Saturday, 30 May 2026

The Left-Behind Child by Romalyn Ante


About the book: The Left-Behind Child is a debut novel exploring the cost of migration on children left behind in the Philippines making it a landmark moment for Filipino representation in British literature. It draws on a story familiar to millions of Filipino families: a mother forced to leave her family and the child who is left to carry the weight of that absence.

Lipa, Philippines, 2001. Neneng is 11 when her mother, Rosa, leaves to work as a nurse overseas: abandoning Neneng to care for a distant father, unsettled relatives and rebellious siblings. Their home shatters, and Neneng finds herself facing womanhood alone. 

From that point on, she vows never to become a nurse, and never to trust her mother again.

But Neneng is more like the strong-minded Rosa than she realises. As Neneng fights to survive and build a new life, the darknesses in the family’s past come to light, and the reasons why Rosa needed to leave become clearer. 

When a twist of fate brings a new mother figure into her orbit, Neneng will come to understand why the profession of nursing matters so deeply to Rosa and – when crisis strikes – what ‘care’ means to Neneng.

The Left-Behind Child will be published on 13 August 2026.

About the author: Romalyn Ante FRSL is a Filipino-British poet, essayist, and editor. She was born in Lipa, Philippines, and was 16 years old when her mother – a nurse in the NHS – brought the family to live in the UK. Her debut poetry collection, Antiemetic for Homesickness, was shortlisted for the Jhalak Prize, longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize in 2020 and named among the best poetry books of the year by the Irish Times and Observer. Her second collection, AGIMAT was published in 2024. She holds a Fellowship from the Royal Society of Literautre. She lives in the West Midlands where until recently she worked as a full-time NHS nurse and psychotherapist, specialising in the mental healthcare of young people. She also co-founded Harana Poetry, a literary journal for poets who write in English as a second or parallel language. 

Friday, 29 May 2026

Logging Off: The Human Cost of Our Digital World by Adele Zeynep Walton


About the book: We live in a digital world. In the 30 years since we have been online, we have created connections, crossed boundaries and discovered new worlds. We have done things generations before us could never have imagined.

But at what cost?

Growing up as a Gen Z, Adele spent endless hours as a teenager on social media, shaping her view of herself and the world. As a freelance journalist, she has used her social media platforms and digital technology to develop a career in an unfamiliar and competitive industry, benefitting from the opportunities that these spaces can offer. But after losing her sister to online harms, she realised that our current digital world is failing us.

We are an anxious and discontent generation. Our lived realities and our online vulnerabilities are inextricably linked, and this means big business for social media tycoons who want us to stay scrolling at any cost. As Big Tech barons make their billions, capitalising on our emotions, instincts, insecurities and desires, everyday people are losing out.

From workers being fired by algorithms, to online forums dedicated to revenge porn and encouraging suicide, to censorship of marginalised voices and the turbulent impacts of AI, the newly released paperback edition of Logging Off (2026) reveals that our digital world is currently fuelling crises that only empathy, agency and humanity can resolve. This book is a call for a radical reclamation of our digital world, for a more humane future that empowers us all.

About the author: Adele Zeynep Walton is an award-winning British-Turkish journalist reporting on the human impacts of digital technology, social media and AI and the author of Logging Off: The Human Cost of Our Digital World (2025). She is also the co-founder of Logging Off Club, a global movement promoting connection, curiosity and wellness through their phone-free events.

Having channelled a personal loss into campaigning for a safe digital future, Adele is an online safety campaigner with Families and Survivors to Prevent Online Suicide Harm. She is also a member of the Online Safety Act Network, a Founding Member of EU youth movement Ctrl + Alt + Reclaim. She regularly works with parliamentarians and policy-makers, bereaved families and parents to campaign for tech accountability and suicide prevention. 

