All Aboard! Little Red Train

Benedict Blathwayt

Random House Group

Be transported to a place like no other: a tiny, man-made island in the bay of Nagasaki, for two hundred years the sole gateway between Japan and the West. Here, in the dying days of the 18th-century, a young Dutch clerk arrives to make his fortune. Instead he loses his heart. Step onto the streets of Dejima and mingle with scheming traders, spies, interpreters, servants and concubines as two cultures converge. In a tale of integrity and corruption, passion and power, the key is control - of riches and minds, and over death itself.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet: Longlisted for the Booker Prize

Literature & Fiction

MITCHELL, DAVID

British & Irish

Chapter 1Storehouse of TearsThe lines are straight and swift between the stars.The night is not the cradle that they cry,The criers, undulating the deep-oceaned phrase.The lines are much too dark and much too sharp.The mind herein attains simplicity.There is no moon, on single, silvered leaf.The body is no body to be seenBut is an eye that studies its black lid.—From Wallace Stevens, “Stars at Tallapoosa”The story Mateo told could only be held in my mind if abstracted, if I flattened the mental image like a collapsible gurney and slotted it in among all the others I had seen. It helped me to not acknowledge how long he had been suspended by his seatbelt in the flipped car, to not consider the feeling of helplessness as his family died around him, considering instead only an instant of time, a still.Or instead, simplifying Mateo himself, I could reduce his dimensionality, the space he occupied—in my own mind compressing flat his human texture into a simple plane. Then I could bind his story together with others like it I had heard or seen—together they became like a stack of old newspapers, all borne together without individual features, fused in a rain of tears. In this way suffering could be summarized as a tractable single object of ten or ten thousand lives. I don’t know why I can’t cry, he began, and when it was all told and bundled, it was not more, or less, than any other ending of a human world.There is no formal protocol in medical training to protect a doctor’s exposed heart in these particularly devastating moments. Physicians and nurses, warfighters, crisis workers—they all come to learn defenses on their own, in order to live among the extremes of human suffering. It is not just the magnitude of the pain but also its incessance—the unrelenting descent into the abyss, day after day, year after year—that without some safeguard would be unsustainable.Our natural impulse is to connect deeply and broadly with someone in a state of personal loss, to try sensing inside our own minds a full and complex representation of the other, to fully understand what the tragedy means. But in the extreme context of horrific suffering, it can be helpful to instead narrow our perspective to preserve empathy, finding a point to experience within the broader tapestry of the patient’s life, focusing on one spot of interlocking threads creating local shape and color It is important to know that the full perspective is available, but feeling fully does not make sense of —and depths of emotion do not seem to help us with precision tasks in the agonal moment, whether performing an artful lumbar puncture of the spinal column or a difficult psychiatric interview to elicit inarticulable feelings. Our perspective widens when it can, sometimes without warning—on the drive home, or among our children with a sudden sob. Until then, out of view but always accessible are the trajectories of the patient’s threads with all the scope of life and its dreams, from their anchors and origins, through the journeys and relationships that came together in that instant of catastrophe and strife.Each tragedy is still felt intensely, and each suffering human being is held in the heart carefully no matter how many more come over the years—every stunned and bereft father after a car accident, every mother struggling to form words as she hears her child’s brain cancer diagnosis. And care is needed; when the cases accumulated are still few, early in the life or training of a doctor (and sometimes still later), a single experience can storm and overwhelm the inner self, in the part of us that sees and feels representations of human beings, textured images of valued others, positioned carefully like tapestries in the innermost fire-lit halls, the hidden spaces of the self. In the keep, if we were castles.I should have been better prepared, but there had been no warning that the keep was vulnerable. Until meeting Mateo (in my role as the on-call senior psychiatry resident

Projections

Karl Deisseroth

Blood, Bones and ButterGabrielle Hamilton's childhood home in rural Pennsylvania, with her four siblings and her parents who threw grand parties (hundreds of guests came to enjoy the pigeon pies and baby lambs roasted over wood fires), was thrilling , magnificent. But when her parents divorced and the family scattered, Gabrielle was left, aged thirteen, almost alone in the empty house for the summer. Forced to fend for herself, she drew on the hours spent watching her adored mother at the stove, and got a kitchen job in the nearest town. The riotous years that followed were full of hard graft, hard living and many far-flung kitchens. In New York, and with rent to pay, Gabrielle spent years working in soulless catering factories, then found herself graduating with a creative writing degree, opening a restaurant and entering into an unlikely and flawed marriage with an Italian man. Every summer they take their two boys to the family home, and her beloved mother-in-law, in Puglia. Gabrielle gives us the stories - gritty and intimate - of the people, places and meals that have shaped her journey. Unflinchingly honest, moving, funny, sharply crafted - "Blood, Bones & Butter" is a rollicking, passionate story about food, purpose and family. Not only is Gabrielle Hamilton one of America's most recognised chefs, she is also set to make her mark as an uncompromising literary talent.

Blood, Bones and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef

HAMILTON, GABRIELLE

Idiot Girls' Action-adventure Club - True Tales From A Magnificent And Clumsy Life

Laurie Notaro

Biographies & Memoirs

Jane's Fighting Aircraft of World War II by Bill Gunston (2001)

Jane's Fighting Aircraft of World War II

History

Bill Gunston ( forward )

Military

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