The Day Is Now Far Spent by Robert Cardinal Sarah in Conversation with Nicolas Diat

Paperback: Robert Cardinal Sarah calls The Day Is Now Far Spent (2019) his most important book. He analyzes the spiritual, moral, and political collapse of the Western world and concludes that "the decadence of our time has all the faces of mortal peril."

A cultural identity crisis, he writes, is at the root of the problems facing Western societies. "The West no longer knows who it is, because it no longer knows and does not want to know who made it, who established it, as it was and as it is. Many countries today ignore their own history. This self-suffocation naturally leads to a decadence that opens the path to new, barbaric civilizations."

While making clear the gravity of the present situation, the cardinal demonstrates that it is possible to avoid the hell of a world without God, a world without hope. He calls for a renewal of devotion to Christ through prayer and the practice of virtue.

The Day Is Now Far Spent is translated from the French by Michael J Miller.

About the authors: Robert Cardinal Sarah was born in Guinea, West Africa, was made an Archbishop by Pope John Paul II, a Cardinal by Pope Benedict XVI, and the Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments by Pope Francis in 2014. He is the author of God or Nothing and The Power of Silence.

Nicolas Diat is a French journalist and author. His latest book is A Time to Die: Monks on the Threshold of Eternal Life (2019).

About the translator: Michael J Miller, a native Philadelphian, is a self-employed translator residing in the northern suburbs. His clients include academic publishing houses and news websites. He has written dozens of news articles and book reviews for publication. He enjoys classical music and has sung extensively in choirs. Michael translated Priesthood and Diaconate by Gerhard Ludwig Müller for Ignatius Press and Eucharist and Divorce: A Change in Doctrine? for the Pontifical John Paul II Institute.

If I Had Your Face by Frances Cha

Paperback: "I would live your life so much better than you if I had your face..."

If I Had Your Face (2020) plunges us into the mesmerizing world of contemporary Seoul - a place where extreme plastic surgery is as routine as getting a haircut, where women compete for spots in secret 'room salons' to entertain wealthy businessmen after hours, where K-Pop stars are the object of all-consuming obsession, and ruthless social hierarchies dictate your every move.

Navigating this hyper-competitive city are four young women balancing on the razor-edge of survival:

Kyuri, an exquisitely beautiful woman whose hard-won status at an exclusive 'room salon' is threatened by an impulsive mistake with a client;

her flatmate Miho, an orphan who wins a scholarship to a prestigious art school in New York, where her life becomes tragically enmeshed with the super-wealthy offspring of the Korean elite;

Wonna, their neighbour, pregnant with a child that she and her husband have no idea how they will afford to raise in a fiercely competitive economy;

and Ara, a hair stylist living down the hall, whose infatuation with a fresh-faced K-Pop star drives her to violent extremes.

If I Had Your Face is a glitteringly dark and unsettling debut novel about four young women struggling to survive in contemporary South Korea.

About the author: Frances Cha is a former travel and culture digital editor for CNN in Seoul. She grew up in the United States, Hong Kong and South Korea. A graduate of Dartmouth College and the Columbia University MFA writing programme, she has written for The Atlantic, The Believer, Yonhap News and other publications, and has lectured at Columbia University, Ewha University, Seoul National University and Yonsei University. She lives in Brooklyn. If I Had Your Face is her first novel.

Follow Frances on Instagram @franceschawrites

Rating: 5/5

Hanya Yanagihara (1945- ), American Novelist, Editor and Travel Writer

What's Left Of Me Is Yours by Stephanie Scott

Hardback: In Japan, a covert industry has grown up around the wakaresaseya (literally 'breaker-upper'), a person hired by one spouse to seduce the other in order to gain the advantage in divorce proceedings. 

When Satō hires Kaitarō, a wakaresaseya agent, to have an affair with his wife, Rina, he assumes it will be an easy case. But Satō has never truly understood Rina or her desires and Kaitarō’s job is to do exactly that–until he does it too well. 

While Rina remains ignorant of the circumstances that brought them together, she and Kaitarō fall in a desperate, singular love, setting in motion a series of violent acts that will forever haunt her daughter’s life.

Told from alternating points of view and across the breathtaking landscapes of Japan, Stephanie Scott exquisitely renders the affair and its intricate repercussions. As Rina’s daughter, Sumiko, fills in the gaps of her mother’s story and her own memory, Scott probes the thorny psychological and moral grounds of the actions we take in the name of love, asking where we draw the line between passion and possession.

What’s Left of Me Is Yours (2020) is her first novel.

About the author: Stephanie Scott is a Singaporean and British writer who was born and raised in South East Asia. She read English Literature at the Universities of York and Cambridge and holds an MSt in Creative Writing from Oxford University. Scott was awarded a British Association of Japanese Studies Toshiba Studentship for her anthropological work on What’s Left of Me Is Yours and has been made a member of the British Japanese Law Association as a result of her research. She also won the A.M. Heath Prize, the Jerwood Arvon Prize for Prose Fiction, and was a runner up for the Bridport Prize Peggy Chapman-Andrews Award. 