Known for her bold interventions, such as protesting outside Meta HQ and confronting a tech billionaire at Davos, Adele is a frontline activist at the defining issue of our times. An extremely credible voice, she's been interviewed by Radio 4, The Times, BBC News, Channel 4, 5Live, CBC, Al Jazeera, LBC, Sky News, The Guardian and is regularly invited to speak at events including The NY Times Debate on AI in Davos, Lush's Safer Socials Summit and the Women of The Future Summit. She was shortlisted for the One Young World Journalist of The Year Award in 2025 and the recipient of the Tenacious Journalist Award in 2026. 

Alight With Hidden Glory by Erik Varden


About the book: "The richness of [these] reflections will continue for a long time to be for us a source of blessing, of grace, of encounter with Jesus Christ." - Pope Leo XIV

Alight with Hidden Glory: The 2026 Papal Retreat (2026) brings together the reflections preached by Bishop Erik Varden to Pope Leo XIV and the Roman Curia at the 2026 Lent retreat.

Informed by Scripture and the liturgy, illumined by the insights of Bernard of Clairvaux, a man who helped shape medieval Europe, the book addresses questions of timeless relevance: 

What is the meaning of freedom? 

How can we speak well about truth? 

How do we respond when high ideals are compromised by human betrayal?

Erik Varden reveals Lent not as deprivation but as a clarifying pilgrimage toward Christ's 'hidden glory'. This contemplative yet urgent work invites readers to walk the exodus path with renewed courage, vigilance, and hope.

About the author: Erik Varden is a Trappist monk and bishop. Norwegian by birth, he studied at Cambridge and in Rome. Having served as abbot of Mount Saint Bernard Abbey, he was appointed to the ancient see of Trondheim in 2019. He is currently president of the Nordic Bishops’ Conference. His books, which include Chastity: Reconciliation of the Senses and The Shattering of Loneliness: On Christian Remembrance, have been translated into about twenty languages.

Sin


The Widow Clicquot by Tilar J Mazzeo


About the book: The Widow Cliquot: The Story Of A Champagne Empire And The Woman Who Ruled It (2008) is the story of the visionary young widow who built a champagne empire, showed the world how to live with style, and emerged a legend.

Veuve Clicquot champagne epitomizes glamour, style, and luxury. But who was this young widow - the Veuve Clicquot - whose champagne sparkled at the courts of France, Britain, and Russia, and how did she rise to celebrity and fortune?

In The Widow Clicquot, Tilar J Mazzeo brings to life - for the first time - the fascinating woman behind the iconic yellow label: Barbe-Nicole Clicquot Ponsardin. A young witness to the dramatic events of the French Revolution and a new widow during the chaotic years of the Napoleonic Wars, Barbe-Nicole defied convention by assuming - after her husband's death - the reins of the fledgling wine business they had nurtured. Steering the company through dizzying political and financial reversals, she became one of the world's first great businesswomen and one of the richest women of her time.

Although the Widow Clicquot is still a legend in her native France, her story has never been told in all its richness - until this book. Painstakingly researched and elegantly written, The Widow Clicquot provides a glimpse into the life of a woman who arranged clandestine and perilous champagne deliveries to Russia one day and entertained Napoléon and Joséphine Bonaparte on another. She was a daring and determined entrepreneur, a bold risk taker, and an audacious and intelligent woman who took control of her own destiny when fate left her on the brink of financial ruin. 

Her legacy lives on today, not simply through the famous product that still bears her name, but now through Mazzeo's finely crafted book. As much a fascinating journey through the process of making this temperamental wine as a biography of a uniquely tempered woman, The Widow Clicquot is utterly intoxicating.

About the author: Tilar J Mazzeo is an American-Canadian cultural historian, biographer, and author of the author of more than a half-dozen award-winning biographies and works of cultural history including the New York Times bestseller The Widow Clicquot . She is also an internationally recognized wine writer and a wine maker and a member of the International Food, Wine, and Travel Writers Association. The Widow Cliquot won the Gourmand Award for the Best Work of Wine Writing in the United States in 2009 and the basis for the 2023 major motion picture of the same name, directed by Thomas Napper. 

