Researcher, campaigner and former UN editor Claire Edwards offers insights and reflections on two very timely, transformative books, The Parents—how far would you go to save your world?, by Olga Sheean and Hominine, by Lewis Evans.
These two thrillers have made me laugh and cry, reflect on this troubled world of ours and change my perspective. Infused with compassion for our human condition, each offers deep insights and the perfect solution for these challenging times. The messages are so tailored to answering our need to understand our current plight that I feel these books can only have been channelled as gifts to humanity for this time
The Parents is a healing for this world crisis. It is an intriguing cliff-hanger full of love, joy, compassion and wit. Its core message is about the centrality of our human relationships, within the family, with friends, within communities, and within society, and shows how much we need the support of those around us as we negotiate our way through life.
The plot keeps us guessing while showing us how we have allowed technology to erode the most precious aspects of our lives and paints the picture of how joyful and creative life can be once we step back and choose a different course. It promises a different future from the bleak one now confronting us, if we can just understand and act on its message.
The Parents is a healing for this world crisis. It is an intriguing cliff-hanger full of love, joy, compassion and wit. Its core message is about the centrality of our human relationships, within the family, with friends, within communities, and within society, and shows how much we need the support of those around us as we negotiate our way through life.
The scope of the novel is both global and intimate, with engaging characters who display the full gamut of emotions as they face the challenges of grief and loss, hope and sacrifice. They are ordinary people who become extraordinary as they find solutions and transform themselves.
The Parents clearly shows us how much we are off kilter—emotionally and in terms of relationships—and provides a vision of the future that we can create and how beautiful that will be.
It teaches us about what is wrong with our societies, our relationships and our technology, and how we can set that right. This new world is going to be! With this book, we can visualise it and that is its importance. Who else has provided a vision of that new world? It is brilliant, uplifting and essential.
I was greatly reassured to see from her book that Olga understands fully, in all its dimensions, the crisis we are facing right now, in 2020. Just like the characters in her novel, I want to break all the rules. I have to be completely, inexorably, fully, revolutionarily ME. I have to shout being ME from the rooftops. I can never again shrink from it. I have to embrace being me in all its wonder and miraculousness, power and glory. And I love it. I think that this whole ghastly, almost unbearable challenge is all about stripping us down to our very essence and forcing us to purify our being of all falsehood until we stand naked as our authentic, unapologetic selves. Olga has really captured that in The Parents.
Hominine has a different flavour altogether. Here we have a geopolitical thriller that outclasses Le Carré himself. Although we have similar megalomaniacs setting out to destroy the world through terror and violence, we are led to understand how they came to be so psychopathic and pity them. This thriller not only analyses the nexus of power and violence that rules our world, but is a veritable step-by-step manual for dissolving it.
The central character is an egoistic politician who gradually comes to realise that his prestige and wealth have been bought at the price of sacrificing his love for his wife. While ostensibly being a public success, in reality his life is a meaningless sham. His wife in turn has sacrificed her life to make his career a success, yet neither is fulfilled.
Hominine is a geopolitical thriller that outclasses Le Carré himself. This thriller not only analyses the nexus of power and violence that rules our world, but is a veritable step-by-step manual for dissolving it.
His hero's journey takes him on a geographical and personal quest of self-transformation through which he learns the value of truth, love, and service to others. He finally learns that only through his own authenticity is it possible for him to save the world from destruction. The dénouement is a test of whether he can apply what he has learned throughout his journey—with the survival of the world resting on the outcome.
This should be required and urgent reading for every politician on our planet, for most of them are right now betraying humanity in its hour of greatest need.
As a campaigner facing down the perpetrators of our ongoing world genocide in 2020, I found myself in tears through the final pages of Hominine as I identified with the protagonist and realised what he—and all of us—need to do to succeed. The real battle that will save us is not fought with others but with our own demons. I have never in my life identified and interacted with a book in such a way.
Together, these two novels are a huge contribution to solving our current very desperate dilemma. They are absolute life-savers. It has never been so important to provide information to people in this palatable way—much more important than any philosophical debate or scientific paper. People can enjoy the books and, while doing so, easily come to understand how we can run our world and our lives so much better—for us and for nature. These books could not be more perfect or timely.
Both of these books are pathways to the new paradigm. They deserve to be bestsellers and would make thrilling films that might one day be celebrated as masterpieces, such as Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times.
What we need above all is solutions. People need to understand what they can and must do, and both of these books set that out superbly and in a highly entertaining way.
For more info, see: https://olgasheean.com/the-parents/ and https://lewisevans.net/hominine/.
