The Diary Of A Social Butterfly

Pakistan may be making headlines—but Butterfly is set to conquer the world. ‘Everyone knows me. All of Lahore, all of Karachi, all of Isloo—oho, baba, Islamabad —half of Dubai, half of London and all of Khan Market and all the nice, nice bearers in Imperial Hotel also...No ball, no party, no dinner, no coffee morning, no funeral, no GT —Get-Together, baba—is complete without me.’ Meet Butterfly, Pakistan’s most lovable, silly, socialite. An avid partygoer, inspired misspeller, and unwittingly acute observer of Pakistani high society, Butterfly is a woman like no other. In her world, SMS becomes S & M and people eat ‘three tiara cakes’ while shunning ‘do number ka maal’. ‘What cheeks!’ as she would say. As her country faces tribulations – from 9/11 to the assassination of Benazir Bhutto—Butterfly glides through her world, unfazed, untouched, and stopped short only by the chip in her manicure. Wicked, irreverent, and hugely entertaining, The Diary of a Social Butterfly gives you a delicious glimpse into the parallel universe of the have-musts.

As every woman knows, matchmaking is no easy job. Particularly when you're trying to find a girl for your dull, balding, freshly-divorced cousin and on top of that manage a house full of servants, shop for contraband Prada goods and attend parties every night. Not to mention the fact that your husband disapproves of everything you do, your city is under attack, and your friends can't be trusted - how is a girl to cope? Originally published with the title Tender Hooks

Celebrating its 30th anniversary in 2024, internationally bestselling author and literary icon Julia Alvarez's In the Time of the Butterflies is "beautiful, heartbreaking and alive ... a lyrical work of historical fiction based on the story of the Mirabal sisters, revolutionary heroes who had opposed and fought against Trujillo." (Concepción de León, New York Times) Alvarez’s new novel, The Cemetery of Untold Stories, is coming April 2, 2024. Pre-order now! It is November 25, 1960, and three beautiful sisters have been found near their wrecked Jeep at the bottom of a 150-foot cliff on the north coast of the Dominican Republic. The official state newspaper reports their deaths as accidental. It does not mention that a fourth sister lives. Nor does it explain that the sisters were among the leading opponents of Gen. Rafael Leónidas Trujillo’s dictatorship. It doesn’t have to. Everybody knows of Las Mariposas—the Butterflies. In this extraordinary novel, the voices of all four sisters--Minerva, Patria, María Teresa, and the survivor, Dedé--speak across the decades to tell their own stories, from secret crushes to gunrunning, and to describe the everyday horrors of life under Trujillo’s rule. Through the art and magic of Julia Alvarez’s imagination, the martyred Butterflies live again in this novel of courage and love, and the human costs of political oppression. "Alvarez helped blaze the trail for Latina authors to break into the literary mainstream, with novels like In the Time of the Butterflies and How the García Girls Lost Their Accents winning praise from critics and gracing best-seller lists across the Americas."—Francisco Cantú, The New York Times Book Review "This Julia Alvarez classic is a must-read for anyone of Latinx descent." —Popsugar.com "A gorgeous and sensitive novel . . . A compelling story of courage, patriotism and familial devotion." —People "Shimmering . . . Valuable and necessary." —Los Angeles Times "A magnificent treasure for all cultures and all time.” —St. Petersburg Times "Alvarez does a remarkable job illustrating the ruinous effect the 30-year dictatorship had on the Dominican Republic and the very real human cost it entailed."—Cosmopolitan.com

‘Jane Austen meets Bridget Jones... Hilarious’ Glamour Meet Butterfly – loveable socialite, avid party-goer, inspired shopper and unwittingly acute observer. Of course everyone thinks her life is perfect but having to contend with a conniving mother-in-law, a husband who doesn’t like parties, and a circle of friends who bring new meaning to the word competitive, Butterfly thinks her life is far from enviable. And as she lurches from crisis to crisis, trailing Jimmy Choos and pearls of wisdom along the way, it seems she might have a little more on her plate than she’s first realised... Wicked, irreverent and hugely entertaining, The Diary of a Social Butterfly gives you a delicious glimpse into the parallel universe of the have-musts.