She began her career as a tenured professor, holding positions at universities in the United States and Canada for more than twenty years. Dr Mazzeo left the academy in 2021 to pursue full-time writing. She lives on Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada.

Be Ready When the Luck Happens by Ina Garten


About the book: Here, for the first time, Ina Garten presents an intimate, entertaining, and inspiring account of her remarkable journey in her long-awaited memoir, Be Ready When the Luck Happens (2024).

Ina’s gift is to make everything look easy, yet all her accomplishments have been the result of hard work, audacious choices, and exquisite attention to detail. In her unmistakable voice (no one tells a story like Ina), she brings her past and her process to life in a high-spirited and no-holds-barred memoir that chronicles decades of personal challenges, adventures (and misadventures) and unexpected career twists, all delivered with her signature combination of playfulness and purpose.

From a difficult childhood to meeting and marrying the love of her life, Jeffrey, while still in college, from a boring bureaucratic job in Washington, DC to answering an ad for a specialty food store in the Hamptons, from the owner of one Barefoot Contessa shop to author of bestselling cookbooks and celebrated television host, Ina has blazed her own trail and, in the meantime, taught millions of people how to cook and entertain. 

Now, she invites them to come closer to experience her story in vivid detail and to share the important life lessons she learned along the way: do what you love because you’ll be really good at it, swing for the fences, and always Be Ready When the Luck Happens.

About the author: Ina Garten is a globally celebrated American culinary icon, a New York Times bestselling cookbook author, the host of Be My Guest on Discovery+, and host of Barefoot Contessa on Food Network, for which she has won five Emmy Awards and a James Beard Award. She lives in East Hampton, New York, with her husband, Jeffrey. Her 14th cookbook, Simply Ina, will be available in stores in October 2026. 

Thursday, 28 May 2026

Brother Deo Gratias: St Felix of Cantalice by Lady Amabel Kerr


About the book: St Felix of Cantalice was a Capuchin Franciscan in the 16th century. Placed among great personages such as St Philip Neri, St Charles Borromeo, and others, St Felix lived a life of poverty and fidelity to the rule of St Francis. 

Born in 1515, he lived as a farm worker until he was 28, when he became a Capuchin. He not only begged alms, but gladly distributed them to the poor. It was said that his alms sack was as bottomless as his heart. He walked bare-foot through the streets of Rome, and his response to anyone that gave him alms was "Deo Gratias," or "Thank God." Thus he earned his name. St Felix also became known as a great healer.

Amabel Kerr (author of the Life of Cardinal Baronius and other books) writes a deep, spiritual account of the holy Capuchin which moves the reader toward the love of God page by page.

You will discover:

- St Felix's deep prayer life and love of Christ and His Virgin Mother;

- St Felix's continual service to the poor, though owning nothing himself;

- How the saint reminded Church dignitaries and the wealthy of their obligations to Christ and the Church;

- The deep interior life of the saint.

Originally published as A Son of St Francis: St Felix of Cantalice (1900), the book is retitled Brother Deo Gratias: St Felix of Cantalice (2019) by Mediatrix Press and is a must have for anyone that loves Franciscan spirituality as well as history.

About the author: Lady Amabel Frederica Henrietta Kerr (1846-1906) was a British aristocrat and writer of religious literature, biographies, children's literature, and novels. She was also a translator from German to English, and a magazine editor. She was described in the University of Ottawa Review as "a rare example of strenuous devotion to the service of God and His Church, rendered all the more forcible by reason of the obscurity in which she endeavored to shroud her work". 

Kerr was the author of a number of books, among them: Unravelled Convictions, being the reasons for her conversion; Before Our Lord Came, an Old Testament history for little children; A Mixed Marriage, a novel; Life of Joan of Arc, and Life of Blessed Sebastian Valfre. She died in October 1906 (Source: Wikipedia).

Saturday, 23 May 2026

Maria Sanctissima by The Very Reverend James Keller


About the book: Ave Maria! 

