Sometimes a book hits at the right time. The Good Immigrant, edited by Nikesh Shukla and crowdfunded on the publishing platform Unbound, is one of those books. I’m heartbroken over the result of the EU referendum, saddened and angered by the surge in openly racist attacks, and all round worried about the future of the…
Category: Non-fiction
Book review: Leave Your Mark by Aliza Licht
Aliza Licht’s Leave Your Mark promises to help give you tips to land your dream job, kill it in your career, and rock social media. Those are some big claims, and while I don’t think reading this book is going to suddenly set you on the path to awesomeness, I think it’ll fire you up…
Book review: The Last Act of Love by Cathy Rentzenbrink
I very rarely cry at books. I’ll get sad, my heart will hurt, my eyes might tear up, but it takes a lot for those tears to actually spill over. So when I tell you that when I finished the last page of Cathy Rentzenbrink’s The Last Act of Love to realise I had tears…
Book review: Life Moves Pretty Fast by Hadley Freeman
I’ve learnt a lot of lessons from 1980s films. From The Breakfast Club I learnt that detention could be cool. From The Princess Bride I learnt that fairytale princesses can be tough AND feminine. From The Goonies I learnt that with a good group of friends you can do anything. From Dirty Dancing I learnt…
Review: Hand to Mouth by Linda Tirado
It’s easy to judge people less well off than yourself, to comment on why they might be on benefits, or to wonder why they spend money on cigarettes when they can barely feed themselves. Our television screens are full of programmes about people living on the breadline, but many of them (the programmes) present a…
Review: Land of Second Chances by Tim Lewis
Cycling has been undergoing a resurgence in the last few years, thanks to Chris Hoy, Bradley Wiggins et al, but my faith in the worldwide cycling community is still pretty shaken from Lance Armstrong’s “misdemeanours”, shall we say. Or, you know, his drug-taking, bullying ways. But Land of Second Chances: The Impossible Rise of Rwanda’s…
Review: The Vogue Factor by Kirstie Clements
Kirstie Clements is probably not a name people cite when asked to list present and former Vogue editors – those honours go to Anna Wintour, Alexandra Schulman and Carine Roitfeld. But for 13 years Clements was the editor-in-chief of Vogue Australia. Granted, it’s not the brand’s biggest or most important title, but Vogue is Vogue,…
Review: My Salinger Year by Joanna Rakoff
Your first ‘proper’ job was probably a challenge, but I doubt you had the added awkwardness of working for the agency that represented one of the most famous writers in the world, and one of the most reclusive. Joanna Rakoff did, and in My Salinger Year she tells the story of her year working at…
Review: I Am Malala by Malala Yousafzai with Christina Lamb
I’m a 20-something woman (it’s rude to ask exactly how old I am) but I’m not afraid to admit that one of my few heroines in life (apart from my mum) is 16-year-old Malala Yousafzai. We all know her name now – since being shot by the Taliban Yousafzai has been hailed by the western…
Sarah Shaffi 