Ruby Rauf is an idealistic, industrious scholarship student with a fixed plan. She is going to ace her exams and get a decent job so she never has to suffer the daily degradation of poverty again. Yet, when she meets the compelling actor-turned-politician Saif Haq, her world is upended. Dazzled by his charisma, inspired by his zeal, she quits her degree midway to join his campaign as his social media manager. Ruby soon discovers that politics, even with a leader as upright as Saif Haq, is a moral minefield. Diligent, sincere but desperately naïve, Ruby longs to do the right thing but struggles at first to square her innate integrity with the difficult choices her job demands. As she wades deeper into the quagmire of political intrigue and the savage world of social media, her values grow more flexible, her methods more ruthless. She out-thinks allies and rivals to deliver brilliant results. Resented and admired by her colleagues, favoured by Saif, Ruby appears unstoppable-until one day when Saif asks her to prove her loyalty by making the most painful sacrifice of all. With quicksilver dialogue, shrewd political insight and a thoughtful take on the MeToo debate, this sparkling novel reveals Moni Mohsin on top satirical form.

I tell you the halaats are so bad, so bad that don’t even ask. The Talibans sitting on top of our heads, bombs bursting left, right and centre, drones droning away, load-shedding a hundred hours a day, servants answering back, in-laws trying to upstage you, friends throwing you out of their kitties and on top of that elections ka tamasha. Janoo tau is coming closer and closer to a nervous brake out while Mummy is getting sterile dementia. As for Kulchoo, bhai, don’t even ask. But I’ve decided, come what may, I tau am not going to let anyone clamp my style. I’m going to live just as I like—watching my Turkish soaps, going to GTs and weddings, throwing kitty parties, telling everyone everything saaf-saaf and, of course, doing summers in London—voh tau must hai na. And I’m going to do it in my Jimmy Choo ki heels and my sleeveless designer shirts, and my streaked hair and my Prada ki sunglasses. This much I’m telling you all from now only. So tighten your seat belts, okay?

These fascinating, never-before-published early diaries of Count Harry Kessler—patron, museum director, publisher, cultural critic, soldier, secret agent, and diplomat—present a sweeping panorama of the arts and politics of Belle Époque Europe, a glittering world poised to be changed irrevocably by the Great War. Kessler’s immersion in the new art and literature of Paris, London, and Berlin unfolds in the first part of the diaries. This refined world gives way to vivid descriptions of the horrific fighting on the Eastern and Western fronts of World War I, the intriguing private discussions among the German political and military elite about the progress of the war, as well as Kessler’s account of his role as a diplomat with a secret mission in Switzerland. Profoundly modern and often prescient, Kessler was an erudite cultural impresario and catalyst who as a cofounder of the avant-garde journal Pan met and contributed articles about many of the leading artists and writers of the day. In 1903 he became director of the Grand Ducal Museum of Arts and Crafts in Weimar, determined to make it a center of aesthetic modernism together with his friend the architect Henry van de Velde, whose school of design would eventually become the Bauhaus. When a public scandal forced his resignation in 1906, Kessler turned to other projects, including collaborating with the Austrian writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the German composer Richard Strauss on the opera Der Rosenkavalier and the ballet The Legend of Joseph, which was performed in 1914 by the Ballets Russes in London and Paris. In 1913 he founded the Cranach-Presse in Weimar, one of the most important private presses of the twentieth century. The diaries present brilliant, sharply etched, and often richly comical descriptions of his encounters, conversations, and creative collaborations with some of the most celebrated people of his time: Otto von Bismarck, Paul von Hindenburg, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Richard Strauss, Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Diaghilev, Vaslav Nijinsky, Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis, Sarah Bernhardt, Friedrich Nietzsche, Rainer Marie Rilke, Paul Verlaine, Gordon Craig, George Bernard Shaw, Harley Granville-Barker, Max Klinger, Arnold Böcklin, Max Beckmann, Aristide Maillol, Auguste Rodin, Edgar Degas, Éduard Vuillard, Claude Monet, Edvard Munch, Ida Rubinstein, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Pierre Bonnard, and Walther Rathenau, among others. Remarkably insightful, poignant, and cinematic in their scope, Kessler’s diaries are an invaluable record of one of the most volatile and seminal moments in modern Western history.