Maria Sanctissima is an inspiring book filled with 150 short stories of spiritual and temporal favours granted by Our Lady that serve to increase one's love for, devotion to, and confidence in the Blessed Virgin Mary. 

Maria Sanctissma (2015) is a reprint of the 1899 edition.

About the author: Father Keller was born 27 June 1900 in Oakland, California. He studied in public schools and for seven years at St Patrick’s Seminary, and joined Maryknoll in September 1921. His last year of theology was spent at Catholic University as a deacon where he obtained the MA (1924-25). He was a member of the Maryknoll Class of 1925 but was ordained separately on 15 August 1925 by Archbishop Hanna of San Francisco. He was the first Maryknoll priest from the West Coast. Instead of being sent overseas as he would have preferred, Father Keller spent the next 20 years in promotion work in California, the Midwest, and New York, acquainting people in the US with the work of Maryknoll. He stressed that his hearers could be “Christophers”, Christ-bearers, in their own lives by showing personal responsibility based on their faith, in all areas of public and private life. By 1945, the “Christopher idea” led him to launch what has become a world-wide movement, “The Christophers”.

The Christophers was the great enthusiasm of the last three decades of Father Keller’s life, and he retained his interest to the end, insofar as he was able in the final difficult years. He launched Christopher News Notes, radio and television programs and a daily newspaper column, to bring the message of constructive individual action to the widest audience possible. His book, “You Can Change the World”, published in 1948, was a best seller both in hardbound and paperback editions. Because of declining health, Father Keller was forced to retire as Director of The Christophers in 1969; Father Richard Armstrong, MM, succeeded him as Director. 

In 1973, Father Keller wrote: “Putting up with the weaknesses of old age is a novelty for me. But it is a good way to get ready for heaven.” Father Keller continued, however, his daily work at the Christopher offices in Manhattan just as long as he was able. In January 1976, Father Keller received the Benemerenti Medal from Pope Paul VI, in recognition of his service, during 50 years as a priest, to The Christophers and to the Maryknoll Fathers.

Christopher radio and television programs now reach a weekly audience of over 5 million, and Christopher News Notes have over a million readers around the world. Father Keller lived to see the Christopher motto carried to the farthest ends of the earth: “Better to light one candle than to curse the darkness.” The title of his autobiography (1963) is To Light A Candle.

Father Keller’s life and work these last decades were very much linked with New York City and the Archdiocese of New York. Father James G Keller died in New York on 7 February 1977.

Friday, 22 May 2026

Unreasonable Women by Justine van der Leun


About the book: Unreasonable Women: Three Stories of Violence, Imprisonment, and Extraordinary Survival (2026) is a groundbreaking account of how the legal system punishes those it purports to protect, told through the stories of three unforgettable women

When award-winning journalist Justine van der Leun began researching the issue of criminalized survival, she was astonished to see women being imprisoned for protecting themselves against abuse. This sparked an intensive, years-long investigation into how survivors are targeted for prosecution, leading her to collect more than a thousand personal accounts from women’s prisons across America.

In Unreasonable Women, van der Leun tells the propulsive, shocking, and intimate stories of three extraordinary women who, finding themselves caught in the direst circumstances, had to kill to survive: 

1) Tanisha is a spirited Michigan mother determined to help authorities solve a cold case, whatever the consequences. 

2) Jema is a softhearted Missouri factory worker struggling to keep her family together while navigating a dangerous relationship. 

3) TC is a bold Californian trying to escape generations of trauma and a toxic family environment. In each case, the women's childhood abuse was replicated in adulthood—until they were forced to make an impossible choice.

A work of literary reportage that reads like a crime novel, Unreasonable Women is the result of seven years of unprecedented research and on-the-ground reporting in US prisons. It is the story of women and violence in America, a wake-up call about a broken system, and the moving narrative of three women who find hope and humanity in the unlikeliest of places.

