On May 15th this year, Derek Burns will leave his home in West Calder and begin a six-week walk from Edinburgh to London. He has made this 624-mile walk for the past two years and the reason behind it is a defining moment in his life. Sixteen years earlier Derek’s 20-year-old son, also called Derek, made the same journey . Telling his parents that he was going to meet his friends for a drink, he instead made his way to London to meet with his girlfriend and then planned to return back home. It w

Little White Lies (Les Petits Mouchoirs) has been described as the French equivalent of the American classic The Big Chill, a film that attained worldwide popularity on its release in 1983. Little White Lies does follow the same theme of lifelong friends meeting up but in this case it’s an annual vacation and not a funeral that brings them together. But there is a precursor to this year’s vacation. The film opens with the motorcycle crash of one of their closest friends, Ludo. While Ludo, in a

I first came across the story of Joyce Carol Vincent (pictured above) when reading an article in The Guardian in October 2011. The article by film maker Carol Morley explained that Joyce Vincent was 41 years old when she was found dead in her London bedsit in 2003. But what made the story so disturbing was the fact that Joyce died at the age of 38. She had been found three years after she had died, her almost skeletal remains lying beside the sofa next to some Christmas presents she had just fin

Enter the  fiery Mexican waitress Camilla Lopez, played by Salma Hayek.  The relationship between the pair starts as one of mutual racial hatred; she is Mexican, he Italian. They both desperately want to be seen as Americans. Arturo and Camilla, like many others of their time, traveled to California to live a golden, charmed life. Instead, they have found reality in seedy boarding houses and broken dreams. The film sticks faithfully to the novel.  Set in Depression-era Los Angeles, writer Artur

“Maybe we are all deluding ourselves into thinking that life has any meaning at all. Perhaps we have to give it one, for ourselves” – Julian Gallo, Naderia. The above line is one that permeates Julian Gallo’s second novel Naderia. At its core, Naderia is a search for meaning, a search that can occur inwardly and on a wider scale with or without the participant’s knowledge. Naderia is a journey, and the ever increasing and inescapable momentum propelling the characters forward is a defining the

here is a line by the late, great, gonzo writer Hunter S. Thompson that states, the hardest thing in this world is to be yourself while all around people are trying to change you into something your not. This line could easily be applied to the characters that inhabit Arthur Nersesian’s New York City novels. Writers, artists and actresses, all with one common goal; the pursuit of their art while living the struggling, starving artist lifestyle. In a world full of corporate clones selling out en masse in order to keep themselves in Starbuck’s lattes, Nersesian’s characters willing leap onto New York’s sacrificial alter, giving hope that there are still a few people out there who are willing to risk everything and not be lured by the corner office with a nice view. In today’s color by numbers world, where people without talent or originality are celebrated, Nersesian’s view of a New York City inhabited by risk takers and dreamers is welcomed with open arms.