Monday, 30 December 2019
Sunday, 29 December 2019
Friday, 27 December 2019
Still Waters (Sandhamn Murders Series) by Viveca Sten
Paperback: Still Waters (2015) is the first instalment in the popular Sandhamn Murders series set in Sweden.
On a hot July morning on Sweden’s idyllic vacation island of Sandhamn, a man takes his dog for a walk and makes a gruesome discovery: a body, tangled in fishing net, has washed ashore.
Police detective Thomas Andreasson is the first to arrive on the scene. Before long, he has identified the deceased as Krister Berggren, a bachelor from the mainland who has been missing for months. All signs point to an accident - until another brutalized corpse is found at the local bed-and-breakfast. But this time it is Berggren’s cousin, whom Thomas interviewed in Stockholm just days before.
As the island’s residents reel from the news, Thomas turns to his childhood friend, local lawyer Nora Linde. Together, they attempt to unravel the riddles left behind by these two mysterious outsiders - while trying to make sense of the difficult twists their own lives have taken since the shared summer days of their youth.
Still Waters is translated from the Swedish by Marlaine Delargy.
About the author: Viveca Sten is married, with three children. Viveca lives just north of Stockholm. She has had a highly successful legal career as a lawyer and until recently held the position as General Counsel at PostNord (the Swedish & Danish mail service), but left in 2011 to focus on her writing. Since 1917, Viveca's family have spent all their summers at Sandhamn where her novels are set. She has written several non-fiction books prior to her crime novels. She is a great humanitarian and has for several years been involved in the Red Cross Centre for Tortured Refugees. Her warmth and caring has been passed on to her three children and last summer her daughter left for the US to tour with the volunteer organization Up with People.
The first five books in the Sandhamn Murder series have been made into miniseries in three parts by Sweden's largest commercial TV-channel, TV4. From the start in December 2010, it was huge success, with more than 1.7 million viewers per episode. The series has been broadcast in all Nordic countries and also in many European countries such as Germany, France and Italy and even as far away as Japan. In the fall of 2014, a Polish version with Polish actors premiered on Polish national television.
Viveca describes herself as driven, stubborn and caring, which is obvious when you meet her, read her books and see all the things she has accomplished in life.
About the translator: Marlaine Delargy works as a translator and adult learning support tutor. She studied Swedish and German at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, and taught German in comprehensive schools for almost twenty years. She has translated novels by Åsa Larsson, Ninni Holmqvist, Kristina Ohlsson, Helene Tursten, John Ajvide Lindqvist, Therese Bohman and Johan Theorin - with whom she won the CWA International Dagger 2010 for The Darkest Room - among others, and serves on the editorial board of the Swedish Book Review. She lives in Shropshire, England.
Rating: 5/5
Report From Calabria: A Season With The Carthusian Monks by A Priest
Paperback: He who has the word of Jesus can truly listen also to his silence. - St Ignatius of Antioch
Devoted to a life of intense contemplative prayer, the Carthusian monks guard their solitude jealously and rarely allow visitors to live with them. The author of this book, an American priest, was privileged to spend four months with the Carthusian community in Calabria, Italy, the resting place of the founder of their order, Saint Bruno. He followed the daily regimen of the monks and wrote home to family and friends to share his experiences.
The priest's journal allows readers to get a deep sense of what this life of prayer feels like: he describes distinctive features of the Carthusian vocation and offers insights gained by a life devoted to silence and solitude.
There are books that explore the Carthusian way of life, but what makes Report from Calabria (2017) different and unique is that it is more like a series of short notes sent home from a foreign land, a sketch book rather than a finished canvas. But sketches have an appeal of their own: they offer a freshness of impressions and can entice us to study their subject more deeply.
The text is accompanied with beautiful photographs of the daily life followed by the monks of Serra San Bruno. The contemplative vocation - bracing and yet deeply human - comes alive in this account of four months in which very little happened but yet a lot was going on.
It is an invitation to readers to not only gain an insight into monastic life, but to clear some space in our busy lives to encounter God more deeply.
Preface by the Author/Priest: More than ten years ago the remarkable film Into Great Silence by Philip Gröning allowed the public to take a peek into the world of the Carthusian monks, considered by many to be the most austere religious order in the Catholic Church. Gröning spent six months filming at the Grande Chartreuse and dedicated two and a half years to editing his footage. The three-hour movie, like the Carthusian way of life itself, was unusual: no soundtrack, almost no dialogue, no dramatic plot. He allowed the viewer to enter into the life of men who spend almost their entire day in solitary prayer, and much of their night in singing God's praises.
What would it be like to live this way? The monastic life is found in many cultures, and it has been an important part of Christianity since the earliest centuries. My own introduction to it came from reading The Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton when I was in high school. I was captivated, as countless others have been. Ever since, I have felt the attraction of a life devoted to contemplative prayer, I have delved into the rich spiritual literature that the monastic life has produced, and I have visited monasteries all over the world.
