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Entanglement (Teodor Szacki Trilogy) by Zygmunt Miłoszewski

Paperback: No one is evil, just entangled. - Bert Hellinger

The morning after a group psychotherapy session in a Warsaw monastery, Henry Talek is found dead, a roasting spit stuck in one eye.

Public prosecutor Teodor Szacki, world-weary, suffering from bureaucratic exhaustion and marital ennui, feels that life has passed him by. But this case changes everything. Because of it he meets Monika Grzelka, a young journalist whose charms prove difficult to resist, and he discovers the frightening power of certain esoteric therapeutic methods. The shocking videos of the sessions lead him to an array of possible scenarios.

Could one of the patients have become so absorbed by his therapy role-playing that he murdered Telak? Szacki’s investigation leads him to an earlier murder, before the fall of Communism.

And why is the Secret Police suddenly taking an interest in all this? As Szacki uncovers each piece of the puzzle, facts emerge that he’d be better off not knowing, for his own safety.

Entanglement (2010) is the first book in the Public Prosecutor Teodor Szacki trilogy set in Warsaw, Poland. Entanglement is a full-blooded crime story with a good plot and great contemporary social background.

Entanglement is translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones.

About the author: Zygmunt Miłoszewski began his career in journalism, at Super Express in the mid-1990s, where he specialized in court and crime reporting, and for several years he also had a column in Metropol. Since 2003 he has worked for Newsweek's Polish edition. His debut novel, the horror Domofon (Intercom), was published in 2005. In 2006, he published a children's adventure story, Viper Mountains, and a year later his second adult novel Uwikłanie (translated to English as Entanglement) came out, the first of the police procedural trilogy featuring State Prosecutor Teodor Szacki, followed by A Grain of Truth (2012) and Rage (2016).

About the translator: Antonia Lloyd-Jones is a prizewinning translator from Polish, and recipient of the Transatlantyk award for the most outstanding promoter of Polish literature abroad (awarded in 2018). She is a long-term translator of Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Olga Tokarczuk, and her translation of Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2018) is currently shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation.

Other recent published translations include Żanna Słoniowska’s The House with the Stained Glass Window (Maclehose Press, 2018), and Mrs Mohr Goes Missing by Maryla Szymiczkowa (pseudonym of authorial duo Jacek Dehnel and Piotr Tarczynski, Oneworld Books, 2019).

She also works as a mentor for emerging translators, and has served as co-chair of the Translators Association.

Rating: 3/5

Writing Is Labour

My DNA

I Have No Other Criterion

The Killing In The Consulate: Investigating The Life And Death Of Jamal Khashoggi by Jonathan Rugman

Hardback: After Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi was filmed going in to the Saudi consulate in Turkey, he was never seen alive again. What happened next turned into a major international scandal, now finally pieced together by Channel 4's BAFTA award-winning Foreign Affairs Correspondent Jonathan Rugman.

Described by Donald Trump as the 'worst cover-up ever', this is the first comprehensive account  of one of the most notorious and outrageous murder plots of our time. In The Killing in the Consulate, Rugman pieces together in minute-by-minute detail the events after Khashoggi entered the Saudi diplomatic building on 2 October 2018, expecting to receive the documentation that would enable him to marry Hatice Gengiz, patiently waiting for him outside. Little did they realise, he was entering a trap, as a 15-man Saudi hit squad had just flown in to the country and was waiting for him. Within minutes he had been viciously murdered and his body was quickly disposed of. The Saudis thought they would be able to get away with it all, and concocted a far-fetched story to cover it up. But what they didn't realise was that Turkey's President Erdogan's security and intelligence agencies had bugged the consulate, and captured the horrific events on tape.

Based on confidential sources, dramatic new evidence and in-depth research across several countries, Rugman reveals the context behind the murder and attempted cover-up. He shows how a power struggle between Erdogan and Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, known as MBS, had such fatal results. The prince had seemed to promise a new and more open era for his country, while also investing vast sums in arms deals with the West. Inevitably other nations, including President Trump and the USA, were drawn into the affair, which created the biggest crisis in US-Saudi relations since 9/11. Skilfully, Rugman draws together all the strands to tell a gripping story of one man's tragedy that had global consequences.

