Book Review of Sleepless by Louise Mumford

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This is an excellent, page-turning thriller. The heroine begins by fighting insomnia and ends up fighting to stay alive against a malicious entity that she sees as a “Big Tech” company and that her mother describes as a cult. The author explores the difference between the two and ultimately finds that there is none. Many Big Tech companies are indeed run the same way as religious cults (and God help the customers and shareholders in the long run). Commentators and especially cartoonists were describing Apple, the Corporation and its strangely-loyal customer base, as a religion back in 1986 and it hasn’t altered course much in the following third of a century. Sleepless, however, is timely, because we are now at a fork in the road, where Big Tech’s proprietors either get their way (which will be perfect only in their own minds, while to most of us it will be intolerable) or they finally receive the wages of high-handed arrogance.

Not every large company producing tech products is like this: I can’t remember Joseph Lucas telling me how to live my life the way that Bill Gates, for example frequently does -and considering that Joe was paying me, while it’s me who pays money to Bill Gates, I cannot see from quite where Mr Gates obtains the moral or legal right to have things this way round. 

 Sleepless by Louise Mumford is published on December 11 2020 by HQ and HQ Digital.

Book Review of “The Lamplighters” by Emma Stonex

 

This is a chilling yet satisfying read. One thread of it is a crime thriller, another is about a father’s love for his departed son: this is intertwined with a thread about the resentment another man has about his own upbringing by an ailing and abusive father. Still another is about a writer trying to write the books his father would have liked. (Oh, how I know!) The author has been praised for the way that she shows things from the perspective of the women in the story, but she’s actually doing pretty well with the men and must actually have known some, which isn’t always apparent with every much-lauded female author.

About a lighthouse crew, their wives and girlfriends (John le Carre fans will have momentarily thought something different if they saw the title without the cover illustration), this novel has not only been well-researched, but well understood. The author knows what all her facts mean, and this, again, is not accomplished by all authors.

And for all the author’s story-telling skill and her care for emotional narratives, this is a story about a life-saving device and a triumph of engineering, which also quietly destroys the men who make it work.

“The Lamplighters” is published by Pan Macmillan/Picador on the 4^th of March 2021