Great New Reads, November 2021
What's Hot on Your Bookshelf, November 2021
‘MALIBU RISING’ BY TAYLOR JENKINS REID
Malibu: August 1983. It's the day of Nina Riva's annual end-of-summer party, and anticipation is at a fever pitch. Everyone wants to be around the famous Rivas: Nina, the talented surfer and supermodel; brothers Jay and Hud, one a championship surfer, the other a renowned photographer; and their adored baby sister, Kit. Together the siblings are a source of fascination in Malibu and the world over--especially as the offspring of the legendary singer Mick Riva.
The only person not looking forward to the party of the year is Nina herself, who never wanted to be the center of attention, and who has also just been very publicly abandoned by her pro tennis player husband. Oh, and maybe Hud--because it is long past time for him to confess something to the brother from whom he's been inseparable since birth.
Jay, on the other hand, is counting the minutes until nightfall, when the girl he can't stop thinking about promised she'll be there.
And Kit has a couple secrets of her own--including a guest she invited without consulting anyone.
By midnight the party will be completely out of control. By morning, the Riva mansion will have gone up in flames. But before that first spark in the early hours before dawn, the alcohol will flow, the music will play, and the loves and secrets that shaped this family's generations will all come rising to the surface.
Malibu Rising is a story about one unforgettable night in the life of a family: the night they each have to choose what they will keep from the people who made them . . . and what they will leave behind.
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‘THE EVERYDAY HERO MANIFESTO’ BY ROBIN SHARMA
For over twenty-five years, leadership legend and personal-mastery path-blazer Robin Sharma has mentored billionaires, business titans, professional-sports superstars and entertainment royalty via a revolutionary methodology that led them to accomplish rare-air results. Now, in this groundbreaking book, Sharma makes his transformational system available to anyone who is ready for undefeatable positivity, monumental productivity, deep spiritual freedom and a life of helping others.
In The Everyday Hero Manifesto you will discover:
- The hidden habits used by many of the world's most creative and successful people to realize their visionary ambitions
- Original techniques to turn fear into fuel, problems into power and past troubles into triumphs
- A breakthrough blueprint to battle-proof yourself against distraction and procrastination so that you produce magic that dominates your domain
- Pioneering insights on adopting world-class routines that will lead you to achieve superhuman fitness and become the most disciplined person you know
- Unusual wisdom to operate with far more simplicity, beauty and peace
Part memoir of a life richly lived, part instruction manual for virtuoso-grade performance, and part handbook for spiritual freedom in an age of high-velocity change, The Everyday Hero Manifesto will completely transform your life. Forever.
‘WHAT IT FEELS LIKE FOR A GIRL’ BY PARIS LEES
Thirteen-year-old Byron needs to get away, and doesn't care how. Sick of being beaten up by lads for "talkin' like a poof" after school. Sick of dad - the weightlifting, womanising Gaz - and Mam, who pissed off to Turkey like Shirley Valentine. Sick of all the people in Hucknall who shuffle about like the living dead, going on about kitchens they're too skint to do up and marriages they're too scared to leave.
It's a new millennium, Madonna's 'Music' is top of the charts and there's a whole world to explore - and Byron's happy to beg, steal and skank onto a rollercoaster ride of hedonism. Life explodes like a rush of ecstasy when Byron escapes into Nottingham's kinetic underworld and discovers the East Midlands' premier podium-dancer-cum-hellraiser, the mesmerising Lady Die. But when the comedown finally kicks in, Byron arrives at a shocking encounter that will change life forever.
Bold, poignant and riotously funny, What It Feels Like For a Girl is the unique, hotly-anticipated and addictively-readable debut from one of Britain's most exciting young writers.
‘THE TRANSGENDER ISSUE’ BY SHON FAYE
Trans people in Britain today have become a culture war 'issue'. Despite making up less than one per cent of the country's population, they are the subjects of a toxic and increasingly polarized 'debate' which generates reliable controversy for newspapers and talk shows. This media frenzy conceals a simple fact: that we are having the wrong conversation, a conversation in which trans people themselves are reduced to a talking point and denied a meaningful voice.
In this powerful new book, Shon Faye reclaims the idea of the 'transgender issue' to uncover the reality of what it means to be trans in a transphobic society. In doing so, she provides a compelling, wide-ranging analysis of trans lives from youth to old age, exploring work, family, housing, healthcare, the prison system and trans participation in the LGBTQ+ and feminist communities, in contemporary Britain and beyond.
The Transgender Issue is a landmark work that signals the beginning of a new, healthier conversation about trans life. It is a manifesto for change, and a call for justice and solidarity between all marginalized people and minorities. Trans liberation, as Faye sees it, goes to the root of what our society is and what it could be; it offers the possibility of a more just, free and joyful world for all of us.
‘CULT FOLLOWING’ BY Bexy Cameron
Bexy Cameron was in her late twenties when the dark events of her past finally caught up with her.
Bexy was born into the Children of God, one of the world's most notorious cults. She was 9 years old when she experienced her first exorcism, held in a secret commune deep in the British countryside. At 10, she was placed on Silence Restriction, forced to be silent for a whole year. Even from an early age, she knew what was happening was not right. At the age of 15, she escaped, leaving behind her parents and 11 siblings.
Haunted by her past, Bexy set off on a road trip across America, embedding herself in the underbelly of religious cults, living with children who, like her, are born into the worlds their parents and cult leaders have created for them.
It is a journey of meth cooks, monks, Jesus Freaks, soap-making Armageddonists, surveillance vans and finally, confronting her parents and herself.
‘SEVEN DAYS IN JUNE’ BY TIA WILLIAMS
Eva Mercy is a single mother and bestselling erotica writer who is feeling pressed from all sides. Shane Hall is a reclusive, enigmatic, award-winning novelist, who, to everyone's surprise, shows up unexpectedly in New York.
When Shane and Eva meet at a literary event, sparks fly, raising not only their buried traumas, but also the eyebrows of the Black literati. What no one knows is that fifteen years earlier, teenage Eva and Shane spent one crazy, torrid week madly in love. While they may be pretending not to know each other, they can't deny their chemistry - or the fact that they've been secretly writing to each other in their books through the years.
Over the next seven days, amidst a steamy Brooklyn summer, Eva and Shane reconnect - but Eva's wary of the man who broke her heart, and wants him out of the city so her life can return to normal. Before Shane disappears though, she needs a few questions answered…
‘THE HOUSE OF GUCCI’ BY SARA GAY FORDEN
The rollercoaster fortunes of the Gucci family are chronicled in a fascinating biography of Maurizio Gucci that focuses on his murder and the sensational 1995 trial that followed.