About the author: Jonathan Rugman has been Foreign Affairs Correspondent at Channel 4 News since 2006. A BAFTA Award-winning journalist, he has reported from Turkey for more than 25 years and is a specialist in Middle East affairs including covering the Arab Spring revolts. He has previously worked for the BBC and written for The Guardian and The Observer. 

Good Chinese Wife: A Love Affair With China Gone Wrong by Susan Blumberg-Kason

Paperback: Good Chinese Wife (2014) is a stunning memoir of an intercultural marriage gone wrong.

When Susan, a shy Midwesterner in love with Chinese culture, started graduate school in Hong Kong, she quickly fell for Cai, the Chinese man of her dreams. As they exchanged vows, Susan thought she had stumbled into an exotic fairy tale, until she realized Cai - and his culture - where not what she thought.

In her riveting memoir, Susan recounts her struggle to be the perfect traditional "Chinese" wife to her increasingly controlling and abusive husband. With keen insight and heart-wrenching candour, she confronts the hopes and hazards of intercultural marriage, including dismissing her own values and needs to save her relationship and protect her newborn son, Jake. But when Cai threatens to take Jake back to China for good, Susan must find the courage to stand up for herself, her son, and her future.

Moving between rural China and the bustling cities of Hong Kong and San Francisco, Good Chinese Wife is an eye-opening look at marriage and family in contemporary China and America and an inspiring testament to the resilience of a mother's love - across any border.

You can now read Good Chinese Wife in Italian. Go check out the description of Una Brava Moglie Cinese, published by Newton Compton Editori. You can find it on Amazon, ibs.it, Giunti al Punto, and la Feltrinelli.

About the author: Susan Blumberg-Kason is the author of Good Chinese Wife: A Love Affair with China Gone Wrong (Sourcebooks, 2014) and co-editor of Hong Kong Noir (Akashic Books, 2018). She is a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Review of Books and the Asian Review of Books. Her work has also appeared in The Frisky, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, and the South China Morning Post. She received an MPhil in Government and Public Administration from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where she researched emerging women’s rights over 100 years ago. Born, raised, and now based in the Chicago suburbs, Susan is an elected trustee of her public library. She lives with her husband, three kids and a surly cat in the Chicago area.

Kate Chopin (1850-1904), American Author

Happy Valentine's Day

To Live An Ethical Life Is To Be Accountable

Consecration To St Joseph: The Wonders of Our Spiritual Father by Father Donald H Calloway MIC

Paperback: Devotion to St Joseph is one of the choicest graces that God can give to a soul, for it is tantamount to revealing the entire treasury of our Lord's graces. When God wishes to raise a soul to greater heights, he unites it to St Joseph by giving it a strong love for the good saint. - St Peter Julian Eymard

In the midst of crisis, confusion, and a world at war with the Church, it is time to come home again to our spiritual father, St Joseph. In this richly researched and lovingly presented program of consecration to St Joseph, Father Donald Calloway, MIC, brings to life the wonders, the power, and the ceaseless love of St Joseph, Patron of the Universal Church and the Terror of Demons.

Drawing on the wealth of the Church's living tradition, Fr Donald Calloway, MIC, calls on all of us to turn to St Joseph, entrust ourselves, our Church, and our world to our spiritual father's loving care, and then watch for wonders when the Universal Patron of the Church opens the floodgates of Heaven to pour out graces into our lives today.

Definitely a book for our time, Consecration to St Joseph is dedicated to meeting the challenges of the present moment and restoring order to our Church and our world, all through the potent paternal intercession and care of St Joseph.

This book has everything you need to take your love and devotion to St Joseph to a whole different level: a thorough program of consecration to St Joseph; information on the 10 wonders of St Joseph; and prayers and devotions to St Joseph.

Accessible, motivating, this book will kick off a great movement of consecration to our spiritual father and change the world.

The 33 Day Consecration To St Joseph begins on 15 February 2020.

The book was published on 1 January 2020.

About the author: Father Donald Calloway, MIC, is vicar provincial and vocation director for the Mother of Mercy Province of the Marian Fathers of the Immaculate Conception. He is the author of 14 books and leads pilgrimages to Marian shrines around the world. He resides in Steubenville, Ohio.