Unreasonable Women: Three Stories of Violence, Imprisonment, and Extraordinary Survival will be on sale on 2 June 2026.

About the author: Justine van der Leun is a journalist, the author of several books, including We Are Not Such Things, and the host of the podcast Believe Her. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, New York Magazine, Harper’s, and The Guardian. She has received fellowships from New America, the Emerson Collective, and PEN America, among others. She lives in New York.

Wednesday, 20 May 2026

Unmasking Samantha Cookes: The Many Lives Of A Serial Fraudster by Alan Bradley


About the book: Unmasking Samantha Cookes (21 May 2026) is the chilling true story of a master manipulator who spent more than a decade reinventing herself across the UK and Ireland with an arsenal of false identities. 

Once known to millions as ‘Carrie Jade Williams’, she slipped seamlessly from au pair and nanny to therapist, psychologist, terminally ill author and online ‘sickfluencer’. 

Each persona carefully crafted. 

Each lie more audacious than the last. 

And each one designed to gain trust - and exploit it.

What started with the tragic death of a baby soon became a trail of fraud, deception and shattered lives. Every reinvention brought new victims, until her most audacious lie, a fabricated terminal illness, triggered a TikTok reckoning.

Drawing on exclusive evidence and firsthand accounts, Unmasking Samantha Cookes: The Many Lives of a Serial Fraudster pulls back the curtain on a mastermind of deception hiding in plain sight, and reveals just how easily trust can be weaponised, with an unsettling question at its core: how well do we really know the people we trust with our children?

Unmasking Samantha Cookes: The Many Lives Of A Serial Fraudster will be released on 21 May 2026.

About the author: Alan Bradley is an award-winning Irish director, actor and writer working across documentary, television drama and ads. He won the Young Director Award for Documentary at Cannes 2024 and is the youngest director to hold a prime-time RTÉ One documentary slot. Named a Broadcast Hotshot 2025, he has directed critically acclaimed films including Patrick: A Young Traveller Lost, Anorexia: My Family and Me and the hit RTÉ/BBC series Bad Nanny.

Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ


About the book: Winner of the International Booker Prize 2026 on 19 May 2026, Taiwan Travelogue (2024) is a bittersweet story of love between two women, nested in an artful exploration of language, history and power.

May 1938. The young novelist Aoyama Chizuko has sailed from her home in Nagasaki, Japan, and arrived in Taiwan. She’s been invited there by the Japanese government ruling the island, though she has no interest in their official banquets or imperialist agenda. Instead, Chizuko longs to experience real island life and to taste as much of its authentic cuisine as her famously monstrous appetite can bear.

Soon a Taiwanese woman - who is younger even than she is, and who shares the characters of her name - is hired as her interpreter and makes her dreams come true. The charming, erudite, meticulous Chizuru arranges Chizuko’s travels all over the Land of the South and also proves to be an exceptional cook.

Over scenic train rides and braised pork rice, lively banter and winter melon tea, Chizuko grows infatuated with her companion and intent on drawing her closer. But something causes Chizuru to keep her distance. It is only after a heartbreaking separation that Chizuko begins to grasp what the ‘something’ is.

Disguised as a translation of a rediscovered text by a Japanese writer, this novel was a sensation on its first publication in Mandarin Chinese in 2020 and won Taiwan’s highest literary honour, the Golden Tripod Award. 

Taiwan Travelogue (2024) unearths lost colonial histories and deftly reveals how power dynamics inflect our most intimate relationships. 

Taiwan Travelogue is translated from the Mandarin by Lin King. It is the first book originally written in Mandarin to win the International Booker Prize, as well as the first by a Taiwanese author. The award, which is presented in the United Kingdom, comes with £50,000, about US$67,000, split equally between author and translator.

About the author: Winner of the International Booker Prize 2026 for Taiwan Travelogue, Yáng Shuāng-zǐ is a Taiwanese writer of fiction, essays, manga and video game scripts, and literary criticism

Taiwan Travelogue, her first book to be translated into English, won the National Book Award for Literature in Translation in 2024 and Asia Society’s inaugural Baifang Schell Book Prize. It has been published or is forthcoming in numerous languages including Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Ukrainian, Italian, German, Dutch, Danish, and Greek.

