Svetlana's Reads and Views

Name of Book: French windows  Author: Antoine Laurain   ISBN: 9781913547752 Publisher: Gallic press  Type of book: France, modern times, artist block, storytelling, secrets, quirkiness, counseling, mysteries  Year it was published: 2024 (2023)  Summary: Bringing his trademark style and charming whimsy, Antoine Laurain’s new novel of intrigue, murder and neighbourly curiosity is sure to delight fans old and new.  Nathalia, a young photographer, has been seeing a therapist. Having accidentally photographed a murder, she finds that she can no longer do her job.  Instead, Doctor Faber suggests that she write about the neighbours she idly observes in the building across the street. But as these written snapshots become increasingly detailed, he starts to wonder how she can possibly know so much about them. With each session, Doctor Faber and his mysterious patient will get closer and closer to the truth. But are the stories Nathalia submit...

Name of Book: Kalmann and the sleeping mountain  Author: Joachim B Schmidt  ISBN: 978-1-916725-00-3 Publisher: Bitter lemon press  Part of a Series: Kalmann series Type of book: Covid, 2020-2021, mysterious death, USA, election, Jan 6 insurrection, FBI, Iceland, possible mysteries,, motives, pollution  Year it was published: 2024 (2023)  Summary: The return of Kalmann, the oddball hero of the  bestselling  novel of the same name. Set first in West Virginia and Washington at the time of the 2021 riots at the US Capitol Building and then in the far north of Iceland where Kalmann, the self-appointed Sheriff of a small fishing village, is faced with murders leading back to US shenanigans in Iceland during the Cold War. It all begins with Kalmann in very hot water. He’s at the FBI Headquarters in Washington, arrested during the Jan 6, 2021 riots at the US Capitol Building. All he wanted was to visit his American father in the US for the Chri...

Name of Book: The INNOCENTS  Author: Bridget Walsh  ISBN: 9781913547523 Publisher: Gallic  Part of a Series: Variety Palace Mysteries ( The TUMBLING GIRL prequel)  Type of book: Victorian England, 1863, 1877, mystery, secrets, tragedy, revenge, policeman turned detective, lower class, proprieties, independence  Year it was published: 2024  Summary: The hotly anticipated follow-up to  T he Tumbling Girl , The Innocents follows Minnie and Albert on a new crime-solving quest in the world of a Victorian music hall. A string of murders has torn through London, throwing together the now notorious Minnie Ward and Albert Easterbrook once again. It seems that the crimes all link back to a tragedy fourteen years ago that left 183 children dead. But given that the incident touched so many people’s lives, everyone is a suspect . . . Characters: Main characters are definitely Minnie and Albert. Minnie is best described as a determined young wo...

Name of Book: Point Zero  Author: Seicho Matsumoto  ISBN: 978-1-913394-93-6 Publisher: Bitter lemon press  Type of book: Japan, 1958, pan pan girls, secrets, prostitutes, train, Kanazawa, mysteries, travel, Japanese coast,  Year it was published: 2024 (1959)  Summary: A  beautifully written mystery novel that takes on the taboo of Japanese prostitution catering to GIs during the American post-war occupation. First published in Japanese in 1959, the novel abandoned the template of closed-room mysteries so popular in pre-war Japan to embrace social criticism. Tokyo 1958, Teiko marries Kenichi Uhara, ten years her senior, an advertising man recommended by an intermediary. After a four-day honeymoon, Kenichi vanishes. Teiko travels to the coastal and snow-bound city of Kanazawa, where Kenichi was last seen, to investigate his disappearance. She discovers he had been a police officer in Tokyo after the war, keeping watch over pan pan girls, Japanese...

Name of Book: A Cut Like wound  Author: Anita Nair  ISBN: 978-1-908524-36-2 Publisher: Bitter lemon press Part of a Series: Inspector Gowda  Type of book: India, 2010s, mystery, transgender, cross dresser, male to female, police work, corruption, former loves, friendships, Bangalore  Year it was published: 2014 (2012 original)  Summary: "Nair writes big, brave descriptions of one brutal murder after the next, relentlessly describing each death even as sub-inspector Santosh loses his breakfast over them."— Time Out It's the first day of Ramadan in heat-soaked Bangalore. A young man begins to dress: makeup, a sari, and expensive pearl earrings. Before the mirror he is transformed into Bhuvana. She is a  hijra , a transgender seeking love in the bazaars of the city. What Bhuvana wants, she nearly gets: a passing man is attracted to this elusive young woman—but someone points out that Bhuvana is no woman. For that, the interloper's throat is cut...

Title of the book: the minds MIRROR; risk and reward in the age of AI Author: Daniela Rus and Gregory Mone Publisher: w.w. Norton  Publishing Date: 2024 ISBN: 978-1-324-07932-3 Summary: An exciting introduction to the true potential of AI from the director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. As advances in artificial intelligence spark fear and confusion, The Mind’s Mirror argues for AI as a force with enormous positive potential for human life—and also major risks with unknown consequences. Computer scientist and AI researcher Daniela Rus offers an expert perspective as a leader in the field who has lived through many technological hype cycles. Rus and science writer Gregory Mone explore what we, as individuals and as a society, must do to mitigate dangerous outcomes and ensure a positive impact for as many people as possible. The result is an accessible and lively exploration of AI’s inner workings, limitations, dangers, and fantastic pos...

Name of Book: The physics of sorrow  Author: Georgi Gospodinov trans Angela Rodel ISBN: 978-1-324-09489-0 Publisher: Liveright  Type of book: history, Bulgaria, maze, 1930s to 2000s, travel, deaths, Theseus and the minotaur myth, secrets, generational trauma, Soviet Union  Year it was published: 2024 (original 2011)  Summary: The “quirky [and] compulsively readable” (New York Times) precursor to the 2023 International Booker Prize–winning Time Shelter. Written with a “formal playfulness [that] suggests Kundera with A.D.D.” (illage Voice), Georgi Gospodinov’s The Physics of Sorrow became an underground cult classic upon its 2012 release. In a radical reimagining of the minotaur myth, a narrator named Georgi constructs the story of his life like a labyrinth, meandering through the past to find the melancholy child at the center of it all. Spanning from antiquity to the Anthropocene, he catalogs curious instances of abandonment, recounts scenes of a turbule...