My wife and I used this book for our weekly devotions over an extended year. We found it both challenging and at the same time reassuring. Each time it led is into an extended time of prayer for friends, family, neighbours and the world in general. Each chapter starts with several Bible passages, which I…
Jesus told His followers: The world hates you. I’ve been thinking about that. Is it true? Surely, not everyone hates us. Recently, I have observed two different streams within western society – the ‘Lorders and Hoarders’ and the ‘Carers and Sharers’.
Gilead – Deep but a bit tedious This is a very unusual book in that it doesn’t follow any recognised structure. This makes sense when one realises it’s an old preacher man jotting down his reminiscences about significant events and minor incidents, while trying to impart wisdom to his young son in a letter he intends him…
They invited me to their house-warming party, though I’d never met them. They aren’t even married. Loud rock music greeted me before I entered the garden. Other guests clustered around beer cans. The hostess was smoking, her bare arms boasting brazen tattoos. She introduced me to her partner – equally tattooed, equally smoking. In his…
This book is captivating from the start and very well written. We feel we get to know unfathomable Lila in spite of her contradictory character and also Lenù, the narrator. We feel their strife, their longings, their first attempts at love, the inevitable rivalries. But there are too many characters to keep track of and…
This very sensitively written book brilliantly captures the character and emotional struggles of the main players through a series of parallel cameos. Through the eyes of blind but bright Marie-Laure, we feel the desperate plight of the Parisians who flee from the advancing Germans, their struggle to survive in occupied Saint-Malo, their fifth column acts…
A very personal, sensitively written account of a naive young Englishman’s encounters with ordinary people as he spends a year walking the length of Spain. We gain a vivid insight into the harsh realities of life in Spain in the 30s, as the author faces poor but kind natives, coupled with blatant immorality, seething unrest…
This book is amazing in terms of its complexity and vivid action. The main characters are very well developed and the action scenes are captivating, even if somewhat incredible at times. As the first of a series, it builds up a huge cast of players in multiple locations, the relationships between which become quite a…
How is it that a story, in which hardly anything happens except for Harold nursing his blisters, can be so captivating, so thought-provoking, so moving? Rachel Joyce has an unusual knack for interweaving past incidents and memories into the current narrative, while cunningly maintaining our suspense by concealing what really happened twenty years earlier until…
Each morning, I read the Daily Moravian Bible Texts – first in German (Losungen), then in English. Both today’s Old Testament and New Testament readings refer (in German) to the Nations (Völker). This made me stop and think. Tut kund seine Herrlichkeit unter den Nationen, unter allen Völkern seine Wunder. Psalm 96,3 Declare his glory among…
Set in Napoleon’s heyday, this is a seemingly endless series of battles – often recounted in gory detail – interspersed with reckless carousing. Peter and Raoul always come out victorious and, if they do happen to get injured, they’re well again in no time. Bonaparte and his troops manage with next to no sleep, advancing from…
This is a complex adventure of political and religious rivalry, set in several nations of a fantasy world where supernatural powers intervene in human encounters. Spiritual bondage and fervour, cruel power struggles, brutal treatment of slaves and blow-for-blow accounts of battle to the death have the reader gasping with apprehension or seething with fury. But…