This week, with Stuart and Eamonn on holiday, we have a wee treat in store - a girl power double header with Talk Media favourites Catriona Stewart and Shona Craven.

At the end of the show a listener question suggested by Brian Brussels.

Recommendations:

Shona

Invisible Child - Book - Andrea Elliot

Based on nearly a decade of reporting, Invisible Child follows eight dramatic years in the life of Dasani Coates, a child with an imagination as soaring as the skyscrapers near her Brooklyn homeless shelter. Born at the turn of a new century, Dasani is named for the bottled water that comes to symbolise Brooklyn's gentrification and the shared aspirations of a divided city. As Dasani moves with her family from shelter to shelter, this story traces the passage of Dasani's ancestors from slavery to the Great Migration north.

Dasani comes of age as New York City's homeless crisis is exploding. In the shadows of this new Gilded Age, Dasani leads her seven siblings through a thicket of problems: hunger, parental drug addiction, violence, housing instability, segregated schools and the constant monitoring of the child-protection system.

When, at age thirteen, Dasani enrolls at a boarding school in Pennsylvania, her loyalties are tested like never before. Ultimately, she faces an impossible question: What if leaving poverty means abandoning the family you love?

By turns heartbreaking and revelatory, provocative and inspiring, Invisible Child tells an astonishing story about the power of resilience, the importance of family and the cost of inequality.

https://www.waterstones.com/book/invisible-child/andrea-elliott/9781529156102

Catriona:

American Fiction - Film - Cord Jefferson

AMERICAN FICTION is Cord Jefferson's hilarious directorial debut, which confronts our culture’s obsession with reducing people to outrageous stereotypes. Jeffrey Wright stars as Monk, a frustrated novelist who’s fed up with the establishment profiting from “Black” entertainment that relies on tired and offensive tropes. To prove his point, Monk uses a pen name to write an outlandish “Black” book of his own, a book that propels him to the heart of hypocrisy and the madness he claims to disdain.

https://www.mgm.com/movies/american-fiction

Glasgow School of Art fire - Features - The Herald

Almost a decade has passed since the unique and world-renowned Mackintosh Building at Glasgow School of Art was badly damaged in a fire as final year students prepared for their degree show. 

Four years later, the category A-listed landmark - widely regarded as Charles Rennie Mackintosh's masterpiece - suffered a second, more significant fire as it was nearing the end of a £35 million restoration effort to repair the damage incurred during the 2014 fire.

https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/24199850.complete-timeline-glasgow-school-art-fires/