Elizabeth Little's smart, speedy thriller Dear Daughter [Amazon.com; Amazon.co.uk] looks set to be this year's Gone Girl. Ten years ago, the LA party girl and heiress Janie Jenkins was incarcerated for her mother's murder – her daughter's name scrawled in blood at the scene of the crime, the dead woman's dying message to the world.
Her first-degree murder charge overturned as part of a larger investigation into the LA crime lab’s mismanagement of evidence, Janie leaves prison determined to discover the truth of what happened the night her mother was killed. Dodging the media, who are salaciously tracking her every move in a vigilante manhunt of their own, Janie follows the clues to a small town in South Dakota’s Black Hills – somewhere she’d have sworn her cultured socialite and philanthropist mother would never have been seen dead, but, it turns out, Janie’s mother was a woman with secrets.
With elements of both Paris Hilton and Amanda Knox, Janie's a sassy, modern heroine, and even though Dear Daughter is Little's first novel, it's grippingly fast-paced and page-turningly addictive.
For something more off the beaten track, Romain Puértolas's The Extraordinary Journey of the Fakir Who Got Trapped in an Ikea Wardrobe [Amazon.com; Amazon.co.uk] is a modern picaresque with a big heart. A bestseller in Puértolas's native France, the author apparently composed the novel on his mobile phone while working as a border guard; and his fiction is clearly directly inspired by his work.
From India to France, to the UK, to Spain, then Italy, Libya and back to France again, Ajatashatru’s trip to his nearest branch of the popular Swedish furniture store to buy a new bed of nails is only the beginning of his adventures.
It’s eminently readable, despite a plot so fanciful that to call it unbelievable is generous, but within this whimsy Puértolas has packed some striking home truths about the reality of the lives of those forced to seek illegal entry into what they regard as Europe’s “good countries”.
Listening to the five Sudanese men tell him how they’ve come to be smuggling themselves into the UK hidden in the back of the truck where he meets them, Ajatashatru has an epiphany, realising that “there existed a much darker and more deceitful world than the one he had seen for himself” – and this is quite a revelation, considering the harshness of his own upbringing, not to mention the fact that his job as fakir is basically that of con artist.
Predictability then kicks in when, armed with this new insight, he attempts to make a difference to those who have shown him kindness in the course of his journey. The plot is definitely on the flimsy side, but it’s hard to be too critical of a story with so much heart.
The Table of Less Valued Knights [Amazon.com; Amazon.co.uk], Marie Phillips's Arthurian burlesque, is equally full of humanitarian goodwill (alongside the necessary beheadings and sword fights, of course). Continuing in the vein of her first novel – Gods Behaving Badly, in which the Greek gods were transported to contemporary London with varying degrees of comic effect – this time round her inspiration is Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, and a motley cast of characters certainly not included in the original, from an undersized giant, a 12-year-old crone, a cross-dressing Queen and Sir Humphrey du Val from Camelot's Table of Less Valued Knights: a broken-legged piece of furniture, rectangular in shape as compared to the more famous Round Table, and home to "the elderly, the infirm, the cowardly, the incompetent and the disgraced" of King Arthur's knights.
Phillips's comedy is mostly to be found in transposing features of the contemporary onto these days of yore – a blacksmith's loyalty card scheme: "Buy nine suits of armour and the tenth is free"; a locum Lady of the Lake; and damsels seducing knights – but the dialogue is funny and the story entertainingly rollicking. Think Shrek with bad language, randy knights and a bit of blood and gore.
If you're looking for more than just a tickle to your funny bone though, both Maria Semple's This One is Mine [Amazon.com; Amazon.co.uk] and Nina Stibbe's Man at the Helm [Amazon.com; Amazon.co.uk] should be high on your reading list. Semple – a television writer who's worked on the likes of Saturday Night Live and Arrested Development – shot to fame with her novel Where'd You Go, Bernadette when it made last year's Women's Prize for Fiction shortlist, and This One Is Mine, a tale of haves and have nots in contemporary Los Angeles, combines the same winning mixture of contemporary social comedy and genuine heartfelt emotion.
