You Can't Wait Until Your Last Breath

 

Hotel Portofino Volume I by J P O'Connell

Paperback: Hotel Portofino Volume I (2021) is a heady historical drama about a British family who open an upper-class hotel on the magical Italian Riviera during the ‘Roaring 20s’.

Hotel Portofino has been open for only a few weeks, but already the problems are mounting for its owner Bella Ainsworth. Her high-class guests are demanding and hard to please. And she’s being targeted by a scheming and corrupt local politician, who threatens to drag her into the red-hot cauldron of Mussolini’s Italy.

 

To make matters worse, her marriage is in trouble, and her children are still struggling to recover from the repercussions of the Great War. All eyes are on the arrival of a potential love match for her son Lucian, but events don’t go to plan, which will have far reaching consequences for the whole family.

 

Set in the breathtakingly beautiful Italian Riviera, Hotel Portofino Volume I (2021) is a story of personal awakening at a time of global upheaval and of the liberating influence of Italy’s enchanting culture, climate and cuisine on British ‘innocents abroad’, perfect for fans of Downton Abbey and The Crown.

About the author: J P O’Connell has worked as an editor and writer for a variety of newspapers and magazines including Time Out, the Guardian, The Times and the Daily Telegraph. J P has also written several books including a novel, a celebration of letter-writing, a spice encyclopaedia, and most recently an analysis of David Bowie’s favourite books and the ways they influenced his music. J P lives in South London.

Rating: 4/5

Lost Shepherd: How Pope Francis Is Misleading His Flock by Philip F Lawler

Hardback: Infallible, but wrong.

Faithful Catholics are beginning to realize it is not their imagination. Pope Francis has led them on a journey from joy to unease to alarm and even a sense of betrayal. As certain fundamental doctrines of morality come into question, it is impossible to pretend that he represents merely a change of papal style.

Assessing the confusion stirred up in this pontificate, one of America's most astute Vatican observers explains what is at stake, what is not at stake, and how loyal believers should respond.

The Roman pontiff should be a source of unity in the Church, but an autocratic style and a radical agenda have made Francis the most divisive pope in modern times. Although he initially charmed the world with his refreshingly unscripted comments and gestures of humility, it has become clear that this is a pope with "friends" and "enemies." He aggressively promotes the former - in the Vatican, the College of Cardinals and the world's major sees - while marginalising, humiliating and even insulting the latter.

Neglecting the reform of the dysfunctional Vatican bureaucracy and the resolution of the sex-abuse scandals, Francis has devoted himself to opening Communion to the divorced and remarried. Bishops, priests, and laymen dismayed by the resulting confusion in Catholic teaching wonder which doctrine will be up for grabs next.

Lost Shepherd: How Pope Francis Is Misleading His Flock (2018) sounds an alarm: the confusion is dangerous. But loyal Catholics will find this book profoundly encouraging. The Church's teaching is constant. If the bishop of Rome obscures the Faith, the other bishops must clarify it. For all his authority, the pope cannot change doctrine. Papal infallibility is an extremely narrowly drawn doctrine, but Christ's promise "I am with you always" is unconditional.

About the author: Philip F Lawler, the editor of Catholic World News, is one of America's most incisive Catholic journalists and commentators. A graduate of Harvard College, he has been the editor of Crisis magazine, the Boston Pilot, and Catholic World Report. He is the author of Faithful Departed: The Collapse of Boston's Catholic Culture (2008), a penetrating analysis of the scandals that brought the Church to its knees in America, and co-author of A Call to Serve: Pope Francis and the Catholic Future (2013). The father of seven and grandfather of twelve, Lawler lives in central Massachusetts with his wife, Leila, a popular Catholic blogger. 

Portuguese Irregular Verbs (Professor Dr von Igelfeld Series) by Alexander McCall Smith

Paperback: Welcome to the insane and rarified world of Professor Dr Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld of the Institute of Romance Philology. Von Igelfeld is engaged in a never-ending quest to win the respect he feels certain he is due - a quest which has the tendency to go hilariously astray.

In Portuguese Irregular Verbs (2003), Professor Dr von Igelfeld learns to play tennis, and forces a college chum to enter into a duel that results in a nipped nose. He also takes a field trip to Ireland where he becomes acquainted with the rich world of archaic Irishisms, and he develops an aching infatuation with a Dentist fatale. Along the way, he takes two ill-fated Italian sojourns, the first merely uncomfortable, the second definitely dangerous.

