My friend Andrew ‘backstory’ K gave me this book with a disclaimer that he hated the cover, so I picked a different one to post here. This one is much better I think!

So I understand why Andrew gave me this book. The man LOVES a backstory, and this book is filled with ‘em, even to the point where the footnotes take up more of the page than the actual story. It bounces around the lives of three members of a Dominican-American family and brings these stories together along with the acrimonious reality of the thirty year reign of Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic (1930-1961) – a man who in 1937, ordered the massacre of over 20,000 Haitians and who also had a fetish for renaming monuments and towns with his name. Not a good time to be a Haitian, or a woman, or a monument.

If I’m brutally honest with myself, I’m not really one to pay too much attention to the history of world politics, so to have this history written into a captivating story of the lives and loves of one family is just about perfect. I learnt something new and had a great story to read at the same time. And it won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction too. Go read it!

Quite a few years ago my mate Rae Begley and I used to put on a party, named The Party (yes, the Peter Sellers movie… it’s in my all time Top 5) at a little bar in Melbourne, Loop. We wore vintage dresses, played 80s pop alongside new indie-electro-rock and then always some soul/disco/beats. I always got really drunk and never mixed the records! We also did the graveyard shift at RRR once in a while and generally had a great time about town. Good Times! Then Rae moved to London. Then I moved to L.A.. Then Rae moved to Sydney. Then I moved to London!

These days Rae still calls Sydney home and she is headmistress extraordinaire at the lovely little PR Agency, Little Hero. They’re the home to many a great fashion label, do pop up shops with brands like Cheap Monday and her blog is cooler than Kanyes’! Such deserved success for a truly talented lady. Checkit!