July 28, 2024 · 11:53 am The longlist for this year’s Booker Prize is due to be announced on Tuesday 30th July. I’ve had mixed results over the last decade or so in my attempts to predict some likely contenders alongside my personal preferences and other possibilities, but it’s always fun to guess anyway. …
Books I Read in February 2024
March 18, 2023 · 11:52 am Islands of Abandonment by Cal Flyn was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction and won the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award in 2021 – two of my favourite literary prizes. Flyn explores 13 places where humans used to live but have now left for…
Books I Read in March 2024
April 8, 2023 · 9:23 am Lessons by Ian McEwan spans the life of Roland Baines, born shortly after the Second World War. Taking in several major world crises from the Cuban Missile Crisis to the Chernobyl disaster to the COVID-19 pandemic as well as intimate domestic events, ‘Lessons’ is a sprawling epic and easily McEwan’s…
Tata Harrier Owner Attacked by Goons, Dashcam Captures Entire Incident
Indian roads can be quite perilous as this case surfaces where goons attack a Tata Harrier owner. Such shocking incidents are unfortunately prevalent in our country. That makes driving here extremely risky and dangerous. Road rage is a huge issue not just in India, but across the globe. But I have been reporting innumerable road…
Books I Read in April 2024
May 18, 2023 · 6:49 pm Red Sauce Brown Sauce by Felicity Cloake is a travel memoir which documents the Guardian food writer’s “British breakfast odyssey” cycling around the UK in search of all the components of breakfast food from sausages in Glamorgan to potato bread in Northern Ireland to jam in Tiptree. Hampered by…
Books I Read in May 2023
June 17, 2023 · 12:05 pm Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld is one of my most anticipated books of 2023. Sally is a comedy writer for the late-night sketch show The Night Owls – a fictionalised version of Saturday Night Live – where she meets Noah Brewster, a pop star since the early 2000s who…
Tata CURVV 25 Features Leaked
The electric iteration of the Tata CURVV will launch on August 7 with the petrol and diesel variants to follow in the following weeks. Some top features in the upcoming Tata CURVV have been leaked online. CURVV will be the first mass-market coupe SUV at a relatively affordable price point in our market. The Indian…
Books I Read in June 2024
July 15, 2023 · 9:13 am I went to the Hay Festival for a couple of days at the end of May and picked up Regenesis by George Monbiot from the signed copies table in the Festival Bookshop (climate and food seemed to be big topics at the Festival this year). The first half of…
The Booker Prize 2024: Predictions, Possibilities and Preferences
July 22, 2023 · 1:19 pm In my Booker Prize blog post last year, I noted that my longlist predictions lists in 2020 and 2021 included the eventual winners in those years: Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart and The Promise by Damon Galgut. I posed the question of whether I could make it three years in a row. The answer…
The Booker Prize 2024 Longlist
August 7, 2023 · 4:52 pm The Booker Prize longlist was announced on Tuesday. The 13 titles are: A Spell of Good Things by Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀Old God’s Time by Sebastian BarryStudy for Obedience by Sarah BernsteinIf I Survive You by Jonathan EscofferyHow to Build a Boat by Elaine FeeneyThis Other Eden by Paul HardingPearl by…
Books I Read in July 2024
August 19, 2023 · 9:49 am Stasiland by Anna Funder won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction in 2004 (now known as the Baillie Gifford Prize) and chronicles the lives of several people who lived in the German Democratic Republic, also known as East Germany, during the Cold War. Funder, an Australian journalist, was working…
Books I Read in August 2024
September 9, 2023 · 12:28 pm The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell is a fictionalised account of the marriage of 15-year-old Lucrezia di Cosima de’Medici to Alfonso, Duke of Ferrera in sixteenth century Florence, merging two powerful family dynasties. Lucrezia would be dead barely a year later, allegedly of “putrid fever” but rumours persist that…