Portuguese Irregular Verbs is the first book in the humorous and hugely entertaining Professor von Igelfeld series.

About the author: Alexander McCall Smith, often referred to as ‘Sandy’, is one of the world’s most prolific and best-loved authors. His various series of books have been translated into forty-six languages and become bestsellers throughout the world. These include the highly successful The No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, the popular 44 Scotland Street novels, the Isabel Dalhousie novels, the von Igelfeld series and the new Detective Varg novels. He also writes stand-alone novels, children's fiction and libretti for short operas.

Alexander has received numerous awards for his writing and holds thirteen honorary doctorates from universities in Europe and North America.  He is Professor Emeritus of Medical Law at the University of Edinburgh. In 2007, he received a CBE for services to literature and in 2011 was honoured by the President of Botswana for services through literature to the country.  In 2015, he received the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction and in 2017, The National Arts Club (of America) Medal of Honour for Achievement in Literature.

Rating: 5/5

Nightcrawling by Leila Mottley

Hardback: When there is no choice, all you have left to do is walk.

Kiara Johnson does not know what it is to live as a normal seventeen-year-old. With her mother in a rehab facility and an older brother who devotes his time and money to a recording studio, she fends for herself - and for nine-year-old Trevor, whose own mother is prone to disappearing for days at a time.

As the landlord of their apartment block threatens to raise their rent, Kiara finds herself walking the streets after dark, determined to survive in a world that refuses to protect her. Then one night Kiara is picked up by Officers 601 and 190, and the gruesome deal she is offered in exchange for her freedom lands her at the centre of a media storm.

If she agrees to testify in a grand jury trial, she could help expose the sickening corruption of a police department. But honesty comes at a price - one that could leave her family vulnerable to their retaliation, and endanger everyone she loves.

Nightcrawling is an unforgettable debut novel about young people navigating the darkest corners of an adult world, told with a humanity that is at once agonising and utterly mesmerising.

Nightcrawling (2022) is longlisted for the Booker Prize 2022.

About the author: A New York Times Writer to Watch, Leila Mottley is an author native to Oakland, California, with an interest in reflecting on institutional and individual inequity, liberation, and joy through writing. Her debut novel, Nightcrawling, was selected as an Oprah’s Book Club pick. Leila has performed and run poetry workshops as the 2018 Oakland Youth Poet Laureate and her work has been published in Oprah Daily and The New York Times.

Rating: 2/5

Beethoven: His Spiritual Development by J W N Sullivan

Paperback: Too often the study of great composers is limited to either a musical analysis of their compositions, or biographical scrutiny of their personal lives. Yet, particularly in the case of the Romantic composers, the artistic and personal sides of their lives are not separate entities but instead are intertwined. 

J W N Sullivan understood this clearly, and his book Beethoven: His Spiritual Development (1927, 2020) illustrates this link in the life of Ludwig van Beethoven. 

Fiercely charismatic and passionate, Beethoven is an exemplar of the impulses that drove the Romantic era. Sullivan traces the developments in Beethoven’s personal life, his beliefs, his aspirations, showing how they are manifested in the various stages of his musical career. Through his music, the listener gains a glimpse of Beethoven’s successes and failures, from the triumphant heroism of his third and fourth symphonies to the delicate genius of his later string quartets. 

This classic work is a must-read for devotees of classical music and all those interested in exploring the connection between the art and the artist.

About the author: John William Navin Sullivan (1886–1937) was a popular science writer and literary journalist, and the author of a study of Beethoven. He wrote some of the earliest non-technical accounts of Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, and was known personally to many important writers in London in the 1920s, including Aldous Huxley, John Middleton Murry, Wyndham Lewis, Aleister Crowley and T S Eliot.

Their Own Company

Saint Isaac The Syrian (c613 to c700)

Confronting The Pope Of Suspicion: The Key To Church Reform (Special 2021 Edition) by John Gravino

Paperback: Pope emeritus Benedict was exactly right when he blamed the sexual abuse scandal of the Church on the sexual revolution. Priests and theologians embraced the psychological ideas behind the sexual revolution, but many of these ideas clashed with traditional theology. So theology was thrown out, and a new "I'm okay, you're okay" philosophy was what seminarians were taught in their religion classes. 

