adrift

The Irish writer Cathy Sweeney’s short fiction has been widely praised, her prose likened to that of Samuel Beckett and Lydia Davis. Her blistering debut novel, Breakdown, displays an impressive economy of language as the middle-aged narrator leaves her husband and two children asleep in their suburban Dublin home. We learn their names but she remains anonymous, defined by her roles: mother and wife.The woman’s unplanned escape from domesticity takes her on a train and ferry from Rosslare to Fishguard in Wales. Over the…

The refugees fleeing the turmoil at the end of the Vietnam war became known as “boat people”. Cecile Pin’s evocative debut, longlisted for the Women’s prize, was inspired by her mother’s experiences while emigrating to France, but she relocates her story to Thatcher’s Britain.Fifteen-year-old Anh and her younger brothers, Thanh and Minh, are the first of their family to attempt the hazardous journey to Hong Kong. If they didn’t drown, they could be attacked by pirates. Their parents and younger siblings perish at sea.…

Breadcrumb Trail Links News Culture Canada Books Instead of despairing about tuned-out 18-year-olds, we should be firing up the interest of eight-year-olds A small-scale survey of Grade 6 and 7 students attending a range of Toronto schools found Grade Six students couldn’t say what country Nelson Mandela came from. Photo by Trevor Samson/AFP via Getty Images Reviews and recommendations are unbiased and products are independently selected. Postmedia may earn an affiliate commission from…

In 1988, the award-winning French writer Annie Ernaux went on a junket to Soviet Russia. On the last day of the tour, in Leningrad, she began an affair with a married Russian diplomat from the Soviet embassy in France. He was 35; she was 48. When they returned to Paris they kept it up. Getting Lost (now published in translation) is the unaltered, original journal that Ernaux wrote during their 18 months together.This was a period of her life when she admits to being lethargic from sex and thus useless for work (“Intense…

Amit Chaudhuri’s eighth novel reminded me of 1993’s Afternoon Raag, featuring an alienated English literature student at Oxford, or 2014’s Odysseus Abroad, about Ananda, a poet adrift in London. Sojourn has the same impressionistic tone – everything feels dreamlike, illusory and yet attentively described. There’s a similar meandering and languid style that likes to survey minor day-to-day details, mingling and suffusing them with the wider significances of history. This time we are in Berlin, though, and our unnamed…

via Nordisk Film There’s no better way for a film or its creators to set out their stall than to go ahead and set a myriad of impressive records, something that 2012’s epic historical throwback Kon-Tiki managed to accomplish before, during, and after its release. The most expensive production in the history of Norwegian cinema at the time, the sweeping tale of the legendary 1947 expedition became the country’s top-grossing release of 2012, and landed nominations for Best Foreign Language Film at both the…

Brex’s decision to largely exit the SMB market has caught its customers, market observers and even its competitors by surprise. And while the affected customers scramble to move their assets off Brex’s platform, its rivals are taking aim at the fintech and the market it’s leaving behind. The decacorn’s decision puts a potentially material customer cohort into play, meaning that Brex’s rivals are likely gearing up to try and attract the accounts left adrift. TechCrunch heard from a number of Brex rivals on the matter,…