Rating: 5/5

A Simple Den

Asphyxiating Opinions

Your House Will Pay by Steph Cha

Hardback: In the wake of the police shooting of a black teenager, Los Angeles is as tense as it's been since the unrest of the early 1990s. But Grace Park and Shawn Matthews have their own problems.

Grace is sheltered and largely oblivious, living in the Valley with her Korean-immigrant parents, working long hours at the family pharmacy. She's distraught that her sister hasn't spoken to their mother in two years, for reasons beyond Grace's understanding.

Shawn has already had enough of politics and protest after an act of violence shattered his family years ago. He just wants to be left alone to enjoy his quiet life in Palmdale.

But when another shocking crime hits LA, both the Park and Matthews families are forced to face down their shared history while navigating the tumult of a city on the brink of more violence.

Steph Cha delivers a bravura performance that captures our culture in crystalline detail.

Your House Will Pay (2019) will be read for years.

About the author: Steph Cha is the author of the Juniper Song crime trilogy. She is an editor and critic whose work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. A native of the San Fernando Valley, she lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two basset hounds.

Rating: 5/5

How To Attract Women

Louise Doughty (1963- ), English Fiction And Non-Fiction Writer, Playwright and Journalist

Hidden Valley Road: Inside The Mind Of An American Family by Robert Kolker

Hardback: The clearest way that you can show endurance is by sticking with a family. - Anne Tyler

Don and Mimi Galvin seemed to be living the American dream. After World War II, Don's work with the Air Force brought them to Colorado, where their twelve children perfectly spanned the baby boom: the oldest born in 1945, the youngest in 1965.

In those years, there was an established script for a family like the Galvins - aspiration, hard work, upward mobility, domestic harmony - and they worked hard to play their parts. But behind the scenes was a different story: psychological breakdown, sudden shocking violence, hidden abuse.

By the mid-1970s, six of the ten Galvin boys, one after the other, were diagnosed as schizophrenic. How could all this happen to one family?

What took place inside the house on Hidden Valley Road was so extraordinary that the Galvins became one of the first families to be studied by the National Institutes of Mental Health. Their story offers a shadow history of the science of schizophrenia, from the era of institutionalization, lobotomy, and the schizophrenogenic mother, to the search for genetic markers for the disease, always amidst profound disagreements about the nature of the illness itself. And unbeknownst to the Galvins, samples of their DNA informed decades of genetic research that continues today, offering paths to treatment, prediction, and even eradication of the disease for future generations.

With clarity and compassion, bestselling and award-winning author Robert Kolker uncovers one family's unforgettable legacy of suffering, love and hope.

Hidden Valley Road (2020) is the heartrending story of a mid-century American family with twelve children, six of them diagnosed with schizophrenia, that became science's great hope in the quest to understand the disease.

About the author: Robert Kolker is the New York Times bestselling author of Lost Girls, named one of the New York Times' 100 Notable Books and one of Publisher's Weekly's Top Ten Books of 2013. As a journalist, his work has appeared in New York Magazine, Bloomberg Businessweek, The New York Times Magazine, Wired, GQ, O magazine and Men's Journal. He is a National Magazine Award finalist and a recipient of the 2011 Harry Frank Guggenheim Award for Excellence in Criminal Justice Reporting from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.

A Time To Die: Monks On The Threshold Of Eternal Life by Nicolas Diat

Paperback: Hic jacet pulvis, cinis et nihil. (Here lies dust, ashes, and nothing more). - Inscription on the tombstone of Antonio Cardinal Barberini, Our Lady of the Conception of the Capuchins, Rome

Behind monastery walls, men of God spend their lives preparing for the passage of death. Best-selling French author Nicolas Diat set out to find what their deaths can reveal about the greatest mystery faced by everyone - the end of life.

How to die? How to respond to our fear of death? To answer these and other questions, Diat travelled to eight European monasteries including Solesmes Abbey and the Grande Chartreuse. Through extraordinary interviews with monks, he learned that their death experiences are varied and unique, with elements of peace, pain, humility, sorrow, and joy.

These monks have the same fears, torments, and sorrows as everyone else, Diat discovered. What is exemplary about them is their humility and simplicity. When death approaches, and its hand reveals its strength, they are like happy and naïve children who wait with impatience to open a gift. They have complete confidence in the mercy of God.

In reading A Time To Die, we better understand that death is the most important act of earthly existence. All life is made to explode, to go farther, to merge with Life, with God. (Robert Cardinal Sarah, Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments)

A Time To Die (2019) is translated from the French by Mary Dudro and illustrated by David le Merrer.

About the author: Nicolas Diat is a French journalist and author. He is the co-author with Cardinal Robert Sarah of the internationally best-selling books God or Nothing, The Power of Silence, and The Day Is Now Far Spent.

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