These new ideas rejected Christian morality in favour of a relativism that encouraged sexual indulgence and experimentation. Seminarians were no longer taught to be chaste and celibate because it was now believed that these ancient traditions were psychologically damaging. Sexual liberation promised greater happiness, freedom, and mental health according to the new psychology. 

But like the promises of a certain ancient serpent, the promises of humanistic psychology would prove to be empty and false. The new philosophy of freedom that promised so much in terms of personal growth and fulfilment took a very dark turn. And it led to one of the darkest chapters in Church history. 

In Confronting the Pope of Suspicion: The Key to Church Reform (Special 2021 Edition), John Gravino documents how the new ideas of humanistic psychology, far from leading to the promised land of self-actualization, drove humanity instead into the wasteland of criminal sexual abuse.

Is Pope Francis the shepherd to lead us out of the wasteland? 

Hardly. 

For he promotes the very heresies that brought us to this dark valley in the first place.

Confronting the Pope of Suspicion: The Key to Church Reform is dedicated to Our Lady of Paris. To the rebuilding of that glorious monument to her, a monument to the marriage of human soul and Holy Spirit, a monument to the Christian spirit of the medieval age, to the marriage of faith and reason. It is dedicated to the rebuilding of that temple and dedicated to the rebuilding of its spirit in our hearts.

About the author: John Gravino is the author of The Immoral Landscape of the New Atheism, which was the topic of a health and spirituality seminar at Duke Medical Schoo. He continues to explore the intersection of health and religion and the other big questions of life at his website, NewWalden.Org.

Listening In

Nuns: A History Of Convent Life by Silvia Evangelisti

Paperback: Cloistered and inaccessible 'brides of Chirst'?

Or socially engaged women, active in the outside world to a degree impossible for their secular sisters?

Nuns: A History of Convent Life (2007) is about the world of nuns and convent life in the words of the women themselves.

About the author: Silvia Evangelisti is Lecturer in Early Modern History in the School of History at the University of East Anglia, UK. She has published widely on women and gender in both English and Italian. She has co-edited (with Sandra Cavallo) Domestic and Institutional Interiors in Early Modern Europe (Ashgate 2009), A Cultural History of Childhood and the Family in the Renaissance (Berg 2010); (with Fancisco Chacon) Identidad y comunidad en el mundo Iberico (Universitat de Valencia 2013). 

Her main research interests so far have been focusing on female monastic institutions in early modern Italy and Europe, women's writings (particularly religious writings), and how religious women responded to normative practices implemented by the Catholic church and state, in the decades following the Council of Trent. She has also done research on women's writings in Italy and, more recently, Spain.

Dead And Buried (True Crime) by Corey Mitchell

Paperback: On the night of 12 November 1998, in San Luis Obispo, California, attractive blonde college student Rachel Newhouse was walking home alone when suddenly a stranger appeared in front of her. His visage was a skull-face: a grotesque Halloween mask. Beating her unconscious with her fists, the attacker threw her into his pick-up truck, took her to his secluded canyon cabin and raped her, still wearing the mask. Rachel Newhouse was hog-tied and left to strangle to death.

On 11 March 1999, in the same town, a stalker who had been shadowing Aundria Crawford, 20, broke into her apartment, pummelled her into insensibility, and carried her away in his truck to his canyon lair. There, she was raped, tortured, and murdered.

As Californians reacted with panic and outrage to the two disappearances, parole officer avid Zaragoza paid a routine visit to one of his charges, Rex Allan Krebs, 33, a violent serial rapist who had served only ten years of a twenty-year sentence in Soledad State Prison. After sending Krebs back to jail for violating his parole, Zaragoza discovered Aundria Crawford's eight ball keychain on the premises. An intensive search of the canyon discovered the two victims' bodies buried in shallow graves on the paroled rapist's property. Confessing, alcoholic sex-and-slaughter addict Krebs conceded, "If I am not a monster, then what am I?" A jury answered his question in May 2001, sentencing him to death by lethal injection.