Semple’s heroine is Violet Parry, wife of a successful band manager, mother to a gorgeous toddler and owner of a beautiful house in the Hollywood Hills, who finds herself inextricably drawn to an ex-junkie, jobbing musician with questionable personal hygiene; the fallout has serious consequences for her family, most notably her self-obsessed sister-in-law Sally.
Perhaps not quite as laugh out loud as Bernadette, but that makes sense given This One Is Mine was actually written first (and this is the first time it's been published in paperback in the United Kingdom), all the same Semple's characters are densely three-dimensional, her plot believably contrived and the story infused with a warm wit and wisdom throughout.
Stibbe's Man at the Helm is another follow-up, from an author who's previously proved herself something of a comic genius. Stibbe's first book, Love, Nina – letters she wrote home to her sister while Stibbe was a nanny in London in the early 1980s – was without doubt the funniest thing I'd read in years. Man at the Helm may be a novel, but anyone who's read Love, Nina will recognise Stibbe's uniquely comical voice, even if it is filtered through her nine-year-old narrator Lizzie Vogel.
It’s set in the early 1970s, when Lizzie, her brother, sister and their mother find themselves negotiating the treacherous seas of a village full of narrow-minded neighbours who don’t take kindly to the arrival of a down-on-her-luck divorcee and her now fatherless children. “If a lone female is left, especially if divorced, without a man at the helm, all the friends and family and acquaintances run away,” Lizzie’s 11-year-old sister explains; it’s only once “a replacement man at the helm is in place, the woman is accepted again”.
Thus the "man list" is drawn up and their often ill-judged attempts to secure their mother a new husband begin. There are some brilliant episodes including Lizzie trialling a feather haircut for her mother – "I glanced at my sister. I saw a look of deep concern on her face, as if watching a disaster in slow motion and powerless to stop" – and a "semi-insane" pony getting trapped on the first floor of their house, but, as in Love, Nina, Stibbe's also able to inject an unaffected, spirited humour into the everyday and this runs throughout the book.
The acclaimed novelist Sarah Waters's new novel The Paying Guests [Amazon.com; Amazon.co.uk] also concerns itself with the sphere of women without men, albeit in an earlier era – 1922 in post-war London. Waters turns her attention to the world of surplus women and the newly straitened conditions of the genteel upper middle classes. In order to maintain their large villa in South London's Camberwell, the widow Mrs Wray and her unmarried daughter Frances are forced to take in lodgers – Lilian and Leonard Barber, a young married couple not quite in tone with the rest of the street but the Wrays need the money and anyway, times are changing.
Initially picturing them as nothing more than "two great waddling shillings", Frances little realises quite how drastically Lilian's arrival will throw her life into disarray. Waters, of course, is already firmly established as a master storyteller, breathing life into previously dusty, overlooked corners of history, never losing the nuances of the period she's writing about but at the same time ensuring that her stories and characters feel bang up to date. She is on top form with The Paying Guests, too: her characters are so full-bodied as to leap off the page; her plot thrillingly readable; and, as Frances and Lilian find themselves caught up in a catastrophe of their own making but powerless to stop events hurtling out of their control, her creation and then control of tension is peerless.
Lucy Scholes is a regular contributor to The Review.