Revelations of Divine Love by Julian of Norwich

Paperback: One of the first woman authors, Julian of Norwich produced in Revelations of Divine Love a remarkable work of revelatory insight, that stands alongside The Cloud of Unknowing and Piers Plowman as a classic of Medieval religious literature.

After fervently praying for a greater understanding of Christ's passion, Julian of Norwich, a fourteenth-century anchorite and mystic, experienced a series of divine revelations. Through these 'showings', Christ's sufferings were revealed to her with extraordinary intensity, but she also received assurance of God's unwavering love for man and his infinite capacity for forgiveness.

Written in a vigorous English vernacular, the Revelations are one of the most original works of medieval mysticism and have had a lasting influence on Christian thought. This edition of the Revelations contains both the short text, which is mainly an account of the 'showings' themselves and Julian's initial interpretation of their meaning, and the long text, completed some twenty years later, which moves from vision to a daringly speculative theology and in which we can recognise her development into the most remarkable English theologian of her time.

This volume is a major work of religious devotion, of theology and of English literature; their beauty and originality have won them many modern admirers (including T S Eliot), and in recent years they have attracted special attention for their female authorship and their attribution of feminine characteristics to God.

Elizabeth Spearing's translation preserves Julian's directness of expression and the rich complexity of her thought. An introduction, notes and appendices help to place the works in context for modern readers.

About the author: Julian of Norwich (c1342-after 1416) is the first writer in English who can be certainly identified as a woman. Nothing is known of her background, not even her real name. On 8 May 1373, when seriously ill and apparently dying, she received an extraordinary series of 'showings' or revelations before God, beginning when her parish priest held up a crucifix before her and she saw blood trickling down Christ's face. After her recovery, she spent many years pondering the significance of the showings, which she believed to be messages to all Christians.

They taught, among other things, that God is our mother as well as our father, that he cannot be angry with us and that no Christian will be damned - doctrines which Julian had great difficulty in reconciling with the Church's teachings. In later life, she lived as an anchoress at St Julian's Church, Norwich (from which she adopted the name by which she is known) and became famous as a spiritual adviser.

About the translator: Elizabeth Spearing holds a DPhil from the University of York. Her previous publications include an edition of The Life and Death of Mal Cutpurse and articles on the Amadis cycle and on Aphra Behn.

The Mercies by Kiran Millwood Hargrave

Hardback: On Christmas Eve, 1617, the sea around the remote Norwegian island of Vardo is thrown into a reckless storm. As Maren Magnusdatter watches, forty fishermen, including her father and brother, are lost to the waves, the menfolk of Vardo wiped out in an instant.

Now the women must fend for themselves.

Eighteen months later, a sinister figure arrives. Summoned from Scotland to take control of a place at the edge of the civilized world, Absalom Cornet knows what he needs to do to bring the women of Vardo to heel. With him travels his young wife, Ursa. In Vardo, and in Maren, Ursa finds something she has never seen before: independent women. But Absalom sees only a place untouched by God and flooded with a mighty and terrible evil, one he must root out at all costs.

Inspired by the real events of the Vardo storm and the 1621 witch trials, Kiran Millwood Hargrave's The Mercies (2020) is a story about how suspicion can twist its way through a community, and a love that may prove as dangerous as it is powerful.

About the author: An author, playwright and poet, Kiran Millwood Hargrave is best known for her award-winning children’s fiction. Waterstones booksellers have been passionate advocates of her work since they chose her bestselling debut, The Girl of Ink of Stars as the winner of the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize in 2017, the British Book Awards Children's Book of the Year, and the Blackwell's Children's Book of the Year and been shortlisted for prizes such as the Costa Children's Book Award and the Blue Peter Story Award. Since then she has published The Island at the End of Everything, The Way Past Winter and The Deathless Girls. Kiran lives by the river in Oxford, with her husband, artist Tom de Freston, and their rescue cat, Luna.

The Mercies, is Kiran's first novel for adults. The Mercies, previously titled Vardø, was subject to a 13-way auction and called ‘unquestionably the book of the 2018 London Book Fair’ by The Bookseller.

Rating: 5/5