient of the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing, the Orwell Prize for Political Writing, and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. He lives in New York.
My Conversations With Poor Souls by Eugenie von der Leyen
About the book: In addition to the Church Militant on earth and the Church Triumphant in heaven, there is, according to Catholic teaching, the Suffering Church in Purgatory, which, according to God's plan of salvation, needs our help so much.
It is this world of the Suffering Church that confronts us in this, the diary of Princess Eugenie von der Leyen. She had a special kind of charisma, a permission from God that allowed suffering souls to contact her.
Eugenie's diary from 1921-1929 is considered by experts to be the best in its field. This diary has a providential task: With the power of genuine charisma, it can sensitize us again to the world beyond, it can open our eyes to the "ultimate things" that are so much repressed today. How poor we are without the awareness of the blissful communion with out mighty friends in heaven and with our fellow sufferers in purgatory who are so in need of our help.
Through unforgettable figures, words of supplication, and heart-rending gestures, My Conversations with Poor Souls (2022) sensitizes us and opens our eyes to the unspeakable plight of the poor souls undergoing purification from their earthly sins.
My Conversations with Poor Souls is translated from the German by Jason Chapman.
About the author: Raised in an aristocratic cradle, a girl named Eugenie was born on 15 May 1867 in Munich, inheriting all the honours of the Germanic dynasty of Von der Leyen und zu Hohengeroldseck, and of the Thurn und Taxis lineage. Nobody, however, could have suspected that, allied to her high birth, remarkable gifts and charisms granted by the special disposition of Divine Providence would adorn her noble soul.
Eugenie left us a diary, thanks to the happy recommendation of her spiritual director. These are pages that let us feel the love and mercy of the good God, as well as the great justice manifested in His sentences. Each of the annotations reveals interior dramas; not, however, of living people, but of souls in the afterlife, suffering the pains due to their sins.
Indeed, from the middle of 1921 until her last days, the princess received continuous visits from souls in Purgatory, who came to meet her in the most varied ways, begging for suffrage in the midst of so much pain. Screams, slamming doors, footsteps in the corridor, shadows and frights, sudden windstorms, weeping and moaning, in short, everything that for us would constitute a true horror story became part of Eugenie’s routine. She died on 9 January 1929 at the age of 62.
Monday, 2 March 2026
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)