thereview@thenational.ae
Company profile
Name: Infinite8
Based: Dubai
Launch year: 2017
Number of employees: 90
Sector: Online gaming industry
Funding: $1.2m from a UAE angel investor
UAE currency: the story behind the money in your pockets
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- Olympic-size swimming pool with a split bulkhead for multi-use configurations, including water polo and 50m/25m training lanes
- Premier League-standard football pitch
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- 600-seat auditorium
- Spaces for historical and cultural exploration
- An elevated football field that doubles as a helipad
- Specialist robotics and science laboratories
- AR and VR-enabled learning centres
- Disruption Lab and Research Centre for developing entrepreneurial skills
In numbers: PKK’s money network in Europe
Germany: PKK collectors typically bring in $18 million in cash a year – amount has trebled since 2010
Revolutionary tax: Investigators say about $2 million a year raised from ‘tax collection’ around Marseille
Extortion: Gunman convicted in 2023 of demanding $10,000 from Kurdish businessman in Stockholm
Drug trade: PKK income claimed by Turkish anti-drugs force in 2024 to be as high as $500 million a year
Denmark: PKK one of two terrorist groups along with Iranian separatists ASMLA to raise “two-digit million amounts”
Contributions: Hundreds of euros expected from typical Kurdish families and thousands from business owners
TV channel: Kurdish Roj TV accounts frozen and went bankrupt after Denmark fined it more than $1 million over PKK links in 2013
First Person
Richard Flanagan
Chatto & Windus
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Director: Sudha Kongara Prasad
Starring: Akshay Kumar, Radhika Madan, Paresh Rawal
Rating: 2/5
Company Profile
Company name: OneOrder
Started: October 2021
Founders: Tamer Amer and Karim Maurice
Based: Cairo, Egypt
Industry: technology, logistics
Investors: A15 and self-funded
The Year Earth Changed
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The National's picks
4.35pm: Tilal Al Khalediah
5.10pm: Continous
5.45pm: Raging Torrent
6.20pm: West Acre
7pm: Flood Zone
7.40pm: Straight No Chaser
8.15pm: Romantic Warrior
8.50pm: Calandogan
9.30pm: Forever Young
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Our legal consultant
Name: Dr Hassan Mohsen Elhais
Position: legal consultant with Al Rowaad Advocates and Legal Consultants.
Mercer, the investment consulting arm of US services company Marsh & McLennan, expects its wealth division to at least double its assets under management (AUM) in the Middle East as wealth in the region continues to grow despite economic headwinds, a company official said.
Mercer Wealth, which globally has $160 billion in AUM, plans to boost its AUM in the region to $2-$3bn in the next 2-3 years from the present $1bn, said Yasir AbuShaban, a Dubai-based principal with Mercer Wealth.
“Within the next two to three years, we are looking at reaching $2 to $3 billion as a conservative estimate and we do see an opportunity to do so,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Mercer does not directly make investments, but allocates clients’ money they have discretion to, to professional asset managers. They also provide advice to clients.
“We have buying power. We can negotiate on their (client’s) behalf with asset managers to provide them lower fees than they otherwise would have to get on their own,” he added.
Mercer Wealth’s clients include sovereign wealth funds, family offices, and insurance companies among others.
From its office in Dubai, Mercer also looks after Africa, India and Turkey, where they also see opportunity for growth.
Wealth creation in Middle East and Africa (MEA) grew 8.5 per cent to $8.1 trillion last year from $7.5tn in 2015, higher than last year’s global average of 6 per cent and the second-highest growth in a region after Asia-Pacific which grew 9.9 per cent, according to consultancy Boston Consulting Group (BCG). In the region, where wealth grew just 1.9 per cent in 2015 compared with 2014, a pickup in oil prices has helped in wealth generation.
BCG is forecasting MEA wealth will rise to $12tn by 2021, growing at an annual average of 8 per cent.
Drivers of wealth generation in the region will be split evenly between new wealth creation and growth of performance of existing assets, according to BCG.
Another general trend in the region is clients’ looking for a comprehensive approach to investing, according to Mr AbuShaban.
“Institutional investors or some of the families are seeing a slowdown in the available capital they have to invest and in that sense they are looking at optimizing the way they manage their portfolios and making sure they are not investing haphazardly and different parts of their investment are working together,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Some clients also have a higher appetite for risk, given the low interest-rate environment that does not provide enough yield for some institutional investors. These clients are keen to invest in illiquid assets, such as private equity and infrastructure.
“What we have seen is a desire for higher returns in what has been a low-return environment specifically in various fixed income or bonds,” he said.
“In this environment, we have seen a de facto increase in the risk that clients are taking in things like illiquid investments, private equity investments, infrastructure and private debt, those kind of investments were higher illiquidity results in incrementally higher returns.”
