In brief: My Favourite Mistake; Homeseeking; The Meteorites: Encounters With Outer Space and Deep Time
Anna Walsh swaps her high-flying PR job in New York for a small Irish coastal town to help her friend Brigit launch a luxury wellness centre against local opposition. There, she faces ghosts from her past: ex-flame Joey and estranged best friend Jacqui. Keyes's brilliance is in tackling thorny issues – the invisibility of fortysomething women, perimenopause, bereavement, female desire – with empathy and wit, in engaging prose. This latest novel is another reminder why she is the doyenne of modern fiction.
Karissa ChenSceptre, £18.99, pp512
Chen's debut novel tells the story of two families against the backdrop of Chinese history over six decades. Haiwen and Suchi meet as schoolfriends in Shanghai and fall in love in their teens. They are separated in 1947, when Haiwen joins the Nationalist army. Political events send them further afield – Suchi to Hong Kong, Haiwen to Taiwan – until their paths cross in Los Angeles in 2008. Chen skilfully interweaves the personal and the political to produce a kaleidoscopic and affecting work.
Helen GordonProfile, £20, pp288
Gordon's highly readable book is an engrossing blend of the scientific and the human. As she visits meteorite landing sites across the globe, the author meets people who have an intimate connection to these billion-year-old objects: those who study them, collect them (at vast expense), have found them, or are simply fascinated by them. We learn about the history of meteorite study and the clues revealed about deep time.
To order My Favourite Mistake, Homeseeking or The Meteorites go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Time Out
an hour ago
- Time Out
‘Big' Sam Young and partner Grace Chen have opened a Chinese restaurant in Potts Point
If you're not following chef-owner-restaurateur-lobster-enthusiast 'Big' Sam Young on Instagram, what have you been doing? The co-owner of Castlecrag's luxe bistro S'more – known for its top-quality produce, bougie offerings and truffle-on-everything energy – posts non-stop pictures of delicious food and private dinners at multi-million-dollar homes. He's also prolific when it comes to being a hustler, which comes from his lived experience of moving to Australia from Hong Kong at 13 – only to have everything, including his passport and money, stolen days later. Being an immigrant and working hard has shaped his ethos. Now, he and partner Grace Chen have opened their second venue – a Chinese restaurant called Young's Palace – dedicated to that journey. You'll see the neon red lights in the excellent former home of Raja and Teddy on Kellett Street in Potts Point. And make sure you're ready to eat. A lot. 'We've been sold this outdated image of immigrant-run restaurants as cheap, fast and scrappy. That was survival. But now, we want to tell a new story – one that honours hard work but also values quality, creativity and pride,' Sam says, who has also spent time in the kitchens of Queen Chow and Lotus. Young's Palace is also inspired by the couple's travels – particularly the Chinatowns they've explored in cities like Paris, Amsterdam, New York, Vancouver and Sydney. 'Grace and I always find ourselves hunting down a plate of fried rice or chow mein, no matter where we are in the world. Young's Palace is about recreating that joy – classic Chinese dishes that are simple, comforting and utterly craveable,' says Sam. Kick things off with veggie spring rolls inspired by the ones found in Grace's aunt's Chinese restaurant in Amsterdam; a fresh and cooling salad of potato, enoki, chilli and black vinegar; and golden and crunchy salt and pepper squid. Other menu highlights include plump scallops doused in a ginger, shallot and soy dressing; kung pao chicken; and stir fried egg noodles with beansprouts. And because this is BSY we're talking about, there are more baller menu items in the pipeline (lobster noodles, that's you). 'There's no reason a bowl of noodles can't be treated with the same respect and price tag as a plate of pasta. We're not here to follow rules. We're here to create something we're proud of,' adds Sam. And after one visit at Young's Palace, we reckon there's lots to be proud of. Address: Kellett St, Potts Point NSW 2011
North Wales Chronicle
3 hours ago
- North Wales Chronicle
‘They are turning him into a hero': Kneecap solidarity gig held in Dublin
Kneecap flags and logos hung from the windows in Connolly Books, which dubs itself Ireland's oldest radical bookshop, in solidarity with O hAnnaidh, Kneecap, and the people of Palestine. Pro-Palestine supporters criticised the decision by British authorities to bring a charge against the performer instead of focusing on the Israeli government's actions against the Palestinian people. O hAnnaidh, 27, who performs under the stage name Mo Chara, is accused of displaying a flag in support of Hezbollah at a gig in November last year. Hundreds of Kneecap supporters greeted O hAnnaidh as he arrived at Westminster Magistrates' Court in London on Wednesday morning, alongside fellow Kneecap rappers Naoise O Caireallain and JJ O Dochartaigh. During the hearing, his defence team argued the case should be thrown out, citing a technical error in the way the charge against him was brought. The case has been adjourned until September 26, when the judge will rule on whether he has the jurisdiction to try the case. At the protest session at Connolly Books on Wednesday afternoon, several artists played Irish traditional music in solidarity with the rappers and Palestine. Musician Ru O'Shea, who performed at the demonstration, said charging O hAnnaidh had turned him into 'a hero'. 