About the translator: Lin King is a writer and translator based in Taipei and New York. King received the 2024 National Book Award in Translated Literature for her translation of Taiwan Travelogue by Yang Shuang-zi, which was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize; she has also been awarded the 2024 Baifang Schell Book Prize from the Asia Society and the 2025 First Translation Prize from the American Literary Translators Association. King speaks English, Mandarin and Japanese. She holds a BA from Princeton University and an MFA from Columbia University. Her fiction has been published in One Story, Boston Review, Joyland, and Best Debut Short Stories. Her debut novel, Weeb, is forthcoming in 2027.

Rating: 5/5

The Family Man (True Crime) by James Lasdun


About the book:
 What drives a loving family man with everything to lose to become a killer?

The Family Man: Blood and Betrayal in the House of Murdaugh (2026) is an immersive account of a seemingly loving father’s transformation into a "family annihilator."

In March 2023, Alex Murdaugh was found guilty of murdering his wife and younger son at Moselle, their home in South Carolina’s Lowcountry. By then, the story had become headline news across the country, with its revelations of corruption in high places, massive fraud, opioid abuse, fake suicides, suspicious accidents, and the generational recklessness of the wealthy legal dynasty at its center. 

Having covered the case for The New Yorker, where his article became the magazine’s most read story of the year, the acclaimed novelist James Lasdun brings his long-standing interest in the darker drives of the human psyche to an investigation into the serial embezzlements, fatal boat crash, and other events leading up to the slaughter at Moselle. 

“Justice may have been served,” Lasdun writes in the preface to The Family Man, "but the human element of the story didn’t seem to add up."

Having traveled extensively in the Lowcountry, Lasdun draws on original interviews (including with Murdaugh’s notorious "Cousin Eddie"), transcripts of phone calls Murdaugh made from prison, the literature of criminal psychology, and the murder trial itself. 

Deeply researched, sharply written, and with the page-turning intensity of a Southern gothic novel, The Family Man constructs a masterful portrait of Murdaugh and the mind-boggling crimes that wreaked havoc on his community.

About the author: James Lasdun was born in London and lives in Brooklyn. His novels, memoir, poetry, and short story collections have won many awards, and his essays have appeared in the New York Times, the London Review of Books, and The New Yorker, among other publications.

Tuesday, 19 May 2026

Saint John Berchmans: The Story Of The Saint Of Innocence by James J Daly SJ


About the book: "This little book (1921, 2015) is an attempt at a study and interpretation of a lovable young saint, Saint John Berchmans (1599-1621), a Belgian Jesuit scholastic, who is recommended as a patron of altar servers, Jesuit scholastics, and students, and helper in solving the difficult problem of maintaining agreeable and efficient relations without cooling in faith and reverence, of making the love of God the dominant motive of conduct without sacrificing any of the courtesies or failing in human sympathies. 

I have depended for most of the facts in my sketch upon the excellent and exhaustive biography of the Saint by the Rev Francis Goldie, SJ. The English Jesuit drew a large part of his material from official processes and enquiries, and from the contemporary The Life of Blessed John Berchmans, of the Society of Jesus (1866) by Father Cepari, SJ, the Saint's superior and confessor. 

As far as facts go, I can, to use a quaint phrase, be tracked in their snow. In the interpretation of facts, I have sometimes allowed myself latitude. In the following brief sketch of the life of Saint John Berchmans, there will not be room for an elaborate description of the rich historical setting which Europe, and especially the Brabant and the Rome of that time afforded. To tell the truth, there is not much call for it. 

The interest of John's life lay in its contact with the big affairs of another world than this. The Saint touched human life, not at its points of earthly splendour and importance, but at its less obtrusive and less impressive surfaces of homely and domestic rounds of routine. 