The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, one of the largest sovereign wealth funds, said in its 2016 report that has gradually increased its exposure in direct private equity and private credit transactions, mainly in Asian markets and especially in China and India. The authority’s private equity department focused on structured equities owing to “their defensive characteristics.”
UAE players with central contracts
Rohan Mustafa, Ashfaq Ahmed, Chirag Suri, Rameez Shahzad, Shaiman Anwar, Adnan Mufti, Mohammed Usman, Ghulam Shabbir, Ahmed Raza, Qadeer Ahmed, Amir Hayat, Mohammed Naveed and Imran Haider.
Election pledges on migration
CDU: "Now is the time to control the German borders and enforce strict border rejections"
SPD: "Border closures and blanket rejections at internal borders contradict the spirit of a common area of freedom"
Chelsea 2 Burnley 3
Chelsea Morata (69'), Luiz (88')
Burnley Vokes (24', 43'), Ward (39')
Red cards Cahill, Fabregas (Chelsea)
88 Video's most popular rentals
Avengers 3: Infinity War: an American superhero film released in 2018 and based on the Marvel Comics story.
Sholay: a 1975 Indian action-adventure film. It follows the adventures of two criminals hired by police to catch a vagabond. The film was panned on release but is now considered a classic.
Lucifer: is a 2019 Malayalam-language action film. It dives into the gritty world of Kerala’s politics and has become one of the highest-grossing Malayalam films of all time.
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PREMIER LEAGUE FIXTURES
All times UAE ( 4 GMT)
Saturday
West Ham United v Tottenham Hotspur (3.30pm)
Burnley v Huddersfield Town (7pm)
Everton v Bournemouth (7pm)
Manchester City v Crystal Palace (7pm)
Southampton v Manchester United (7pm)
Stoke City v Chelsea (7pm)
Swansea City v Watford (7pm)
Leicester City v Liverpool (8.30pm)
Sunday
Brighton and Hove Albion v Newcastle United (7pm)
Monday
Arsenal v West Bromwich Albion (11pm)
Details
Through Her Lens: The stories behind the photography of Eva Sereny
Forewords by Jacqueline Bisset and Charlotte Rampling, ACC Art Books
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The rules on fostering in the UAE
A foster couple or family must:
- be Muslim, Emirati and be residing in the UAE
- not be younger than 25 years old
- not have been convicted of offences or crimes involving moral turpitude
- be free of infectious diseases or psychological and mental disorders
- have the ability to support its members and the foster child financially
- undertake to treat and raise the child in a proper manner and take care of his or her health and well-being
- A single, divorced or widowed Muslim Emirati female, residing in the UAE may apply to foster a child if she is at least 30 years old and able to support the child financially
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UAE currency: the story behind the money in your pockets
Young women have more “financial grit”, but fall behind on investing
In an October survey of young adults aged 16 to 25, Charles Schwab found young women are more driven to reach financial independence than young men (67 per cent versus. 58 per cent). They are more likely to take on extra work to make ends meet and see more value than men in creating a plan to achieve their financial goals. Yet, despite all these good ‘first’ measures, they are investing and saving less than young men – falling early into the financial gender gap.
While the women surveyed report spending 36 per cent less than men, they have far less savings than men ($1,267 versus $2,000) – a nearly 60 per cent difference.
In addition, twice as many young men as women say they would invest spare cash, and almost twice as many young men as women report having investment accounts (though most young adults do not invest at all).
“Despite their good intentions, young women start to fall behind their male counterparts in savings and investing early on in life,” said Carrie Schwab-Pomerantz, senior vice president, Charles Schwab. “They start off showing a strong financial planning mindset, but there is still room for further education when it comes to managing their day-to-day finances.”
Ms Schwab-Pomerantz says parents should be conveying the same messages to boys and girls about money, but should tailor those conversations based on the individual and gender.
"Our study shows that while boys are spending more than girls, they also are saving more. Have open and honest conversations with your daughters about the wage and savings gap," she said. "Teach kids about the importance of investing – especially girls, who as we see in this study, aren’t investing as much. Part of being financially prepared is learning to make the most of your money, and that means investing early and consistently."