'I think it's been a huge misstep by the powers that be to go after him in the first place,' he told the PA news agency. 'I reckon that they don't have a thing on him, and I think they are turning him into a hero, and I think we need a hero. 'What's happening in Palestine right now, it's gotten to such an extreme that it's waking a lot of people up, including the British who might not have ever seen it otherwise and stayed in that bubble forever.' O'Shea's friend John Feehan said: 'I think people are maybe starting to look up a little bit in Britain, and I think things like what's happening with Kneecap is a catalyst for people to be like 'Oh, wait a minute, what's actually happening here?'. So I hope there's momentum, but I really don't know.' Dubliner Aoife Powell, 19, said she came out to protest because she is 'angry' at the decision to charge an artist rather than focus on what is happening to the people of Gaza. 'I'm here because it just worries me that the fact that governments are focused on artists expressing themselves rather than the actual problem, which is obviously the genocide in Gaza,' she told PA. 'It's a little bit disheartening to see there's so much pressure being put on these artists to stop saying what they truly think and to stop standing on the right side of history. 'I feel like it's a distraction from what's actually happening. 'When a government tries to silence people, they should learn that they can never silence people. I feel like the public would get more angry at that.' Sean O'Grady is from Coleraine in Northern Ireland but has lived in Dublin for almost 70 years. 'I'm delighted with them (Kneecap), that they've done what they're doing, and they're getting plenty of publicity. 'The British government are crazy, I mean, what are they at? 'They're supplying a lot of the bombs, and a lot of the arms and ammunition to Israel to do what they're doing. So they should be ashamed of themselves instead of bringing in these people (to court) for stupid reasons. 'It's getting good publicity over there for the cause of the Palestinians.' Dubliner Dermot Nolan said he attended his first Palestine protest in 1967, and while he remembers horrific events such as the Vietnam War, the scale of death and injuries in Gaza is the worst he has ever lived through. 'I'm here because it's important to for two reasons – first of all, to show our intolerance of the genocide and slaughter that's being carried out by the US, Nato and Israel. 'The second reason is the question of civil rights. We're protesting about the indictment of a member of the Irish group Kneecap. 'It is a sign of creeping authoritarianism which is happening in all the western countries and most clearly in Britain.'
Scotsman
4 hours ago
- Scotsman
Edinburgh Fringe music review: Waves of Tradition: A New Horizon in Scottish-Chinese Music
Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... MUSIC Waves of Tradition: A New Horizon in Scottish-Chinese Music ★★★★☆ theSpace @ Surgeons' Hall (Venue 53) until 23 August This modest show – scarcely 45 minutes in duration – with a rather grandiose subtitle packs quite a musical punch. It features Wan Xing, a virtuoso of the guzheng (an imposing-looking Chinese plucked zither) with Glasgow-based Scottish harp and percussion duo Eleanor Dunsdon and Gregor Black. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad On stage, both harp and zither are instruments of presence, but it was the latter that opened the show with flourishes of quavering, sliding notes, joined by the ringing strings of the harp and Black's propulsive but not overbearing percussion, for a number called Road to the Orient. Wan Xing, Eleanor Dunsdon and Gregor Black of Waves of Tradition: A New Horizon in Scottish-Chinese Music | Contributed The following piece, The Way We Dance, began with stealthy harp over brushed percussion before the distinctively clamorous voice of the guzheng came in and things developed into a fairly frenetic Chinese-Irish mash-up. They moved on to Gaelic waulking songs, conflating them with Chinese women's work songs, zither trilling over harp and bodhran, while the pairing of a Shetland reel with a tune from south-west China prompted some dramatic interplay between all three, harp ringing out the melody, zither deploying staccato bass strings then cascades of notes. To stay up to date, why not sign up to our weekly Arts and Culture newsletter? So you don't miss a thing, it will be sent sent daily during August. Before we knew where we were, they were on their final number, Ode to Friendship, which wrapped up Auld Lang Syne with the popular Chinese melody Mo Li Hua – 'Jasmine Flower', the zither sounding out the old Burnsian favourite, Dunsdon answering back on harp, before they were off into another Shetland reel, closing their brief show with multicultural gusto.