When I was in the seminary a young man several years behind me entered a Carthusian monastery in Spain. Several years later I was able to visit him in his monastery with our bishop. We were there for only twenty-four hours, but the experience moved me deeply. I remember saying to the bishop as we drove away, "I feel like someone has just doused me with a glass of ice water."
The atmosphere was simple in the extreme - a life stripped of many of the comforts to which we are accustomed, a life pared down to the essentials. At the same time, our friend struck me as very relaxed, conversational and natural.
The names of the members of the community at Serra San Bruno have been changed out of respect for the Carthusian desire for privacy. It is customary for Carthusian authors to remain anonymous; that custom will be honoured by the author/priest of this book.
Thursday, 26 December 2019
Wednesday, 25 December 2019
Tuesday, 24 December 2019
The Best People: A Tale of Trials and Errors by Marc Grossberg
Hardback: The physics of life is that every choice forecloses other choices.
Paddy Moran, a former cop from Brooklyn, is a newly licensed attorney in Houston with dreams and aspirations to make it big. He survives early rough bumps and ethical challenges. Then, through networking, he lands two high-profile clients. With his brash moxie and brilliant legal strategy, he gets outstanding outcomes that put him on the success trajectory to the upper echelons of the city's divorce bar. But, faced with difficult choices in high-stakes litigation, will he balance his thirst for recognition and respect with his sense of right and wrong?
The Best People (2019) also follows Pilar Galt, a sensuous, intelligent single mother from the Houston barrios, for whom a temp assignment evolves into a relationship with the richest man in town. Her path intersects with Paddy's and eventually converges during a pivotal time in her life when she must overcome self-destructive tendencies to survive.
A legal drama and social satire set after Enron and before the devastation of Hurricane Harvey, The Best People portrays a Houston as it is, a glitzy meritocracy populated with larger-than-life characters. It is the landscape where the country-club and café-society sets clash amidst clever legal manoeuvering, big law firm politics, a Ponzi scheme and judicial corruption.
In a stunning debut novel, author Marc Grossberg, a native Houstonian who has practised law in Houston for more than fifty years, offers a glimpse into a world where you cannot always tell who the best people are.
About the author: Marc Grossberg is an observer and a listener. He has a passion for his family, friends and clients, and for books that entertain and provoke him. He has practiced law in his native Houston for over fifty years. Somehow he overcame being a Board Certified tax lawyer and one of the Best Lawyers in America© to write The Best People. Marc is a proud product of the Houston public schools, the University of Houston and the University of Texas School of Law. He lives in the NOW and goes wherever his “green light” tells him the intersection might be interesting.
Rating: 5/5
Monday, 23 December 2019
The Sacrament by Olaf Olafsson
Hardback: The Sacrament (2019) is the haunting, vivid story of a nun whose past returns to her in unexpected ways, all while investigating a mysterious death and a series of harrowing abuse claims.
A young nun is sent by the Vatican to investigate allegations of misconduct at a Catholic school in Iceland. During her time there, on a gray winter’s day, a young student at the school watches the school’s headmaster, Father August Franz, fall to his death from the church tower.
Two decades later, the child - now a grown man, haunted by the past - calls the nun back to the scene of the crime. Seeking peace and calm in her twilight years at a convent in France, she has no choice to make a trip to Iceland again, a trip that brings her former visit, as well as her years as a young woman in Paris, powerfully and sometimes painfully to life. In Paris, she met an Icelandic girl who she has not seen since, but whose acquaintance changed her life, a relationship she relives all while reckoning with the mystery of August Franz’s death and the abuses of power that may have brought it on.
In The Sacrament, critically acclaimed novelist Olaf Olafsson looks deeply at the complexity of our past lives and selves; the faulty nature of memory; and the indelible mark left by the joys and traumas of youth.
Affecting and beautifully observed, The Sacrament is both propulsively told and poignantly written - tinged with the tragedy of life’s regrets but also moved by the possibilities of redemption, a new work from a novelist who consistently surprises and challenges.
The Sacrament is based on real events that took place near where the author grew up. And of course it is. No one is shocked by the widespread sexual abuse in the Catholic Church - not anymore. Olafsson may not have given us a new story, but he has reminded us it is still a relevant one as institutional power continues to prey on both the weak and the resolute. (chireviewofbooks)
About the author: Olaf Olafsson was born in Reykjavik, Iceland, in 1962. He studied physics as a Wien scholar at Brandeis University. He is the author of five previous novels, The Journey Home, Absolution, Walking into the Night, Restoration, and One Station Away, and a story collection, Valentines. His books have been published to critical acclaim in more than twenty languages. Olaf is the recipient of the O Henry Award and the Icelandic Literary Award, was shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor Prize, and has twice been nominated for the IMPAC Award. He is executive vice president of Time Warner and lives in New York City with his wife and three children.
Rating: 5/5
Sunday, 22 December 2019
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