Cocooning: 3 Top reads

This week, Philip Blackwell, the Karma Group’s Literary Luminary,  shares three recommended reads to keep you entertained. These include ‘Billion Dollar Whale’, named as one of the best books of 2018 by the Financial Times, the spellbinding ‘Square Hunting: Five Women, Freedom, and London Between the Wars’ and the coming of age ‘Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens’…

Billion Dollar Whale: The Bestselling Investigation into the Financial Fraud of the Century by Tom Wright

Named as one of the Best Books of 2018 by the Financial Times, this exciting bestseller exposes the details of how a contemporary Gatsby, swindled over $5 billion with the aid of Goldman Sachs in one of the biggest heists of the 21^st century. Billion Dollar Whale is an enthralling story that reveals how a young social climber managed to pull off one of the world’s largest financial frauds. In 2009, a mild-mannered graduate of the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Business named Jho Low set in motion this unprecedented fraud that would come to symbolize the next great threat to the global financial system. Over a decade, Low, with the aid of Goldman Sachs and others, siphoned billions of dollars from an investment fund–right under the nose of global financial industry watchdogs. Low used the money to finance elections, purchase luxury real estate, throw champagne-drenched parties, and even to inject money into Hollywood films like The Wolf of Wall Street.

Square Hunting: Five Women, Freedom and London Between the Wars by Francesca Wade

On the fringes of interwar Bloomsbury, which was home to some of the world-famous activists, experimenters and revolutionaries; among them modernist poet H. D., detective novelist Dorothy L. Sayers, classicist Jane Harrison, economic historian Eileen Power, and writer and publisher Virginia Woolf. Each member of the group alighted there seeking a space where they could live, love and, above all, work independently and freely. This is Francesca Wade’s spellbinding biography of the group that explores how trailblazing women pushed the boundaries of literature, scholarship, and social norms.

Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens

A New York Times bestseller, Where the Crawdads Sing traces a coming-of-age story in the landscape of the Southern states of America and is electric with the beauty of the landscape in which it is set. For years, rumours of the “Marsh Girl” have haunted Barkley Cove, a quiet town on the North Carolina coast. In late 1969, when handsome Chase Andrews is found dead, the locals immediately suspect the ‘Marsh Girl.’ But Kya is not what they had originally thought -sensitive and intelligent, she has survived for years alone in the marsh that she calls home, finding friends in the gulls and lessons in the sand. When two young men from town become intrigued by her wild beauty, Kya opens herself to a new life – until something totally unthinkable happens – a surprising tale of possible murder. Owens reminds us that we are forever shaped by the child in our own hearts, and that we are all keepers of the beautiful yet violent secrets that nature keeps.