Like most of us, he was forced by circumstances into a pack-horse gait. His days, like ours, were much of a kind, singularly beggarly in their opportunities for spectacular heroism. And yet, he achieved heroism. With the scanty materials supplied by the stern realism of an ordinary every-day life, he succeeded in kindling a splendour which has burnt its way brightly through the mists of time, and, after three centuries, remains a fixed and steady glow in the night that has fallen upon the deeds of by-gone generations." 

- James Jeremiah Daly, SJ (author)

St John Berchmans was declared Blessed in 1865, and canonized in 1888. Statues frequently depict him with hands clasped, holding his crucifix, his book of rules, and his Rosary.

About the author: The Reverend James Jeremiah Daly (1872-1953), professor emeritus of English at the University of Detroit and the author of several religious works, died Monday in Mount Carmel Hospital, Detroit. His age was 81. Professor Daly had been a Jesuit for sixty-three years and a teacher for fifty-six years, the last twenty-two of them at the University of Detroit. 

Among his literary works were “Life of St John Berchmans," "A Christian Ascetic," "The Road to Peace," "The Jesuit in Focus" and a volume of verse, “Boscobel and Other Rimes." He was literary editor of America from 1909 to 1911, assistant editor of The Queen's Work from 1920 to 1924 and literary editor of Thought from 1924 to 1939. In addition, he wrote book reviews for The New York Times. Born in Chicago, he studied at St Ignatius College and entered the Jesuit novitiate in 1890. He was ordained at St Louis in 1905 and took his Master of Arts degree at St Louis University in the next year. In one of his books, he discussed the spirit of the Society of Jesus as revealed in its constitution, rules and spiritual exercises.

Monday, 18 May 2026

The Two FBIs by Nicole Parker


About the book: Two of Nicole Parker’s colleagues were murdered while executing a search warrant on a dangerous suspect with no SWAT support. Meanwhile, the FBI sent SWAT for those charged with 2 January 2021 (United States Capitol attack) misdemeanours.

Special Agent Parker witnessed an internal war between what she refers to as the two FBIs - “FBI 1” and “FBI 2.” While FBI 1 was comprised of honest, unbiased employees dedicated to keeping all Americans safe, FBI 2 used their law enforcement power to push their personal political and social agendas. Lowering hiring standards, unequally enforcing laws, and aggressively going after perceived political or social enemies became commonplace, and it seemed unstoppable.

Through the lens of her life story, Parker chronicles the takeover of the bureau. The Two FBIs tells how Parker left her job in finance to serve her country. Her faith carried her through as she stared evil in the face on a daily basis while investigating the most heinous crimes.

Over time, FBI 2 seemed to be winning the battles, but Parker was adamant it would not win the war. After over a dozen years of service, she chose to leave the Bureau. FBI 1 warriors believe drastic changes and accountability are necessary in order to return the FBI to its greatness and restore the trust of the American people.

Filled with electrifying stories of violent crime takedowns and heart-wrenchingly tragic investigations, as well as shocking revelations about the administrative state shackling patriotic heroes, The Two FBIs: The Bravery and Betrayal I Saw in My Time at the Bureau (2025) by a former FBI Special Agent will provide you with a new appreciation for what it takes to keep Americans secure - and how real the efforts are to cripple the brave souls who preserve our security.

About the author: Nicole Parker is a contributor for Fox News Media who provides law enforcement analysis. She joined the FBI as a Special Agent in 2010 serving in FBI’s Miami Field Office through 2022. Initially, she specialized in investigating white collar financial crimes then focused on violent crimes including: active shooters; crimes on the high-seas; bank robberies; murders for hire; suspicious deaths; sexual assaults; extortions; and more. Notably, Parker was the only woman on the FBI’s top-ranked Violent Crime Fugitive Task Force and received three Outstanding Law Enforcement Officer Awards from the US Attorney’s office in the Southern District of Florida and the Medal of Excellence from the FBI Director.