Dead and Buried (2003) gives a shocking account of rape, torture, and murder on the California coast and includes the killer's confession. Dead and Buried can be purchased used on Amazon (UK and US).

About the author: Corey Mitchell wrote several bestselling true crime books including Hollywood Death Scenes, Dead and Buried, Evil Eyes, Savage Son, Strangler, Murdered Innocence, and Pure Murder. He was also the founder of the #1 true crime blog, In Cold Blog, and a contributing editor for MetalSucks, the #1 website for heavy metal news. He co-founded Austin’s Housecore Horror Film Festival and co-authored Philip H Anselmo’s Mouth for War: Pantera and Beyond.

Bibliomaniac: An Obsessive's Tour Of The Bookshops Of Britain by Robin Ince

Hardback: Why play to 12,000 people when you can play to 12? 

In Autumn 2021, Robin Ince’s stadium tour with Professor Brian Cox was postponed due to the pandemic. 

Rather than do nothing, he decided instead to go on a tour of over a hundred bookshops in the UK, from Wigtown to Penzance; from Swansea to Margate.

Packed with witty anecdotes and tall tales, Bibliomaniac: An Obsessive's Tour Of The Bookshops Of Britain (2022) takes the reader on a journey across Britain as Robin explores his lifelong love of bookshops and books – and also tries to find out just why he can never have enough of them. It is the story of an addiction and a romance, and also of an occasional points failure just outside Oxenholme.

Bibliomaniac: An Obsessive's Tour Of The Bookshops Of Britain is now available in all bookshops and online selling platforms.

About the author: Robin Ince is co-presenter of the award-winning BBC Radio 4 show, The Infinite Monkey Cage. He has won the Time Out Outstanding Achievement in Comedy, was nominated for a British Comedy Award for Best Live show, and has won three Chortle Awards. He has toured his stand up across the world from Oslo to LA to Sydney, both solo and with his radio double act partner, Professor Brian Cox. 

He is the radio critic for the Big Issue and writes a monthly column about science for Focus Magazine. He appears regularly on both television and radio. He has two top-ten iTunes podcast series to his name.

Sparring Partners by John Grisham

Hardback: #1 New York Times bestselling author John Grisham is the acknowledged master of the legal thriller. In his first collection of novellas, law is a common thread, but America’s favourite storyteller has several surprises in store in his latest book, Sparring Partners (2022).

“Homecoming” takes us back to Ford County, the fictional setting of many of John Grisham’s unforgettable stories. Jake Brigance is back, but he is not in the courtroom. He is called upon to help an old friend, Mack Stafford, a former lawyer in Clanton, who three years earlier became a local legend when he stole money from his clients, divorced his wife, filed for bankruptcy, and left his family in the middle of the night, never to be heard from again - until now. Now Mack is back, and he’s leaning on his old pals, Jake and Harry Rex, to help him return. His homecoming does not go as planned.

In “Strawberry Moon,” we meet Cody Wallace, a young death row inmate only three hours away from execution. His lawyers can’t save him, the courts slam the door, and the governor says no to a last-minute request for clemency. As the clock winds down, Cody has one final request. 

The “Sparring Partners” are the Malloy brothers, Kirk and Rusty, two successful young lawyers who inherited a once prosperous firm when its founder, their father, was sent to prison. Kirk and Rusty loathe each other, and speak to each other only when necessary. As the firm disintegrates, the resulting fiasco falls into the lap of Diantha Bradshaw, the only person the partners trust. Can she save the Malloys, or does she take a stand for the first time in her career and try to save herself?

By turns suspenseful, hilarious, powerful, and moving, these are three of the greatest stories John Grisham has ever told.

About the author: John Grisham is the author of forty-seven consecutive #1 bestsellers, which have been translated into nearly fifty languages. His recent books include The Judge’s List, Sooley, and his third Jake Brigance novel, A Time for Mercy, which is being developed by HBO as a limited series.

Grisham is a two-time winner of the Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction and was honoured with the Library of Congress Creative Achievement Award for Fiction.

When he is not writing, Grisham serves on the board of directors of the Innocence Project and of Centurion Ministries, two national organizations dedicated to exonerating those who have been wrongfully convicted. Much of his fiction explores deep-seated problems in our criminal justice system.

John lives on a farm in central Virginia.

Rating: 5/5